This Amazing Opportunity

Let's remember why we're here at retreat: for this amazing opportunity to really look into the core of our own existence, the core of life itself that is so easy to overlook. It's so easy not to pay attention to it, because it's not noisy and it's not clamoring for attention like all the other aspects of the human mind. Egoic consciousness is always pretending to be the most important thing that is happening.

And yet there's this thread, this sense of something other than, deeper than, more real than, more essential than this scattered and divided noise that so many human beings live in, in their minds. And right in the midst of all that, there is a presence, there is an awareness, an unconditioned awareness, an unconditioned consciousness. Right in the middle of this conditioned mind, conditioned consciousness, is this shining, unconditioned essence. Essence doesn't mean a little part hidden somewhere in us, the little teeny kernel of essence. Essence means the totality, the whole thing. Essence means the truth of you as opposed to the untruth of you.

Essence isn't a small thing, essence is an immense thing. The essence of you is everything you ever see, taste, touch, and experience. Everywhere you go, every step you take, every breath you take is actually happening by the essence, of the essence, in the essence, and to the essence. All the rest is noise and chatter.

So we come here to give our attention, our affection, our time. Our most highly prized commodity is our time. Anything or anyone you give your time to shows immediately what is most important. And I want to remind everyone that what you really are, what the person next to you is, what the children in Africa scraping up the little grains of rice are, this timeless essence, is not hidden. It's not hidden at all. It's in plain view. Everywhere you look, that's the essence. And the mind would say, "Where? Where? I don't see it. All I see is a car, a billboard, a tree, the person in front of me, the funny man on the stage. Where is this essence?"

It's easy to grasp for it, isn't it? "Where is it? What is it? I want to understand it. I want to know about it. How can it work for me? How can I utilize it?" But it doesn't come upon us through the grasping of it, through the striving for it, and through the struggling for it. There's no merit gained through wasted effort, through excess struggle. There are no merit points for the people who drove themselves the craziest along the way to self-realization. For most people it's so obscure that it seems very intuitive to grasp and to struggle instead of relaxing, not grasping, letting something come to you, letting the truth of your being reveal itself to you on its terms, in its way, letting it happen. 

It will happen. It's always happening. It's always trying to show itself.

- Adyashanti

I AM

When it comes to hurricanes and storms of the mind, all we can do is hang on to something that won't move. We get to high ground or take refuge in a hotel during a hurricane, but where do we go in the mind? Fear, doubt, confusion, anger, these are the winds of the mind and they can attack with hurricane force. Too bad we can't measure their velocity like we record wind. We can say they are pretty strong when we require medication or end up in the headlines for some bizarre behavior. Is there such a place as a refuge from a mind storm? We need to turn within to find out, you would think.

You can try this yourself right now. As you read this there is a knower that is like a background awareness that is witnessing your reading and thinking about this piece. You can't turn and see this knower like you would if you suddenly sensed someone looking over your shoulder. When you are very still you can sense there is two of you, a thinker with its story and a knower who knows you are thinking.

When a mind storm hits the coast of your self and sweeps you up in the winds of anxiety, the knower is the background or space that is prior to the storm, remains still during the storm, and is there undistsurbed after the storm leaves. Hurricanes have an eye and so does our mind. Without the eye the hurricane and the mind cannot exist. And yet the mind does not disturb the eye because the eye has no form. The eye is empty. So what is mind? Mind is form, thought form. Who is the knower of the mind? Pure consciousness, space, is the witness of the content of the mind. Without content there is no mind, but there is still the knower that says I AM.

Forms are impermanent, but the I AM is changeless. Thought is in time, but the I AM is timeless because it is prior to thought. Our I exists before thought and after thought is gone. When we die, thought goes, but not the I AM. Meditation is learning how to strengthen the I AM and weaken the storm. We should take refuge in that.

- Ed Conley

Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may have noticed, they are not here to make you happy or fulfilled. If you continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold on to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.

Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Things to Think

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you've ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you've never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he's about
To give you something large: tell you you're forgiven,
Or that it's not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it's been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

~ Robert Bly ~

No personal, individual effort

can possibly lead to enlightenment. On
the contrary, what is necessary is to rest helpless in beingness,
knowing that we are nothing - to be in the nothingness of the no-mind
state in which all conceptualizing has subsided into passive
witnessing. In this state whatever happens will be not our doing but the pure universal functioning to which we have relinquished all control.

Ramesh S. Balsekar

God's Unity

What does it mean to learn the knowledge of
God's Unity? To consume yourself in the
presence of the One. If you wish to shine like
day, burn up the night of self-existence.
Dissolve in the Being who is everything.
You grabbed hold of "I" and "we,"
and this dualism is your ruin.

- Rumi, Version by Camille and Kabir Helminski, from Rumi: Daylight

Drawing Jesus

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The first patient drew Jesus as a tall, slender
man with three smiling heads, one eye in the
center of each. Another sketched him as a stick
figure wearing a yellow hat. The teenage girl
from Alabama drew a white vulture with a halo
above its head. At the table by the window the
Hungarian immigrant whose language no one
understood drew a face with a scar running
down his cheek, a ragged red beard, and the
kind of wild eyes that frighten children. The
old woman who has lived half-a-centuary in
the asylum painted a picture of a dozen orange
boxes and asked me to guess which one Jesus
was hiding in. I pointed to the box with the
bulge in the middle. The Hungarian started
laughing. Then they all joined in.

-David Shumate, from Gulf Coast

The Nature of Mind

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The very nature of the mind is to produce thoughts,
and any kind of suppression of thought can only make
matters worse. One need only witness all thoughts
and desires as they arise and not get involved in them.
Such witnessing in the end does away with one's
identifications a separate bodily entity.
Ramesh S. Balsekar

Nonduality Explained - "The Table"

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Nondual experiencing is not at all complicated. As a matter of fact, it's as simple as bumping into your kitchen table. One must only understand that when you bump into your kitchen table, you also bump into all the experiencing that arises from it. Your entire neurology simply reacts to the situation.

When you understand that you and others don't consciously control the perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and emotions that arise in any situation, you are open to being the nondual experiencing of each moment. Bumping into a table is no different than encountering the rest of life. What you are is the experiencing of an inherited and conditioned neurology "bumping into" life situations.\ Whether you are bumping into a table, meeting a friend in the park, considering the pros and cons of "paper vs. plastic" in the checkout line, awed by a beautiful sunrise, or grieving the death of a loved one, it's all part of the experiencing of living. Pain, pleasure, confusion, beauty, amazement, and grief are some of the many elements of living that are experienced along the way.

Every second of living is interpreted through the lens of your absolutely unique neurology that has been built and shaped through your genetics and life conditioning. You are the experiencing of your neurological lens meeting life. With this understanding, "living" becomes the magnificent and completely unique experiencing of each moment.

The good news is that you are always already the experiencing of life. Whatever allows for the dismantling of "the illusion of conscious control over your present moment experiencing" will only free you to discover what you already are. And then there you'll be, the nondual experiencing you've been searching for, but that you have always already been. You'll simply be the dynamic experiencing of living - all "Am" and no "I."
Gary Crowley, From Here To Here: Turning Toward Enlightenment

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What can we do but keep on breathing
in and out,
modest and willing, and in our places?
~Mary Oliver

"Once again we face a paradox, for it appears
that softening your heart and gently tending its
wounds will protect you from evil. Building a
fortress and defending yourself behind it will
only make you more vulnerable. Healing your
own heart is the single most powerful thing
you can do to change the world. Your own
transformation will enable you to withdraw so
completely from evil that you contribute to it
by not one word, one thought, or one breath."
-Deepak Chopra, *The Deeper Wound Recovering the Soul from Fear and
Suffering*

Life and death as nirvana.

Don't be picky, don't choose this or that.
However comfortable your life is,
right now at this moment,
I know some of you have pain.

Whatever painful situation you are involved in,
consider that as the very life of the Buddha,
the very state of nirvana itself,
and be it.

Just live that life.

It doesn't matter whether it is

life of hell,
life of the hungry ghost,
life of the animal.

It's okay.

Just live that life, see.

And as matter of fact,
no other way.

Where you stand,
where you are

that's what your life is

right there,
regardless of how painful it is,
or how enjoyable it is.

That's what it is.

That condition never continues forever.

You can even say it changes completely

in less than a second.

This life, death.

--Taizan Maezumi

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Billy Collins

Kris Johnson (July 4, 1951 - January 5, 1985)

The lamp once out
Cool stars enter
The window frame.
Natsume Soseki
(1867 - 1916)

Ramesh S. Balsekar

Once there is a clear apprehension that an individual human being is an inseparable part of the totality of phenomenal manifestation and that he cannot pull himself out of the totality as an independent and autonomous entity, man naturally ceases to have personal intentions. When he is convinced that living is a sort of dreaming in which he cannot have any effective control either over his circumstances or his actions therein, all his tensions cease, and a sense of total freedom takes over. He then willingly and freely accepts whatever comes his way within the totality of functioning that this dream-life is.

To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else...
-Emily Dickinson

hat tip Anne L-M

"Reinventing the Sacred"

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One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere,
and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity,
we typically do not and cannot know what will happen.
We live our lives forward into mystery, as Kierkegaard said.
We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives
forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for
that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must
live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we
cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an
insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center
of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully
human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has
finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must
there fore reunite our full humanity. We must see
ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never
fully know.
~Stuart A. Kauffman, Biologist and Complex Systems Researcher

Only

That Illumined
One

Who keeps
Seducing the formless into form

Had the charm to win my
Heart.

Only a Perfect One
Who is always
Laughing at the word
Two,

Can make you know
Of
Love.

- Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky, from: The Gift

George Carlin 1937 - 2008

HERE . . . . . . .

Genius . . . . .

Viruses, mold, mildew, maggots, fungus, weeds, the e-coli bacteria, the crabs...nothing sacred about those things. So, at best, the sanctity of life is kind of a selective thing. We get to choose which forms of life we feel are sacred, and we get to kill the rest. Pretty neat deal, huh? You know how we got it? We made the whole fucking thing up!
-
Working-class people "look for work." Middle-class people "try to get a job." Upper-middle-class people "seek employment."
-
If crime fighters fight crime and firefighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?
-
I distinguish between maniacs and crazy people. A maniac will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo. A crazy person will beat nine people to death with a steel dildo, but he'll be wearing a Bugs Bunny suit at the time.
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I saw a picture of the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, Edwin Teller, wearing a tie clip. Why would the man who invented a bomb that destroys everything for fifty miles be concerned about whether or not his tie was straight?
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Traditional American values: genocide, aggression, conformity, emotional repression, hypocrisy, and the worship of comfort and consumer goods.
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One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor.
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The word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.
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I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the sidewalk. It's so fuckin' heroic.
-
They debated the NAFTA trade bill for a long time. Should we sign it or not? Either way, the people get fucked. Trade always exists for the traders. Anytime you hear businessmen debating "which policy is better for America," don’t bend over.
-
The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, Y'know, I want to set those people over there on fire but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.
-
Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck.

Summer Solstice 2008

There is a Zone whose even Years

No Solstice interrupt --
Whose Sun constructs perpetual Noon
Whose perfect Seasons wait --

Whose Summer set in Summer, till
The Centuries of June
And Centuries of August cease
And Consciousness -- is Noon.

The House Was Quiet And The World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens

Who has not found the Heaven--below--

Will fail it above--
For Angels rent the House next ours,
Wherever we remove--
~Emily Dickinson

Shifting the Sun

When your father dies, say the Irish,
you lose your umbrella against bad weather.
May his sun be your light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Welsh,
you sink a foot deeper into the earth.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Canadians,
you run out of excuses.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the French,
you become your own father.
May you stand up in his light, say the Armenians.

When you father dies, say the Indians,
he comes back as the thunder.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Russians,
he takes your childhood with him.
May you inherit his light, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the English,
you join his club you vowed you wouldn't.
May you inherit his sun, say the Armenians.

When your father dies, say the Armenians,
your sun shifts forever.
And you walk in his light.
~ Diana Der-Hovanessian ~

Visions And Interpretations

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Because this graveyard is a hill,
I must climb up to see my dead,
stopping once midway to rest
beside this tree.

It was here, between the anticipation
of exhaustion, and exhaustion,
between vale and peak,
my father came down to me

and we climbed arm in arm to the top.
He cradled the bouquet I'd brought,
and I, a good son, never mentioned his grave,
erect like a door behind him.

And it was here, one summer day, I sat down
to read an old book. When I looked up
from the noon-lit page, I saw a vision
of a world about to come, and a world about to go.

Truth is, I've not seen my father
since he died, and, no, the dead
do not walk arm in arm with me.

If I carry flowers to them, I do so without their help,
the blossoms not always bright, torch-like,
but often heavy as sodden newspaper.

Truth is, I came here with my son one day,
and we rested against this tree,
and I fell asleep, and dreamed

a dream which, upon my boy waking me, I told.
Neither of us understood.
Then we went up.

Even this is not accurate.
Let me begin again:

Between two griefs, a tree.
Between my hands, white chrysanthemums, yellow
chrysanthemums.

The old book I finished reading
I've since read again and again.

And what was far grows near,
and what is near grows more dear,

and all of my visions and interpretations
depend on what I see,

and between my eyes is always
the rain, the migrant rain.

~ Li-Young Lee ~

The Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
~James Wright

IF THE FALLING OF A HOOF

(for Russell)

If the falling of a hoof
Ever rings the temple bells,

If a lonely man's final scream
Before he hangs himself

And the nightingale's perfect lyric
Of happiness
All become an equal cause to dance,

Then the Sun has at last parted
Its curtain before you -

God has stopped playing child's games
With your mind
And dragged you backstage by
The hair,

Shown to you the only possible
Reason

For this bizarre and spectacular
Existence.

Go running through the streets
Creating divine chaos,

Make everyone and yourself ecstatically mad
For the Friends beautiful open arms.

Go running through this world
Giving love, giving love,

If the falling of a hoof upon this earth
Ever rings the
Temple
Bell.

Hafiz (Redux)

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That's crudely put, but ...

If we're not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

~ Gregory Orr ~

Lovers have pitched their tents in nonexistence:
they are of one quality and one essence, as
nonexistence is.

Rumi

Mathnawi III, 3024

"In the end, all of the pointers get back to the same fundamental understanding...The belief or assumption that we stand separate and apart from the one reality of 'God' is the beginning of all doubts, fears and problems in life. To dissolve this belief is the essence of the spiritual life. Because, in truth, all that exists is that one power. That being so, where is the room for a separate individual, ego, or person? Such a being is a false assumption, not a reality. Abandoning that wrong assumption leaves only the oneness as the remainder. That oneness is love itself. Love is the nature of God. Remember the statement of St. John, 'God is love'.

...When the emphasis is on the supremacy of God alone, the individual is no longer emphasized. God alone is. The creature is at best an instrument in his hands. When God is recognized as the only real power, then that power alone is, and that is love. Not 'my' love,but love itself. There is no longer a reference to 'I' and 'mine'. The concepts of 'I' and 'mine' are the source of suffering and separation. Without 'I' and 'mine', the cause for suffering is removed. Without suffering, what remains is the pure presence of oneness, which is God, or love.

The aim is the dissolution of the separate seeker. This is realized by inquiring if the separate seeker is even present, or else through ackowledgement of the supremacy of the one power.

Either way, the separate self is removed from the equation. God or reality alone remains, the one omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient source. That is nothing but pure love itself. As St. Francis once said, 'It is by self-forgetting that one finds'. In your true essence, you are nothing but pure love. You are not a separate person in need of attaining or manifesting love. But in shedding the false notion of separation, your real nature is revealed as love itself."
John Wheeler (from You Were Never Born, p. 140-141)

Sunday Satsang

In this moment, we are always at the mercy of the Whole.
The mind weaves its web of pretend security that sort of
buffers our perception of this, but in any moment, anything
can happen to us. We are so here, at the mercy of whatever
wants to catch us. When we are completely unprepared,
naked, clueless and just here, there is a rightness about it.
A softness and vulnerable feeling, but also a solid feeling
of sitting on the throne of the Beloved, so sweetly open.

If I'm not protecting myself from this moment, what's
here? What's here to see I've never seen? What's
absolutely so new that in paying attention to it, every-
thing I thought I knew can drop away?

We give ourselves mercy when we dare to be here
without all of our stories of what must be wrong with us,
what must need solving, andwhat must be done in order
to just be here. When we give ourselves abreak and
simply let ourselves be.

Now we can come to this moment, delivered from the
weight of what our mind says must be, and instead find
out what is. If we don't go to the mind, there's not much
happening. And what is happening, what we can find
happening if we don't go to the mind, just wants to be
touched by us. Seen by us. Embraced by us. Let be, as it is.

I sit up here at your mercy. I let you see all the way into the
heart of me, without rehearsal or protection, without a clever
plan. And that's what I invite from you also. Then it's just
beauty beholding beauty.

Not much here for the mind, in terms of entertainment, or
anything to chew on. So if there's anyone who's used to being
in their mind, you might find yourself wondering where the
action is. It's in your heart, in your gaze, in your beholding.
In the complete flinging open of the doors, in the complete
offering of what's there. Just to rest here forever.

When we look out from Love, all is already done. Already fed.
We just forget that we're fullness and Love, and then we go l
ooking for it, trying to get back to it. Trying to get somebody
to listen to us, just for five minutes. Instead of remembering,
"Oh my God, I'm the feast itself!" So we can say, "I don't always
feel like the feast, but I am the feast itself. I sometimes feel like
a pack of a thousand beggars looking for the feast, but I am the
feast itself." That's why the beggars come and visit you; that's
why there are so many of them. They heard a rumor that you're
a feast and they didn't wait for the invitations to be printed.
They came running.

It is not theoretical that we are Love. It's not something we
have to wait to connect to when we've said enough prayers
or sat enough hours in meditation. If we wander just for a
moment away from the tyranny of the mind, we either run
into Love Itself or a beggar. And if we pat the beggar and say,
"Oh, my dear, you've come for the feast! Here I am," we return
to love. When we forget we're the feast, and we start thinking
that the beggar is a sign of something very horrible; then we
just run around in crazy beggar clothes for awhile. So we
slow down to hear and let ourselves be completely consumed
by these beggars we've been kicking out the door, locking in the
basement, tying up and telling to go away for the last however
long. Let them have you.

Radiant beauty - that's what you are. You can't help it, even
on your worst days. We forget to look for the radiant beauty in
ourselves and outside of ourselves. We're conditioned to look for
the slime. We don't need to participate in our own sliming; we
don't. When you rest in Love, all is done. All is good. All is perfect.
All is well.

Pride is interesting. How the frightened body-mind builds and
builds and builds its little tower up here all by itself, above
everything, out of the reach of what you fear might get you.
And Truth just comes in and goes "Hoowagh!" And you find
yourself lying on the ground with everybody else; we all end
up on the ground. It's the only place we can come from that's true.

Stay in that beautiful, naked, not-knowing. May you live always
there. It takes a little while to get used to it. It's very, very raw
and uncomfortable, and plenty of people will let you know that
that's true, complete with details about what you should be doing
to make them more comfortable about your willingness to hang
out in the void. Let's just call it what it is. People say they're being
helpful, but they're freaked out. Bless their hearts. You don't need
any help; you are right at the core and center of the Truth.
No worries. Just perfect. Naked, clueless. Me too.

Jeannie Zandi