consciousness

Humans have risen from the earth and continue opening into and through evolving realms of consciousness: vegetable, animal, psychological, spiritual.

Vegetable and animal consciousness are concerned with survival and dominance. Psychological consciousness is concerned with self-awareness. Spiritual consciousness is concerned with moving in harmony with the life force that calls us into being, with What Is.

With the first three, it is easy to fall into pursuit of our individual self-glorification. We constantly look into our mirror and adjust the make-up of ourselves.

The warrior of spirit has no mirror, throws all her/his energies into spiritual consciousness, into life-force awareness, leaps into the flames of existence with total abandon, dies before s/he dies, and thus truly lives.

This path is for everyone, but few take it.

line, circle, sphere

Line.
You are a vertical line.
The line looks as if it has a top end and a bottom end.
It has no end, extends forever "upward" and "downward."

Physically, the line is your spine.
Energetically, it is a line of light.
The sword of the spirit.

Circle.
You are a circle.
You are a circle with no circumference.
At the center of the circle is a dot.
The dot is the line of light.

Sphere.
The circle with no circumference is a sphere.
You are a sphere with no surface.
The sphere that is you extends infinitely in all "directions."

At the center of the sphere is the dot, the line of light.
You are a firm center in infinite space.
The space is filled with the radiance of you.

You sit in a chair. You walk around. You live this life.
You are a sphere of energy extending subtly and infinitely.
You are a sphere of influence.

Line. Circle. Sphere.

cosmos

For we all share the same body.

possessed

Through separating things, we've gotten them all mixed up. The most powerful instance of this is life and death. We have chopped up this ongoing ever-changing transformational flow into those two antagonists.Then we have come firmly down on the side of one while abhorring and fearing the other. How odd we are. How funny. How infinitely amusing.

Some of us get really attached to our feet, our face, our hands. We want to have them forever. The operative word here is "have."

Some of us get all attached to these personas we have so carefully crafted over the years. We just hope and pray our personality survives the jump, lands safely on "the other side," and goes on cavorting in its familiar peculiar ways. The operative word here is "our."

Some of us just absolutely l-o-o-o-v-e our mental ability, thinking the other humanoids are absurd stuporous brutes who just don't get it (whatever "it" is). We fancy ourselves as the intelligentsia of the universe, kind of the Teacher's Pet, and we know we won't be shelved with an eternal dunce cap. The operative word here is "fancy."

And so on. Survival, darling, we are talking survival. And in the form we are, with maybe a few little tweaks and changes, that wart, that guilt, that shame, a small surgical operation, nothing too drastic, you understand.

Some are scared shitless they are going to totally disappear. For others, that would be a blessed boon.

All these shenanigans start, as I said at the beginning of this death and doom and salvation and afterlife glory epistle, with our chopping up what can't be chopped into what we want and what we don't want.

Chaio Hung put it this way: "The wise person has no life. Not because he slights it, but because he doesn't possess it. If someone has no life, How can he be killed?"

The Zen dudes and dudesses put it this way: NO CLINGING!

Or as one of my favorite puns (somewhat outdated, but then so am I) puts it: Cling, cling, cling goes the folly!

grace and grit

How does one open to supra-sensory awareness? The simple answer is by grace and grit. Grace means this awareness is given to us. Grit means we must have the stamina to allow ourselves to open to it.

What? The stamina to open? Isn't opening easy? No. We humans like to remain closed, protected, secure. Do you know how to get fit physically and mentally? Join the Marine Corps and go through their boot camp. One is thrust into an entirely new world of awareness. What you thought was awareness before was cushy goo.

Opening to supra-sensory awareness is not for the faint of heart. It is joining a Spiritual Marine Corps. It is a lot easier in many ways to coast along in the world of appearances and never open beyond the physical senses that are given you for a short while.

Let me switch metaphors. Let us say you are sitting in a chair and over there is a door. The chair in which you sit is the world as it appears to your physical senses and nothing beyond that. You sit in the seat of sensory awareness. You may even found a religion and say there is nothing but sensory awareness -- the Religion of One's Extended Butt. That is a very popular religion these days and you will find many in your congregation.

As long as you think the chair is all there is, you will never leave it. You will live your life in the butt-sprung seat of sensory awareness and that's that. And I'm sure you can come up with many fine reasons as to why that is a wonderful thing to do.

If you have even a hint though that you are sitting in a chair and there is more to life than that chair, and you seem to be getting glimpses of a door, you will no longer be satisfied with Ass Extension as a philosophy of life.

You are going to want to get up and walk (a spiritual practice not as easy as it sounds) over to that door. The surprise is going to be that you were never in a chair and there is no floor, no room, and no door. You've been out here with all that gives birth to the world of appearances the whole time.

Grace means we always already exist in the realm of supra-sensory awareness. We are also prone to believe we are separate chunks of matter and appearance is all that matters, and it takes some grit, some stamina and practice to open beyond that proneness.

Does the universe exist in a grain of sand (the one grit that you think you are)? Yes.

The best answer I can give as to how to know that is an ancient one: Knock and it shall be opened. Have the grit to keep at it. Grace will come.

conversations

Seems like some of the things I write irritate the bejesus out of one of my friends. We talked about it this morning. These aggravational items fall within the realm of the experiences I have had and continue to have in what might be termed the mystico-theosopho-philosopho-psychologico areas of consciousness. He and many others have not had those experiences so I could easily be labeled as delusionally insane and dismissed. To his credit, from my point of view, he did not write me off and so we continue our conversations.

He was surprised that no one else had approached me in the straightforward way he did on this matter. I surmised that (a) some folk did not understand what I said much of the time anyway, so, just like not bothering to look up unintelligible words in the dictionary, just slid on by and went on with their lives, without further exploration or questioning comments, (b) some folk got riled that I spoke of what to them is the unseen, the unscientific, and hence, the ignorant as if it were seen and real and decided not to make too much of it since that's just George and he's too old and set in his ways to get converted to modern reality anyway, (c) some folk have had and do have similar experiences and so fully comprehend what I am talking about, and (d) some folk just don't want to think about such things.

My friend allowed as how I had a few things in my favor that kept him from deleting my every posting -- I seemed to be fairly intelligent and well read, seem open to a wide variety of opinions and viewpoints, and seem to have a sense of humor. Plus he said something that just cracked me up. He said I didn't seem to be trying to lead some kind of mass movement, and that if I was I seemed to be totally inept at it.

I love that guy. I hope he comes on and argues some with me. You too. Isn't that called a conversation?

journey

Journey.

What is the story of humans but one of genesis and return, of descent and ascent? All the books humans deem holy speak of this -- the Qur'an, the Tanakh, the Bible, the Buddhist sutras, the Book of Mormon; even the Old Dude, Lao Tzu, in his Tao Te Ching.

Journey.

Where we came from, our descent (which means both a fall and our line of ancestors) and where we are going, our ascent (implying transformation). All the holy books, all our revered explanations of us, say that we are on a trip, voyaging, casting out into the deep.

Jour-ney means how far we can travel in a day (jour). We go as far as we can while there is light. At night we hunker down, build artificial light, tell stories of the journeyers who have gone before. That is, until we lit the globe so that jour is all the time.

We have lost the rhythm of descent and ascent. Some say we are perpetually descending now, that all is lost. Others say no, we have just begun our ascent, having finally rid ourselves of those old stories we told around our night fires.

But if we listen carefully to our own heart, we can hear the thump of its closure, a door shut with finality, followed immediately by its opening with as much assurance as it closed. It had to be closed before it could open, and open before it could close. Closure or openness standing alone means nothing. Each requires the other for its meaning.

I see the feet of those walking this aeon path. We are part of that parade. Our lives consist of genesis and revelation, of the great fall and eternal return.

Journey.

Our souls burst with happiness, with joy for the pleasure and the gift of participation.

There is a caution here. Jesus said it well: I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. This refers not only to individual death and transformation, but to species death and transformation. We can work on the physical plane for only so long, then we move to a different plane. Humans will work no more. What is born out of humans will work.

Journey.

just can't stop writing

Hmmm... Notes To Myself, the blog that this one superseded, continues to get hits from around the world. Maybe I should have just one big fat blog, rather than the nine I have. But I like having my thoughts sorted out into different categories.

mind set

It is the mindset that does us in. Today is Sunday. What if you had your Monday mindset today? You think that is silly. Why would you do that and ruin a perfectly good day? My point exactly.

It-inerary

We are composed of multiple Its, fragments of ourselves that take ascendance from time to time, then recede into subterranean background.

We place some of these Its on hold, to be lived only at certain times: on vacation, with a certain set of friends, in particular subsets of circumstances.

We repress some Its, lock them in a dungeon, never to surface, visited only infrequently and brought scant food tossed haphazardly through their barred cells.

We glorify other Its we are, trying on their always too large shoes, clomping around like children at play with wishful dreams.

We keep our It circus going, performing in multiple rings of our devising -- the acrobats of agile moves here, the clowns there, the lion tamer with lions in Its protective beast-taming cage.

Each of us is a nation, a small nation of Its, each with Its own m.o., i.d., and raison d'etre.

Irruptions in the fabric of time, we person-ify ourselves. Deep within each persona is the embedding of the Unseen, the Unknown.

sniffs of transcendence

Many profess no belief in a transcendent reality, that only their meat & matter is real. This profession of no belief is itself a transcendent reality, rising beyond the meat one claims one only is. Subjectivity exists and is transcendent.

Of course, one can insist that one's subjectivity is the only subjectivity in contact with TRUE REALITY and that all other subjectivities are WRONG. But isn't that a stance of exclusion, a religious stance at its worst, a stance that one who professes anti-religious, anti-transcendent sentiments abhors?

I find this rather amusing: stiff-legged dogs sniffing each others' butts for any scent of transcendence which will set them growling, while knowing that scent only because they have a transcendent component themselves.

Those who are anti-transcendent fall readily into the old familiar trap: my transcendence is the only worthy transcendence -- a stance at once both hilarious and painful.

line dance

Boundaries exist only where we place them.
We are bound only as we bind.
We bind ourselves with our boundaries.
Bound and determined.

hand in glove

How beautiful that the Source of all being would embody as a human! And that is you, my dear! That is you!

the imaginal

"his head is in the clouds" they said
while i had no head at all

vast boundless range

no orthodoxic form
no braces or clamps
would ever reek a do

infinity cannot be stuffed
within society's shoe