Who or what would you have the hardest time loving?

what is that quote by t.s. elliot about arriving back at  place and knowing it for the first time.
loved your blog.

Everything is our experience.  I love this Centria.  You weave words so well to point to these truths.  Thank you.

beautiful arrangement of thoughts and words here - thank you

 With our physical senses we only see the tip of the iceberg. If we could see the whole, we’d discover that the unpleasantness was only the tiniest piece of a most spectacular puzzle that was created with order, intelligence, and absolute love. We’d see that contrary to appearances, in the grandest scheme of things, nothing is ever lost, no one becomes less, and setbacks are always temporary. And we’d understand that no matter what has happened, everyone lives again, everyone laughs again, and everyone loves again, even more richly than before. 
 
 ~ from the divine words of The Universe.

My Centuria!  The things you say (write) ~ amazing, thoughtful, deep, insightful, and so full of love.  Will you be my Mom?  ;0)

Love, Ayla

Kathy, that is what I said! In not so many words… but an explanation is always helpful to map the path…
Great post!

Your thoughts and feelings remind me of the quote I can’t recall exactly, or even who said it, but the impact of the words is still with me…as your thoughts will be: What lies before and what lies behind is nothing compared to what lies within….

Insightful and beautiful post dear Kathy.
 
I loved when you said:
 
 “A place where self & no-self dance together and apart.  So now you see a “self” and now you don’t.  Look: a self!  Look:  no-self!  And can you love all the parts as they come into awareness? ”
 
Reminded me of these thoughts I had recently how we all are part of this great pulse. A universal heartbeat, like a giant breathing in and breathing out that you see everywhere,  not only our own breath, but the oceans, all around us is this rhymn of in and out, the creative dance of the universe.
 
                    
 

jenni….take your pick:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of
all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place
for the first time.

T. S. Eliot


What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.

T. S. Eliot

thats it.
thanks maze. I was thinking of the first one but like the other one too.

In the dance between Self and No-Self, Self keeps stepping on No-Self’s toes! When is Self going to commit to being a better dancer? ~grin~

Hi Kath,

Always thought provoking and pointing to the essence… With that you say above:

“Ahhhh, here in the confines of a human body, in the perhaps contracted
expression of wanting to be a Self, of needing to be a Self, we push
others away all the time.  We judge YOU as being too ____________(fill
in the blank) in order to support our inner insecurity which needs to
be more _______________ (fill in the blank.)”

Right, so why do we care if others are too _______? Then you write…

We listen to our inner critic and judge labeling, cornering, limiting
the Other.  Because what happens when the Other is limited?  We almost
convince ourselves that we are OK.  Almost.  Because, in the end, I
think, we can never convince ourselves of our basic worth when it’s
pitted against another part of the Larger World.  No, we need to first
remember our worth, and surrender to the true love of it, and then what
do we see?  An outer world which reflects the love of which we are!

Very nice!

We can’t convince ourselves. Is it because we are pitting ourselves against a larger world? Or, is it because we just don’t feel right about something inside us? What inside us is pitting? Me and the ego is not an acceptable answer. That is relying on what someone else has told us, a spiritual concept.

Directly speaking in present experience, what is it that is getting between us and the larger world? Sure, we can surrender to the love of who we are, but what is it that get’s in the way of that? Are we flawed when we cannot connect to that larger self? What is it really that gets in the way without reading books or someone telling us what they think it is?

o.k. I am way past my point. What is it?

If it was anyone else, I wouldn’t bother asking.
Love You,
Ben

What is getting in the way of surrender to the love we are?
 
“The love we are.”  I guess we are simply caught up in the idea that we’re not and that is creating the illusion of separation. I don’t believe we can connect to that larger self, because the we that we think we are is the very thing that creates the illusion of separation. But the larger self can connect with us any time, or perhaps connect isn’t even the right word because it always already is, so let’s say we can allow for it.
 
But allowing, surrendering, we find difficult because to the we it looks like dying, dissolving into something we aren’t quite familiar with yet, eventhough that something could be ultimate bliss.
So it seems to come down to faith and ultimate trust.

I’ll be thinking about what you just said and try to comment on that. But not now because it’s 1 am and I really want to tryi to get to bed earlier (lol) these days. It’s been pretty much over the top lately, especially around full moons.
 
I’ll just throw in one more thing  for the fun of it:
“Let’s say we’re compulsively grasping & attaching to an urge to come and visit Gaia twenty times a day.  Not saying that any of us are doing that, but let’s pretend.”
 
You got me chuckling gurl!!

Hi Kath!

You pointed to the answer to the question I asked by even writing this entry to begin with. These are important questions you ask. I will offer that “thinking” about the answer to the double jeopardy question will not provide an answer from direct experience. To keep it real clean, I will say I could not have begun to answer it myself to take all soap box preaching, and geez don’t you know out of it.  So let me start by asking questions I see as compatible with yours. After all, we do tend to blend in what interests us. ;o)

How is it after thousands of years of religion for humans, and at least years if not decades\centuries of spiritual engagement of all kinds, we look around us and see what is happening in the world today? We have war, addiction, divorce, fighting, judgment, confusion, poverty, disease of all kinds, the highest level of teenage suicide attempts, economic downturns, so on and so forth? Are we any more peaceful, loving, and kind? Really. Are we?

Here is what I offer to the discussion. What is most missed in all of this? We have mind and intellectual achievements beyond anything ever before. We have numerous and diverse ways to engage with spirit. Prosperity and abundance is beyond anything we have known before even with the economic crisis. We have physical knowledge and technology beyond anything previously known before. What could it be that we are not seeing?

Eckart Tolle calls it the ”pain body”. Michael Brown calls it emotional imprints. In this view, I say it is we have these energies in motion (emotions) feelings, and feeling memories while past are indeed influencing our very present (presence) and experience. Not only this, I will agree with a few others like Tolle and Brown and say that their impact is pandemic on the world at large.

How about a large scale example. Israel cuts a peace deal with Palestine in the early 90s to begin moving out of the Gaza strip. What actually happens? The Israeli population in Gaza between then and now doubles. Why?

After giving up all hope of Israel leaving the Gaza strip, Hamas begins sending missals into Israel. Why? To get their attention? To punish them for not honoring the agreement? What?

Who is right? Wrong question. What is each reacting to? I offer an answer emotional imprints or collective pain bodies from the past as a highly likely answer. In the meantime, innocent people die, are hurt, or at a minimum traumatized including children. Nice memory for them eh? And the beat goes on…

Now, let’s look at our individual lives even as good as we seem to be doing with our spiritual and transcendental orientations. Are we seeing evidence of this in our lives, our relationships, in the peace that occupies our minds, bodies, and our daily occurrences?

Now I will speak for myself and leave everyone to answer the questions for themselves. Did spiritual practices, concepts, and orientations really provide peace and help me? The answer is a resounding YES. In fact, I would submit that they saved my life… literally.

So, how is it I can proceed to real peace, real love for myself and others? How can all this really impact the world? Why has Tolle struck such a chord with millions of people across the world? Let me write that again, millions of people! We’re not stupid, just not looking.

Tolle or Brown take your pick or not. Everyone will do what they will. As for me, I am going to face what is inside, what suffering rises within me, and as people like Ramana Maharshi and so many others have said, it makes no difference what happens in the world as far as world peace if I don’t start with myself.

A couple of videos from Michael Brown. His Presence Process has revealed and moved mountains in me. It is the easiest and the same time the most challenging thing I have ever done or I should say not done.

Everything Is Love

Love is to Evolve

To anyone who says everything is already perfect. I would both agree and say, if your body got sick or hurt would you not take your body to the doctor or a health care practitioner? So, what about your feelings and emotions? What needs healing inside?

For the first time in a long time, I have glimpsed the innocence of a child and the gratitude I have for that surpasses anything to this point and also includes it.
Love to All,
z

Thanks Ben for inviting me to weigh in.  It’s interesting reading all of the posts, starting with Kathy’s.  We speak of things that we take for granted: “self,” “the world,” “spirit,” “the pain body;” very big words.  What do we know of them, truly?  What is my spirit that the world is not?  What is my pain body that enlightenment is not?  How do I know?  How many more word games shall we play?  What is beyond them?

Living is here.  There is no end to it.  I have seen probably 50 people die.  Life is not absent the corpse in the bed.  Let it stay there for 3 days and we’ll be sure of it. 

But in the play of words, we subscribe our lives to a life lived in words.  Living is here.  Right here, doing it.  There is no true name for it.  There is no place in all of it to place the word that could reflect it and yet be separate from it. 

Living is here, uninterrupted.  It is not going anywhere, yet there is no “where” where it is not.  You can not find it, because there is nowhere where it is not.  If it is not absent, how could you find it?

Mankind runs on the ratwheel of its own linguistic making.  Another round for progress.  Another round for science.  Another round for “spirituality.” Another round for environ-MENTAL-ism.  What new batch of MENTAL ISM are you cooking up now?

Have you taken a run through the bushes lately?  Have you rooted through your lover’s bush lustily lately?  Did you dare to leave your mind behind, or were you trying to be the perfectly considerate and consummate lover?

Could you dare to not-know, and simply Taste!  Taste!  Taste!, your lascivious tongue dripping with the thunderhoney that banishes your imaginings and shoves your bright face straight into the purlewed loins of the brightness you already inhabit: groaning, sweating, dripping, bleeding, coming and laughing with a fart at all your notions of remedies.

I bid your tongues bright journeys beyond the dried bones of imaginary vocabularies and straight into the wet grunt of LIVING!

Ok Kathy here we go again, I read the original blog again, just yours this time, to get a refreshed notion with how this blog started  in the first place.
Plus I just read the lates comment of Little Big O, which I thought was just delicious.  
Ok there’s a copple of basis things I distill from yr blog: 
When we flow , there seems to be an outpouring of Love, it seems easy to look at the world and others with compassion. Then when we’re not flowing, it all of a sudden seems a lot harder, our inner critics and a whole lot of other ghost come up.
I have no answers Kathy, so I’m just going to do some freefalling here, just for the fun of it.
I’m not sure why one moment we’re  all in tune and the next moment we’re not. We can either consciously prepare ourself for attuning to love by meditation, being attentive or whatever works for us to prepare a space of being open and sensitive, other times it just seems to flow through us without any seemingly conscious intent.  Then there are those other times where it doesn’t seem to flow, those yakky times. Obviously we’re tuning into something other than that which we call our Love space. It might be indeed a trigger from a former mental or emotional imprint, it might be something we pick up from outside of us which then reacts with a former inprint. Those of course are things we can bring to our attention, work on, enough methods, exercises,  therapies etc. for that. 
But what intriques me the most is your last sentence, so very vital to me:
“Look: a self!  Look:  no-self!  And can you love all the parts as they come into awareness?”
Who or what is it that does the observation looking at a self and a no self? The most obvious answer would be one a lot of us have learned as some spiritual doctrine: well that’s our greater awareness witnessing .
But is it really?  How can something that is in essence undivided Oneness make that distinction? 
Isn’t it rather a part of our divided self that does that?  Even when we have moments of insight into loving awareness,  our minds love to jump in immediately to categorize. In other words the very judging that we seem to do on whatever doesn’t feel holy or loving is perhaps the very thing that keeps us in the illusion of seperation. I dunno. It’s just that whenever I’ve been able to allow a feeling, an emotion, a thought that didn’t fit into my category of holy and loving enlightened state of being etc. ,  just allowing it to be there in an atmosphere of loving attention, I’ve noticed it dissolves, it changes. There’s only one place we can be and that one place at the same time is everywhere. We can either be in judgement and categorize  whatever crosses our path or we can be in acceptance of what is.
So it’s here I’m meeting with your last sentence “..can you love all the parts as they come into awareness?”  Love is the binding factor, so I feel it’s not the nagging parts of us that necessarely keeps us in a sense of division but our incapability of  loving those parts as well (which is not necessarely the same as agreeing with them or not wanting to change).
 
Another thing, in this blog was referred to Tolle’s pain body. I see it this way, I don’t believe Tolle means that whenever something comes up for healing like an emotional pain, we shouldn’t let it, I think he merely means that we should be aware of not endlessly be trapped in unconscious triggers that cause reactions of former inprints.  Sooner or later in order to heal and let go of those imprints, you’ll have to deal with some of the underlying pain or upset.
 
Well it’s just me rambling, don’t believe anything i say or believe all of it, I’m only sharing some stuff that came up, whirling by in this absolutely magnificant dance of us here being together, touching each other in
wonderful intentions to let Love Be, Freefall all the way.
 
Oh btw, those thoughts of this Universal heartbeat came up when thinking about the ocean. Always when I’m at the ocean and sense so much the power of the tides, and the openess of sky and depth of water, I feel at one with this rhythm so I started thinking how we’re all part of this breathing in and out, if we look at our bodies, the tides, we are this rhytm and then I just had this imagination of the land being that crosspoint, a point of creation, just like our bodies are perhaps just the crosspoint manifestation of an ever moving rhytm of breathing in and out. Well it’s just an image, because apart from Being and Living it, we only have images and language as pointers to the living waters of Spirit.
 
So what I’m really trying to say is that being enlightened perhaps just means embracing even those yakkis.  Hmmm…..but perhaps then they wouldn’t be yakkis anymore?
HUGGIES.

Kathy, I think our pods must have crossed, because when i posted my last comment I hadn’t read or seen the above one yet.

Sweetie,
 
I guess one should indeed look at what the word “being in the flow” means to oneself. We might all have different associations with that. One of the things it means to me is being attuned to a loving awareness which is a unifying force, not one of division. It’s an action directive rooted in a greater, deeper sense of Love, Oneness and responsibility.  So it doesn’t mean anything goes. What I mean by embracing all, doesn’t mean that one should not have discernment.  Embracing to me means also to be totally OK to not agree with something that doesn’t seem to be attuned to loving action.  It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t speak up or whatever action you want to take. It just means to me that you don’t get totally off center by starting to mirror that which represents the raper. That you try to stay in the flow of a centering awareness. It also doesn’t mean to me that we can’t feel angry or sad if something like that happens,  it’s ok to have emotions about that, but it’s quite another story to blindly act out on these emotions.
 
When the raper would have learned to listen to all these yakki voices within him that asked for love and attention and would have been able to meet those with love and attention, he probably wouldn’t have had the need to project them on someone else. But unfortunetely a lot of people never had the right models, never learned how to do that yet. So he goes out on impulses, old imprints that are not in allignment with a unifying sense of love, I wouldn’t call that being in the flow. I wouldn’t think that’s Spirit’s voice either.
 
So as far as flow goes I guess it comes down to what concepts you carry about the words “being in the flow”. I guess a lot of people carry it as a notion that anything goes, which to me seems just an easy way out of caring.
 
He it’s late again, gotto go.

This is great discussion. I had a minister tell me one time that every action, every move, every decision no matter how misguided or distorted was in the pursuit of love no matter how deranged it appears on the surface. Interesting view if you look through the eyes of another especially if that other as no idea about love, spirit or any of the glorious writings on this entry. Some people would be happy with a meal today.

We can all say something works on any given day and it might most of the time. However, I contend that life is dynamic, not a formula, and will never ever be able to put to formula or a nice little box. Still, some something does seem to be changeless in its abiding aliveness beyond inside and outside. I had to say that as I looked over my shoulder to keep a wandering ZenMaster from whacking me with his stick. lol! I would be black and blue after my first two sentences.

So all this rides on the assumption that there is someone to do something and to make a choice or strategy about anything. Not necessarily a given in my view. ;o)

Whew! What a ride this one was! Ha!
z

good morning
wow what a shift from the starting point
many people here and grab onto ‘flow’ as an excuse to be irresponsible and to themselves the most
a lot of the new language would have all thinking they were the center of the universe and really helps those who mislike thinking that what they do has no effect or accountability not to society and definately not to self…may as well be an active addict that way and insert stuff into the veins….inserting platitudes into the brain is just the same
but then again the only way out is through or is it?

o.k. so we are really on the “flow” word. I really did not read anyone here saying the word “flow” was an excuse for being irresponsible until recently. Not one comment says that prior to the last two. So where is this interpretation of flowing coming from?

When your flowing who cares what flowing means? And more importantly who cares to define it when your really flowing?

I haven’t seen one happy and joyous person or most importantly child flowing in a way that was irresponsible or even caring about defining it.

The joy of life was just too magnificent.
z

this was great! thank you all…
so now is ‘it’ IN or THRU or WITH? the words have taken on a new meaning…
these were not my enlightened first thoughts, but before i wrote them, so glad to have read how spirit went to love… rather than ‘hardest time’…
in spirit, in love, then on a higher plane of living in the now, then I could and would love everyone and everything. but in the moments i forget, and lose awareness, i might have answered entirely different…
thank you for reminding me not to go there…
love is pretty powerful, let these threads continue outward as well as inward.

To Kathy and other sumptuous denizens of Beingness,

First of all, as the Mayans say,”In Lak’ech!” “You are another I.”

Can we venture together for a moment?

Let me ask you:  what do the meditator, the activist, the addict, and the rapist all have in common in terms of what motivates those specific activities: meditation, activism, addiction and rape?

Consider that for a moment.  What are they all trying to do that we are trying to do?  Please note the phrase: “trying to do” which gives a big clue.


So here’s a quote from Kathy that points to it and it’s the crux of how Western humans relate to their experience, after 12-18 plus years of programming in schools to pick the “right answer” to “do the right thing” and I quote you.

“I see myself, and lots of other people (may be a projection) saying we’re in the flow.  When really we’re still asleep and just responding from the firing random associations in our Pavlov-dog neurons. ”

So there are times when we feel like we’re in the flow, or say we’re in the flow and then there are times that we’re just Pavlovian-dog bio-bots, right?


Consider the rapist Kathy mentions.  Okay, so he’s chosen an activity which, on the surface, appears quite different than, say the meditator’s activity, right?  …on the surface…   There are times when the rapist is in flow and there are times that he’s not, right?  Kind of like sky-diving, meditating or something, perhaps, I don’t know.  

But what’s a rapist?  What is he doing?  A rapist is someone who interrupts another human being’s will to follow their chosen course and hijacks their experience into fulfilling their expectations for a totally different experience.  They subject one human being to another’s will.


Johnny sits at the window at school.  It’s May.  Mrs. Stuart is teaching algebra.  Suddenly a small, bright orange bird alights upon the sill right next to Johnny, outside.  The birds head tilts and his eyes connect with Johnny.  It’s THEIR moment.  He trills a short blast of thrilling notes that reach straight through to the pulsatile essence of Johnny’s heart.  Johnny’s in COMMUNE-ion and LIFE is singing to him.  There is only one movement and the entire world is a part of it.  

Mrs. Stuart has something that she believes is much more important than Johnny’s experience, and she will bodily, even violently assure that Johnny grasps this.  He is not in charge.  Mrs. Stuart is in charge of him!  Mrs. Stuart is not pleased to see Johnny looking outside and Johnny gets rudely called out of his experience into the experience that Mrs. Stuart intends for him.  This interruption is the essence of rape.  Please consider the dynamics that I am pointing to, not the judgment.  As long as we allow our children to be interrupted, and as long as we continue to interrupt our children, rape will proliferate, because we acculturate each other into the belief that we can feel better by interrupting another person.  
 
So rape is essentially believing that MY experience is more important than your experience and I’m going to gang-press you into my experience.  This is the essence not only of rape, but of our educational system, our parenting model and majority rule democracy.  Bottom line:  “We have decided that you WILL do what we say AND, not only that, you WILL submit to the belief that it’s for your own good.”

How many times have you heard someone you’re “close to” tell you “I absolutely need to talk to you!” Whenever you hear that you are talking to someone who is insane!  
 
This is NOT the status quo amongst human beings, but it is in many cultures AND there are others that don’t treat each other this way.  I had some Cheyenne, Lakota & Klamath friends that I spent years with that very specifically did not do this.  When I was with them, I began to notice that they didn’t ask direct pointed questions and very few questions at all.  Already something as subtle as, “Kathy, will you drive me to the grocery store?” is understood to put you in a situation where I am trapping you into a choice about what I want to use you for.  i.e. “Will you allow me to use you for my purposes?”  Instead someone might say “in the air,” without making eye contact (and thus putting someone on the spot) “I want to go to the grocery store today.” Simple statement.  Now someone can GIFT their aid or simply share the adventure.  “Yeah!  I’m going there shortly and there’s room in my car for whoever wants to go.”

Our cultures are very different.  Notice how we are perpetually negotiating other people’s wills.  “Hey, honey, will you do this?” “Honey, did you do what we agreed upon?” This is Western intimacy and it’s no wonder we’re all driving each other nuts.  What we often miss is that we’re driving OURSELVES nuts too.

The vocabulary of “Honey, how can I make you happy?” & “How can I make myself happy?” has shared presumptions. This is the vocabulary of life as an artifact that requires manipulation, not life as LIVING.  (And that’s okay.  As a matter of fact, it’s beautiful!  Our BEAUTY is inescapable.  We can only choose to Taste!  Taste!  Taste!… or not…)

But we do treat each other and ourselves this way.  After 12 plus years of getting perpetually interrupted in the mental institutions called schools, where our experience is reduced to a mental artifact, we are conditioned to believe that “performance” or “flow” or “feeling good” is a matter of doing something ELSE or getting someone else to do something, i.e. we are conditioned to separate ourselves from our experience and to decide whether or not we are PERFORMING as desired.  Our lives are no longer authentic, they are pre-conceived, or pre-mentated performances.  

Please take this in for a moment:  Performance…  “How do I perform?” “How is my performance right now?”  “How is YOUR performance right now?!” “Are you doing this right?” “Are you Being right?!” “Are you grasping what Little Big O is telling you right?!”  
 
HAHAHAHAHA!
 
We are crazy, beautiful beings.  

 
Anything for you there?
 
So feeling is a performance.  We are convinced that we will feel better when we DO something better.  Of course we want to feel good right?  We tell the world how good we feel.  We are in pursuit of a feeling.  It doesn’t matter whether we are meditators, addicts or rapists, the fact is that we are conditioned to believe that by doing something, we can feel better.   If we simply DO something, we can taste that thrill that is perpetually elusive.  And we do things and we do feel better.  But “better” doesn’t last, does it?  Soon we’re faced with our Pavlovian self again…  “Oh shit!  You mean I turned into that Pavlovian fucking dog again?!  Oh FUUUUUCK!  I was so God-damn close to enlightenment and then I turned back into a lumbering, drooling 185 lb. Newfoundland slobbering all over the damn place!  What’s up with THAT!!!!!!!!”  

Once we have internalized the culture of the Mrs. Stuarts, of the world and of our parents, our relationship to ourselves is one of perpetual interruption and evaluation.  We become the next generation of interruptors.  Interruption becomes intimacy.  How do I show my loved ones that I care?  I interrupt them.  How do I show myself that I really want to improve?  I interrupt myself.  “See!  Now I’m an adult.  I don’t need Mom, Dad or Mrs. Stuart anymore.  I can interrupt myself all on my own and even find brand new ways of interrupting myself that Mom, Dad, & Mrs Stuart never even imagined:  Tibetan ways, shamanistic ways, crazy no-way ways, etc.  Now I have better vocabulary for what I SHOULD be doing than my peers. “Am I in flow or am I out of flow?” “Do I feel okay or not?” “AM I okay?” “Really?” “Reeeaaaaaalllly?”  and we are perpetually seeking to feel better by some mental criteria.  We want to improve ourselves.  We have an IDEA of what “flow” is and we are trying to feel it in our emotional and physical bodies.  We have an idea of how we could “be all that we can be,” right?  And even though we may not join the army, we’re still going to gang-press ourselves into the IDEA we have for ourselves.


Is this wrong?  No.  It’s not right or wrong.  It’s CURIOUS.  
 

“Curious”  
 

Let me offer you curiosity as a treasured, lived key, heart to heart, and beseech you cup your hands together and allow me to pour this bright tingling intimacy of this energetic relational key we label “curious” and pour it from my hands to yours, from my heart to yours, tingling up from our palms, up our arms to our chests, necks, heads, bellies, groins, legs, toes.  
 
Curious, eh?
 

Can you FEEL that there’s something profound about loving wrapped up in this curiosity?  Like if we were to discover passionate love together, its dimensions would be proportionate to how much curiosity we dared offer each other.  Can you FEEL it?
 
Maybe there’s something already-here…  Are you curious?
 

Yet we keep bumping up against this frustration of trying to achieve some state which very astute people keep selling to us as “better” than the state we’re presently in.  The depth of our access to our present experience is shallow because we are conditioned to perpetually interrupting it and playing Mrs. Stuart with ourselves and evaluating whether we are experiencing what we want to experience.

What’s the alternative?  Well, I think Michael Brown puts it quite succinctly when he says, “We can either ,eep trying to feel better OR we can get better at feeling.” The latter process is one of venturing through the layers of what we are experiencing without trying to do something to it.  If we feel “awful,” we develop the courage to actually feel what awful FEELS like without making drama that we externalize and without trying to make awful “not awful.”  We begin to become curious.  We begin to allow that in “awful” there is room to simply BE, to taste, to experience.  We begin to experience that we don’t get destroyed by “awful” nor does the world end in awful.  Awful, once we FEEL it, isn’t actually awful.  There are really no words for it, but the experience is vital, it is alive and we are living it.  When the Zen people say “Not-two,” what are they pointing at?  You are already it!  And then they say, “And if you tell me ‘One’ I will beat the living daylights out of you!”

Not One!  Not Two!  

Something is LIVING here.  It is not separate from you.
 
Engaging in this process for many of us means reconnecting with a process of maturing our relationship to our experience that was interrupted at a very young age.   It’s simply accessing this experience we are having right now and allowing, even for a short time, that we can take, say, 15 minutes a day and not interrupt our experience.  Not chasing “enlightenment,” not “self-improvement,” just a simple willingness to come home to being THIS beingness.  “Hello!”  Settling in.  Tasting the flavor of this.  Maybe expansiveness.  Maybe Pavlov’s dog with the long wet tongue.
 
We begin to redevelop familiarity with our felt experience beyond the perpetual fascism of continually “fixing,” “readjusting,” etc.  And if we continually fix and readjust, we don’t fix that either.  We fix and readjust and get curious in the midst of it.  “Wow, look at me go trying to fix myself again!”  “Wow, look at me go trying to fix my child, my lover, my world, my gaia friends again!  How CURIOUS!”
 
Hahahahahaha!
 

“What’s here?”  It’s okay to be just-this and NOT do something about it.  Life can go on here.  Life can move within us and we don’t have to interrupt or correct it.  Then another intelligence that we are knit of appears.  Not an idea and not no-idea.  BEING is here.  We are it!  How curious!
 
We can smile, laugh then become very curious:

 
“O!  It’s me again!  How curious!  Hmmmm…..”

Hey, just as an aside, YOU ARE ALL SO DAMN BEAUTIFUL!

And Kathy, yes!  the snowshoes say it all, don’t they!?

Crunch, Crunch, Crunch…..

hahahahahaha  You are Sumptubopmolishnowoopietonicity!  Already DOIN’ IT!  Nothing to do!

ROFLMAO

Absolutely Magnificent O! Thank you for taking the time to write a complete rendering of what you have seen. That is sooooo helpful and a truly BEAUTIFUL GIFT that I am going to cherish and savor. It expanded my awareness, and that is such a wonderful expansion for a loving life.

I relate directly to experience interruptus. Yesterday, at work, I was mouthing about all the chaos and having to learn some new software. Mrs. Stuart was jumping up and down in my head the whole time telling me what it is I should be experiencing on my projects, what constitutes forward progress, and how fast I should be learning the new software. It totally controls how I organize my work day and how I can do it to make myself absolutely miserable. The point is that I do to myself what Mrs. Stuart used to do, and I can expand that into the spiritual as you write.

I really appreciated the Zen Master analogy because that is what I saw the other day in my comments, so I applied 40 wake up whacks with the virtual stick to myself saving Z.M. the trouble. ;O) I had to laugh at myself for that one.

You wrote: The birds head tilts and his eyes connect with Johnny.  It’s THEIR
moment.  He trills a short blast of thrilling notes that reach straight
through to the pulsatile essence of Johnny’s heart.

Whew! That was an incredible Taste just reading that. If you ever decide to teach an O vocabulary class let me know, I will sign up on the spot! Love that word pulsatile.

So much of my life O has been one interruption after another for the sake of performance and control of my environment and experience.  Not good. Not bad. Just now tasting it. Seeing how it has driven me nuts.

In my experience, I spent the first 11 years connecting with the bird before the punishment and being marginalized pushed me into submission. I am kind of happy about that independent streak, and unfortunately made up for lost ground to get the “man” off my back. <hehehehe> You have to do what I want in order to be loved and seen as special schtick. This is pandemic in our culture.

I really enjoyed the gentleness you describe of the Lakota way. I find I am naturally that way myself. What I see though is I want to accept the help of others when I make the statement “I want to go to the Drug Store today.” I am not accepting the help offered is my awareness on that one.

Many expansions here O, and I am deeply grateful to connect with the innocence of that little boy inside again and re-learning curiousity which might as well be flow.

Great post Kath! This has been very lifefull!
Deepest Bow and no whacks! Ha
z

I can see I am way beyond the words and meanings and have not read all the replies… I just wanted to say I loved the wood and ice picture you added into it.
look for your daily photos, there really is so much beauty in winter, only i prefer mine with green all year, but especially the blue skies and stars that I missed seeing everyday that I was in michigan… however my tune with change in aug!!!
much love for your love!
and l now have john lennon in my brain,allwe need is love, dadadadada, love is all we need… oh am i showing my age,hahahah

letting my eyes and the surface of my mind flow over all the words
here.  I really like that some people will effort the expression of
something that is so hard to express, and I am too lazy to express. I
here acknowledge your brilliance and generosity. And imagine a being as
simple and majestic as a blue whale’s.

a time for every season under heaven… to every thing change change change. or is it turn turn turn??? humming in my head!
I am thinking byrds …  byrds are in my head now… think this is a good time to get the things done that I need to do today… will have to listen to youtubes later, maybe add a few to my own blogs.
hope the lighting is perfect for your daily photo today… is the snow melting yet?
those spring bulbs and lime greens are starting their magic, yet to be seen…
may the sun shine on you today and always!
and i really need to read again how this thread started, have enjoyed all your lovely writings and poems and photos! peacelove

carla, love that blue whale visual, with its eye staring back at us!!!
they are such amazing beings, always breaks my heart when I think of how we pollute their world. I believe theyare wiser than we are!!! you too write beautiful words of beautiful visuals! I can even hear the whale sing too… :)