I'm on a spiritual journey of realizing the awareness that we are.

Tee hee.  Aren't we all?

Let's put this another way...I am on a two day "driveabout" (like the Aboriginal walkabout) letting the steering wheel guide the way.  Where it goes, nobody knows.  It steers, we go. 

Oh what an amazing day yesterday was! 

It started at dawn down by the Keweenaw Bay and then danced itself around to sunset in a town about an hour north.  It was incredible.  The "voice of Spirit" which has been silent mostly during these six long years of more focused meditation has opened up again.  I am SO glad to hear that inner voice of wisdom guiding, instructing, leading, prompting.  It shares with such wisdom that tears prickle.

This inner voice began to teach back in '87 with the opening into the Native American way and then dissolved with the meditation years, probably about the time I became suspicious of words. 

But...oh!  It points with such clarity toward Awareness as Everything, Everywhere, All around, never ending, never beginning, always Here, always Now.  And right in the Moment, when a thought or feeling arises that seems to move away from this knowing, it surfaces again gently expanding it back to THIS.  This all-pervasive knowing of Oneness that delights in the apparent separation and the realization of Itself.

On this driveabout, it's so very clear that there is not a place where Awareness is Not.  And that Awareness is leading the show.  Awareness is the show.  Awareness is the space that arises and how did we ever think we were a little self? 

Silly us!  What a divine joke!

Looking around this motel room it's so clear, like crystal clear, that I am this whole room.  Or rather, the awareness that is now perceiving this space filled with itself that looks like a separate motel room.  Gosh, that was a convoluted sentence.  Look at what's arising in me:  bed, computer, clothes, telephone, light!  But I am emptiness itself...thinking she's sometime Kathy...how funny!!

This morning the Mind started its litany of "what to do?"  Awareness witnessed the usual litany with its usual subtle tension.  The tension of a self that thinks it has to DO something!  Then awareness chuckled.  There's nothing for Kathy to do!  The Mind continued to offer all these options:  go swimming, drink coffee, meditate, read, turn on the TV, find the heat in the motel room, exercise...and yet there was no need to even do anything except watch what arose. 

And suddenly Awareness reached for the light switch and picked up a notebook and started writing.  How amazing!  That wasn't even one of the options suggested by the Mind.  And later put down the pen and the legs went over the bed and...well you get the picture.

Awareness is leading the show!  It has been all the time!  And we thought we were doing something.  Tee hee.  It's the grandest joke.

So the driveabout continues today.  Where we go in the field that is us, who knows?  Glad you're all along for the drive.  How could it be any other way?

Yesterday was the most perfectly lightly-stressed day.  You know, the kind of day where you're slightly tense all day because a) you think you have too much to do and b) your Mind tells you all day "I have too much to do!" and c) you believe your Mind.

So the day passed with the Mind in the forefront convincing the feelings that they were slightly overwhelmed.  One of those kind of days.  Not the kind of day you want to say "Oh, life is so wonderful!"

And then.  As some of you know, I have been experiencing...oh goodness...what have I been experiencing since July 20th?  Moments of awakening?  Experiences of awakening?  Something like that.

So last night about 10 p.m., pretty exhausted, after spending some time focusing energy and love in the direction of a loved one, suddenly all the Inner Racket fell silent.  Ahhh...incredible peace.  It feels like everything simply just falls away into an endless field of empty awareness and  blessed peace.  (I have not been feeling lots and lots of bliss...it's more like endless deep soul-releasing fields of endless peace.  At times.  Obviously not most of yesterday.)

And then became aware of Awareness.  Doing its thing.  Witnessing it gently moving from place to place around the room and cosmos.  Within this field of peace.  Would have loved to stay awake to meditate more, but decided to go to bed.

But Awareness didn't want to sleep.  But it was soooo relaxing.  Lying there for a couple hours watching Awareness move.  Then Awareness would become what it perceived.  Thoughts would arise (even the inner writing of this blog which usually drives me batty!) but Awareness remained perfectly aware even within the context of words.  Images of distant places, other dreams, would arise, but Awareness never lost itself in them, forgetting itself.

And then time collapsed.  I understood instantly, perfect, that Time is an illusion.  Not as a mental concept, but as a truth.  There is only the Now. 

Have been chuckling this morning thinking about reading Thich Nhat Hanh in the past and thinking "oh way too simple and kinda boring, watching the hands doing the dishes and just that simplicity--" and now I see clearly how his directions and guidance can be right on.

For me, this path of witnessing Awareness "do its thing" is collapsing everything.  Time, self, thoughts, feelings, Universe, stress.  Just to go back to simple awareness.  Over and over and over and over again.  And it's like the least boring thing in the Universe.  Surprise, surprise!

So we'll see what today will bring.  More stress?  Awareness of Presence?  Watching the hands dehydrate dried mushrooms and the body doing lots of work and the self grasping?  Or more of the field of peace?  Strangely enough, right now, it doesn't matter. 

This moment is all there is, right?

Throwing words in the suitcase left and right
 under the underwear and socks
words like "I am" between a shirt
and "I believe" tossed haphazardly near skirts
and extra shoes.
Going on vacation!
Will the words scamper out
when we arrive at our destination
or will they remain in the suitcase
 while awareness dresses
in its nakedness and
tucks the suitcase under the bed
and instead bare toes
dance on the red Georgia earth?

So you want to be spiritually enlightened?  Home to your original self?  Sitting within the faceless face of that which never births or never dies?  

What to do, what to do?  

You have two choices today.  You can do nothing.  Or you can do something.  Pick your choice carefully.  Although some will laugh and say:  it doesn't matter.  (And that, too, will be true if you spin the kaleidoscope far enough.)
 
 Let's say you decide to do nothing.  To do nothing you must gauge where you're beginning.  Are you beginning in the place where you are asleep, in the collective trance of our humanity?  Are you sleeping?  Are you hypnotized, sleep-walking, reaching randomly here and there, grabbing and avoiding, yawning and stretching, doing the same things day in and day out?  Are you free?  Can you choose?  Are you happy?  Do you have a sense of a hard self that judges, limits, cuts off, separates?

Many of us are half-way between sleeping and waking.  Sometimes we're aware that we're dreaming.  Sometimes we recognize shafts of light which ignite a dim half-buried memory of Knowing.  Most of the time we're drowsing in night-time blankness.  An automan, a robot, a slave of thoughts and feelings.  A feeling comes through and we act on it.  A thought comes through and we believe it.  We're like puppets.  Pull our strings and we dance.  (But, oh, can we dance when our strings are pulled!  And the more crazily we dance we're liable to insist, "We're free!  We're already free!  Look at us move!"  

Some people will say, "Do nothing."  Do you have to do something to wake up?  Do you need an alarm clock?  You'll wake up, all right.  And that may be true.  You may wake up.  Now or in six hundred lifetimes from now, you may awaken and remember the truth of your essential nature.   

Let's say you're dreaming and something kindles a desire within you, like striking a match.  You want to awaken.  A desire is born!  You want to awaken to your true nature.  Now here's where it gets tricky.  Oh so tricky.  Because you ARE already awake.  And you TRULY do not need to do anything.  Even the spark of that desire is not really "true".  

If you realize this truth implicitly, down to your bones, down to your dancing cells, down to your tingling toes, fine and good.  There is nothing to do.  You will know the truth.  

But if you only partially awaken, if there's still sleep in your eyes, you may have to do something in order to realize the implicit ringing truth of "do nothing".  And so, what is that something that you might do?   

For many of us, that something involves mindfulness training.  Meditation.  Stilling the roaring river of our thoughts and emotions.  Or, as Don Juan of Carlos Castaneda fame put it, "stalking the assemblage point."  Honing awareness.  Honing awareness to a pinpoint of recognition of the Moment.   

For some of us, that something involves learning to flow like the river.  To be fluidity.  To leap into the air like a gazelle as needed.  To move without rough boundaries limiting us, without harsh edges damning up the waters of a separate self.  We learn to shape shift.  We learn to recognize our fluidity so acutely that we move from mask to mask to mask and yet know that we are none of the masks we've utilized.  We are that which utilizes the mask but does not own it.  Don Juan called this awareness "dreaming".  Others call it fluidity.  

Somewhere, dancing between the two energies of stalking (meditation) and dreaming (flowing) is the knowing that You are Already Awake.  But to recognize that utter truth, we often need to work with energy.  We need to hone our stalking or dreaming.  Because we're all different fingerprints, we all come into this world with different amounts of energy, different degrees of stalking and dreaming.  We have different orientations.   

Don Juan once said something like this (and I am roughly paraphrasing):  "Do you want to know the secret of infinity, of power?"  Then he moved his arms around widely, taking in everything,  "Here it is!  It's here, in this moment, right now.  It's yours!"  Carlos stared at him blankly.  Don Juan shook his head,  "You don't have the personal power to realize this yet."  

So our Doing Something often involves courting Power.  I am reading a book called "Power" by Thich Nhat Hanh right now.  He discusses this in Buddhist-language, but I doubt Don Juan would disagree.  What exactly is Power?  Power is the ability to be so infinitely free that we can twirl on a dime yet remain absolutely fixated in awareness simultaneously.  You can spend a lifetime courting power.  It's a process of letting go, letting go, letting go.  And perhaps building up emptiness.  You have spent years claiming a personality; now you release yourself from its shackles.

This is why it often takes years and years of "work" to realize that there's nothing to do.  Years and years of releasing, opening, learning to integrate the energies.  Years and years of listening when to reach and when to pull back.  Years and years of listening to recognize when to flow and when to hone awareness.  Years and years of building and surrendering a self.  

And in the end, when you realize there's no such conflict as time, no such conflict as doing or not doing, no such conflict as self or not self, then you can sit back and relax and realize that it's all being done through you, anyway.  

But in the meantime, listen deeply to your inner self.  Whenever we believe only one pole of this world of duality such as "do nothing" or "do something" then we're often not flowing.  We're stuck.  We're believing an ideal of what someone has uttered, and not our inner essence which already knows perfectly.   

So when someone says "Do nothing", beware.  If we're being prompted internally to do something, that heeding may need to be followed.  We may need to meditate.  To practice mindfulness.  To gain insight.  To clear away that which blocks the river of our flowing.  On the othe hand, when someone says "Do something", beware.  If our deepest inner self sees that the river flows freely, that our awareness is steady, then surrendering and relaxing into that which already Is can awaken you in this instance, now, not a second too early or too late.

Ahhh, there's a universal flow which surrounds us, IS us, flows through us, around us, in us, between our toes, through that chair, around the salsa, in the flickering dance of sunlight!

Why should there be a need to do anything except surrender to that flow which is us?  Everywhere we are:  there in that nook, here in the cranny, in the soft gentle autumn breeze, echoing in bird chatter.

Here, now, in this very golden second!  Look all around, listen infinitely, breath deep the sultry garden!  We are that which we've been seeking.  We once wore the armor of personality and now we're free to run breathless in the dawn, barefoot, our bodies delighting in moving.

Awareness running the show, awareness the stage manager, awareness the All!  It's the doing that does effortlessly and any thoughts saying otherwise are part of its magnificent production.  Sit in the audience and enjoy the actors, marvel at the play of light and shadow.  Surrender so deeply to awareness that you'll know there's no you to surrender!

Walking in the flow there's only movement and heart pulsing-beating in joy.  You are the scattered leaves turning colors.  You are the words spoken, all of them, only appearing contradictory to those who refuse to contradict themselves.  And even that, a bliss to the Infinite!  There is no contradiction; only salsa with its bold red tomatoes and sizzling peppers and sweet onions and obstinate cilantro and festive garlic. 

Let's eat!  Let's sup together at a table where Everything comes together and dines.  Let's not hold ourselves in hard categories that can't allow the dance of the infinite.  And when we do, let's drink lots of water to cool down the burn of too-much salsa. 

Knowing nothing's too much.  And everything is. 

How wide can you spread your arms and sway in the wind?  Are feathers sprouting, wings growing?  Have they been there all along?  Will awareness have you jump or smile or turn the page or stand bliss-filled before the pulsating flow, simply alive?

--Why, oh god, why am I having to write another blog now?  Silence wants attention!  Silence wants focus!  Silence wants her day in court!

**Because, dear one, you're not here in this body alone.  Others of us want to speak.  May we proceed?

--No, no, no, no, not if you expect me to come forth and comment on comments!  I cannot do it anymore, cannot, cannot...

**There, there, dear one, you needn't respond to comments on this blog at all.  You'll be fine.  But some of the rest of us have some questions we'd like discussed.  May we just place this blog on Gaia and let any responses which arise come up...and you do not have to answer a single one.  You're off the hook.  But others of us want to know.  What do you say, dear one?

--I am not your dear one.  OK, I am.  Write whatever you have to write and then let me free of this computer, can you?

**Thank you.  Dear readers, we have a question for you.  We opened the Sounds True catalog yesterday and leafed through it with some interest.  We discovered a 10CD set (17 hours) by Alan Watts called "You're It."  We would have liked to purchase the CD's but the Financial Manager among us said "no".  She said that the CD's cost $99.95 and that was way too much for the budget.  

Here is the line that intrigued us:  Alan Watts promises to tell us about "the beauty of unenlightened state--why you don't have to be awakened to play the great game." 

Could any of you explain what you think is the beauty of the unenlightened state?  Please?  Some of our number doesn't appreciate the unenlightened state as much as they could and we would like to respond intelligently to their fuss without spending $99.95.

Thank you.  So much.  To repeat:  your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to write a few words or paragraphs defending the unenlightened state.  Sharing its beauties.  Without pointing too much toward the enlightened state.  That state will have its turn to hold the eagle feather and explain why it's preferable.  Thank you.

And if Kathy refuses to comment, it's just because she's overwhelmed right now.  This always happens when too many words start to confuse her.  We'll leave her out of this for now, shall we?

Thank you sincerely.

Time for a commercial!  **Brought to you by the creators of Voice Dialogue, a technique for getting in touch with the many selves which comprise the All.  Contact a Voice Dialogue facilitator if you, too, want to learn to talk to your self (selves)!**