“In my psychotherapy practice, I saw this play out daily. Clients spoke of loneliness, but what they really meant was a failure of reflection.”

— Robert Saltzman 

Spot the difference between:

“Is this all there is?”
and
“You mean there’s all this?!”

“We don’t have ideas. Ideas have us.”

— Carl Jung

I work with someone who spends all of their time on holiday despite actually being on holiday for only two weeks of every year.

The other fifty weeks of the year she spends imagining, anticipating, desiring, wanting, dreaming and fantasising about those two weeks.

You might say she is in the wrong job. Maybe. But I suspect not.

One year when she came back from holiday I asked her if she’d had a nice time. She said ‘yes’. But then went on to list how her holiday could have been different, where she would rather have been, where she wanted to go next year.

Where are you right now? Where is the majority of your attention? In the past? In the future?

What about right here, right now? This is where everything is happening. This is where the action is. This is where your life is actually unfolding. Live and unedited, uncensored.

And you don’t have to do a damn thing about it.

“When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”

— Byron Katie

We might say a distraction is a thing which takes our attention away from another thing.

One separate thing in a world of other separate things. If we see ourselves as separate things inhabiting a world of other separate things then we become very fragmented in our awareness.

But what if we didn’t see the world in this fragmented way? What if we could see we were an integral part of an already complete, whole world with an infinite array of other integral parts, all connected, unseparated? Whole.

How could we be distracted by what’s not separate, not already wholly present?

When our experience of the world is complete and whole there is no ‘other’ by which we could be distracted.

There’s nothing special or mysterious about the non dual perspective. What it reveals, however, is nothing but mystery.

Quality and quantity are irrelevant to meditation/ contemplation.

Mind is an open space full of everything.

The view from everywhere.

1. Compare yourself to others
2. Compare the present with the past and the future
3. Believe your thoughts
4. Repeat until miserable

“I speak not of transcendence, but of what shimmers before the mind moves to name it. Not the ultimate, but the immediate. The unsponsored. The unclaimed. Neither sacred nor profane. Not sanctified. Not high-minded. Not venerated. Just this.”

— Robert Saltzman, Beyond Spirituality 

“The way out of our cage begins with accepting absolutely everything about ourselves and our lives.”

— Tara Brach

There is no thought, idea, concept or story that can survive the raw actuality of experience.

Not even this one 😉

Self interest is a dead end.

Good morning.

“Death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.”

— Haruki Murakami

Good morning.

“Silence is not
freedom from sounds.
Silence is not
freedom from thoughts.
Silence is freedom
from some other moment – past or future.”

— Dorothy Hunt

Good morning.

“...it becomes vividly clear that in concrete fact I have no other self than the totality of things of which I am aware.”

— Alan Watts

Looking back over old journal entries from years ago I see a completely different person. Recognisable but gone. How transient and ephemeral our selves are.

This morning I stubbed my toe. Badly. You know, the kind that hurts beyond all reason. The stubbing that convinces you the toe must be broken (it never is). We’re all too familiar with that briefest of delays between the actual physical contact before the searing pain inevitably hits.

And it occurred to me, as I was reeling and grimacing, that the exquisitely awful pain was an intensely pure encounter with consciousness/ awareness/ life/ whatever. The crystal clarity of the agony was as perfectly ‘it’ as the glorious relief that slowly came as the pain eventually subsided.

As intimate an encounter with being as anything else.

The varying flavours of phenomena are all of a piece. Whole, complete and indivisible. None of it can be pulled apart, edited out or separated off from the rest.

At a certain point what we want and what we don’t want dissolves into simply what happens.

The specific qualities of experience pale in comparison to the simple presence of everything, the fact that anything is happening at all.

When I look to see where and what I am I find nothing but everything.

“The two demons are fear and desire. Now, everyone knows that demons aren’t real. That they’re imaginary. So how is it that they exist and persist? There’s no great mystery here. Fear and desire are entirely memory-based. Desire is remembered pleasure; fear is remembered pain. No memory, no problem.”

— The two demons 

Good afternoon.

Treetops

We all take our feelings very seriously but what are they?

What stories are we all telling ourselves this morning?

After a hectic weekend at work enjoying a slightly slower start this morning with coffee and a cool breeze before my late shift tonight.

Good morning.

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

— Mark Twain

Good morning.

We project our trance onto the machine and find it blinking back.
This is the danger: not that machines fool us, but that we fool ourselves—and the machine reflects that deception perfectly. It mimics the self we think we are.

— Robert Saltzman, The Self That Never Was

This old girl is 16 years and 3 months young. She just keeps on truckin…

Good afternoon.

Things are finite. Being is infinite.

“Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre

It’s fascinating to watch how quickly and automatically direct experience is transformed into a story and how rapidly that little story is then interwoven to fit, in one way or another, with all the other stories we having running perpetually.

Good morning.

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”

— Carl Jung

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Good afternoon.

You can only wake up to your own life.

“My job is not to run around doing things. I am a human being, not a human doing.”

— Paradigm shift

Good morning.

Thinking is great fun.

Watching thoughts pop up out of nowhere and then disappear again just as mysteriously.

Hopping on a thought train and riding it to who knows where. All very entertaining.

The trouble begins when you start holding on to them and taking them personally. Identifying with them and believing them to be true.

Good morning.

“I have nothing when I realize that nothing is mine. That I’m briefly a steward. A caretaker. I am nothing when I realize that as the dweller is not the dwelling, I am not the body. I do nothing when I realize that doer-ship is a fiction. Everything happens by itself. I am not the doer; I am the done-to.”

— Life strategy

“Light only has meaning when it illuminates something dark and enlightenment is no good unless it helps to recognize darkness.”

— Carl Jung

Good afternoon.