If we don’t assimilate and integrate traditional ancient wisdom into the ordinary reality of our own lived experience then we’re completely missing the point.
Mind scribbles.
If I knew what I was doing this wouldn’t be here.
If I knew what I was doing this wouldn’t be here.
Paying close attention to our mind and the myriad thoughts that arise, it’s possible to see the difference between thoughts ‘of’ experience and thoughts ‘about’ experience. The former arise, observe then pass away. The latter indulge in story making and identification with self and perpetuate themselves until the stories occlude experience.
So much unnecessary fear, anxiety and suffering (as well as groundless hope and optimism) is caused by confusing a story about what is going on with the reality of what is actually happening.
Can we tell the difference between feeling life and feeling something about life?
This is how I see all brands, slogans and advertising.
“Finding meaning is merely a matter of finding a better story. Stories put your pains and pleasures into a context you can accept. But when your attention is truly free in the present, the question of meaning doesn't arise.”
— Sam Harris
Good morning.
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
— Albert Camus
“Here is not an ‘Either-Or’ crossover but, rather, a ‘Both-And’ revelation.”
— Dennis Gallagher
Non-Duality. That place where we see that the One manifests as the many and the many are inseparable from the One. It is always around us and within us—just as we are always inseparably within it. At some point in a contemplative’s life, both sides of a profound either-or paradox begin to become experiential and our words become slippery. We begin to see words as small lies; in and of themselves. But more happens. The world you inhabit begins to flow with new visions. Knowings, born of inseparable wholeness, arise wordlessly. And another world, that has always been here, concurrent with the world of words, begin to present.
— Dennis Gallagher
Good afternoon.
Happiness has nothing to do with pleasure.
There was a time (even before the printed word) it was thought that the written word signalled the death knell of human wisdom and culture via oral traditions.
The world has always taken great leaps forward while simultaneously going to hell in a hand-cart.
Our thoughts and ideas are the least of us. Always late to the party that’s already in full swing, uninvited yet full of their own self importance and righteousness. Taking credit for everything and responsibility for nothing.
“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
Where do you want to be?
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
Distraction? What distraction?
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.
How to be unhappy
- Compare yourself to others
- Compare the present with the past and the future
- Believe your thoughts
- 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.
Ouch
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.”
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.
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