Having an idea about what is happening is not what is happening yet it is an aspect of what is happening.
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.
Today, it’s as if seeing the world through an entirely new frame. Everything has changed yet remains the same.
Some things appear more important, others less so.
A more vivid sense of randomness, irrationality and chaos.
The tissue of certainty and security weakens and rips.
Future plans become more tenuous.
The sun still shines.
Our world is made of language. Change the language and so does the world.
Humanity’s single greatest triumph and folly is our ability to make stuff up.
The irrational is where it’s at.
“As something, I am merely that thing. As no-thing, I am all things.”
— Douglas Harding
The paralysing tyranny of ‘should’...
How much can we actually know, as a matter of direct experience, and not indirect information?
“I'm sitting here looking at the mushrooms coming up through the rotting leaves, and thinking about how much grief and loss are required for growth and change.”
You know it’s right when you can’t explain it. The truth lies beyond words.
Every moment of existence has value. It all counts.
You can’t edit life. You’re either all in or all out.
“Only the human species is afflicted with the idea that just being alive is not enough, and that enlightenment is required, in addition.
— Judy Cohen
Never mind the specific latest apparent technological and political threat, the greatest problem we face, as has always been the case, is ourselves.
It interests me that I seem to have listened and taken some heed of the
voice inside me that directed me towards volunteering and ultimately
care work after the family trauma.
It seems I did not try to redeem
my life but allow it to happen automatically by surrendering to what was
needed.
“Enlightenment is: absolute cooperation with the inevitable.”
— Anthony De Mello
“It is by no means certain that the man with good intentions is under all circumstances a good man. If he is not, then his best intentions will lead to ruin, as daily experience proves.”
— Carl Jung
“When a man lacks self-knowledge, he can do the most astonishing or terrible things without calling himself to account and without ever suspecting what he is doing.”
— Carl Jung
Understanding who one is has nothing to do with identity or images of selfhood. Knowing who you are means accepting your wholeness, embracing every aspect of your being, the dark and the light. We discover that we are who we are and not who we think we are or who we would like to be. This recognition requires a radical honesty and letting go of fantasies of identity.
“If I know what I shall find, I do not want to find it. Uncertainty is the salt of life.”
— Erwin Chargaff
The infinite variation and uniqueness of minds ensures there is no single, common experience of any sort. We are deluded by the similarities and remain unenlightened by the differences.
“We hear men say they are really motivated. Which is, of course, their misfortune. Where peace, truth, love and beauty are concerned, no effort is required.”
— The two obstacles, Men’s Work
“I suppose that when it comes down to it, what I am trying to say is that the path of inward solitude, or whatever it should be called, is something one finds oneself falling into when everything else has fallen to bits. Only when there is no other way does the way open; and it is the way one has been searching for all along.”
What matters?
Different things at different times. Answers come and answers go revealing that there are no answers and eventually the question simply dissolves leaving, as always – what is, important or not.
- Recognition
- Acceptance
- Gratitude
Direct experiencing – that which requires no learning or belief, meaning or reason. Everything we feel, taste , see, hear or think requires no understanding or explanation for it all to be exactly and fully what it already is.
A simple, gentle contemplation on my drive to work at the hospital this morning. A sense of the ‘little me’ falling away to reveal the inevitability of everything. As I noted somewhere in the past: ‘If I am anything I am simply whatever is happening.’
“Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time, they’re different processes.”
— Corita Kent
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.”
— Mary Oliver
The glory of a beautiful Spring day would not exist if not for all the bleak, grey winter ones that preceded it.
Investigate, question, examine, interrogate anything for long enough and sooner or later it disappears.
Everything is always it. Illusions, delusions, fantasies, hallucinations, confusion… Everything is included, nothing left out.
I don’t want to do anything ‘extra’, simply being here is more than enough.
There’s nothing to find because everything is here. There’s nothing to get because you’ve already got it.
The distinctions made between art/ language and life/ reality are entirely arbitrary.
“6.44: It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists at all.
— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The most important thing is to find your own way, the right way for you, the way that works. There’s no point, say, in sitting Zazen and practicing Zen rituals and chants for twenty years if it gets you no closer to recognising the nature of your own mind.
If however you see yourself clearly while dancing or reading poetry or listening to the wind and rain or cooking or even driving then you will know you have found your true practice.
“Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.”
— John Cage
“The self is nothing but thought.”
— Judy Cohen
Nothing happens next. This is it.
I seem to be doing a lot of questioning, doubting.
What is not in doubt, what resists all questioning is this present moment in all its manifestations.
“…you can’t have it all
but there is this.”
— Barbara Ras
Zen student: “I’m enlightened! What do I do now?
Zen teacher: “Sweep the floor.”
Three points from a Zen abbot.
- Gratitude for what’s happened.
- Service to what is.
- Equanimity with whatever arises.
I am very lucky in my work that I often find myself in what is sometimes referred to as a flow state.
The next necessary step, one after the other after the other. Everything happening spontaneously, automatically including all the necessary thoughts required. There is no doing, just everything unfolding as it must.
For me Care work is incredibly simple. It may be hard, tiring, challenging and often exhausting but above all it is profoundly uncomplicated. One human supporting, encouraging and helping another.
The question ‘what is this?’ needs no answer.
Listen to your quietest voice.
We spend most of our days overlooking what we are. Contemplation and/ or meditation is simply failing to overlook yourself.
Don’t go looking, you already have what you need.