~~~~~~~Writing Eveyman~~~~~~~

This was my spot
536 Kathryn Street
Santa Fe, New Mexico
where in my 40s
I did most of my writing

my apartment was nicknamed
The Hovel
and on weekdays
surrounding my job
as Bellman at The Radisson
I wrote

on weekends I was Uncle Plaything
to my niece and nephew
sweet days 1993 to 1999
unraveling my consciousness
of things that once were

it is
what it was 

~~~~~Walking Through This World~~~~~

So the ego looks for what it can possess
and That Which Is
just beneath that facade
looks for what it can give

living outside in
or
inside out

Life comes in many stages
and it seems every decade has a new
sobering outlook
on what is our impermanent life
here walking through this world
actually is

Jung said we spend the first half of life
building our ego
finding our place
in this world
and the second half of life
letting it go

living outside in
or
inside out

and so we live in thought
measurement and comparison
judgement
until that Life Within Us All
begins to break through
and by compassion we see
each one of us
had the same journey

pictured above
Jiddu Krishnamurti was lacing up his walking shoes
getting ready to take a walk
from his home Pine Cottage
through the Ojai Valley

and we all take our own walks
where do you go?
while the body is still strong?

and where do we go
when it no longer is?

living outside in
or
inside out

no matter who you are
this world is impermanent
you are impermanent
and so why is what the ego thinks it accomplishes
of any value at all?

the rarest of the things of Life
are no things

stillness
silence
kindness
compassion

all born of emptiness
consciousness born not of the ego
untouched and unapproachable
by thought

living inside out
or
outside in

awakened
scents of sanity
timeless
home

beyond the temporal dreams
of the dream ego
in this dreamworld
we all pass through
and awake from

was life inside us
all along?

when we were looking
outside?

~~~How Do You See This Earth?~~~

Neil Moores................For comparison and in connection with this conversation; historically, one can distinguish four different world-views on reality:
1. Physical realism. Only the physical world exists, so it is observing itself.
2. Solipsism. Only the mind exists, so the physical world is like a dream created by the mind.
3. Dualism. The physical world exists, but is also observed by another higher world beyond it.
4. Virtual realism. The physical world is a construct generated by non-physical quantum processing.

 

 

David Grimm..........I think there is one more world view not mentioned above - pantheism, which is similar to the Vedanta philosophy.

 

 

We live where all that we see is impermanent......

how deep it goes

what it is connected to

the very nature of who we are is when analyzed by thought debatable....

and isn't that kinda funny?

that reality isn't self evident?

because it's the self that distorts reality....

like the double slit experiment?

 

knowing creates illusions

thought is the main ingredient of maya

reality is hidden from the created

 

we go to sleep

we wake up

 

in 1976 i went to sleep

and dreamed life as a fundamental christian

in Lamb of God

in 1978 i got kicked out

and that woke me up

 

from thought stilled by true belief the best drug of all

to uncertainty & anxiety knowing life is on a razor's edge

 

i go to sleep dreaming i'm one thing

then reality wakes me up saying no you're not

 

i've done this a few times

i guess i'm always trying to be comfortable

find an image & live behind it

make things easy

live by habit

sleepwalk

pave reality with the asphalt of thought

 

i came to California to caddie @ Pebble Beach

be in play to visit my mother & brother's family

but by death or life they've all flown the coup

the mother died

and The Old Folk's Home

an empty nest

 

it's time to wake up

again

 

impermanence

change

seeing life most differently

with each passing decade

 

death to life

old wineskins can't hold new wine

manna from heaven lasts only for today

 

we live in the moment

and when we die?

 

that would be the ever-new now

the timeless moment?

 

the awakening.....

from the dream of this lifetime

 

going to sleep

waking up

 

thought

death

 

illusions & maya

truth & reality

 

that's how i see this earth......

that seems to be the game of consciousness

we play here.

 

:)

 

 

Samadhi #2~~~Chamisal, NM~~~Last 2 Weeks of June~~~2014

 

 

 

In terms of our extended conversation, here is what Yogananda has to say about it all:
"“Just as most people on earth have not learned through meditation-acquired vision to appreciate the superior joys and advantages of astral life and thus, after death, desire to return to the limited, imperfect pleasures of earth, so many astral beings, during the normal disintegration of their astral bodies, fa...il to picture the advanced state of spiritual joy in the causal world and, dwelling on thoughts of the more gross and gaudy astral happiness, yearn to revisit the astral paradise. Heavy astral karma must be redeemed by such beings before they can achieve after astral death a permanent stay in the causal thought-world, so thinly partitioned from the Creator.

“Only when a being has no further desires for experiences in the pleasing-to-the-eye astral cosmos, and cannot be tempted to go back there, does he remain in the causal world. Completing there the work of redeeming all causal karma or seeds of past desires, the confined soul thrusts out the last of the three corks of ignorance and, emerging from the final jar of the causal body, commingles with the Eternal."

 

To surmount maya was the task assigned to the human race by the millennial prophets. To rise above the duality of creation and perceive the unity of the Creator was conceived of as man’s highest goal. Those who cling to the cosmic illusion must accept its essential law of polarity: flow and ebb, rise and fall, day and night, pleasure and pain, good and evil, birth and death. This cyclic pattern assumes a certain anguishing monotony, after man has gone through a few thousand human births; he begins to cast a hopeful eye beyond the compulsions of maya.

 

Osho's 10 Commandments:

 

 1. Never obey anyone's command unless it is coming from within you.
2. There is no God other than life itself.
3. Truth is within you, do not search for it elsewhere.
4. Love is prayer.
5.To become a nothingness is the door to truth. Nothingness itself is the means, the goal and attainment.
6. Life is now and here.
7. Live wakefully.
8. Do not swim—float.
9. Die each moment so that you can be new each moment.
10 .Do not search. That which is, is. Stop and see.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samadhi

 

Samadhi #1~~~Monterey, CA~~~!st 2 Weeks of March 2014

"If there is no continuity what is there? There is nothing. One is afraid to be nothing. Nothing means not a thing - nothing put together by thought, nothing put together by memory, remembrances, nothing that you can put into words and then measure. There is most certainly, definitely, an area where the past doesn't cast a shadow, where time, the past or the future or the present, has no meaning. ...We have always tried to measure with words something that we don't know. What we do not know we try to understand and give it words and make it into a continuous noise. And so we clog our brain which is already clogged with past vents, experiences, knowledge. We think knowledge is psychologically of great importance, but it is not. You can't ascend through knowledge; there must be an end to knowledge for the new to be. New is a word for something which has never been before. And that area cannot be understood or grasped by words or symbols: it is there beyond all remembrances."
Jiddu Krishnamurti

"I see the cruelties - the big fish eating the little fish, one animal living on the flesh of another, life fighting life, the horrors of poverty and disease. I say, "Lord, this is YOUR show. So be it. But I do not care to be a part of it, except to do Your will. As quickly as I can, I shall do your work and get out of this play of Yours; but I want to take others also away from this delusive drama of comedies and nightmares."
Paramhansa Yogananda

~~~Living In This World of Magical Thinking & Maya~~~

 

   Conflict exists between various desires, not between light and darkness. There can never be struggle between light and darkness for where there is light, darkness is not, where there is truth the false is not. When the self divides itself into the higher and the lower, this very contradiction begets conflict, confusion, and antagonism. To be aware of what is and not escape into fanciful illusion is the beginning of understanding. We should be concerned with what is, the craving for self-expansion, and not try to transform it, for the transformer is still craving, which is the action of the self; the very awareness of what is brings about understanding. To be aware from moment to moment brings its own clarification. The desire for achievement and recognition prevents awakening; the sleeper dreams that he must awaken and struggles in his dream, but it is only a dream. The sleeper cannot awaken through dreams; he must cease sleeping. Thought itself must be aware of creating the structure of the self and its perpetuation. One who is earnest must discover for himself the truth about self-perpetuation.  Jiddu Krishnamurti, Ojai, California | Third Talk in The Oak Grove, 1946

   So the battle between good & evil is an illusion? That all comparisons of one with another have no merit whatsoever? That all desire for the self to expand it's horizons to envelope things as they actually are just an impossible dream? That all the drama thought creates has no meaning? That the fullness of life is there when you are not? What does this imply about our individuality? Our selves? Our personalities? Do they continue on into the next life? Or are they just parts we played in this current lifetime on Earth?

    Is there anything really to lose?

 

   Ramakrishna said he was just the dust on his servant's servant's shoes.

   The ego can't even take credit for the act of  abandonment.

   Robert Adams put it this way: The knower is the last to go.

   Is there nothing you can do?
 

   Or as Sri Ramana Maharshi put it: "I am" alone is; and not "I am so and so", or "I am such and such". When existence is absolute it is right; when it is particularised it is wrong. That is the whole truth.
 

   You just can't dream your way out of a dream.
  "There is no use in trying." Bob Dylan

   Does the ego have any value at all?

    I've lived most of my life in images & illusions & dreams. My childhood. My days as a religious fundamentalist. My time as uncle plaything to my brother's children. It's the...magical thinking...of the individual who believes in...the innocence...of the worlds that thought creates....weaving it's dreamworlds....over a lifetime...that last...like bubbles...only for for awhile.

    Eventually we all wake up. The fact that we do has no dependence upon the individual and his or her capacities, it's just that the dream is not reality, and that reality comes upon us all like the dawn. And when you see that you've been asleep? Dreaming? The creator of your own illusions? You also see everyone else is dreaming their own dreams.

    Why else would a world of maya exist except to dream?
    So creating a place where illusions can exist for awhile?
    But why do we dream?

   Is it that we could stay awake no longer?

   

~~~~~~World of Emptiness~~~~~~

 

   All descriptions of reality are limited expressions of the world of emptiness. Yet we attach to the descriptions and think they are reality. That is a mistake. ~ Shunryu Suzuki

   The universe is an empty drum vibrating. ~ David Boem & Jiddu Krishnamurti

   The word is not the thing.
   The description is not the described. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

~~~All of the Personal Dramas of Our Impermanence~~~

 

 

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-...down basic whatever there is. And you're all that, only you're pretending you're not. And it's perfectly OK to pretend you're not, to be perfectly convinced, because this is the whole notion of drama. ~ Alan Watts ...from "The Nature of Consiousness"; also published as "What Is Reality?" (1989)

~~~~What's Our Problem?~~~~~~~

 "Relationship is our problem, and not the idea about relationship not at any one particular level but at all the levels of our existence."

 

 

    Jiddu Krishnamurti

~~~~~~Impermanence~~~~~~

Everything is impermanent, except the love of God.

~ Neem Karoli Baba

~~~~~~~~A Sower Went Out To Sow~~~~~~~~

   There are only two disappointments in this life: the first is when you don't get what you want, and the second is when you do.

   How can I live a life of fulfillment, when the most important thing that exists in all of creation, the creator.....seems....abscent? Looking for life in the things of this world, in their pleasures, always trapped in the realm of beginnings and endings? Sex? Power? Position? Knowledge? Always seeking the timeless in the dreamworld of time? Lost in illusions? Wandering through impermanence? I explored what society, mankind, had to offer. Limited by my conditioning, I had not the eyes to see.

   When you try, and fail, it's like Dylan's lyrics in Love Minus Zero/No Limit: "There's no success like failure and failure's no success at all." Negation, it's the way I navigated through the illusions of this life, on my spiritual pilgrimage, and every path that I took in the end reached a dead end. Failure? Negation? Dead Ends?  What good could spring from such a meandering life?

   Questions. I started asking God questions. Not with my head, full of images, but with my broken heart, and these questions were the seeds that a sower went out to sow. Honest questions born within personal brokeness. Genuine questions, holding out no hope of becoming anything at all. Questions that abandoned all paths, even myself, and most of these questions were a simple one.....why?

   Seeds in fertile ground, watered by the spiritual rains, nurtured by timeless love, the answers to my questions were born in their due season. Never as I expected, always new, of their own accord, and nature. And what fruit was born of all this? Only, trust in the life that sustains me, like a little child, and thankfulness, for all that I have been given.

  It's an impermanent, and violent, dreamworld we live in. All stocked up with maya. Born into it, the darkness of the abstract image. the sterility of thought, we are blind to the timeless. Born into Plato's Cave, we enter a realm where God seems to play Hide and Seek, and we have not the ability to find our way out, or our way home.

  Cosmic Consciousness? Enlightenment? Spiritual Ambition? How can you say you've become somebody when in the end you're not there?  When you see that everything's alive? That you are That? That the knower, the seeker, was always an illusion, and that God was hiding in the place we never expected God to be....inside us all....inside of everything?

  A sower went out to sow, we all ask the same questions and the difference in our answers springs from their source, as the life that asks them, also answers them.

   Thou Art That. 

~~~~~~What Happened To The Knower?~~~~~~

 

 

Advaita (Nonduality, Oneness, One Love)

In Advaita Vedanta, the knower is the last to go. What comes after the knower? Silence! There is nothing else.

Just think how much knowledge you've gathered all these years. Reading so many books. Meditating for years. Seeing so many teachers. Having so many discussions, debates, arguments. Can't you see now this is what's been holding you back? This is what has been holding you back. For you have believed that you're the knower. For you have to become a knower to become free. Yet no one has to know anything for there is absolutely nothing to know. Why is there nothing to know? Because there is only omnipresence, infinity, absolute reality and there is no name for this.

In other words, you cannot know absolute reality. You cannot know pure awareness. As long as there is someone who knows about it, it doesn't exist. It's only when you put an end to knowing that you become the Self. The Self has no shape, no form, no identity. It is no thing. Yet you are that. What are you going to do about it?

~ Robert Adams

...from "The Knower Is The Last To Go!" - January 9th, 1992

~~~Mystery Religion and Personal Religion~~~

   There isn't any adam and eve ashamed of their nakedness within the mystical feminine, these ladies, pictured above. It's a celebration of all of nature, this life, and there seems to be no personal religion and it's judgements clouding their consciousness, at all. It's like The Spearmint Rhino in Las Vegas, Nevada in the late single digit years of the beginning of  the 2000s, except the equation for bodily pleasure doesn't involve any Ben Franklins, a world we have created here in The Great American Spiritual Desert. In Las Vegas 'the savage heart of the american dream' it's most always an orgy 'controlled by money'. The painting above is a celebration of youth. Either way, it's this kind of personal freedom that personal religions have no desire to allow, as their Gods always seem to be dressed up in holy robes, or a business suit.

   Empires and religions walk hand in hand down the corridors of time as The King or The Caesar have a special audience, the preemminent relationship, with their God, or gods. Heirarchial control rests at the top of every totalitarian pyramid of power, be it held by a king, emperor, priest, or shepherd. Speaking for God and telling everyone what God wants them to do is every psychopaths wet dream. When religion gets personal, personal freedom vanishes. Brave New World. 1984. The former ecumenical christian community, Lamb of God, Incorporated. When you have that kind of power it's like an addictive drug, something you have to use, for when you really get down to it all of any society's behaviors can be controlled.

   Constantine and the cannonization of The Bible. Justinian I and the doctrinational elimination of reincarnation. Christianity lifted from obscurity by a dying Roman Empire and shaped in content by two Roman Caesars. Christianity is an extremely personal religion for it guarantees the salvation of your soul, he self, the little you. No longer do you have to fear death for your consciousness will be delivered into eternity by your own personal savior, Jesus, and through what he did you will be able to live forever, in Heaven, with God, and the other people he saved. That power a personal religion gives to the organization that represents God in this world is the deepest penetration and most controlling hook one person can have over another. Knowing God's Will for you creates two classes of people: those who know, and those who are told. An elite class, the master race spiritually speaking, and the common man who needs their help. Personal religions get really personal in their control of all that is personal, and that's why they're the best political religions ever invented. The Roman Empire and The United States of America, so what's the difference between these two? One sold religion 'over the counter', one 'under the counter' due to 'prohibition', but either way their personal religion was sold, it was toxic. The implosion of  Lamb of God personally illustrates just how personally violent personal leaders of personal religions can get, for it's just what happens when you try to establish, and manipulate, that which is sacred. The genocide of the Native American Peoples and the theft of their continent, the religious crusades and all their veiled conquests, The Final Solution of The 3rd Reich and mass extermination, the psychic slaughtering of all the sheep in Lamb of God, all of these holocausts, are examples of how personal religions go toxic. Doctrines that divide the whole, festering the belief that they are the best, that god is on their side, and they the chosen ones, and that all other non believers have no value whatsoever, such are the toxic mutations personal religion manifests, in mankind's consciousness.

   What in time is released into the timeless? What besides That Which Is can reside in both places? Is time just an illusion? What survives death? Mystery religion say that All Is One and the creator of all, That Which Is, is all around us and dancing within this temporary maya, this violent world, our earth, and all of it's seeming seperateness. Mystery religions tear at the veils of the illusions of thought, beg us leave the confines of Plato's Cave, awake from the dream, open our eyes, and see things as they actually are, timeless. The Life is within all of us, no one besides ourselves holds the key of our being alive, to all,  and to everything. Through the valley of the shadow of death, all this seemingly violent impermanence, space time, where everything comes and goes, is born and dies, has it's beginning, and then? The End. Mystery religion embraces the everchanging dance of maya, trusting the life, it is elways dying, always being reborn anew, in the moment; while personal religion, hangs on to what it's got, the illusion, for dear life.

   Mystery religion is molten, fluid, organic, alive and not fixated, while personal religion is set in doctrine, belief, and all the rigidity that the dead words of set cannons brings to consciousness. I've vacillated between these two religions all my life, from spiritualist hippie, to fundamental christian, and now, some kind of vedantist who really doesn't know a thing, but trusts the life that is within us all, like a little child, thankful for all that I have been given.

   Old wineskins can't hold new wine, and maybe next lifetime, I'll be frolicking in the springtime of our youth with those naked girls, having the freedom to be lost, and dance to the mystery. It sure wasn't in this lifetime, until I walked in the door of The Spearmint Rhino in the winter of 2005, and I was 55 years old.

  Life isn't death's opposite, birth is. Life is something altogether different and the only way to 'discover this' is, to live your life, not try to hold onto it, with thought and belief, for old wineskins can't hold new wine. Life is too expansive, alive, connected, whole, sacred, and one for that to happen. Life can not be held in a rigid vessel, for how could time ever contain, that which is timeless?

  Dead trees don't move with the wind.