7.3.23
Things are not aware, trees are not aware, animals are not aware, humans are not aware.
Awareness is aware, Consciousness is conscious. God is known only by Herself, even as She is also all that is, including all of these “fragments” of knowing we humans tend to call you, me and us.
A three-dimensional mind-body caught in beliefs of time and space cannot imagine or reason its way into, out of, or around this truth. It MUST eventually become about surrender. Including all ideas, feelings and fears of what surrender itself might mean, or look like.
The miracle seems to be that Awareness, Consciousness, Goddess, ten thousand names for what cannot ever be contained or known by a name, is presently choosing to awaken to Herself through humans.
A choice made manifest THROUGH humans, this very possibility for each one of us to ALSO choose.
God loves us by becoming us. Yet only by our own choosing to surrender fully into this fire.
The purpose of a human mind founded upon beliefs in separation is to take us to where we finally are willing, not willful, willing, to leave it behind.
What awakens through our willingness, in Goddess’s own use of this time that we have invented, is not less than the tree, and not less than the Universe.
As the Buddha said, when asked what is enlightenment: “I and ALL sentient existence has awakened.”
Every awakening is all of us, all of life, all of energy, all processes.
THIS Awakening is the Source of everything now knowing itself through and as everything, including ALL our temporary efforts to understand what is beyond all understanding, and yet we also are.
Each death is the death of a whole world; in every way it has become up to and including the moment of passing. The beauty, the horror, all of it.
And yet all that passes away are embodied beliefs. With all else being simply movement and change, the play of energies rising and falling away, here in the midst of what is everything, which we also are. Time was always just another invention of mind, to hide for a while from what we cannot ever understand, only be.
As much as we accept this passing within consciousness, staying present with all our temporary and ephemeral thoughts, grief, glories and fears, is exactly how much we become this loving Source of all of it, which is also Love.
Our collective human world is a mix of eight billion individually believed in worlds of separation, all swirling and reflecting and bouncing within and off of each other.
The only way it ceases to be destructive chaos overlaid upon Creation, as it presently is, is for enough of us to once again, this time consciously, become loving sources of One Source, in and as all its infinite multiplicity.
There is the only way this insanity, in the form of our collective human beliefs in separation, overlaid upon Earth, will end.
The only real choice there is. And it REALLY IS a choice.
7.15.23
Way simpler, actually. Realize all belief as mere belief, and not what we truly are. BE this realizer, without need of identity or separation, already knowing itself AS this knowing, without any other.
Easy? No. We are called to become the end of both belief and believer. In such a becoming it is only the illusion of a believer that dies. Beliefs continue, yet now through ever shifting and changing, rising and falling away conscious choice, or we might say through aware participation in creation, in what has always been a play of All with, as well as within, Itself.
7.17.23
Question absolutely ALL of your beliefs, and all the beliefs that reveal underneath those beliefs, all the while as your unrelenting questioning continues to disperse beliefs. And then really keep going, with zero concern for how “long” it takes. It will be “done” when the questioner disappears. A sort of “non-event,” so to speak.
7.24.23
We are speaking here of the rational/irrational “thinking” mind, based in conditioning and memory, with all its false beliefs in past and future. Altogether founded upon one single primary meta-belief almost all present day humans seem to agree upon, the illusion of separation.
In Zen Buddhism this distinction is often made via mind verses Mind, and in other non-dual traditions perhaps via mind verses Awareness, or Consciousness. In Sufism “man” verses the Beloved, or Friend.
And then to finally accept, truly going beyond eventually becomes the end of the goer.
And so therefore the end also of all these words.
Yet something remains, seeming to appear as all this play, and now knowing itself as you and I.
7.24.23.2
This is ego speaking, about its own dualistic extremes, master or slave.
Whichever “side” you manage to identify with (attach to), it will only be for a while, before you fall over to the other side. For all these beliefs you are sharing remain caught in the same old ancient and false ideologies of separation.
Clinging in these ways merely destines you to keep reverting back and forth, between all your variously labeled projections of duality, “forever,” or we could say trapped here in these illusions of time.
A mind can neither master itself nor be a slave to itself, any more than a knife can cut itself.
Simple foolishness.
7.30.23
Actually, light casts no shadows. And only our beliefs in what is resistant, grasping, or obstructive to light will ever seem to, for exactly as long as we identify with belief. You need only sit still and watch a candle for a while, to realize this is true.
Are you an object, or are you light? That is the only real choice a true auspicious human birth will ever face, or need to make. Once this choice is finally and fully made, there will be no turning back.
I made only an offering. There is nothing to debate. You are not your thoughts, feelings, ideas or beliefs. It only remains for you, or anyone, to discover and fully realize this for yourself.
8.1.23
Ego plays chess with itself. As many dimensions as we may wish to imagine.
We fool only ourselves. There is nowhere to go.
Surrender past and future.
All these thoughts, feelings, sensations, beliefs, contractions and experiences are merely passing through what we always and already are.
Active willing surrender, over and over and over. Like a showing up to here and now. Forever.
Not willful. Willing. Discover what this distinction means. Deeper and deeper.
We become more and more familiar and comfortable with this terrain that we also are, all the while as we allow it to guide us. These are the ways of nature, the Wild. Eternal unfolding.
A terrain without concepts, labels, or names, instead a kind of naked knowing of what IS, these incredible, ever shifting, ever coming and going, and ever changing subtleties.
Terrain and knowing have become the same. Taking hold and letting go become one natural whole movement, with neither beginning nor end.
Familiarity has become the Friend.
The chessboards eventually dissolve into this terrain, the way clouds dissolve into the sky. Along with players and pieces, all these different “aspects” of ego that play the game of keeping us convinced “they” are what we are.
A huge and infinitely subtle terrain it be. And yet the Miracle. THIS ever-growing Familiarity with what cannot be known apart from surrender, continually arising and rearising and disappearing back into all these myriad expressions of the Way.
8.6.23
Deep wisdom is also an illusion. Clarity dissolves questions, questioner, experiencer. Even these words.
The koan forces nothing, invites us instead to drop the mind, go beyond the mind, discover what is always and already here, prior and eternally beyond all this dualistic mumbo jumbo made of mere words.
You will know who you are when you stop “trying” to know who you are. All this still being just more thinking, now here in the form of these words.
The purpose of our body-mind is to take us to where we are ready to leave it all behind.
You can stand at this “edge” you are making up with all the things you imaging are past it, here in all these words of yours, and thereby seem to “shorten” your distance to this edge, literally forever. Repeat, forever.
Even if you “shorten” the distance 99% each time, a thousand times, each remaining 1% will be the “new” infinite distance between the still always same illusion of you, and what you always and already are.
With “forever” understood here to be merely further out somewhere, in the inventions of “time,” than you are able to imagine.
A better question, for you, I believe, might be to ask yourself why is it that I am not ready? And then keep asking, always setting aside every answer, until the questioner has begun to dissolve away. And then keep going.
On the other side of that gateless gate you may briefly find yourself glancing back and noticing that nothing has happened.
8.7.23
All you know is what you are directly experiencing right here and now. Everything else is belief.
Repeat, everything.
In other words, memory and conditioning. All of it arising out of what you call the “past,” with some of it variously remixed into projections you like to believe (or fear) is the world around you, and some of it remixed into what you want (or fear) is the “future,” or a “different” past, etc., etc.
Our here and now experience includes all thoughts, sensations and feelings. All of it either passing through AS here-now experience, OR it becomes merely more belief, neither real nor you, that you grasp onto and make into projections of time, space and temporary identity, upon what remains always and “forever” this present moment.
A much better exploration or inquiry is to go looking for the experiencer. It is THIS quest that leads to true freedom.
8.7.23.2
Pure foolishness.
Once a “man” knows his “real self” he naturally ceases attaching to individuality. It is THIS freedom that threatens the state, corporations, institutions, and ruling classes.
As long as she believes she is an individual she can be threatened and controlled. When she realizes that she is Everything, nothing will ever again frighten or threaten her.
Kill her body maybe. But nothing can kill or control her actuality. Simply because she knows who and what she is.
This truth is in many different teachings and scriptures, all around the world, going back thousands of years.
8.7.23.3
All this sounds more like ego mind multitasking to me. Actual Awareness (without any other) has no need to engage in a question like this.
Things, life, appearances happen, thoughts, feelings, actions, whatever.
Awareness, Consciousness, whatever term we choose, for what cannot be conceived or named, and is only known by Herself and experienced by Herself, in myriad ways.
8.10.23
These thoughts you are sharing are just thoughts, not you. Thay are arising out of an embodied, conditioned life formed of unfolding circumstances.
Just notice that this is so. Understand that you could not experience these thoughts if it were not so. Become comfortable with yourself as being only and merely this noticing, which in fact IS all you truly are.
The more you become comfortable in this way, the less energy or effect thoughts will seem to have upon you.
Through this way of noticing, in which you realize more and more you are not the thoughts, not thinking, not any of it, just the noticing, thoughts will eventually begin to loose their hold on you, and fade away, like clouds, into this “sky” of noticing, which you realize more and more you always and already Are.
As noticing increases and thoughts fade, lives very simply and naturally change.
Thoughts “paint” our “views,” which then influence more thoughts, along with our words, feelings, actions, and unconscious reactions. The less we paint, the less we will react. And concurrently the less we react (unconsciously believe our paintings) the less we paint. A spiral path of freedom. So to speak.
We still choose, we still think, we still paint, but now it has all become conscious. And through this new kind of consciousness, we have become participants in Creation. No longer apart.
8.12.23
Words, thoughts, concepts, plans, theories, philosophies, streams of consciousness, beliefs, ideologies, grasping, resistance, avoidance, past, future, idols, all the same.
Allow all of this fire of creation, source of possibilities, aka existence, to be what it is, both a pointing and an unfolding, infinite potential always and eternally leading back to itself in ever new and different ways.
And yet such paradox, that here in this stillness, prior to all these words, idols, beliefs, we always and already are everything.
8.12.23.2
In these realms, whether you call words truth, or lies, you are missing the point.
ALL words are lies, until and unless they touch back into this same place we and they come from, and then disappear.
As our words begin to touch what is real they become no longer needed. Slowly, simply and naturally, we are left with what is, which we also are.
After that, when words are again needed, they come all by their own Self, perhaps via “you,” perhaps via “me,” perhaps via “another.”
All else is merely resistance to what is. But resistance cannot disappear until the “resistor” is also seen as an illusion.
In other words, ALL ego identity is resistance,to what simply is.
Not “make it” go. Wee simply LET go, and allow ourselves to be dissolved, in Grace’s own time and ways, naturally.
The first step in letting go is to stop acting out our beliefs. First we notice, then we want to choose differently, and then, slowly, haltingly, however we are able in any given moment, we simply stop acting them out.
We SEE the resistance, feel it, allow it, and yet remain, still. This is what “not acting it out” means. Simply being still, in the midst of all our own resistance, denial, clinging, grasping and attachment.
Until once we AGAIN realize we ARE this stillness, and that all resistance and attachment is merely coming and going, not real, always and forever dissolving away.
Getting stuck on teachers, whether it be Rupert, Osho, another, whether it be through attachment or resistance – “my” teacher, “bad” teacher, “your” teacher, “good” teacher, “that” teacher, whatever – is all the same.
Same as in judgement, identification with separation, beliefs, ideology, idols, ego.
What is real and true is now able to find its own words, as needed. Through wherever and whomever they wish, regardless of what people “think” or “remember” about any of these temporary vehicles.
Time, as in past and future, merely more illusions.
When some words touch your Self so that you Remember, they have become blessings upon you. The words dissolve away. YOU remain.
Any words you choose to fight or cling to, instead of simply letting them pass on by or dissolve away, are in fact triggering your very own stuff, your very own resistances, your very own attachments.
And so, more practice, more familiarity, deeper and deeper, into letting go.
8.13.23
“Free will,” in this divisive context, is an illusion. It is the ego’s activity, the identity of separation, trying to convince itself it is real.
This false reality is made out of inherited stories and beliefs passed down through generations, altogether creating a millenniums old fantasy world of “separate egos” in conflict.
And yet, paradoxically, there is a Will that is truly free. The Will of our Source, who is the substance of Everything and the very space in which it all unfolds. We are an extension of this Will.
We can no more be separate from Source than a thought can be separate from the Mind that thinks it.
The Mystery beneath all mysteries seems to be that humanity was given the ability to choose, and to believe.
And then a primordial choice was made: to believe we are separate. This is the root of all suffering—the belief we are apart from Source, from each other, from ourselves.
This meta-choice to believe in separation was first embodied by men. Born of the womb, but not “with” a womb, they seemed to be apart from its direct lineage.
The male human’s natural journey was to go apart, out into the “wilderness,” be transformed, and then return into that human lineage through union with a woman.
This was part of how change began to evolve into consciousness. But men got lost in the identity of being “apart.” They began to believe separation was real, sought to dominate, and so patriarchy was born.
The belief in separation is just that—a belief. The choice to believe in separation was made possible, but the actuality never was.
And yet because a first choice was made, another choice became possible. We can choose again. Differently. If we wish.
So, because in Truth nothing can be apart from what is Everything, the purpose of separation is NOW to unlearn the lie of it.
Here is the only real choice and the only free will humans have. We can keep choosing separation, or choose again, and again, and again. This is because for most of us, there is a lifetime and even generations of conditioning to undo.
This is the true spiritual journey: transformation through the dissolution of the false belief in separation.
In this always and forever evolving unlearning, we realize over and over that we already ARE Everything—and that is the awakening.
What is Real awakening to Itself, through us, as us, and as all of Life.
Thought awakens as Mind.
This realization becomes the Gift of Source to Herself, experienced through each of us, through all of us, through all of life. Our purpose is to receive this Gift.
Here also is both the Source and the Meaning of Love.
8.15.23
Not subtle at all. Actually, the superficially most obvious. Merely good memorizing and agile game playing, “piecing” together bits and pieces of various “non-dual” teachings. All the while as you continue to confuse your thoughts, beliefs, concepts and memory with actual experience. Alan Watts used to sometimes call this “eating the menu”.
I say this with confidence because you are clearly and pretty near totally missing what actual experience knows, that these words you are parroting are meant to be the conveyors of a thousand deeper levels, in order to finally “disappear” an experienced reader of mystical pointings into the true abyss of actual awareness. In such a movement the superficial totally disappears along with the reader.
8.23.23
You cannot bring truth to illusion (aka ego), and make it real, true. Every effort merely changes superficial appearances. Illusion will always remain illusion, ego will always remain ego.
But you CAN take illusion (ego) to truth. Because in truth illusions are clearly seen for what they are, not real, not true, mere illusions, and so, just like a cloud in the light of the sun, they will slowly dissolve away into what they always were in truth, this very Sky that they, and we, never were not.
All the rest, aka you, me, the clouds, merely belief.
8.26.23
It is not either or. We are fully responsible, even as we are being called to completely surrender. Paradox is not something you figure out, or “decide,” it is something we must actually live.
8.28.23
Alone, in a silent place, you are not afraid. In the street, with all its noise, people and activities, you are. The mental/emotional conditioned body-mind, like so much of this physical existence, is also a defensive tool. And mostly these days, for humans, it is used to protect its own beliefs in and identities of separation.
And so, what do you fear? Follow that question deeper and deeper, transforming every answer into a deeper question, until you have become the knowing of your own questioning, prior to ALL questions and answers.
Do this in the streets as well as alone in silence. One day there will be no difference.
“In my defenselessness my safety lies.”
8.29.23
“IT” is what is asking this question.
That is, beliefs, in the illusions of time which imposes a sort of seemingly linear order to the imagery, language and concepts arising out of our various mental, emotional and physical reactions and responses to all the myriad and hugely varied environmental (internal, external, natural, and human) activities and experiences we notice, and with this ersatz “noticing” always dependent upon where and how our defensive attention and actual moment to moment involvement is oriented.
All of this is then recorded via sensory inputs into brain patterns. As “time” progresses in each human organism’s journey, all “past” input patterns will more and more pre-filter and re-pattern all newer inputs, in order to “properly place” these newer inputs into prior and more strongly identified with, or we could say more deeply “established,” prior patterns.
The problem is of course, here in these realms of spirituality, non-duality and seeking, awareness is pretty near totally lost in identifying with all that activity, sensory input, and patterning, via mental memory and embodied conditioning. That is, lost in believing all this patterning is also what it is.
This meta belief, in a nutshell (no pun intended), is what is referred to as ego.
This ego cannot actually take a bow though, having no reality of its own, except when and as much we are willing and eager to provide it an audience, via our belief in it. Audience, enemy, friend, prey, whatever role(s) we keep believing we are, in this continual dance within all these reflections, are always and merely ego reflecting to and upon itself.
Ego cares not what role we play, friend to it, enemy of it, believer or unbeliever in it, as long as it can keep pretending as well as keep us convinced that this engagement with ego IS also what awareness is.
And yet ALL sides of this dance are ego, without exception.
Just one great big hall of mirrors, with even the mirrors themselves made up out of our beliefs.
It is exactly our own beliefs in the ego’s illusory existence that keeps the acting, clowning, dramatizing, resisting, attacking, figuring out, running away, and all these other myriad seeming activities in the beliefs of separation, going. Emphasize seeming.
All of which we as awareness continue to feed, with our very own actual and real Source-derived energies of belief.
And such a simple solution. Stop believing. Not easy of course. But definitely simple.
The thing is, giving up belief as an identity, aka the “believer,” is not partial. It is all or nothing.
Yet there is a gift, or blessing, even here, which is that there is always belief going on, so we don’t have to “go looking” for it.
On the other side of this what I’ll call a doorway, or say Zen’s Gateless Gate, something totally new and different may begin, something that maybe even looks like belief to the uninitiated, but is not. Because This Activity is now occurring directly within and as consciousness, awareness. Knowingly, outside of time.
But first there must be a passage into nothing. The spiritual non-journey, end of belief.
Always in no knowing.
---
You need to step free of your own thought processes, more than anything else. This chopping Whole movements up into bits and pieces, and making your own favorite “salads” out of them, no less.
The same sort of thing “scientists” do, with lifeforms, thinking they will somehow be able to understand life Herself, by cutting the expressions of life up into bits and pieces.
Your cup (mind) needs to learn how to empty itself at least a little bit, before you can even begin to learn how it might be filled with a different sort of brew.
Time is an illusion.
9.1.23
Ego is a belief in separation believing it is real.
All fear that is not natural body-centered instincts necessary for survival is the fear of the ending of THAT belief.
The ego will ALSO use our body centered instincts for its own purposes, including hiding within them as well as activating them, all in order to continue this illusory belief in its own separate existence.
The less landing places (unquestioned beliefs) we give the ego, the less it is able to sneak back in.
The end of the sneaking is the end of ego, and the ego knows this.
The ego simply “dissolves” away in the absence of belief. The same way an illusion dissolves in the presence of Truth, or darkness in the presence of Light, or a cloud in the sky when the sun is high.
9.5.23
What or who is calling this “awakened” experience “almost terrifying, shocking?” In other words, who is this experiencer who obviously remains apart in order to label the experience this way?
Notice that the experience was momentary, passing, however long in “time” it seemed to remain. Even if it was a true “experience” of the Real knowing itself without any other. And see if you can set it aside for a little while.
All the thoughts, memories, beliefs and mind-body conditioning, which you had been holding onto as your separate identity, collapsed for a little while into this “non-experience.”
When this what I am now calling non-experience passed, your identity was left terrified, shocked and amazed at its own seeming collapse, or disappearance, and how your lifetime accumulation of ideations and body conditionings, that was keeping your “separate” identity in place and defended, became as if nothing.
Yet, only for a while. Ego has myriad ways of sneaking and crashing its way back into the play. Especially when it is able to use what seems to be its own fear as a gate crasher. When something radical like this seems to happen, it will very often come back “terrified and shocked,” as well as amazed.
The great opportunity then becomes, while you are “gone” (not here, or however you try to describe what cannot be described), is to actually “turn around” even further, metaphorically speaking, and “look” for this “experiencer” NOW, the soon to be shocked and terrified one who is never-the-less also amazed by what seemed to be, in retrospect, an “experience,” but was not, was instead actually what you always and already are.
Look for the experiencer, and keep letting yourself disappear into the emptiness, even this.
9.6.23
This is direct experience, bubbling up and out of what is clearly an unfolding of awareness aware of itself. The actual experience speaking of itself through some amazed residuals of a “you” that has been temporarily dispersed.
The scent and primal rhythms of a direct and alive immediacy is pervading your every word.
And here you are responding to it with a story of the past, mere words, accompanied by some static visual imagery that you seem to believe supports what is still merely story.
Altogether signifying someone who is still clinging to and identifying with past experience, using memories to cultivate the idea of someone (you) who is “awake,” regardless of the term you use.
You are not the only one here doing this of course.
Instead of all this foolishness, we must and very simply encourage each other to keep going. Keep “turning,” as a Sufi like our beloved Rumi might say.
SEE this experiencer, hold them clearly in awareness, who otherwise becomes merely another illusory story teller of another turn or unfolding. AKA ego, which is always sneaking, manipulating or crashing its way back in, through all these now static identified-with “openings” which it keeps attempting to convince us is “what “we are, and through which all this shared projected world in the beliefs of separation can only just keep intruding and unfolding.
To turn ever deeper and deeper into experience itself, and then finally, in Grace’s own time disappear.
So that even disappearing disappears.
9.9.23
“You” cannot do this. “You” can only become more and more willing. Which also means less and less words, less and less stories, all the while as you become increasingly familiar with silence, stillness, and your very own true heart and soul intentions. Grace does the rest.
Familiarity needs no words.
To paraphrase Adyashanti, not even surrender is possible, in the end we are surrendered.
Or Richard Rohr, God loves us by becoming us.
You can play on these sorts of imagined edges, “shortening,” via stories of a “distance” to an imagined “first step,” there in your mind, just more and more stories about fictitious journeys, forever.
There is no actual bridge. Only and simply temporary “steps,” which disappear as you take them. Until the goer herself is totally gone, along with the steps. In a true non-journey like this all that you feel and think and believe you are eventually, and actually, ends.
And, you cannot do it.
Pema Chödrön once said, again paraphrasing, that the story of the Boat of Dharma, that takes you to the other shore, the so-called shore of enlightenment, is an intentional trick. In truth that boat takes you all the way out into the middle of this vast Ocean of Samsara, and then sinks.
And yet even then, we must become still ever more and more willing, to drown, or in other words actually dissolve away into these Waters of Existence. All in Grace’s own time and ways.
Meanwhile, we simply keep turning, around and around, and around again, looking always for who and what is still making all up these stories, and also discover, on the way, a true willingness to let this “process” take forever.
With “forever” merely being more “time” than a finite human mind can imagine.
9.12.23
And good to remember that we are all on our own unique paths, through and as this One that All is revealing, in infinitely new, unfolding and evolving ways, itself to ItSelf.
This is so whether we seem to be appearing or disappearing, as individuals, collectives, leaders, and/or followers.
9.13.23
If we are broken deeply enough, and often enough, and somehow by the grace of God keep surviving, getting back up, and going on, from wherever we find ourselves, we will eventually discover, and then become more and more familiar with, what it is we ARE that cannot ever be broken or diminished.
We begin to identify with THIS, more and more, and not with what seems to break and diminish and is actually meant to, by the very nature of all these temporary and ever shifting appearances we have been conditioned to believe, repeat believe we are.
All that belief is what holds each of us, and all us, in these illusions of separation. To simply question THAT belief, the belief in separation, in all things, is the transformation our world is presently being called into.
And there really never has been another time in all of history (his story) like now. For it really is our very whole planet Earth, and ALL of life on it, that is now breaking, as well as calling into human consciousness the very most fundamental question of all; what is all this belief in separation really about.
Therefore, the one belief I do very much intend to share here, and that I hold most dear, IS the need for more and more and more of us to begin to actually LIVE the reversal of our collective human beliefs in separation.
A belief that is made tangible via its meta-expression or ideology that nearly all humans share; that first there was “matter” and then there became “consciousness.”
When in Truth it is the absolute and complete opposite. First there was, and is, consciousness. All else, repeat ALL seeming else is arising within consciousness, is the myriad and infinitely diverse expressions of consciousness, and is “made” of consciousness.
It is exactly THIS shift that must happen, within our collective and planetary human zeitgeist, if all our insane separation-identity destruction is ever going to end, and love once again become manifest and evident as the central abiding force and experience of human life, and all life here on Earth.
Rather than merely seeming to appear, for a while, in the lives of a very privileged few of us who are enabled, by circumstances such as birth, genetics, extreme perseverance, and/or luck, to even begin to explore these sorts of questions.
9.17.23
Let’s say that we, and all seeming things around us, are all a lot of bits and pieces of ice, clinking and clunking up against and among and around and toward and apart from each other, altogether within a multidimensional boundary-less expanse of water that is itself swirling and moving all about and through and within a whole lot of its own myriad multidimensional currents and streams and whirlpools and etc., etc.
And that some of these pieces of ice, who are calling themselves physicists and philosophers for instance, want to understand the whole of all that. The bits of ice, the water, the currents, all of it.
And that as a part of their efforts they keep coming up with increasingly larger and more complex theories about it, with some of these theories pure math and some grand philosophies, and even some with experimental and physical bits of evidence and outcomes they use in support of their theories and philosophies.
With M theory being another attempt to bring all those various diverse and very often competing theories together, into one overarching all-encompassing theory of matter, energy, and the universe.
This is the “matter first” world view, and the basis of mainstream science for centuries and millenniums, which says it all started with bits and pieces. That existence life and humans started began with bits and pieces bouncing off of and interacting with each other in ever more complexifying ways. The ice.
The “consciousness first” world view says it all starts with and occurs within consciousness. The water.
So, if they do come up with a good M theory, one that enough of them agree on, will it be describing matter, or will it be describing consciousness? That is, ice, or water?
Non-dual metaphysics and spirituality, playing some more within the same metaphor, says there is no real difference, that it is a matter of belief merely, AND that we can only ever REALLY know who and what we are and existence is by actually melting, completely.
But because we have come to believe, and with the power of belief being what it is (a different conversation), truly believe, that we actually are these bits and pieces of ice, we must also now melt willingly and knowingly, if we truly wish to know our own true nature.
And yet, paradoxically this melting also naturally occurs, simply because it is the very nature of ice to melt.
Only beliefs think they can resist this melting, and by resisting continue on indefinitely.
Beliefs that keep coming up with ever more and more belief, more and more ways to resist melting, more and more chunks and bits and pieces of ice, philosophies, theories, people, identities, ego, technologies, empires, math equations.
Playing here, in the midst of your growing curiosity, and yet this is still with just more mere words. Bits and pieces of ice. Pointing at the water all around us, and how we also are made of water.
9.17.23.2
Each of us comes through what we are born into, so to speak. With lots of levels, degrees and dimensions to this journey or passage. And with every passage unique. Especially in regards to these so-called non-dual ways we are exploring.
The more ideas and concepts and filters we look and listen through, the more we become able to eventually see and hear through and past all ideas and concepts and filters. This is so because the Universe, Source, God, whatever term you wish, is constantly speaking and calling to Herself, through everything, everywhere, and in every way.
And She is always calling first and foremost to Herself. In and as everything.
“Knowing” in these terrains eventually becomes much more about an ever-growing familiarity, and less and less (and ever less) about mere facts and figures.
Nothing truly Real can ever be grasped, moved, held down or contained. It can only be Itself. In this Being there is then also Knowing, without any need of separation, or separate “knower.”
And then the Miracle, above all possible miracles. We are, also, That.
10.6.24
Exactly so.
And then one more “non-step” entirely. Realize you already ARE the context, or may we say spaciousness within which all this seems to be appearing, as well as the very “substance” of ALL so-called singular and “co-joined” appearances that seem to be rising and falling away, within This, that you are.
Not “in control.” Just, Are.
After that, and coupled with a total willingness (never willfulness) to wait and surrender forever, because your love and desire for This is that great, all sorts of “gateless gates” will eventually begin to open.
In whichever ways as you may (or may not) be called (or invited) to look.
10.17.24
This meme is classic (as well as half-baked) spiritual nihilism. In other words, merely more “thought” that has contrived itself, out of a lot of reading of some rather limited and juvenile understandings, and damn near zero actual experience.
And, going by the image and what is obviously a self-assigned and overblown “identity” you are affecting with it, it is all gathered together to support some additional studied and highly contrived pretense.
Or we could say a purposeful affecting of the airs and shiny labels of and ersatz wisdom.
Merely more fractured thought that is pretending to “know,” via the same sort of thinking it is claiming, through “insinuation,” to be the “absence” of.
Altogether badly woven around a misunderstanding of what it has very clearly never experienced.
All of it in order to convince itself (along with a few “validating” others) that it is NOT thought. And, it’s not even doing it, very well.
No one with any real actual experiential, repeat experiential knowing, in, of and as ANY of these terrains, EVER talks or writes or presents their self like this.
With “terrains” here just another form of pointing toward what we cannot ever actually “know,” only become, via inspired willingness and surrender, more and more may I say “familiar” with.
10.20.24
We are also here collectively, in other words not just individually, to cut through these illusions and delusions we humans uniquely share, believe are real, and which are presently, in these very exact moments we are speaking, destroying the very creation some of us call Earth, or we could say the greater Whole we have all come into form through, and so actually BECOME these possibilities of awakening.
An Earth that we share with all of life, and this life that we ALSO are.
Or in other words, as much as any one of us awakens, ALL of life also awakens. In the Buddha’s words, “I and all sentient existence have awakened.”
Your words here, as well as a lot of the actions and non-actions in this group, totally miss most of where I am pointing towards now.
You are not alone of course, most “teachers” and wannabe teachers miss this.
Life will continue in other and different forms, and awakening will continue, but humans may not.
Unless more and more people, some exactly like you, bring ALL of this, aka all of yourselves, into some greater collective awareness.
And most especially without all the woo-woo. Because woo-woo ain’t it.
10.20.24.2
You seem to be mostly all about cultivating a made-up public “spiritual” identity.
You keep allowing only what serves that inclination, which tends to severely limit and suppress any real interactive and potentially expanding explorations into the Real.
Such behavior most often reflects someone who is deeply identified with their own bondage. Sort of like a “pet” bird that refuses to leave its cage, even when the door is left open. Instead, it tries to paint the bars with pretty images of freedom. So that even when the cage itself is being revealed as an illusion, it continues to hold on to it, and stay “within” it.
All the so-called “bars” and ALL our human contrived cages are mere beliefs. And beliefs are not real. Some beliefs of course are temporarily useful, but never ever are they Real.
Your curating here is sort of like sewing spiritual “patches” onto an identity jacket, in the hopes that if you get enough of the “right” patches, all of it organized in some “proper” ways, you, as the wearer of that metaphorical “jacket,” will become special, aka “spiritual.” It is altogether part of some rather common, though still extremely strange, once we see it clearly, human hubris.
With ALL this sort of behavior being exactly what is now often called “spiritual materialism,” a term first publicly coined by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, in his book with a similar title, in the early 70’s.
The only real question here, for anyone really delving into any of these ways, is, are you looking merely for another somewhat “better” self, identity, or public image, in the context of merely more temporary experiences, OR, are you fully committed to becoming your own always and already extant self-knowing and self-aware Reality?
With the understanding that if you really ARE fully committed, then you are ALSO fully committed to the total and complete cessation and annihilation of “you.”
~ John Fridinger
Late Fall, 2025
Talent, OR