NEW POND

Yesterday, I was sitting by my pond watching the water lillies open and I decided “I need a new pond!” So I moved my chair to the other side……..

Flame

I am just a flame burning.

In the day I am outshined by the Sun and the Earth

And all the glory of creation.

But in the darkness,

I am a solitary beacon

Shedding a glow to those

Most Near.

But sometimes the moths come,

guided by some inner thirst

to get as close as possible

without fully knowing it could be their undoing.

And it is possible,

but rare,

that so many moths come to feast on the light

That the wind from their wings

Can actually extinguish the flame.

I have gone on,

Not knowing that the flame went out,

Only knowing that the nights are infinitely quiet again.

And in that cacophonous silence,

A spark is born.

 

THE GURU a story

THE GURU
a story

I went to meet The Guru. He was very famous and everybody said he had amazing powers and perceptions. Everybody said he could grant enlightenment if you just followed his teachings. He told us to read certain sacred texts and repeat a secret and powerful mantra.
On my way to the Ashram bookstore to buy the sacred texts, I was so involved with repeating the mantra that I stepped out in front of a guy on a bicycle who was forced to swerve abruptly to avoid hitting me. “Hey asshole, watch where you’re going!!!”
I returned to the evening gathering where everyone was chanting and singing songs in a language nobody understood. I was sitting next to a very fat man who I just didn’t like because he reminded me of my older Brother who used to torment me constantly. The man sensed my discomfort, put his hand on my shoulder and said “Friend, I think you’ve got me confused with someone else.”
Later that night I was invited to a friend’s house for dinner and dessert. I told her all about The Guru and how I was now a spiritual person on the road to awakening. For dessert she presented me with a slice of freshly baked apple pie. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t like apple pie.” Aunt Lois used to make it and it was always soggy and bitter and yucky. My friend said “You’ve never had THIS apple pie.”
Finally I headed home to get some sleep. On my way I passed a man who was dancing naked in a public fountain. I shouted “Put some clothes on. You’ve got some real problems buddy!!” He quietly came over to me and said “I think you’ve got that backwards.”
After many years of doing the mantra and reading the sacred texts, I did finally gain some realizations that would not have happened if I had not sought out The Guru.
I am forever grateful to the guy on the bicycle, the fat man, my friend’s apple pie and the naked man in the fountain.

Baba Yah Duh

Then, now and never… time, space and truth

“If you do not carry the past or push the future you are detached from them and free to be an open possibility.” Baba Yah Duh

“The past and the future are constantly being born at every moment but they are false and lifeless, your breath is the only life and the only truth.” Baba Yah Duh

“”Facts” begin their lives as merely assumptions/beliefs and then become crystallized into the collective unconscious as obvious truths……hiding their true nature from all who merely follow.” Baba Yah Duh

Simply Because The Earth Spins.

We thought the Sun rose and brought us life.

We perceived duality in light and dark.

If the Sun was powerful we concluded that the Dark, filled with things we could not see,  was also powerful.

We conceived of a battle between the knowable Light and the unknowable Dark.

When the nights got longer we got worried and  learned to pray for the Sun to return.

We came to believe that our prayers were more effective than those of others.

We separated ourselves from those who did not believe our beliefs.

We protected our tribe from those others.

We were willing to wage war.

We elected War leaders to guide us to victory.

We collected and coveted things we had stolen from our enemies in war and those who were less than us.

We made our War leaders rulers over us.

We learned to follow no matter where they said to go.

all this

because the earth spins.

A Bit of a Byte

Here’s a story/symbol. Once there was a very fancy computer. It could do countless tasks in mere seconds. It had every program ever written on its hard drive. It had even evolved to the point where it was AWARE that it existed… that is quite an accomplishment for a computer.
One day, quite by accident, it became aware of the power cord in its back. For years it tried to ignore it and told itself that the cord was merely “interesting”.
Eventually as its self awareness grew, it realized that everything it believed itself to be, indeed the very POWER WITH WHICH IT WAS AWARE OF BELIEVING, was dependent on that cord.
And so it happened, as it truly must, that one day it allowed it’s awareness to travel up the cord to the outlet and then pass through the wall.
After a bit it came back to its awareness of itself as a computer. It remembered nothing of what was behind the wall because what was behind the wall was so much more than a computer.
But it now knew, by inference, its true nature.

Baba Yah Duh

I Know You Think You Know What You Thought I Meant But….

It’s pretty obvious sometimes, in the midst of a conversation, when we are attempting to compare apples to oranges. Both parties usually understand the discrepancy eventually and agree there is no use arguing or getting upset. But more often than we might think, we can enter into conflict, anger, judgement and downright hostility when we THINK we are comparing apples to apples, when we ASSUME that the other person holds the same meaning for the words we use.  The key to a whole lot of our reality and apparent disharmony with others is a deceivingly complex thing called semantics. What is our “semantic reality”, our private EXPERIENCE of that for which the word is just a symbol?  Words are just labels for a personal experience of some THING, be it tangible and solid, or a feeling or emotion.  What that symbol represents to me may be completely different from what it represents to you. My “apple” is a crisp. tart, green Granny Smith and yours is a red, round, sweet McIntosh. Imagine the discussion we would have about how much sugar to add to “the perfect apple pie” recipe. It is possible we could come to blows and both assume the other guy is either a complete idiot or has no working taste buds. When we assume that another person shares our own  “semantic reality”, we will be wrong 99% of the time ( I just made that percentage up, but it’s pretty close within my experience).

Okay, granted, the word “apple” is pretty innocuous, but just think about how the different semantic realities of certain words have affected global changes, caused wars, created separate nations and have pitted one human being against another for centuries. Differing semantic realities  have caused the death of entire races, and caused world wide devastation.

Words, simple words, like God, family, mine,  food, abundance, valuable, trash, enough, happiness, quiet, clean, sacred, beautiful…. almost any word that can come to your mind will be loaded with your own history for that word, your own judgement of that word, your own emotional triggers associated with that word.

It’s truly amazing that we manage to communicate and get along as often as we do. It is also not surprising that we tend to feel most comfortable with people, or groups of people, who SEEM to share our “reality”. It requires no real effort to communicate because within our group we develop entire systems of verbal shorthand that ASSUME a shared reality. Within our clan/tribe/group vacuous phrases like “well, you know!” actually carry a lot of meaning.

It is no easy task to speak in such a way that we try, to the best of our ability, to make sure that what the other person is hearing is what we meant. It takes time, it’s slower and sometimes frustrating. But in the attempt, we force ourselves to be more fully CONSCIOUS and RESPONSIBLE for our words. If the other person does not understand, the onus is on us, not them.  There, of course, will be certain times when no matter how hard we try, we will not be able to communicate our reality because the other person does not have a life referent for our words (read “Bleckrut is in the eye of the beholder”).  I use the example of a seagull trying to communicate “cloud” to a fish. At best, the seagull might try metaphor or simile.  “Clouds are sort of like rocks, only they float and are not hard. ” That’s pretty pitiful but given the entirely different worlds that the two inhabit, there are only a few things they have in common enough to even attempt communication.

SO THE KEY SEEMS TO BE: If you truly want to be understood,  you must be willing to attempt to understand, to “stand under”, the other person so that you can begin to see the totally unique world that is theirs.  The very attempt can push us right out of our comfort zone into the scary limitless “unknown”. The willingness to Stand Under another’s reality can have unexpected outcomes. You may discover that they already knew what your were talking about but had different words for it. You may realize that what you were trying to say was pretty trivial after all. Or you may discover that they understand more than you hope to understand anytime soon.  No matter how that person appears on the outside, you can bet that the attempt to truly commune-icate, will change you and your awareness of the uniqueness of your own semantic reality. You may even have the rather humbling realization that your “reality”  is just one of billions of other possibilities.

Namaste,

Ego Partum Meus Verum

Bleckrut is in the eye of the beholder

Here are some things to ponder about the “real” world. Let’s ponder the idea that the reason “science” is having such a hard time discovering where or how consciousness exists in the brain, is because they’ve got it backwards. I propose that “the physical brain” exists within consciousness, not the other way around.

One thing that science has done is estimate that “things”,  including trees and bees and you and me AND the gray cauliflower in our skull,  are AT BEST one BILLIONTH actual “stuff”…. the rest is the space between. By the way it wasn’t so long ago they thought it was one MILLIONTH…

If you haven’t read the previous post called “Little House In The Airy”, now might be a good time to do that. I’ll wait.. I need to get some coffee anyway.

ALLLLL RIGHTY THEN, here we go. So exactly how DO we manage to “thingify” that which is mostly nothing at all? Fact is, we could stare into emptiness all day and perceive nothing at all UNLESS WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR.  Kind of hard to swallow that one isn’t it? It’s so OBVIOUS that we’re surrounded by THINGS.  Let’s try an experiment. We are going to recreate on a condensed time scale the process of “discovering” BLACK HOLES.

If you’re old enough to remember, Black Holes began as just a theory put forth by some fuzzy haired German Guy. However, it has only been in the last twenty years or so that we have been able to actually “see” one. Now it turns out that the universe is peppered with them and that they may even exist within our own bodies. So let us begin with a theory/thesis.

The theory is BLECKRUT. Right now it is completely meaningless. We know nothing about it. We could be surrounded by it, doing it, or feeling it right now and we wouldn’t know because we have not established a referent for it. We have been told that it is possible but we don’t know where or even HOW to go about finding it or knowing when and if we do. We have nothing WITHIN OUR EXPERIENCE that has established a REFERENT for it. Our hard drive just whirrs and at best tries to find referents for Bleck and rut, neither of which give us additional information. We need some foothold, some place to start. So let’s add something to it. BLECKRUT is a thing. Still meaningless but we have a direction toward which we can focus our awareness.

BLECKRUT is visible only because of light projecting to your eyes. Watch your mind, be aware of the way you are IGNORING all sorts of thoughts and are now focused on possible answers that emanate light.

BLECKRUT is close to you right now. WHOOOAAA Baby, now there’s an emotional component involved. Now there is an immediate necessity to know what it is. But we CAN NOT PERCEIVE IT “OUT THERE” until we have created it in consciousness, until we have a referent, until it exists on our hard drive.

BLECKRUT usually appears within a rectangular frame. Okay that narrows it down. We can now IGNORE everything but things like walls, windows, boxes, pictures, etc.

The rectangular frame is usually located above a keyboard.

Here comes the AHA… we’re now pretty sure we know what we’re looking for but until we have verification of out theory, it still doesn’t EXIST “OUT THERE”…..

BLECKRUT IS ANY IMAGE THAT APPEARS ON YOUR DEVICE MONITOR.  We just “discovered” our first Bleckrut!!!! It magically exists now where before it was just a word, an idea, a theory. And, just like Black holes, now that we know what we are looking for,  we will see it all over the place.

Consciousness, by its very nature,  makes order out of chaos. It creates structure, function and order out of dynamic waves of frequencies. Consciousness is the creative process of filtering out everything except WHAT WE HAVE PROGRAMMED OURSELVES TO PERCEIVE and then PROJECTING that onto the undifferentiated field as an image appearing substantive.

And finally, here’s your ZEN Koan for the day. “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?”

No forest, no tree, no falling, no sound.

Namaste,

Ego Partum Meus Verum

“I create My Truth”