. . . thus, it is good to be clear about the nature of our expectations: when I am an awakened being, it will look like this. It will feel like this. Others will respond to me in this way. And so forth.
Expectation, even though it is directed at the future, is predicated on the past. No – it is the past. That is where our ideas come from. We met or read about someone who professed to be awake, and we began to associate and free-associate. Over time – all that reading and studying and watching videos and going to workshops in the interest of enlightenment, of spiritual liberation, et cetera – those associations become a sort of fixed object: the awakened self. Our awakened self.
Thus, awakening – which is not a future event but a present cognition of a present reality – is largely or altogether missed because it doesn’t fit our prearranged ideal. Our seeking constructs a model that neatly, nearly perfectly makes finding anything impossible. We are too busy reading A Course in Miracles, or studying the 20th century advaitists, or meditating, or admiring our vegetarianism, or writing about awakening and so forth.
None of those things are bad in and of themselves, of course. It’s just that in the ultimate sense, A Course in Miracles isn’t any more significant than Danielle Steele. Consuming life in the form of plants isn’t morally superior to consuming it in the form of a chicken. And so forth. Yes, yes, we have to make decisions and live some way, but the point is that awakening is not contingent on those decisions. Awakening is not conditional. It is not contingent on any external appearance or construction or circumstance. Our belief to the contrary is what makes seeing this simple truth impossible.
We could put it this way: what we are in truth is altogether unaffected by our decision to eat meat, or to have an affair, or to be an ACIM student rather than a Buddhist, or to write poetry rather than ad copy for Budweiser, and so forth. Life does not stop because of our ideas about life – because of our standards or preferences. It doesn’t even change because of those ideas. It just is.
. . . truth is constant, and implies a state where vacillations are impossible . . . happiness in changing form that shifts with time and place is an illusion that has no meaning (T-21.VII.10:5, 13:1).
A little over a year ago I had an insight about giving attention, which subsequently and profoundly transformed my practice which, in turn and time, changed my experience of self and other. About six months after that insight, in the midst of its burgeoning effects, I began to have a sneaking suspicion that it was time to stop being so desperately and frantically consumptive, especially with respect to spiritual and philosophical texts. The time for learning was over; the time for application was now.
I beheld the clarity of Tara Singh.
The only Truth is “What Is.”
Only in Truth duality ends.
In thought, concept, dogma, belief systems, there is always conflict.
If you cannot harness the energy of a Truth, then you only know the words.
(Gifts from the Retreat 16-17)
I became determined to harness Truth: and I am here to tell you: Truth is like a horse that misses us and secretly wants to come home. It will not resist our harness. It draws vividly near even as we become aware of our desire that it drawn near. How lovely! How accommodating!
How infuriating!
Because slowly – slowly but certainly – I began to get angry. Deeply angry. At first I didn’t understand it; perhaps it was just a prolonged mood? But then I began to see that what had once delighted me – the chickadees, the black bears, the tracks of the moose, games within language, the fall of the light just so – did not any longer. Or rather, I saw through the loveliness, saw through the delight. The loveliness of these objects was not compromised, but their meaning certainly was.
What do I mean by that? I mean that I was finally seeing the content behind the form: and the content was nothing but all the junk I projected: thoughts and memories and ideas and stories and landscapes and images and sounds and themes and this and that and holy Christ what an ugly tangled mess it made. Every time my heart leaped and my voice rose in song, this enormous ruinous welter of the projected self, of the self-made self, presented itself, and I fell silent. The chickadees and cardinals, the black bears and moose, the birch trees and fire ponds, the moon and the stars, collections of poetry and black-and-white photographs of my grandmothers when they were young . . . all of it was hostage to the ego, tortured by the ego into a desperate attempt to keep itself going.
In other words, what I had called joy was a lie with a singular goal: perpetuation of the separate self, regardless of the resultant tides of guilt and sorrow caused thereby.
If you seek to separate out certain aspects of the totality and look to them to meet your imagined needs, you are attempting to use separation to save you. How then could guilt not enter? For separation is the source of guilt, and to appeal to it for salvation is to believe you are alone . . . to experience yourself as alone is to deny the Oneness of the Father and His Son, and thus to attack reality (T-15.V.2:3-7).
I was angry because I did not want to see the truth of what I was doing, because to see the truth of it, was to know that one had to give it up. And how could I do that? How do you jettison a lifetime of specialness? How could a chickadee be just another bird? How could my writing about A Course in Miracles be just more blather? And so forth.
Please do not rush to tell me that I am wrong here. Or that it will all be okay. Please do not prattle about how special relationships are translated into holy relationships and so forth (T-15.V.8:1). I have read that, too. I have prattled thusly. I am saying something else here, or trying to. I am saying that we must meet experience where it is, which meeting requires rigorous honesty, and that to call this meeting unpleasant may be to understate the case dramatically.
I am saying that when we at last perceive the illusory nature of the world, that some of us must go through a period of anger and regret and bitterness. I am sure there are those who skip lightly through this stage and struggle with others, but I am not one of them. It hurt, and the hurt did not instantly or readily dissolve. And, because it hurt and kept on hurting, resistance entered.
Resistance takes many forms, one of which – for me the most cunning and resilient of which – is an interest in its many forms. I just love to study my apparent failures under the guise of getting better someday. Yet as soon as we are focused on form, we are distracted from Truth. Not permanently but presently, which is entirely sufficient unto the ego’s needs.
Thus, if I felt that consumption of spiritual texts was no longer called for, I doubled down on my study of them. Nisargadatta, Martin Buber, Shih-t’ou and so on. If the Holy Spirit said zig, I zagged, and when the Holy Spirit said zag, I zigged. I extended the proverbial middle finger resolutely, unrepentantly. Suck on this, Jesus. Pressed to admit that chickadees were neither lovelier nor holier than grackles or June bugs, I wrote a ten-thousand word treatise on the sacred blessing only chickadees could impart.
And oh how it didn’t work. And oh how I began to depress, to become depressed, my stumbling reduced to a crawl, my crawl reduced to blindly clutching fistfuls of dust. Nothing worked, and the unworkability of it bled slowly through my life – my work, my relationships, my walks, my wordiness. I couldn’t go forward as I was called to go, and going back wasn’t any better. Everywhere I turned I saw the same bleak possibilities, no one of which struck me as palatable, passable, viable. In no metaphorical way, my prison became very clear and very tight. I fell asleep to the clinking of chains and woke to the utter absence of light in which every moment was a recitation of my death sentence.
Now it is important to acknowledge that this condition is in its way a blessing – from the outside looking in it is a blessing – but it cannot possibly be perceived as such from within the experience. A prison is a prison; the willing prisoner and the informed prisoner and the optimistic prisoner are still prisoners.
Shih-t’ou said:
The spiritual source shines clear in the light;
the branching streams flow on in the dark.
Grasping at things is surely delusion;
according with sameness is still not enlightenment.
It is important to see that the prison is constructed of ideals: thought makes it: it is thought itself. The world isn’t doing anything to us – life is just life, impersonal and neutral, flowing and evolving, unconditioned by the past and unaffected by the future. But our thoughts and perceptions – the workings of our so-called inner life – when unacknowledged, these become the dense web of illusion in which our entanglement becomes the very essence of loss and grief and confusion. It cannot be said enough: we confuse our thoughts about reality for reality. Stop giving thought such primacy – let it be the equivalent of bird songs and waterfalls and eighteen-wheelers a mile or more away – and everything will settle quite nicely.
But of course – again, critically – it doesn’t make a whit of difference to say this. But to finally make contact with the seeming realness of it all – to stop pretending that the prison is a beautiful landscape, or a perfect kiss, or a great poem, or a clear star on the horizon in winter . . . To just see that we are entrapped by thought and haven’t got the first fucking clue how to get out . . . That is something.
In a sense I am saying it is very important to see hell as hell, and to really accept it as such . . . You will know you are there when there is no way out, no possibility of hope, when there is no intellectual comfort whatsoever . . . Don’t resist this but rather embrace it, in the sense of not trying to change it, or pretend it’s anything else. Don’t look for the crack through which the light seeps; just sink into the darkness.
If we do not embrace our hatred of God, then we will not be able to finally know God as Love. There is no way out but through the Hate and Guilt and Fear, all of which is hidden by meaningless dreams of Love, our cheap hymns to health and happiness that are grounded not in experience but wishful thinking.
Shih-t’ou said:
In the light there is darkness,
but don’t take it as darkness;
In the dark there is light,
but don’t see it as light.
So what happens? Here is what is happened for me, which won’t be what happens for you, because your path is not my path, even though we are walking together, calling to one another in darkness and fog, like hikers on the trail, separated by great distance, but perhaps it will still be helpful.
One morning you wake up and the prison is there: the hopelessness is there: the sentence of death life has laid on your bones chokes and strangles you and you wish only that the end would come, the sooner the better. And you say then from the rotting pit of your heart, from the wretched depths of what you have made of yourself, in a faint whisper no angel would recognize as language: “there must be another way.”
That was how Bill Thetford put it. Shih-t’ou adds:
Hearing the words, understand the meaning;
don’t set up standards of your own.
If you don’t understand the Way right before you,
how will you know the path as you walk?
Progress is not a matter of far or near,
but if you are confused, mountains and rivers block your way.
How simply the veils part when we stop insisting they be veils. How the jail cell dissolves when we make inquiry of the prisoner. How readily the path unfolds before our feet when we stop trying to go anywhere. And how soft your hand is in mine, Beloved, when I no longer beg to hold it.
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Sean that leaves nothing more to say bless you
thanks Sean . . . wordy bastard that I am, I’ll probably find something though . . .
Well fuck dude, thanks for nothing.
Anyway, that’s kind of where I am at. I had kids later in life, love them infinitely, have a great wife, but I can’t shake this blasé feeling about life. Nothing is real or has any meaning and I just can’t seem to get my arms around Truth and God and Peace and Joy… to a degree sufficient for sustenance.
Where is the beauty then? Where is the loving feeling of Home and God? Where is the Joy and Peace. How is it attained? Howfore does it come? I have been blessed with Awarenessses and “communications” and ample “proof” of God and Truth et. al., but have not shifted from this feeling of “Okay, I see it’s all nothing and an illusion (though I maintain some hold out that Peace and Joy can exist within me while I am here and that God permeates all so, it can’t all be “bad” right?) but where is the flip side? Where is the inevitable conclusion? Where is the underlying and simple Peace and Joy you know truly exists at the core of your Awareness?
When I finally became aware of and accepted that I was not self-created and that God did indeed truly exist in a manner I had not heretofore understood, I experienced about 10 days of true Joy. I mean, it took me a couple days to figure out what this subtle giddy feeling was, but when it didn’t subside and when I put my attention on it I became aware that I was feeling true Joy for the first time in my life.
But that passed and has yet to reappear…
Ultimately, you are left with, “I must be doing something wrong” and then you imagine what all those things might be…. guilt see? Then you think, well, I must still be holding too tight to the ego and my specialness etc…
So for me, it’s kinda like that, right now… Some days are pretty good in a “passable” sense, but most are mediocre. Most times I have the feeling I am not really feeling at all. Kind of wooden. It always seems as though there is much more to feel but it never rises to the surface. I see my kids and I love them, but always feel I could feel more love. It always feels as though something is missing.
I am happy to have progressed to this point. At least I know the ego is a fucking nut, but I still can’t figure out how the ego can have any autonomy. I mean, it is talked about like it actually thinks and is self-aware (pun intended) and makes nefarious plans and implements its hidden agenda as if it has some consciousness of its own outside of You, but I know this cannot be true, so what is the ego? Just the idea of being separate? Is it really as conniving as I think I am reading? I mean, the ego can’t even be real. The thought of separation had to be my idea, so how was the ego born with all these seeming attributes? Huh?
Now I’m rambling…
And then there is all this “I” stuff, “I” think this and “I” think that and ad infinitum and ad nauseum. It’s all about me and I and separation see? I think I am continuously looking at the insanity of the split mind. I know there is no real true “I” outside of God, but that knowledge is insufficient.
So, another way? Yes, I have long felt that. But transitioning to it seems to be the hill. I accept the old failed way is no solution, but the “new workable way” is much too subtle.
I am told God wants me to gently wake up from my dream. You know what I say? Fuck gently. Rattle my cage. If I feel like I (the ego) is dying and if it is uncomfortable and painful so what? Bring it! I’ll survive. Test me! Task me! Hit me with it for chrissakes! Challenge me, I like the struggle! I’ll make it! Ooops, what are we looking at here now? Ohh man…. What the fuck…
Thank you, Michael. Your description of the space you are in or perceiving or whatever is familiar to me. Anything I say here should be taken as one friend to another, or one student to another. I’m not trying to pontificate. I’m finding my way as well.
I think it is helpful to see that what ACIM calls the ego is not an object or entity but a process, one that can be considered a way of thinking or, better, a habit of thinking. It is a kind of conditioning in which we take thought – which David Bohm helpfully defined as including feelings, ideas, stories, memories, goals and all of that – not as a particular representation of reality, but as an accurate depiction of reality.
To be caught up in ego is simply to be caught up in believing that our thoughts and feelings are true. But in fact – I know that you know this – they are just what passes, with as much affect as clouds reflected on a lake’s surface, to bastardize the old Zen proverb.
More and more I am aware that the problem, so-called, is simply the fact that I would like Life to be other than it is. I judge everything: my feelings towards my wife and children, my efficacy as a teacher, the dog’s relucance to leave the trail, Bob Dylan’s decision to cover Frank Sinatra, the weather . . . everything. But what the hell do I know? A blizzard isn’t a problem, unless I want to make it one. It’s just weather being weather. This is true of literally everything: the ego leaps into it; spirit lets it be.
And then somewhere in that “let-it-be” being, we begin to sense the Truth not as an object or goal but just as presence or ground or whatever – that-which-holds-it-all – Christ how fucking useless words are at this juncture! – and turn more and more in that direction. Just seeing what is – giving attention, as I like to say, which is just words of course, but still. Whatever else happens does not impact life – the birthday present I didn’t get, what people do with Photoshop to the one confirmed Emily Dickinson photograph, my wife’s impatience and so on and so forth and so on . . .
It is my experience that because “ego” is a habit of thinking – a kind of conditioning to which we are deeply attached, not in a willful but almost evolutionary way – that even as we perceive the alternative, we still slip in and out of the old patterns. How could we not? Surely there are those whose awakening is sudden and perfect, but there are other experiences of it as well – slow and gentle, but not without its bumps.
I find myself saying an awful lot: “this? Really? This?”
And yet . . .
Thanks again, Michael . . . I gather the proverbial miles preclude a cup of coffee and talking but I’m with you, man. I’m with you.
Sean
What? Bob Dylan covered Frank Sinatra!?
I know you are not trying to pontificate. Your expression of thought is refreshingly loving, concise and genuine. I have great affinity for you already.
Forgive my rant, it was not much more than that, and though the issues I bring up are real and true to a degree, I know they are small and will pass easily in the light of unfolding Truth. So, more than anything I guess, thanks for your indulgence.
I like your description of the ego. It is just that, unless I grossly misunderstand, the ego seems be defined as this cunning third party that is you, yet is not. It has its own agenda (your death) and the apparent requisite consciousness to attempt implementation. It seems to have been born out of the idea of separation, but somehow somewhere along the line became its own “self”, as least that’s how I interpret the ACIM definition. I would love to believe that definition because it best excuses my worst behavior, but the truth is I am not aware of anything making decisions for me. I am responsible and “was there” for everything thing I have ever done, said or thought. Not that that should include guilt and shame, but simply the statement that I am in the driver’s seat and it has never nor can be otherwise. I mean, ego schmeego. It is my thought system to hold and mine to dispose of.
There is an awareness I get sometimes, it usually occurs when I am in a conversation and “rolling” with a flow of expanding Awareness. As I communicate on a certain subject I get “higher” and my understanding broadens and the more I go the more I know. A compelling flow develops and it carries you. If I get on that train, I ultimately arrive in this really weird place. It is a state of Awareness. The Awareness is, I sit in incredulity at the obvious and unavoidable Truth that everything and everyone is my personal creation. I am the only thing that that truly exists and even all people exist only to populate and serve in my self-created universe. Like I said, it’s a really weird place. The thing is, while in this Awareness, nothing else is real but me and my mind and my universe.
While in this state, I marvel at the fact that the entire universe, as I know it, is completely my personal creation, including everyone in it. This is not some dream or illusion mind you, this is an actual Awareness with the requisite feeling of Truth. This is something you KNOW with perfect clarity and certainty. It seems incomprehensible, but there it is all laid out before me. Even as I look at it all, I rationalize this must be true for everyone, but while in this state of Awareness, that really doesn’t seem true. It seems only that all reality is my creation and I wonder at how can this be true.
There have been times when I kind of existed in the borderlands of this state. During those times I observed that every thought I have manifests with no regard to size or scope. A song I think of plays. A person I think of appears. I think of a certain type of unusual car and there it goes down the road. Sometimes, I know everything someone is going to do right before they do it. (He’s going to spit, he spits. Now he’s going to ask me a favor, he asks it and so on…) I think of something happening on a world scale in another country, a day or two later I hear it happens on the news. In a moment of considering the viability of ridding the world of dangerous people, I think of Kim Jong-il having a stroke, I hear ten days later he had one, 10 days prior. The world seems to fluidly and easily mold itself to suit my ever changing thoughts and considerations, and I struggle to understand how this can possibly be especially if it is true for everyone, which it must be, right?
Now, the odd thing is, and the thing most worthy of note, there is a part of me (all of us) that is an observer of all phenomenon i.e., on some scale I am a third-party witness to everything I be and do. I am sure you are aware of this phenomenon, that there is always an “I” there, a part of you that simply and always observes.
I am Aware of the “Truth” of this State of Awareness and I see its truth played out in the mirror of life, yet I am also aware there is something else that is unseen. There is some higher Truth that remains hidden. I cannot be the only “real” person in existence with all creation just a reflection/mirror of my personal thought processes, yet in this state there exists nothing to the contrary, but somehow there is an “I” that is an observer. This tells me there does exist something more…
Regardless of the “Higher I”, I never could understand this phenomenon where I was the Creator of Everything, or how it could be as true as it seemed until I read ACIM, then I understood the “reality” that we all create (make). Christ stated we project our thoughts and “people” our universe, but the people are not whole people, they are the fragments we perceive. So I was gifted for some reason with first hand observation of the Personal Universe phenomenon, but it is all really weird and answers surprisingly little, other than how complete the illusion of individuality and this “reality” is.
Although this must be true for everyone, there isn’t really an everyone is there? There is only One Son. There is only One Mind. There is only One God and there is no separation between God the Father and God the Son. I suspect there Is truth in that “I” am the only One, but the observer “I” referred to is the same “I” we all share and has it’s root and home in God, indeed is God. The “I” or person I see as Mike Murphy who has this reality he creates, is an illusion. I know this. The people in it are illusions too, I know that too. What I am looking at, for lack of a better description, is Egoland. I am looking at the domain of the personal self and the personal mind held so dear. I am looking at how it plays itself out and seems to manifest an “outward reality” we think is real. We think cause and effect are separated and that effects can cause things. We think we can be effect. None if it is true.
I am daily looking at a screen that plays out my thoughts as if they were disconnected from me and had their own life and source, then I realize this is all occurring in my mind and I am, by every definition, insane. I cannot escape my own hallucination and everything I think I can do to try to escape is itself part of the hallucination.
At first I thought it was kind of novel to have this Awareness, now I see the profound completeness of isolation, the profound insanity of the whole endeavor, the seeming perfection of the whole mechanism, but have yet to realize the corresponding “enlightenment”, the flipside of it all. That is what I was referring to earlier. I understand that holding to even one illusion obviates all of Truth, but I still hold out for… You know, you want it all and you want it HERE. But you can’t have it all here and that is what you refuse to accept. You want the Kingdom of Heaven and you want it here and you cannot see why ne’er the twain shall meet. The illusion is complete.
Well, the thing is, what you finally and ultimately must realize and accept, is that God is not “out there.” He is not in space somewhere. He is not in the past and He is not in the future. He is right here right now. He is You and You are He, right now and always in the ever present moment. But I can’t see or know this because I am heavily involved in some weird consciousness where I consider myself a whole, complete individual self. I am personal only to me. The gross error and untruth of this almost completely banishes not only God, but nearly all memory of God and my True Home, yet here I persist. With God, but completely oblivious to Him.
The Truth is, as much as I rationalize and complain and try in a way I think is genuine to understand What I Really Am and What God Really Is, I do all this from a viewpoint of a personal self. I maintain my selfness while trying to understand why I can’t feel or understand God and my True Home. I am duality.
When I look at things this way, I have to admit the personal self has appeal. I think one factor is, this personal self consciousness is all I know. It feels like to move from it is to move into the unknown, into oblivion even, which for the personal self is precisely true. It really feels like you will die, and I know this is why God and the Holy Spirit are gentle in spite of my pleas to load me up.
The other factor is, personal selfness has appeal. The feeling that I am ME and I can DO and BE whatever I want seems to be fun stuff. I love to ski. I love bombing down the hill borderline out of control. I love to fish. I love a dead accurate rifle. I love the beginnings of a new relationship with a woman. I love the first time you make love. (Don’t do that anymore.) I like driving alone at night listening to Neil Diamond sing Holly Holy (Hot August Night version). Hell, I love that song anywhere. I enjoy watching Tombstone, and Braveheart and Pulp Fiction and Paint Your Wagon anytime I find‘em. I really like The MacAllan 18 year old Scotch. I love this stuff. There is a lot of places I want to go and experience. I want to come back and learn to surf next time and give Everest my best effort. I’d like to have a stupid amount of money just to see if I could actually do any real good with it. I want to write something worthwhile…
I wonder if these things exist in Heaven. And yet I know none of these things are important. I know they are the baubles of the personal self. The glamour to keep you entrained. I know that if I really knew what I was trading I would laugh at how preposterous the proposition was. I suspect I have committed something monstrous in making and maintaining a personal self. I know this place is horrendously fucked up, but I keep thinking it can be a good and enjoyable place. I keep thinking I can do better.
(And then there’s all these “I”s.)
Isn’t it tremendously satisfying to truly help another on this path? Is that even necessary or important? If not, why write ACIM?
I don’t know so many things and I have to admit I am weary beyond words of not truly Knowing anything anymore. I can remember what it feels like to exist in a state of calm certainty, and I miss that. I am tired of waking up to the same world, of perceiving everything the same way. I feel locked in and trapped in some weird persistent hallucination. I used to think that us humans were on the cutting edge of Creation. I used to think that our unique selves, engaged in our unique thoughts and responses were contributing to Creation as a whole in a way that truly expanded all Creation. I thought that was God’s divine plan, to create us as Him and send us forth to create where each individual self contributes to Creation in his/her own unique way.
Now I laugh at the folly of thinking we could actually add something to God from this awareness. That we could have a truly unique thought or action that truly benefits Creation. I marvel at the ingeniousness of the personal self, and its desperation. I marvel at my willingness to embrace its bullshit and help make the bullshit sound even better.
And all along there is the Observer. There is some portion of me that watches me do and think all these things. Somewhere in back of all is an “I” that I am aware of that is always there and is always Aware. This “I” never judges. It simply observes. It is simply There and Aware. Who is that I?
In the end, I know what the problem is and what the solution is. In spite of all, I am just not wholly convinced the personal self is not the way to go. It holds some value to me. I have not yet fully realized and accepted its folly and emptiness. I do things I know I should not do and don’t do things I know I should.
But I am getting there. I am farther than I have ever been. The world weariness grows within and except for the fun stuff, I can’t really think of anything worth experiencing anymore, at least nothing that I have not already experienced in every conceivable way over a million lives already lived.
I think I am close, but I think that only means I am closer than I have been since I embraced this weird consciousness, because it also seems like I have a long way to go, to find God RIGHT HERE.
Please excuse to poor grammar, syntax and typos. I didn’t proof anything.
Yeah, Dylan covering Sinatra:
http://youtu.be/tt1BBubMHzM
and it’s pretty good, though my judgment in this sense is often questioned. Even when Dylan’s off, he’s pretty on.
Thank you for sharing so much . . . it all seems clear and sensible and resonant and helpful . . . The pesky “I’s,” yes, always a problem in terms of language, of speaking/writing – they naturally reinforce separation (at many levels, not just the so-called metaphysical ones) but we have to say something, or so I tell myself . . .
I am not really arguing with you – maybe I am only repeating you – or adding a gloss on your already lovely clarity – but it seems to me that – magic and metaphysics aside – wordiness about awareness aside – everything, including guilt and war and famine and experience and all that – the whole of egoland – is already contained in what is, no? In light of which the rest of it – what we do, don’t do, want, don’t want, et cetera – really loses its sheen. . .
Maybe we are saying the same thing.
It makes no sense spatially or temporally even but but in the sense of, is there anything that is not? it’s all just the flux and it all happens in awareness, where awareness has both subjective and objective qualities (confusing of the two being most of what separation is) . . .
But I am saying more than I mean to, being mostly happy to read your long & graceful comment.
Thanks, Mike, for sharing. I appreciate it.
Sean
I like Dylan too. Just before reading your post I was wondering what Dylan was up too and hoping it was something worthwhile and satisfactory…
Yes, if I understand you correctly, I consider you are correct, the whole of egoland is contained within “what is” (or rather, “what is not” if you prefer/allow “what is” to be defined as Truth.) Everything personal is there, but it seems some worthy thoughts transcend that consciousness, eventually us too
I think you summed it up perfectly. “It all happens (with)in Awareness.” That’s all there really is, isn’t there? Nothing exits outside Awareness. It/I/we/all exists within Awareness and the mind of God. That is one of the more interesting aspects and realizations of all this, that the only thing that Truly Exists is Awareness.
I know I sounded kind of disgruntled and I really should apologize for that. It seems I used your site as a portal to vent. Your site and your intentions for the site are better than that. I prefer to be insouciant, but for some reason I ranted a bit here. I’m in that hinterland where personal existence/awareness has lost much its appeal, but am sufficiently entrenched to mitigate higher Awareness. Perhaps I thought there would be some understanding here. I don’t know. The ego’s kind of a squirmy sneaky little thing.= and I am to quick to agree with it at times. Anyway, no big. It’s all part of the path and plan that I do truly enjoy.
Thank you for your site, wisdom, poise and grace. In the Earth context (and perhaps much greater?) you are a rare and beautiful Being. I am enhanced by meeting you. I think that’s pretty much all one can ask from either end, you know?
I hope we get to talk some more sometime…
BTW, what’s your middle, name? I’m hoping there’s a fine Irish name to go between the Sean and Reagan. Mine is Patrick. My grandparents were McDonald and Bennett, so a good bit of Scottish mixed in, (I find a family name can be interesting, but with no personal significance), but “Sean Regan,” wow, that’s just as Irish as Michael Patrick Murphy, if not more so.
Be Well Bro…
I liked the rant . . . no worries at all . . . My middle name is Patrick too . . . The Irish thing is pretty big with my family, though I have drifted away from it over the years. Still it makes me happy . . . yes, it would be nice to talk some more sometime . . . maybe it will happen . . . thank you for the kind words and the insights . . . Love, Sean