Nothing Other

 

 

For a number of years there was the desire here to ‘wake up’. What the heck that meant was not understood. Life as it seemed to be was just somehow sensed as not the whole story. It was a vague, non-specific feeling, not present a lot, but when it was it was clear that something called ‘waking up’ might be what would end this nebulously uncomfortable state of affairs. At some point I began wanting it with every fiber of my being.

That normal, everyday living was a kind of dreamstate had been touched. How that was recognized is unanswerable. It just was. And as for waking up, there was no definition for it available to me. There were only vague ideas of love, bliss, harmony. There had been no contact with any Eastern religions or ways of thinking about spirituality at that point. Buddhism, Zen, advaita, no self, non-dual… those were simply words. Whatever they meant was completely out of reach. I was on my own.

Yet I did have friends with whom there were many discussions of awakening. We talked a lot about what it might be like, but could see no real means of making it happen. In fact, we often mistook the side effects of realizing Reality as the road that would take us there, imagining that being more loving, peaceful, mind-quiet would somehow trigger what we so deeply wanted. And I felt such a failure, because I could not seem to create more lovingness or peace. A quieter mind seemed an oxymoron. Not possible.

Now it is seen that these qualities, and many others, arrive, if they do, because of awakening, rather than as stimulators of it, and flower as it goes deeper. Now it is known that there is no road to realization, only realization itself. And what is that, you ask? It is the clear, solid, unambiguous seeing, via direct intuitive experiencing, of what we naturally are. It is the unassailable insight that there is not a ‘me’, not an ego ‘I’; that instead what is present every moment is endless, complete, spacious emptiness; the no-thing that is the source of all.

It is what I am, and we are no different, you and I. Not in the slightest.

Home

 

 

I have been at sea, having set sail four months ago with nothing but blazing intent to lead me. Awake to the truth that there was no genuine person associated with this body, I was on fire to discover what was here instead. I was ready.

The ocean upon which I found myself was of waves tremendously, hugely powerful, close to unendurable; troughs lower, darker than could ever have been imagined. I was small, large, vulnerable, strong; often frightened, crying with doubt and uncertainty; many times exultant, calling the name of the One with unrelenting joy.

Never could this have been foreseen, for never had I dared to cross into the darkest of this unknown territory with a shattered open mind and pounding loving heart. Before, fear of what would be embraced and what would be released kept the border safely and securely many miles away. Before, I truly did not want to know. Now, there was nothing else.

I found much I mistook for truth, and much that was so real it shined of its own accord, with the unmistakable living light of Reality. Constantly asked was the prime guiding question, “Is it true?”. And many times thought was “Oh, this is what I am.” And then, “No, this is what I am”, each time moving to the next truth, and the next.

With them was consistent understanding that they were only partial truths, relative; necessary, and not enough. Also understood was that the flaming desire would keep pushing me on, to be eventually deposited on the shore of… what? I did not know. The only thing known was that I would recognize it, once there.

After a final huge and miserable mistaking of ego as real when it rose up stronger and more alluring than ever, everything fell away. Up surged the next guiding question. Ignoring the waves, the troughs, the thoughts, the feelings, I asked every day, all day, “Who am I? What am I?” I was obsessed, yet again, knowing that the one taking this journey would not be the one to arrive.

And so it was. The horizon abruptly changed; land came into view. Then someone, something, left the water behind forever and stood on the sand, surrounded by, filled up with, unending eternal Reality. Full emptiness, so near, so dear, welcomed Itself home, as was always known It would. And now it is seen: I am That, as are we all, for there is nothing other.

Fundamentally Not Me

 

So… who is it that wakes up? Since there is no self, no I or me, and something is obviously still conscious and aware, what is it?What is awake?

First, a description. Two experiences of the personal self as non-existent happen here. The first and most powerful is what occurs  in the explosive awakenings that take place: There is a shockingly empty space, profoundly lacking in anything at all, where the ‘I’ had previously been ‘experienced’, where it was customarily sensed as being ‘located’. The emptiness of this is so obvious that, when it’s seen, it is ludicrous to imagine that anything ever was there. The formerly held belief in a separate ‘me’ becomes ridiculous, and a lot of belly laughing ensues.

The second way no self is experienced is the more sustained of the two. It is a quiet blankness where self used to be, and it is this that is the usual experience. Volcanic awakenings have their moment in the sun, to be sure, and then they fade, leaving a residue of deeper awareness, disappeared belief, and more tangible knowing. This is where the meat of the matter resides, everyday existence as something entirely new and gloriously unburdened of a demanding, insecure, lonely little me.

Without a personal identity, consciousness Itself is what lives, perceives, speaks, thinks, feels, sits, sleeps. And that is the way it always was, even before the falseness of ‘I’ was recognized. The I was never real to begin with, yet all along living, awareing, speaking, thinking, feeling, sitting, sleeping consistently took place. Everything simply happens, with no self needed to ‘do’ anything, then or now.

It was and is only consciousness here, not a human self. Radical stuff, this. Also entirely ordinary and natural. It’s what is; what isn’t is what used to be believed: a personal self, considered by ‘me’ to be Queen of the Show. However, once the lights came up it was seen that me wasn’t even there, much less in charge. Such sweet relief that it isn’t the one waking up!

And here’s the very short little video that will add the punchline.

Missed, Until It’s Not

 

 

Recently written to a friend:

“It is seen so clearly that One is everywhere, all the time! Last week there was a huge awakening experience of the Absolute as the entirety of what is ‘here’. And so much belly laughing and tears at the obviousness of IT hiding in plain sight! Oh such joy!!! How could it not have been seen? How can anyone miss this? It’s so everywhere! And even now, with that time of direct experiencing faded, there is joy and knowing of the reality of IT here, everywhere, all the time. Such comfort and love…”

Oh indeed! How on earth is this missed? Who can say, other than when it’s time for it to be seen, it will. More and more of ‘us’ now coming into this. The seeing and knowing that IT, the Absolute, is present and accounted for, all the time, all the where.

It’s Reality, coming soon to a location near ‘you’. Or maybe already showing. Take a peek.

From Fire to Flight

 

 

The fire is out.

There’s been a lot of action here lately. I have felt like a walking conflagration. You know what this means: trial by fire, the scorching out of the untrue, undesired, untenable. For now, flames are down and the phoenix is rising. Yet again.

How things happen here are not a lot different than how they happen to most, I suspect. Misery begetting more of itself, or confusion or anger or whatever it happens to be. And then… enough. We are filled to the edges of tolerance with what we can no longer abide. The fire begins, it eats all the ready material, then banks down into coalhood. We resume regular living: changed, charged, perhaps even…. awake.

Awakening is now no longer questioned. Something has shifted, and vacillations have ended. In truth, these were only thoughts swinging from one end of the spectrum to the other. Awake? Asleep? Light, no light? It was nuts. And it’s over.

There is no ‘I’ and it’s irrefutable. Realization of what Is, equally so, and growing. The pendulum has ceased it’s huge oppositional movement and there’s no going back. There may be more fires, of course. No matter. None will ever again be able to knock out the knowing that I am, as are you, the Infinite: awake and aware here in this body/mind. The fire did its job.This is the future, and it is here and now. There is nothing other: no different moment exists, nothing else possible to be. This is It.

Next up, deepening. Awakening is wings and the territory awaits my flight.

                             ***************

Here’s a short video I made to go along with this post.

 

In the Belly of Being

 

A tiger came for me.

A deal attempted; consenting to freedom but negotiating to keep a few links of the chains that bound.

Agreeing to be what I am, and secretly stashing a little of what I am not in the back of the suitcase.

Doesn’t work that way, and this is known, known, known.

Meanwhile, that slavering, slobbering, stinking beast is growling and drooling all over. It doesn’t care about wounds, dismemberment, death. It has what’s left of the ridiculously non-existent me in its jaws, and the worst has begun. Consummation.

It doesn’t see destruction, only result: its own fuller belly.

It shakes its head once, twice, working up to… what? An orgy of pulling and ripping? Flying away with a broken bloody body in its jaws, to devour what remains of the nothing me at its leisure? This is utter impersonal ruthlessness with a laser beam focus. Its owness prime; all else but in service to that.

There is sickness unto death of the pretense of a point of view, gluey thoughts, an imagined duo.

Reality is toying here; It conceals and pretends to look. Hides, then simulates seeking. Foundness is happening, a violent end to what never was.

So make way, make way. Time to go.

Ripped flesh, empty shell, final shreds of self. Time to go.

Tiger is eating my name.

Being Neo

 

 

 

In the movie ‘The Matrix’ everyone thinking themselves to be a human with a body in a real world is shown to be delusional, to say the least. All of them have bodies, yes, but they are hairless and fetal-curled, located in life-support pods attended by robots that make sure they are healthy and hooked to their individual energy transmitting cords. They are mammalian energy-producing units; their perceived ‘world’ a mind-inserted computer program, a virtual reality that runs 24/7 as their bodies coma. Within this false world they know not what they do, they only think they know.

Enter Neo, who is about to eject out of that imposed dream. When we meet him he’s just like all the rest, believing without a single doubt that his body and the world sensed around it are as real as it gets. He thinks he is a man of knowledge. He is not in the knowing of anything even remotely real. 

Enter next Morpheus and his gang, and the reality rubber really meets the road when they help Neo actually leave the ‘world’ to enter The World. After the red pill, he wakes up in his actual physical body, one of genuine flesh. Shortly thereafter he sees for himself the power plant pod-farm wherein his body had been stored, its perceptions locked into the virtual lie.

In the end, Neo experiences the code that underpins and permeates the program’s projected reality; it happens while he is a part of the program, faux body in faux world. He is then no longer capable of believing a single so-called fact of that false world other than the obvious one, which is that it is fake. He has seen the truth, and it murders every belief he has.

Herein lies the point: No one could have told Neo this, that his world was an illusory sham. No way could he simply have heard and then believe, much less know, that his entire life was a lie. He needed direct experience. And the having of it killed off his ability to buy into the lie ever again. He realized what it was. Return not possible, not even thinkable. How to paste together shattered thought, dead insanity, the noneness of dreaming? Can’t be done.

Another name for Neo’s journey is ‘Doing the Math’. This means not taking anyone’s word about truth. It doesn’t matter what others know; soaking it up won’t do you any good. Second hand knowing equals not knowing. It’s belief, and it’s worthless as far as truth is concerned.

Look. See. Add it up for yourself. Is your world what you think it is? Are you? Is anything?

Be Neo. Get out. Live in truth. Everything will look the same, only you will be different. Different how? Find out for yourself. Don’t take my word for it.

Ask the single question, and ask it about everything you think you know:

“Is it true?”

Be Neo. Be new. Be truth.

Meltdown, the Recipe

 

 

Reality

traded places with the burning fire of be it get it find it force it.

Steam and smoke filled my living room.

Cooking happened, smelling human.

Big inflated me fizzled to flat wet latex

and this went on for weeks. Twice.

Do-it-yourself directions:

Puff and huff and blow yourself up

until space is filled with redundant blind and bloated I.

You’ll see yourself,

throne claimed, crown crowning.

The royal you,

two letters forehead-carved with Descartes’ knife

M

E

It’s hopeless and you know it. You’ve always known.

Give up.

Be sick of yourself.

Simply stop, remove face, be unfilled.

Hold everything that’s thought, felt, purportedly known

in one hand.

Tattoo the other: ‘What’s true?’

Sit with this hand and on the other hand.

Walk with it,

shit piss eat with it.

Sleep dream writhe with it.

Shower with it, shop, run, drive with it.

Make love to this question like a demon from hell,

until the letters in the black ball float up

‘I know a few true things and me isn’t one of them.’

To finish,

celebrate your death

and pound in as necessary:

Life is ocean,

and I am water.

She’s Not There

 

Aloha, my friends..

I remember Lisa, that there seemed to be that she. Lisa was the name given to the body who types this. That body/mind was apparently born, had mother, father, brothers. There were homes, schools, husbands, children, thoughts, feelings. What else? Some friends, dogs, cats, a couple of gardens, a bunch of books and some decorative items. OK. That about covers it.

I remember Lisa, it is not possible to forget because all of that is still intact. It’s just that now it’s obvious she was never real; joyfully laughable that it had ever been thought she was. It was imagined there could be an ‘I’, a ‘me’ that owned a body, a life, things, thoughts, feelings. In the end, she owned nothing, for she never existed.

I remember Lisa. And now I am beginning to forget, but only the attachment, for that’s where the mistake was made. She thought she was real. She thought she suffered. She thought she caused the suffering of others. None of that happened by her. All of it merely thoughts, taken to be something of substance. It wasn’t. It all came out of the nothingness, the emptiness that is the source of everything. All of it here and there and everywhere simply what is, which is now called this. So funny.

I remember, maybe always will, Lisa… a no thing, a no body; no mind, no feelings; a name for nothing at all. Handy, albeit suffering’s source, while it lasted. Lovingly gone forever; never really here in the first place.

She will not be missed. She will simply not be missed. Does the sky miss a cloud that dissolves? Do butterflies miss caterpillars? Does the ocean miss a wave that rises, peaks, falls? 

Can that be missed which appears from nothing, only to then disappear back into it? 

I can only continue to be what I am. Everything… nothing… space, fullness, emptiness, completeness. Here, now, as a body/mind with a dreamname, a dreamlife. And if the thought Lisa returns, perhaps it will stay for a while, perhaps not. No matter either way, despite thoughts and feelings that may arise around it. 

All of It is… All That Is. And the love of It is It. She never knew this, and now she’s gone and never will. She never could.

She never.

Much love.

Hold Pen, Write Words

  

Aloha my friends,

Having tended to see most things fairly black and white throughout my life, when non-abiding awakenings began I automatically thought in terms of right and wrong: I had done good in waking up, bad in falling back asleep. I imagined that something other than a natural, inherently positive process could occur. Not so.

In these seeming polarities of awake/ losing most of wakefulness, grey areas in the form of large or small amounts of conditioned belief appear. And where the two meet I’m finding  great presence and power through looking deeply at the beliefs. Through this I’ve found that right/wrong applied to awakening is simply irrelevant. Oxymoronic, actually.

How does this grey stuff show up as everyday life in one neither here nor there, a.k.a Lisa?

Thoughts continue to emerge, even with no me around to greet them. That’s natural, even when a false I is assumed. Most simply pass through. But some stick, pulling back a temporary re-identification with the idea of a self. These are  the grey areas,  where my most cherished and/or hidden illusions about Life are entrenched. I call grey the thoughts to which I cling, with greater or lessor awareness that clinging is happening. It’s identification; I think the thoughts are what I am. When believed, whoosh! back to the past I fly, leisurely or like a bullet, the awake state having leaked right on out.

What re-emerges is the world as it had always seemed to be, with a temporary sense of a me residing therein.  Yet consistently deeper somethings abide, continue. So, not bad, just the way is. How to proceed became the question; ‘Look at the core beliefs’ appeared as the answer.

To that end a few weeks ago I started a journal. It’s obvious to me now that the immediate thoughts can be covers for the ‘unconscious’, deeper ones. What is casually passing through can be a less loaded, disguised version of  a belief of which I am unaware. It is masked by the more innocuous surface thought. When something pops up that hurts in any way, it’s a signal. Attention is paid.

Mild emotions/softer thoughts can be resolved on the spot (meaning the idea and its reaction are both quickly seen, and both simply fade). Sometimes though, a column of emotion rises straight up through my torso, or a sudden energy fills my center, and I am in distress and discomfort.  

Here then, journal is opened, pen becomes poised. Writing begins. Closing of the journal is the end of the issue. Until the next time, or the next after that. Anywhere from one to many viewings of a surface thought leading to the depths could be what it takes. The inevitable result? Another core belief blown to bits.

Here’s an example, directly from my journal. It’s personal, intimate. Makes the point. I am not after how I went wrong here, or looking for ways to fix anything. The point is to dispassionately get to the root of experience and simply ask, ‘Is it true?’.

Purple words are what jumped out as my hidden core beliefs.

Just saw a stranded chick in the yard – fear for it emerged. Saw that it was similar to feelings re: lost, hurt, abused dogs, animals, etc. 

Thoughts/beliefs:

1. They need help, they are innocent victims

2. Victims of ……  life. (Oh)

3. Life is cruel, uncaring

4. I am cruel & uncaring and project 

5. I believe I am uncaring because parents were considered uncaring and I absorbed/modeled that and then labeled myself as that around certain situations. Parents = me.

6. Anthropomorphized life to be like me

7. Chicks = victims = me = victim

8. I am a victim of parents (each incident now, e.g., chicks/dogs = me as a victim and so it’s scary and painful.

This in no way addressed anything about a stranded chick, nor did it ‘fix’ things that happened years ago. It did explain to me why shakiness and fear and a destabilizing vulnerability came about one particular morning. It also showed that there is a carryover from childhood that appears in all kinds of ways. And that deeper, definitely more core stuff can be addressed via further inquiry: Is it a fact that life is uncaring? Am I a victim still? Is it true? Lots of room for discovery.

Once again, thank you for your attention. The road less traveled is now full of many companions and my gratitude grows daily.

Love,

Lisa