Month: August 2019

For much of my adult life, I have lived in a dream world. I am becoming aware how much of that illusory world has been shaped by cultural consensus. So much of it has also been shaped by my willing fabrication of my notion of myself. From one perspective, I have thrived in that dream world so affected by lies. But it is a dream world. As an older person, I am realizing it is time to wake up. And it is about time.

It is time for me to let go of the old goals and outcomes that have seemed so important to my culture and myself. Letting go of my old ways does not just happen easily or over night. It is a slow process of becoming aware. Intention, as critical as it is, does not bring about instant awareness, but it does light up the path.

I am gradually learning to live a new kind of life that is open to ambiguity and uncertainty. My attraction and attachment to outcomes and to a way of living is slowly fading away as though it was a dream I once lived. If there is anything I might call success, it is becoming more aware. Gradually, the past lies can disappear.

There is a new kind of rawness that allows the melting away of the old illusions. I am becoming more familiar with rubbing up against a world that is uncertain and unpredictable. I am developing an awareness that comes from raw experience and not something that comes from cultural convention or concepts.

Surrendering to this awareness is like the experience I have of falling asleep. I find myself falling into a world without preconceived notions and shapes that constantly seem to change. I surrender notions of how things should be, aware that those illusions diminish my awareness. I neither resist what shows up or get attached to what is desirable.

I am weary of living in a culture preoccupied with lies and fabricated illusions and expectations. I want to free myself from the lies we share about our world and about ourselves. I am intentionally giving up an impersonation of myself, and opening myself to a free adventure of becoming.

I want to make each day something other than a replication of yesterday’s lies. It is not too late.

As I light the candle and incense, preparing to sit on my pillow, I am very aware of my whole body. My whole body seems intensely present. I am standing there, present in a very physical way. I feel that I am present from my forehead to my toes. I feel present from the surface of my skin through my muscles and organs.

In this moment, I am aware how my body is here, present in this small space, standing above my pillow. I feel the outline of my skin, the weight of my torso, the tingling in my head.

This has been a new experience for me for perhaps three years now. Aware of my body presence was not only frowned upon while I was being taught. It was somehow simply wrong. Except for eating, I was mostly taught to avoid this intense awareness and not focus in a way that might encourage bodily delight.

Today I stand here above my pillow and before my shrine and my body vibrates, radiates, proclaims awareness and delight. I enjoy the feeling of being physically present, I welcome the tactile awareness that oozes through my bodily presence. If I had the eyes to see, I would appear to glow.

This is no simple delight in a sensory experience. It is the foundation, the opening for the growing experience of concentration. When my mind is focused on my bodily presence, it relaxes.. I feel the joy of a mind at ease.

I enter into a seclusion that otherwise evades me when I am not so intimately aware of where the parts and extent of my body reside. When my body is known as being present, the rest of my world fades.

Soon, I focus my attention on my breath, still aware that it is my body that is breathing. My awareness of my body presence has made the arrangements. My mind can now settle down and focus on my breath. Then my mind will enter into the between, into that place where there is no past or future, no space or time.

All this happens because my body has learned to open the welcoming portals. When my body experiences this kind of being present, my mind can more easily enter a place where there is no physicality at all.

My body has finally learned to be present in a most intimate fashion, and so my mind can be free to do what it does so well when it is unimpeded. My mind can be present as well.

I am constantly between what was and what is about to be. My world, and I, are in constant change. I am beginning to wonder if there is anything in the between. Or maybe it is everything. So it sometimes seems.

I am constantly reminded of what has been. I spent a few days at my cabin, and I was surrounded by reminders of my past experiences, especially all those aspects of my cabin I have built. I am often reminded of past experiences, all of which can lure me into thinking of what has been. I have friends who populate conversation with remembrances of what they have done, of what happened to them. They quickly move from now to then, a point in the past.

For me the future often has a similar distracting attraction. Promises of things to come, threats of how things may not turn out to my liking routinely populate my thinking mind. The past invites me to think of past joys and regrets, the future tells me of a panorama of hopes and fears.

Still, all I really have exists between the past and future. Apart from memories, I can really know little of what has been. I cannot yet know what has yet to be. I am between, and that is all my mind can truly gasp and absorb. That same mind yearns so much to dwell on memories of the past and to anticipate what is about to become.

If, out of habit, I allow my mind to be drawn to the past or future, I am likely to miss out on what is happening right now. I am living between, and so is the world. Nothing exists any longer as it once was, and nothing has yet become what it is about to be. No activity or fabrication of my mind can change that. I can only know what is between.

I am beginning to think that what is between, between past and future, is emptiness. I think that time and space between past and future is emptiness. There is no true now. Everything is between, in a state of becoming. To enter into now is to enter into emptiness. Now is the realm of infinite possibility.

Focusing on now can be a small and subtle experience of emptiness. Between past and future there is only a realm of becoming. When I experience what it feels like to be between, I experience a small door of openness to what is yet to be and a small trace of what has been. That is as close as I typically get to experiencing becoming.

My between is not so much past or present or future. It is the emptiness of becoming.

Every day, I begin with the intention of engaging in deep concentration, of being aware. I know that this will be more than something about to happen in my mind. My body will be intimately involved in my being aware. While this will be an experience of my being conscious, it will be an experience that feels deeply rooted and braided in my body.

Even my most removed experiences of awareness feel intimately connected with my body. Awareness begins with my body as I feel the sensation of movement or of stillness. My experience of awareness is something like a step removed from that sensation. I am aware of what it is like that I am sensing the position or movement of my body. While it might seem that I am aware “in my head,” I am very aware that this is rooted in what is happening in my body.

So much seems held in the confines of my body. Memories seem intimately connected with the minute structures of neurons in my brain. If that physicality is impaired, the memory is impaired. Yet the memory is an awareness that feels distinct from the body that it inhabits.

I experience the world through my senses, but the awareness of sensation seems removed from the very senses on which it is based. I wonder about the way in which the non-physical is braided with the physical.

My body holds that spark of life that first appeared in gradual steps millions of years ago. And that spark seems somehow connected to the awareness of which I am conscious. Did my consciousness evolve with that spark of life and where will it go when my body can no longer support its presence?

Some day, the physical substance of my own body will be recycled, just as it now consists of material recycled from previous life forms. What of the consciousness that seems to inhabit that body? How will the braiding unfold. Perhaps my consciousness is simply a fragment of a larger consciousness that has received some kind of individual identity by being braided with my physical body. My own body is borrowing a fragment of something much more vast, perhaps infinite.

Without the confines of my body, without the confines of time and space, I wonder what form my consciousness will take. Some days, I touch the outer limits of what that might be like. Some days, my awareness momentarily steps away from my body and lightly touches that vast arena of no time and no space. Some days I allow my body to totally relax and take a break while I dabble in a place where there is no place.

I am happy with my body, and I have learned so much through it. I am also very aware that it is impermanent and will some day take on different form. The braiding of my consciousness with my body will come to a conclusion. That will be a day of great change. I may perhaps become aware of what continues.

I don’t think there are more frequent words put before a question mark than these: Do you believe in God? Perhaps it is only my own sensitivity to the issue that makes me think this. The question, however, seems to be one that I have heard more than any other. And it is a waste of words.

It is, of course, a trick question. It is a question that must first be directed to the person asking it before I can give an answer. The substance, the core meaning of the question is: Do you believe in MY God? or anyone else’s. The notion of “God” is really present first in the mind of the person asking the question. That is where the concept originates and allows one to ask the question.

An appropriate response might well be, “Describe your God, and I will be better able to answer your question.”

Language, after all, is that way. Language offers a way of communicating concepts. Those concepts are fundamentally subjective and in individual minds. They are based on the experience of the individual using them. Words, like “God”, allow us to come to come common, shared ground of understanding, but never to the exact same place.

Fortunately, we have developed the ability to communicate with one another because there is some overlapping of experience, and words can communicate some of the commonness we share in our individual minds. But the meaning of that commonness is never exactly the same between two minds, between two experiences of awareness.

Few words fail so miserably to communicate a common experience as the word “God”. The question, “Do you believe…….” is impossible to ask because we do not share a common notion or concept. I think very few, if any persons have directly experienced God. Hardly anyone can use that word to describe what they have experienced. They are in no position to describe an entity they have never experienced.

Until I reach a state of total absorption, all my experience is only peripheral. It is only the peripheral experience that I, or anyone else, can truly describe. If I use that ambiguous, subjective word “God” I am at best referring to a peripheral experience. The word, and hence the question, is at best a metaphor or perhaps a simile. The response can be nothing better.

Even the atheists who use the word “God” to refer to a void, an emptiness, an absence are on totally subjective and shaky ground. They have, perhaps, had no direct personal experience of the void, but that may be as much as they can say. For them, only a peripheral experience describes the void around which they ambulate and attempt to describe. As it is for anyone, peripheral experience is all the atheist can use to describe the conjectured entity or non-entity.

If someone ventures to ask me the ‘believe in God” question, as I am sure they will some day, I have at least two options. I can ask them to define God, based on their own experience and understanding of the word. I am confident that I can reply “no” to their understanding. It is impossible that my notion of “God” could be the same as theirs.

If they give me the chance to define my notion of God, then my answer relies on my own subjective experience, not theirs, and they will not understand my answer. I would never be able to answer their question affirmatively.

In either case, I am not aware that my answer can be at all meaningful to anyone asking the question. Perhaps, it is best to say that the question is unanswerable, it is irrelevant. It is a waste of words.