Alan Watts again

These quotations come from Nature, Man and Woman, (Vintage Books, New York, 1991). But, first, here is the Dedication:

To the beloved company of the stars , the moon, and the sun;
to ocean, air, and the silence of space;
to jungle, glacier, and desert,
soft earth, clear water and fire on the hearth.
To a certain waterfall in a high forest;
to night rain upon the roof and the wide leaves,
grass in the wind, tumult of sparrows in a bush,
and eyes which give light to the day.

And now the quotes:

If the ego were to disappear, or rather, be seen as a useful fiction, there would no longer be the duality of subject and object, of experiencer and experience. There would simply be a continuous, self-moving stream of experiencing, without the sense of an active subject who controls it or of a passive subject who suffers it. The thinker would be seen as no more than the series of thoughts, and the feeler no more than the feelings.(pp.70-71).

...(I)f political health consists in realizing that legal restraint is freely imposed by the people, philosophical health consists in realizing that our true self is the natural man(sic), the spontaneous Tao, from which we can never deviate. In psychological terms this realization is a total self-acceptance standing, like political freedom, as the constant background of every thought, feeling, and action - however restricted. Such acceptance of oneself is the condition of that underlying integrity, sincerity, and peace of heart which, in the sage, endures bemeath every disturbance. It is, in short, a deeply inward consent to be just exactly what we are and to feel just exactlty what we are feeling at every moment, even before what we are has been changed, however slightly, by accepting it.... Stated boldy, if crudely, it is the insight that whatever we are just now, that is what we should ideally be. This is the sense of the Zen Buddhist saying, "Your ordinary mind is the Tao, the "ordinary mind" being the present, given state of consciousness, whatever its nature. (pp.131-132).

To act or grow creatively we must begin from where we are, but we cannot begin at all if we are not "all here" without reservation, or regret. Lacking self-acceptance, we are always at odds with our point of departure, always doubting the ground on which we stand, always so divided against ourselves that we cannot act with sincerity. Apart from self-acceptance as the ground-work of thought and action, every attempt at spiritual or moral discipline is the fruitless struggle of a mind tht is split assunder and insincere. It is the freedom which is the essential basis of self-restraint. (p.132).

To the extent that we do not yet know what man (sic) is, we do not know what human sexuality is....What man is, and what human sexuality is, will come to be known only as we lay ourselves open to experience with the full sensitivity of feeling which does not grasp.
The experience of sexual love is therefore no longer to be sought as the repetiton of a familiar ecstacy, prejudiced by the experience of what we already know. It will be the exploration of our relationship with an ever-changing, ever unknown partner, unknown because he or she is not in truth the abstract role or person, the set of conditioned reflexes which society has imposed, the stereotyped male or female which education has led us to expect. All these are maya, and the love of these is fantasy. What is not maya is mystery, what cannot be described or measured, and it is this sense - symbolized by the veil of modesty - that woman is always a mystery to man, and man to woman.. It is in this sense that we must understand, van der Leeuw's remarkable saying that "the mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced."(pp.158-159).

Emerson - Part I

At some point I intend to include a number of Emerson's thoughts in this blog. But, for now, this quotation which was projected onto the wall in a Unity Church, here in Victoria a few weeks ago, will have to suffice:

Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

And here is one from his aunt, Mary Emerson: "Always do what you are afraid to do." Don't I wish!

Some more Alan Watts

Unfortunately, I neglected to make note of the title of the 1960 pocket book from which these quotes come - I just have some loose pages!
(Emphases are in the original):

... the spiritual is not to be separated from the material, nor the wonderful from the ordinary. We need above all to disentangle ourselves from habits of speech and thought which set the two apart, making it impossible for us to see that this - the immediate, everyday, and present experience - is IT, the entire and ultimate point for the existence of a universe.

Spiritual awakening is the difficult process whereby the increasing realization that everything is as wrong as it can be flips suddenly into the realization that everything is as right as it can be. Or better everything is as It as it can be.

The most impressive fact in man's (sic) spiritual, intellectual, and poetic experience has always been for me, the universal prevalence of those astounding moments of insight which Richard Bucke called "cosmic consciousness....[which] .... is a release from self-consciousness, that is to say from the fixed belief and feeling that one's organism is an absolute and separate thing, as distinct from a convenient unit of perception.... The central core of the experience seems to be the conviction, or insight, that the immediate now, whatever its nature, is the goal and fulfillment of all living.

About which Jack Kornfield had this to say - again I don't have the reference:

Most of us have spent our lives caught up in plans, expectations, ambitions for the future, in regrets, guilt or shame about the past. To come into the present is to stop the war.

Paulo Coelho - Part VI

So here, after a long silence, are some more quotes from "Eleven Minutes:"

If I must be faithful to someone or something, then I have, first of all, to be faithful to myself. If I am looking for true love, I first have to get the mediocre loves out of my system....

...it's best to live as if today were the first (or last) day of my life.

I can choose either to be a victim of the world or an adventurer in search of treasure. It's all a question of how I view my life.

...the great aim of every human being is to understand the meaning of total love. Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves; we simply awaken to it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with.

...really important meetings are planned by the souls long before the bodies see each other. Generally speaking, these meetings occur when we reach a limit, when we need to die and be reborn emotionally. These meetings are waiting for us, but more often than not, we avoid them happening. If we are desperate though, if we have nothing to lose, or if we are full of enthusiasm for life, then the unknown reveals itself, and our universe changes direction.
Everyone knows how to love, because we are all born with that gift. Some people have a natural talent for it, but the majority of us have to re-learn, to remember how to love, and everyone, without exception, needs to burn on the bonfire of past emotions, to relive certain joys and griefs, certain ups and downs, until they can see the connecting thread that exists behind each new encounter, because there is a connecting thread.

Every human being experiences his or her own desire; it is part of our personal treasure and, although, as an emotion, it can drive people away, generally speaking, it brings those who are important to us closer. It is an emotion chosen by my soul, and it is so intense that it can infect everything and everyone around me.
Each day I choose the truth by which I try to live.... But I would like to be able always to choose desire as my companion. Not out of obligation, not to lessen my loneliness, but because it is good. Yes, very good.

Profound desire, true desire is the desire to be close to someone.... When desire is still in this pure state, the man and the woman fall in love with life, they live each moment reverently, consciously, always ready to celebrate the next blessing.
When people feel like this, they are not in a hurry, they do not precipitate events with unthinking actions. They know that the inevitable will happen, that what is real always finds a way of revealing itself. When the moment comes, they do not hesitate, they do not miss a single opportunity, they do not let slip a single magic moment, because they respect the importance of every single second.

Paulo Coelho Part V - On Love

I have just finished reading one of Paulo Coelho's books entitled "Eleven Minutes" (HarperCollins Publishers Inc., New York, 2004) which, in many ways, is, to me, so different from his earlier works.

The opening line is "Once upon a time, there was a prostitute named Maria" and the story is a fictional account - but factually based - of a woman's experience in that profession, in Switzerland, that began and ended in one year i.e. when she had saved up enough money to go back home to Brazil and buy a farm.

And Coelho is consistent. The words below that he puts in Maria's mouth, are almost identical to the ones he wrote six years earlier in his book The Fifth Mountain (HarperCollins etc 1998) which I re-read last Christmas night after my car accident earlier that day.

Note: The theme of the latter book is that some things in life are unavoidable. So my choosing to read it that night, with no memory of its contents, was an interesting piece of synchronicity, because that was how exactly how I felt about putting a car in a ditch after forty years of basically accident free driving. But that is a separate story in itself.

In the book, the widow-woman, (Luke 4;24-26), whom the prophet Elijah visited in the town of Zarephath about 870 BC, says to herself [that] She would go on loving him, because for the first time in her life, she knew freedom. She could love him even if he never knew; she did not need his permission to miss him, to think of him every moment of the day, to await him for the evening meal, and to worry about the plots that people could be weaving against the foreigner.

This was freedom: to feel what the heart desired, with no thought to the opinion of the rest. She had fought with her neighbours and her friends about the stranger's presence in her house: there was no need to fight against herself ....

She was free, for love liberates.

And Maria, who in the other story is only twenty-three , writes in her diary:

All my life, I thought of love as some kind of voluntary enslavement. Well, that's a lie: freedom only exists when love is present. The person who gives himself or herself wholly, the person who feels freest, is the person who loves most whole heartedly....

In love, no one can harm anyone else; we are each of us responsible for our own feelings and cannot blame someone else for what we feel.

It hurt when I lost each of the various men I fell in love with. Now, though, I am convinced that no one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone.

That is the true experience of freedom: having the most important thing in the world without owning it.

So I am both grateful and joyful that the universe chose a very special person to be the mirror in which I would finally find this awesome gift of freedom. Little wonder that I love her so much, fully aware that she is not only much younger than me, but is also married with two small children, three dogs and a couple of cats!

So love comes to each of us in many ways of which this is but one example at this particular time in my life

Amma - today's third posting!

I was brought to Amma's web-site, www.ammachi.org via a man on the lower mainland of British Columbia who seems to be making a remarkable recovery from terminal prostate cancer. These three quotes got my attention:

Spirituality is the practical science of life. Apart from taking us to the ultimate goal of self-realization it also teaches us the nature of the world, and how to understand life and live fully in the best way possible.

The purpose of one's life is to realize who we really are. By realizing our own self we become full, with nothing more to gain in life. Life becomes perfect.

If you ask the river "why do you flow?" what can it say?

I had no idea my week was going to start this way but this is what wanted to happen. So what can I say??

Pages from a journal

The lettering on the cover of this little book is in an oriental language. Only the first four pages have been written in - in English - by, it seems, a young female student at a school somewhere in North Vancouver. She had left the book behind the back row seating in a bus that I happened to get on. It contains no identification. Inside the front cover is written a quotation by a Ralph Miller whose name means nothing to me:

The only thing you get to be is who you are.

The next page contains the rules for the journal:

1. The secrets have to be true and honest.

2. If you write a secret it will have to be neat and tidy.

3. If you disobey these rules you can't write in here again.

And do you know what? The last two pages are messy with crossings out and hasty scribbles. So she was right. It is highly unlikely that she will write in that book again. I could have given it to the bus-driver to go into the Lost and Found. But it seemed to me that her words - these cries from the heart - needed first to be shared and put out into the world rather than being left to languish on a shelf somewhere. She began, on February 23rd of this year, with a poem entitled The Wind Blows:

it blows hard at me as i stand there on the grass field.
it's cold and sunny.
i'm facing the sun, my eyes closed.
i feel like a sail on a boat, or a kite.
any moment the wind may pick me up and i would fly away ...
the wind blows hard towards me.
but even if i wasn't there,
the wind would still be there on that grass field,
doing its thing.
blowing,
the wind blows.

The next page is entitled "but we also love" which is the real reason I did not leave this book in someone else's hands:

everyone is perfect.
perfectly disfunctional. (her spelling)
perfectly fucked up.
we are all perfectly fucked up in our own special way.
we hate, kill and destroy.
but none of that matters when the spark of love in a stranger's eyes bring tears to your own eyes.

The next day, underlined, she wrote be silly like billy:

simon says, be silly.
seriousness is a disease,
it will bring you to your grave,
it will make you be a slave.
it will bring you to your knees.
seriousness is a disease.
damn the daemons of disease.
do the world a favour please;
do bend over my dear lass,
and take the carrot out of your ass.

And, on the next page, two short entries:

Simplicity is key, that's all there is to say 'bout that.

any lock in the world can be opened, and i ain't even jokin' ...

And this last entry blows me away because I have been studying Inca shamanism for two years and have yet to experience Ayahuasca, the Vine of Death from the Amazon jungle that takes people, after much vomiting I am told, on hallucinatory journeys:

ayahuasca is like a mother .... and a mother would never hurts its child.
(maureen, Sept 24th 2005).

Anway ... a psychic friend has suggested that she and I do a healing ritual for the unknown author of these writings and after that we'll ask for guidance as to what happens next with the book and its hundred empty pages.

Swami Amwar Jyoti

I found these first quotations of his on a calendar in one of a family physician's treatment rooms. His wife, Nancy, his receptionist, chooses them:

Open your eyes: life is a perennial flow of joy, a perennial beauty.

The silence within us is the source of all that we are.

The mission of everyone on earth is to realize our relationship with the Creator or the source.

Look at life through divine eyes and it will be divine life.

And two other quotes from a book in the waiting room of a friend who does live blood analysis:

The things that matter most in our lives are not fantastic or grand. They are the moments when we touch one another.
Jack Kornfield.

Touch is the vehicle through which we comfort one another and are comforted, via hugs or clasps of the hand.
Howard Cutler.

Wayne W. Dyer

Here are some extracts from his book, There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem (HarperCollins, New York, 2001) which I have just finished reading:

The essential message of this book is in the following ten points.

1. Everything in our universe is nothing more than energy. That is, at the very core of its being, everything is vibrating to a certain frequency.

2. Slower frequencies appear more solid and this is where our problems occur.

3. Faster frequencies such as light and thought are less visible.

4. The fastest frequencies are what I am calling spirit. (emphasis in the original).

5.When the highest/fastest frequencies of spirit are brought to the presence of lower/slower frequencies, they nullify and dissipate those things we call problems.

6. You have the ability and the power to increase your energy and access the highest/fastest energies for the purpose of eradicating any problems in your life.

7. There are some basic foundations and principles that you will need to understand and practice in order to access spiritual solutions to any "problems" you are encountering.

8. Your ultimate choice, once you understand these principles is to align yourself with a high energy field or a low energy field.

9. In essence, when you finally come to know and understand the world of spirit on an intimate basis, you will see clearly that all problems are illusions in that they are concocted by our minds because we have come to believe that we are separate from our source, which I call God, but you can label it any way you prefer.

10. These illusions are nothing more than mistakes in our thinking and like every error they dissolve when put face to face with the truth

Much later, he writes:

I recall a highly evolved spiritual teacher of mine saying to me, "Stop taking your life so personally." I was shocked and responded with something like, "What do you mean by that? This is my life, it's very personal." He was alluding to the idea that we are not our bodies, our personalities, or any of our material world possessions. We are eternal, spiritual beings disguised as fathers, spouses, managers, proprietors, and owners. When we know our true divine nature, we stop taking everything personally, including our own lives....

So, he continues:

I recommend that you stop taking the opinions of others personally. Remind yourself that you are not going to give any energy to what they want for you if it conflicts with what you intend to create for yourself, unless the energy you give is kindness, understanding and love.

In terms of personal relationships, he also emphasizes the need to be clear about who we allow into our lives:

You must say good-bye, albeit with unconditional love, to anyone who pollutes your life space with slowed down [negative] energy .... Anyone you allow to be a regular visitor in your body energy field must come with love, peace and the higher spiritual energies."

And I think the key word here is "regular" because love and compassion, it seems to me, ask that we also be available, at times, for anyone with what Dyer calls a "problem."

Lastly, the more I think about these things, the more I realize there is only love. Nothing else. And now I'm ready to dismantle the computer!.






.

Mercury retrograde??

Apparently there is a "damaged" file somewhere in my computer. So it needs to go into the shop to be looked at. But these quotes wanted to be recorded before that happens:

Each day we are born again to start our life anew.
What we do today is what matters most.
The Buddha.

We don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is around us, is itself a marvellous victory.
Howard Zinn, historian.

Nothing happens until something moves.... The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the power of all true science.... To know that what is inpenetrable to us really exists is at the centre of true religiousness. In this sense I belong in the ranks of religious men.
Albert Einstein.

Every event we experience and every person we meet has been put in our path for a reason. When we awake to this fundamental truth, we begin to understand that a benevolent force of energy is available to guide and direct our lives. I call this energy the unmistakeable touch of grace.
Cheeryl Richardson.

Choose with awareness what gives you joy and it will lead to spirit.
Margot Anand.

You are here to enjoy an original relationship with the universe.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Daoist advice: Avoid excessive Thinking, Craving, Distractions.

Two poems and a postscript

The first of these was written by my friend Susan, a Body-Talk practioner, after one of our sessions, to mark my birthday. The second - I like Haiku's - was my response.

A Poem for Bill

Morning, and I remember the moon
above our heads the way the crows
sometimes enter the conversation
right when we need to hear what
they’re saying. Not synchronicity,
but attention. The way a man must
know the dance floor if he wants to be called
a good dancer. A nod, a slight bend in the arm
and the pair floats to the centre of the room.
Bill’s a sailor, a man willing to witness
the world over and over again the way
the wind takes his breath away with his heart.
Each wave, one epiphany after another.
The pain there, too, witnessing, remembering.
After each storm, the sea unravels, waits.
So many voices calling Bill for answers, and
some not calling, but answering, in a language
Bill is willing, ready now, to share.

Miracles are Everywhere

Saturday mornings

Bill and Susan's bodies talk

While daffodills bloom

All of which reminds me of the words on one of the Tree of Life Inspirations cards:

Friendship is the journey of souls who join hands in the celebration of each other's lives.... True friendship paints the world with colours that never fade.

Love - Part III

A young friend in Indiana recently sent me John Lennon's beautiful ballad, Imagine, which I hadn't thought about for awhile. She began her e-mail this way:

....why must we define love? Can't we just feel it?

On this planet in this life-time I try to love everyone, especially those who cross my path although I feel a love for people I don't know. It is difficult to love everyone equally because some just tend to touch your heart and soul more than others. Others take a lot of effort to love....

Note: I call the former my soul-mates because we seem to have instant recognition though we may have never physically met before. So here is Lennon, plus a couple of other quotes on this timeless topic.

"Imagine"

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

And from a greeting card:

If life is a journey ... love is what makes the journey worthwhile....
Love ... is the magic of all things felt with the heart.
www.treeol.com

And Rumi again:

Love is the energizing elixir of the universe, the cause and effect of all harmonies.

Lastly, Buddha:

You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and attention.