294
the dream and its awareing
appear to be two
but can one exist
without the other?
try as I might
I can’t extricate myself from
either, and I ask myself:
how can I believe in two
when I fail to find even one?
~
belief
wild wideawakeness and radical creativity
282
Here are some classic strategies for ‘unblocking creativity’:
receive nurturance
respond
be wild
begin
protect your time
stay with it
protect your creative life
craft your real work
lay out nourishment for the creative life*
I used to hold hope in such strategies. It was great fun exploring them as I busily built a creative self. But now it’s different. I found out that there’s a screamingly simple way to open the door to creativity.
The two obstacles to creativity are thinking one knows what it is, and wanting it. Wanting to ‘be creative’ is the safest strategy I know to ensure you will never be creative. Just like wanting to be wideawake will ensure dreaminess.
Wild wideawakeness and creativity both lie beyond the reach of belief and believer.
My strategy is too simple to sell. It wouldn’t fill a ‘how-to’ book:
I simply stop, I sit down, and I shut up.
Great silence never fails to reset its own natural state: radical creativity.
~
*From Clarissa Pinkola Estes wonderful book, Women who Run with the Wolves
hell is thinking other people are other
276
Sartre was right: Hell is other people.
I don’t know enough about the man or his play to be sure that he was right for the right reason.
But I do know that whenever ‘others’ enter one’s life-play, the split from wholeness has happened, meaning, a ‘me’ has morphed.
Most readers of Sartre take the “hell” of “other people” to be their capacity to annoy or frustrate one.
But it seems to me that hell is the capacity of the imagined ‘me/myself’ to annoy and frustrate itself by turning the equally imagined ‘others’ into victimizers or objects of desire, or those who must be pleased with me and like me, regardless of the cost to body, happiness and sanity.
In other words, turning them into stories.
.
And then believing it’s all true and real.
~
no worries, mate!
250
Problems?
Of course there are problems; isn’t that the nature of dreams?
If you wake up from a sleeping-dream which was problem-filled you say, “Oh it was only a dream, whew!”
When you wake up within the big Dream the response is the same: “Whew!”
As they say in the big Down Under: “No worries, mate!”
~
The first time I sat with Krishnamurti he asked us whether it was possible to live without problems. Just to entertain the possibility. What exactly is a “problem?” he asked.
Twenty years and much deliberation later, spaciousness scribbles: A problem is a thought believed to be real by another thought – the ‘me’ thought. It’s only by inquiring into the nature of thought that one gets a grip on problems. Or, rather, they lose their grip on the tail-chasing thinker.
Problems are as ephemeral as the ‘me’ thought. When the dreamer wakes up to the Dream, problems are seen as Life’s creative unfolding. There is nothing outside of this utterly mind-boggling miracle of Creation.
~
beliefs are like hookworms on the brain
147
Beliefs are like hookworms on the brain. Firmly and deeply embedded into the bio-computer, they both feed on it and distort its functioning.
The most pervasive and destructive hookworm is the ‘me’ concept – it’s the motherworm and fatherworm in one fat wriggler.
To attempt to extricate it is to assist its replication. It grows new heads and tails; mutates with amazing skill.
Waking up to the workings of thought is the only remedy. When it’s seen that what one took oneself to be as an independent self-existent ‘person’ is a bundle of thoughts wearing a different barcode every time you turn around, everything changes.
It’s a seeing that’s fatal to all brainworms.
~
God . . . Life . . . I
142
Try as I might I can no longer separate these three little words: God and Life and I. Which is not to make the claim that “I am god” or “I am life”; but rather to point out that the fundamental sense of ‘I’ is what I used to conceive God to be – namely Life ITself. There’s no person involved in this equation.
Taken separately, the ‘God’-notion is a mine-field (pun intended). God is too burdened with beliefs to be a useful concept when it comes to self-inquiry. It’s a blunt and contaminated instrument; delusional infection is likely.
The ‘Life’ concept is less of a problem, and hard to argue about. One is, if still breathing, in full awareness of it. The word is not the thing, but at least we are in accord about what it feels like to be alive.
‘I’ is a hot potato, for in normal parlance language dictates its usage to denote personhood: me, myself, and there are as many versions of what that means as there are beings to think them up.
Strung together, and understood from the wideawake perspective they form a concept that might be more useful.
‘God-Life-I’ has nothing to do with beliefs or persons or language or even self-inquiry, yet IT cannot know ITself without them.
IT’s the self-appointed president of the GLI (glee) club. Chuckles.
~
sucking at the wrong source
134
Some speak of ‘my’ energy, of ‘their’ energy, of ‘others’ draining one’s energy – as in bad and good vibes… But where is this self that owns its ‘own’ energy? Exactly where are these other selves who can steal ‘my’ energy? Can life’s energy exist as an object to be manipulated or to be stolen? Scientists can measure energy in different forms, but can they hold it in their hands and view it with the naked eye?
What I’ve discovered these past months, in the company of a dear someone who constantly monitors ‘his’ energy and also informs me of the state of my own, is that the sensation of energy loss – or gain – in my body is caused by identification with said body, coupled with the belief that energy is finite and fixed. I question this popular paradigm that posits human beings as a collective of hungry vampire energy-suckers. As far as I’m concerned they’re sucking at the wrong source.
What if all those beliefs were untrue?
What if our ‘real’ energy was something utterly
unknowable
immeasurable
changeless
limitless
non-local
and so unavoidable that you’d have to conclude
IT was your
own dear Self?
~
echoes from emptiness 