changeless-awareness

lessons from the lifeboat

 

Echoes from Emptiness - Lessons from the Lifeboat

 

Seventy years on and still floating along. This morning’s sit sent me scrambling for my pencil and here’s what downloaded – a list of seven treasured wisdoms the old girl has learnt (so far…)

 

peace

is this rock-solid, inescapable

aware-ing

 

contentment

is simply the end of seeking

salvation

 

separation

is a story without verifiable

substance

 

suffering

is an argument with Life’s

thusness

 

compassion

is meeting Life’s thusness without

a story

 

joy

is unbridled delight at Life’s endless

wonderment

 

grace

is the gift of this unshakeable

understanding

 

Image source

all places and all times are nowhere but now-here

310

Tamborine Mountain, in the great down-under called Oz, wraps its stony self in subtropical rainforest garb.  Peering through spaces in the forest bordering this property I see cultivated areas of huge avocado and macadamia nut trees. There’s a large tree massed with flowers of scarlet.  Beyond, there’s a stand of huge eucalypts, and it’s through their open arms that the sky shows gold, then pearl, as the great Shining climbs out of the Pacific and over the rainforest rim.

Oh delight!

I notice that as this verdant vista unfolds in perception, it brings up a bouquet of similar delights archived in this particular memory:  Normandie, Norway and New Zealand, the English Lake District, Uttarkashi in the Himalaya, and the Western Ghats in Kerala, India.  Each vignette bears its unique geographical and chronological label, yet all places and all times exist nowhere but now–here in this vastness of mind.

~

Image

wideawakeness penetrates the dreamtime

308

There were dreams last night.  They involved intense activity and the emotional involvement was amazing.  This is curious, for in the dream state called ‘daily life’ there is, for the most part, quiet emotional equanimity.

But clearly emotional reflexes are still intact and available in the brain, and there’s an ego construct that can ‘feel’ them to be real, even while the watching ‘I’ – the Knowingness of the dream – does nothing but be and see.

The impossibility of the separate existence of an entity that can own and suffer emotions penetrates even the night-time dream.

Wondering wonders if there will come a time when night-time dreams will disappear completely.

Strange, but ‘I’ doesn’t give a toss one way or the other.  Night-time dreams and the infinite versions of the daytime dream are all the same to this changeless ‘I’.

~

changeless presence : I

269

the little sanctuary is full of packing boxes

I sit instead, in the bedroom
same cushion
same I

body-mind is stiff and weary from lift and shift
same cushion
same I

the impulse, Life-driven, is towards a new abode, cool and quiet
same cushion
same I

same
changeless
presence
:
I

~

the miraculous hides in the mundane

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today:

packing and moving parents’ belongings, preparing for their shift to a new abode …

washing windows, hanging curtains, changing light globes, cleaning out a filthy second-hand fridge …

there’s this ‘me’-body performing apparent functions according to its physical and mental abilities, and this ‘me’-mind gliding through its miraculous multi-tasking modes:  alpha-thinking playing its part translating the intelligence of omega-mind into alphabetized commentaries …

and awareing both the physical activity and the mind meanderings …

this unknowable knowingness

~

this Light of awareing doesn’t rise or set

149

On the Blackall Range the sun shakes itself off and emerges from the gleaming Pacific earlier than on the coast.  We sit sipping our steaming green tea, awareing the birth of the new day.

Gradually the little motel room floods with golden light called up by the bird-lords of the mountain, who take off for breakfast elsewhere once their work is accomplished.  Other fellow-travelers stir:  a dog barks at a jogger, a gecko jumps at a huntsman spider, a TV begins to quack in the next unit . . .

The apparent shift to another place, another space, is just that – an appearance.  Phenomena may change, will change, are ceaselessly changing . . .

But this Light of awareing doesn’t rise or set, and knows no time or space.  Wherever we go IT remains unchanged, yet IT births all that appears to change.  Wherever we place our cushions for a morning sit, there IT is.  And when we get up again?  There IT is.  Beloved!

~

what’s the big deal about bad habits?

122

habit = conditioned, repeated, mechanical action

who has them?
no entity here to own anything

how can they be changed then, or controlled?
can’t

what to do?
enjoy

heresy!
hairy who?


The addictive notion of ‘me’ and ‘mine’ is the only habit that’s really interesting – and then only until it hits home that habits are nothing to do with what we actually are which is:

IT-expressing-IT-ness-in-whatever-is
(which includes the whole kit and caboodle, even those pesky ‘bad’ habits!)

Look very closely and you’ll find
that the Knowingness of every experience, addictive or not
is never affected for an instant.

And astonishingly, a side-effect of that in-sight
is that  the “conditioned, repeated, mechanical action”
one was identified with
ceases to be an issue.

So what’s the big deal about habits?

~

For new visitors to this blog, IT refers to that which cannot be named, but which we never tire of labeling:  life, aliveness, god, spirit, awareness, beloved, divinity, noumenon and on and on . . .

~