inquiry

on “spiritual inquiry” – be warned

 

Echoes from Emptiness - Image credit: Jaypee Online - Flickr

 

if you endlessly ponder

your seeming lack of enlightenment

(the proof of;  the reasons for;  the need to overcome)

your life appears to be unenlightened

and is experienced accordingly

 

if, for one instant, you stop your pondering

the Real is found to be already and always there

(luminous;  changeless;  already perfect)

and your life, in that instant, IS enlightenment

and is experienced accordingly

 

you don’t need to seek or strive or supplicate

you don’t even need to understand or accept or believe

you just need to slow down

get really quiet

and stop

 

how cool is that?

 

Image credit: Jaypee Online – Flickr

if there’s no ‘there’ out there…

Meditating Woman - sculpture by Dorothy Frankel

 

I keep on checking
but I always fail to find
a ‘within’ or ‘out there’
apart from thoughts in mind

 

so how can I ‘go within’
to ‘nurture’ the Immeasurable
or ‘cultivate’ it in the world
when ‘world’ and ‘me’ are inseparable?

 

if there’s no ‘there’ out there
(and this isn’t hard to see)
the buck stops right here
in this matrix called ‘me’

 

with nowhere to go
and nowhere to hide
no inner, outer, higher or lower
the heart can open wide

 

can kiss each wondrous moment
with a love that can’t be taught
the only way you’ll stop it
is to entertain a thought

 

~

Sculpture: Meditating Woman by Dorothy Frankel

 

time is mind’s favourite toy

342

On a sun-drenched Easter Sunday nearly seven decades ago, two destiny maps – known as my Mum and Dad – came together in marriage and stayed together.

 

Echoes from Emptiness: Grahame Sydney - Road West, Ida Valley

 

It happened in the remote Ida Valley, Central Otago – sheep-station country in New Zealand’s South Island.  Think tussocks blanketing the dry landscape with shimmering liquid gold, huge rock outcrops and only a few scattered willows bordering the creeks; skies of unfathomable indigo with tiny skylarks soaring and diving and ceaselessly singing on the wing…

Time!  How it creates this apparentness of be-ing!  Creates the insistent illusion of individuals with identities and histories; creates the fabric on which Life embroiders a multitude of manifestations.  Time is mind’s favourite toy.

This is my question:

What was never born
never entered into marriage
never had children or parents
never succeeded or failed at anything
never suffered injury or heartache
nor enjoyed a single moment’s pleasure
and yet ‘knows’ it all, intimately,
while remaining
utterly unaffected and impartial?

Painting:  Road West, Ida Valley by Grahame Sydney 1999
710mm x 1220mm
Oil on Linen

wonder, creativity and wonderment

339

wonder births questions
questions birth creativity
creativity births wonderment

The cycle of creation begins with wonder

What exactly wonders?
Not ‘me’, not ‘you’!
Life Itself wonders, and billions of bubbles of sentience (felt as ‘I’-ness) explore its questions in billions of different ways.

The questions will always generate creativity in one form or another, but it takes a ripening awareness for creativity to birth wonderment.

Whose ripening awareness?
Not ‘mine’, not ‘yours’!
It’s a natural ripening without subject or object, without knower or known; a flowering that’s conclusion-free and that operates outside of time.

~

oil slicks on oceanic mind

268

Creativity cuts through a pattern of thought that has become habitual and reflexive.  Yesterday there was the freight train analogy; today – an oceanic oil slick comes to mind.

Habitual patterns of thought are like oil slicks on the surface of oceanic mind.

Oil slicks can be exquisitely patterned.  The patterns are complex and colorful; they can rearrange themselves in endless variations.  Attractive and seductive – yet how lethal when spread over the living, breathing, ecosystem of an earth ocean!

Mental oil slicks operate in the same suffocating manner.  They contain only one component – the output of the conditioned memory machine.

And in the manner of an earthly ocean, when oceanic mind stirs up a storm (with a few fearless questions), crashing waves and spray break up the oil slick.

Even if the break is only temporary, Creation will have had a say.

Creativity will have surfaced.

~

creativity and habit are mutually exclusive

267

Creativity is radical discontinuity in a pattern of thought.
~ David Bohm

 .

Continuity of thought creates tic-toc habitude, linear and time-bound, chugging along like a freight train.

It takes some stopping, and can never be derailed volitionally.

Why?

Because the person who imagines they ‘have’ volition is the freight train incarnate.

What stops it in its tracks?

When tic-toc activity is clearly apperceived, creativity creeps through the cracks of habitude, slams on the brakes and the thinker-thought train is derailed.

.

Genuine creativity is Creation’s non-personal Intelligence in action.

~

go for the guts of IT

262

What can be said about the overpopulation of the planet?  What can be said about starvation, about terrorism, about climate change?  What can be said about the spread of diseases like AIDS?

Whatever is said or imagined by thought will be the product of conceptualization – the same source that produced the problems, the questions, and that endlessly spins the solutions.  But genuine change cannot be wrought by thought’s projections, for it only knows the known, and the known is the past.  Revolution is never creative; it may be innovative, but that’s not the same as creative.  Innovation is generated by thought re-arranging what it already knows.  Is it possible for thought to find a new question?  Or can new questions only arise from That which is beyond thought?

What thought knows cannot be the Truth for Truth is changeless and unknowable.

Go for the guts of IT: find the changeless, unknowable Truth and then see what happens to the rest.

Watch in amazement as Life rises to meet ITself – with wisdom and compassion and your name on ITs ID card.

~