‘me’-self

following fear into the star-stuff of my cells

Frederick Walker, The Woman in White, 1871 Tate Gallery

 

This post is an attempt to explain why I’m a dedicated follower of fear.  For as long as I can remember (and that’s probably way further than your lifespan dear reader), I’ve been keenly curious and unafraid of a good adventure.  So it’s surprising that I was so slow to arrive at the threshold of my body’s dark knowledge.  Needless to say, the Shadowlands had good reason to be well-hidden from my agenda…
But once the bellyflop into the deep occurred, the implications of the free-fall of fifteen years ago could at last percolate down and settle in the cells.  I am writing this in the midst of another dive – a somatic meditation retreat, which I think of as a pre-death trauma detox.  For the most part I’m avoiding the screen, but this pressed to be posted.

We hear it so often:  To be happy, to be spiritually liberated, to be … (insert personal agenda), we must choose between love and fear.  And the ominously silent insinuation is that choosing fear is definitely not the way to go.

My platitude-sensitive antenna start to hum; a dictum like this is demands scrutiny.

A good place to start is by being clear about what one actually is, i.e. the nature of one who could claim to make such a choice.  If there’s still a belief in a separate, solid-state self, (which is a bit like admitting that you believe the world is flat and climate change is a myth), then you’ll believe there’s someone who can make a choice of this kind.  You’ll believe that this mental object called “me” can adroitly and wisely select between other mental objects (fear and love) in order to become a happier mental object.  To the imagined self – the chooser – love and fear are inescapably conceptual.  And what follows won’t make a smidgin of sense.  (Click X now.)

However, if you’ve sniffed out the falsity of an independent me thing, you’ll find it slightly incoherent that these two concepts, with their inherent duality, are so commonly presented as an either-or option.  It sounds like an invitation to reconstruct a fresh version of a self – one that will either make the right choice (good work!) or get it wrong (see how hopeless you are?).  You’d be right to want to sniff out the truth of the matter.

Let’s start with love.  Having experienced the mind-shattering absence of anything that could exist as an independent ghost-in-the-machine, you’ve already noticed the sweetness, the benevolence that floods into the space vacated by that phantom.  You’ve realised that that very sweetness is the Love (big L) you always imagined was elsewhere.  (Hiding behind the façade of your spiritual teacher, your partner, your lover; waiting at the end of your seeking, your arduous practice-project…)  You’ve woken up to the fact that it’s always been there;  that it’s your inescapable fundamental state and that it has no opposite, only a limitless wardrobe of apparent disguises.

Repeat – Love has no opposite.

Which means: Fear is not the opposite of, nor an alternative to, Love.

So let’s look at fear.  We’re told that humans are born with just two innate, hard-wired fears: fear of falling, and fear of sudden loud noises.  All other fears are learned, and these are the ones I speak of here.  I’m not talking about natural, normal reactions to any kind of physical danger.

I experience psychological fear as a contraction within my body.  It’s a tension, a more or less subtle holding-on – sometimes so subtle that it escapes awareness – those who have encountered the consequences of heart tension know about this.

Unlike the changeless Love discussed above, which isn’t an experience but the space in which experiences arise, any experience will always have an opposite.  If the cramping experience had an opposite, what might it be?  Wouldn’t it be the absence of any contraction triggered by recent or ancient memory?  Wouldn’t it be an open and accepting gesture towards my life?  Towards whatever the universe is throwing in my face right this minute – regardless of how it conflicts with my stitched-together idea of how it should be?

Fear is a re-action posing as a new sensation.  When I learned that after the age of six or seven we never experience a new emotion, but endlessly experience a replay of those established in infant-hood – albeit dressed up in fresh scenarios – I was shocked.  I realised that since I’m well over the age of six, any experience of fear will always be a re-action.  A re-enactment.

Another shocker came with this:  98% of what the body knows is unavailable to our conscious awareness.  Meaning that – for the most part – I don’t know what I’m afraid of and why.  Which makes it tricky to talk about “not choosing fear” – let alone being “honest” with myself.  Gulp.

The primal imprints of my early experience were laid down in the cells long before there were words to describe anything, and proceed to map out my experience, decade after decade.  Without my conscious awareness having a clue.

And so it goes for all of us.  Until something moves us to inquire.

What moves us?

Since we’ve awakened to our abiding nature as Love, we must concede that Love moves Itself.

There’s nothing personal involved:  It happens by itself.  It happens for itself.  And it happens exactly when It wants to.

It delivers an impeccable invitation to enter into an unabridged encounter with things we’ve been working all our life to avoid because the associated pain was/is unbearable.

If fear is in my face it’s because Love is fishing for a lost child’s pain – a pain unique to this matrix of experience and potential, yet universal to all humanity.  And since Love is inescapably present as the shining awareness that knows my fear, I can turn towards this fear (or grief, or rage) without ever leaving Love.

I say, “Welcome!” to fear.  I plump up a cushion for it in my heart.  I stop.

I notice the instant impulse to act out habitual, conditioned re-actions.  I desist – or at least press the pause button.  I’m interested;  having been informed that we are ignorant of the knowledge hidden in the cells, I’m curious.  Who wouldn’t want to explore?

I turn towards the sensation that is visiting me – in dreams, meditation and daily interactions.  I turn my breath, my awareness, my sensitivity and my curiosity its way.  I don’t give it the label “fear” or spell out a story about it.  I refuse to be tempted to fix it or lean into it or accept it or imagine any outcome.

So here I am, just looking, with the impartial gaze of whole-body awareness.  As though I’m looking through the eyeballs of each of the 37.2 trillion cells in my body.

I watch what happens.  I pay attention when those long-stifled echoes from the emptiness of my body begin to whisper.

Love clears its throat.  And when it knows I’m truly committed (not furtively checking out the exits) it speaks loud and clear.  Its language is felt rather than heard, sensed rather than known.  It reorganises this neurological field and in so doing recreates my relationship to the world.

And further – since it’s evident that my body has no borders – it completely recasts my relationship with and as the Cosmos.  Slowly but surely, I come to view this work as an offering made by the Cosmos for the benefit of one’s fellow-beings, the Earth, and the Cosmos itself.

Out of my mind
and into the star-stuff of my cells
I’ll follow the angel called fear
so resplendent in her costume
borrowed
from Love’s limitless wardrobe.

The angel called fear.

Allons-y!

 

Image: Frederick Walker, The Woman in White, 1871, gouache on paper. Tate London

oh how I love being so deluded

 

Andrew Wyeth: Wind from the Sea, detail

 

I was asked to find my mind

and

I failed

I was asked to find my thoughts

and

I failed

I was asked to find my self

and

I failed

 

So then it seemed timely to try to find

the I

that was so successful at failing

 

ha!

it couldn’t be found

yet

it can’t be escaped

 

oh how I love being so deluded

that simply watching words leak out of a pen

can deliver shameless delight!

 

Image: Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea
Tempera on hardboard, 1947, detail
[What moves – the curtain or the wind?]
Source: Washington Post

All writing on this blog leaks from the pen of Miriam Louisa Simons.  Over at my other blog this unlit light, you’ll find more of a smorgasbord of writing, including some of my own.
I chose this WordPress theme for its uncluttered minimalism, and because it’s responsive (i.e., it displays readably on all devices).  All the links that normally appear in a sidebar or footer are hidden behind the menu icon at the top of the page.  If you feel inclined to explore the offerings posted here since 2010, please click that icon.  You’ll also find a way to follow this blog by email there.  I promise you won’t be overwhelmed – emptiness has erratic and unpredictable habits.  Posts turn up.  I marvel.
– mls
Copyright © Emptiness

this mysterious morphing me

 

Echoes from Emptiness: this mysterious morphing me

 

‘me’ is a mystery
to myself and to the world
of teeming memies

it morphs on-demand
to become … whatever is
projected-then-perceived

it’s a shape-shifter
expert nanodrama artist
in cunning disguise

 

but no such mystery
shrouds the changeless One called ‘I’
right here, always ON

Creation’s unblinking eye

 

image source

awakening is as simple as this

And so my scribblings in that little ring-bound notebook came to an end.  Three hundred and sixty five dawns had come and gone.  The notes began with the calamitous and irretrievable loss of a psychological solid-state “me” entity.  (See the free-fall.) They jotted themselves down in prose or poetry, as I explained in the about page.  Incidentally, I was more surprised than anyone to find that readers thought the echoes were “poetic”.

At the end of that year, Life sent a robber to divest me of the physical aspects of my identity, as though it were cleverly matching outer to inner.  I’d be lying if I claimed to be happy about this, but I was fairly philosophical – or so I’m told.  It was awfully inconvenient.  I learned what it felt like to be a refugee, a paperless person.  (Identity theft is an expensive thing to address – one has to begin by proving that one was actually born, and build up the official paper/image trail from there.)

All this occurred a decade ago.  Last year there was an impulse to post what I’d come to call the *echoes* on a blog.  It was the same kind of impulse that prompted me to scribble them in the first place; I complied unhesitatingly, having learned by this stage that Life’s agenda is totally beyond my personal comprehension.

And anyway, it was fun.  I love learning new tricks, and the folks at WordPress were always there to help.  Gratitude goes to the wonderkids who, without a trace of impatience, cheerfully answer one’s goofy questions on the WP forums.  And gratitude to whomever deemed that this little blog would serve as a good example of the ‘Manifest’ theme on the WordPress Themes pages.  When I look at the stats, I keep in mind that many of my visitors have probably come to see how the theme works, rather than to read the content.

But perhaps something of the perfume of this savage wisdom has wafted across cyberspace, regardless.  How else to explain the long list of followers?  Blessed be.

The question now is:  do I stop here or do I continue?  Perhaps it’s for my subscribers and readers to decide.  The *echoes* keep echoing; I keep scribbling. Do you want to continue to tune in?

I leave you – for the moment – with the last of my notes from that time, a decade ago.  I had been reading my favorite living poet, David Whyte, and this *echo* echoes forth from my embrace of his unique wisdom.  Homage!

awakening
in this now place, here
is as simple as this:

look and look again
for the self you take yourself to be

find every self’s substance
to be a reflection
in the mirror-light of looking

and at last
on knees of awe and gratitude
see your True Face

– miriam louisa

 

Echoes from Emptiness: quantum emptiness

 

life’s got a thing going with my zafu

234

“How do you find the time to sit?” I’m asked.
Well, I don’t.  I will explain.

Decades passed with ml desiring more time to sit.
The cushion was ever calling, but she was a self with things-to-be-done.
They lined up in lists and no matter how many were struck off, accomplished, more recruits would appear to replace them.
She longed for more time in which to achieve all the must-do’s that self spun around its existence.
She longed too, for the space and silence of the zafu.
And all that longing created conflict.

So, what changed all that?
When the impossibility of ml’s existence as a separate solid entity was seen, everything shifted.

ml was replaced by Life, Itself, and Life loves using the zafu as its launch-pad for the return to Itself – point ZERO.

So I confess I don’t have to find time; nor is it really true to say, “I sit.”

But it happens.
~

no time, no space: no me

155

It’s curious that while most folk who inquire, even at a fairly superficial level, will concede that time is a conceptual construct with no objective reality, they continue to argue for the existence of a solid-state self-entity.  This is ‘me’ – wysiwyg!

But if time is illusory, it follows that duration in space is impossible.  How can any concept of space be workable without the added dimension of time?

How can there be a near and a far?  A then, a now, a when?  And bereft of space (in which to exist) and time (in and through which to endure) what’s left of ‘me’?

I’ll tell you what’s left: the entire gobsmacking universe.

~

I am not
but the Universe is Myself
~ Shih T’ou
AD 700 – 790

first find the slippery fish called ‘me’

131

The reality adjustment business is huge. Not only the trade in drugs and drink, but all the subtle and not-so-subtle remedies for all the things we don’t like in our lives – and particularly the popular paths to new, improved, enlightened, creative selves.

Being an old soldier on these route marches, I appreciate their appeal. I remember the mini-euphoria that would occur when one found a fresh fix to try, with its promises of a new ‘me’. This would be the answer to my discontent; this would make me happy again!

But after trudging doggedly up the track for a while, I’d notice that nothing had changed, fundamentally.

The problem, however, wasn’t the product. It was the notion that it was necessary. Where do we get this calamitous notion?

Well, we get it from the same source as spawns the ‘me’ –
that slippery fish that thinks it runs the show
and spends its life in discontent, trying to change it all.

Instead of focusing on self-improvement strategies,
first find the slippery fish,
hook it, reel it in
gaze into its lidless eye:

if this is your real and improvable ‘self’,

 

what’s looking?

~