me

‘me + world’ or ‘me = world’?

'me + world' or 'me = world'? You get to decide your stand in the great Game of life.

 

everything
is either ‘for’ or ‘against’
your being free

one of my teachers sagely pointed out
that everything is definitely ‘against’

then along came another who shook
her curls and laughed:

it’s all set up for your delight!
how could you bear to miss one morsel?

they were both right of course –
it all depends on whether one’s view
is from the look-out of ‘me + world’

or ‘me = world’

in their compassion and kindness
both gave me the key
to the secret of secrets:

you get to decide which look-out you’ll accept
and which version of the Game you’ll play

you get to decide

yes

you!

 

[That’s the Game in a nutshell. Which version are you playing?]

Image source

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

are we listening?

361

To listen and to hear are as alike as oil and water. We often think we are listening, when all that’s really happening is that we’re hearing a download of noise from an external source, data which our memory (thinking) sorts into stories that gel with our own worldview.

The art of listening involves bringing relaxed word-free attention to the moment’s fullness – whether it’s a friend sharing confidences, a ghetto-blaster thumping, a kookaburra cackling, the water murmuring and the breeze sighing over its surface. In the same impartial way, this listening notices the constant commentary being broadcast inwardly by thinking and feeling – the whole movement of “me”.

It’s interesting to find that when this quality of listening is present there’s really nothing to say because opinions are absent. There’s nothing to say, yet everything that matters is being said. In the absence of words, something else has space to speak, something inextricably intimate that we recognize as Love.

~

I is nothing to do with me

306

‘I’ is the eye of existence.

‘Me’ is the figment of fantasy that imagines itself owner of that eye.  ‘Me’ is the way ‘I’ refers to itself, yet neither an ‘I’ nor a ‘me’ can ever be located.

The I-eye of clear Awakeness is owned by nothing – no circumstance, no person/entity, no thing whatsoever.

It is never born, although the body- mind organism it saturates and substantiates appears to be born.

It never dies, although its ‘host’ will appear to do so.

It can never be found, for it is always inseparable from that which seeks.

‘I’ is nothing to do with me, or any other personal pronoun.

‘I’ is.

That’s all that can be known – or said – about It.

And even that’s two words too many.

~

just call me … d e s t i n y

298

again, the rain
the huge trees softly shrouded
music dripping, sloshing, trickling
mozzies incarnating for the bite of a lifetime
mold and mustiness and mushrooms:
the sublime suchness of the rainforest

~

If one has to have a name, why not ‘Destiny’?  All the billions of apparently individual persons existing in the phenomenal world are but one power, one Life-energy moving through Life-patterns determined by destiny.

Some call destiny ‘God’s Will,’ others refer to ‘Cosmic Law’.  Destiny is the simply the unfolding of circumstances according to genetics, structure, environment and experience, all powered by Life’s natural impulse to move, to grow, to unfold and expand.

Destiny is a picture too vast to be comprehended by this miniscule thought-bubble called me, yet it is none other than mySelf in motion.

~

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.

~