The journey keeps on unfolding..each day brings new change, new development. I saw a man with a huge tumor on the side of his head today that deformed him horribly. I did Tonglen practice...breathing his tumor into my heart, feeling his suffering, and breathing back love from my heart towards his (imagined) now handsome face. I am thinking of him now; what suffering he has to endure and how grateful I am to be normal. I realized that the gift of peace (which I will write about) is for everyone, and how miraculous if he could also liberated. And then, marvelling at existance, at creation. Just looking at all the people on the subway, seeing how each person is the center of their world and sees the world in their own way. Just astounded and amazed that we are here, that the miracle of life exists, that the miracle of death exists. Creation is astonishing; how small our minds are that we become blase about the show we witness every day.

Three weeks ago. I had a strong often unbearable pressure pushing down on my head. There were dreams of a white haired young man with shining light around his head.
Two weeks ago. I had burning heat every morning, and many of my positive attachments came into awareness. My crown chakra twitched a lot..For a week I was tired and exhausted until they were released.

Dreams the last two nights…
1. I go towards a large room. My feet are washed by someone before I enter the room. I go inside and there is a magnificent presence, of enormous grace and goodness and power. Reverence is my only response.

2. I am again with my Tibetan Master. We are in a room in a house together, and we watch TV. I find out he also likes tennis and understands science, just like I do. There are beautiful girls on TV; we both watch. I am pleasantly surprised at how open he is. There is rain outside. A white dove flies down from the sky through the rain and lands by the window. One of the masters servants opens the window and brings the dove to me, placing it on my shoulder. I stroke the dove, and then it flies off.

Today I have felt peace. A line from somewhere in the bible kept coming to me ‘the peace that surpasses understanding’. Peace is sublime and beautiful, almost immaculately soft and gentle. It’s not a state of mind or a way of thinking. It’s not something that can be known. It’s not the feeling of relaxation you may have after coming back from vacation. As the line goes, it’s beyond understanding. I pray that all of you may get to experience this gift.

As I write this, I can feel neck and shoulder tension starting again… here we go again??

Blessings to all..
Love Bruce

 

I fought reality yesterday and I suffered because of that. The funny thing is, I couldn't see how I was fighting it and only when I found my anger did I realize the fight. Getting to know myself is a long, complicated, challenging and fascinating affair. ( I have always had a weakness for affairs..ha!)

There are a few things at play. One is my kundalini process, which has been hitting block after block for the last 2 ½ years. Slowly my body is increasing its ability to handle larger amounts of energy that are moving through it. I have had to learn how to work with this energy, and how to exist and think in ways that are compatible with it. The only way is to be radically open to the moment, without any attachments to the past or the future.(this doesnt mean I dont havevision or intention). When I get caught up in attachments, I block my ability to be fully present and fully open to what is happening now in the moment, and the energy in my body then gets blocked and can't move. I start to feel this as pain, as fatigue, as tension. I have no choice but to unconditionally acknowledge the perfection of this moment, because if I don't, I get into knots and it hurts.

I have been caught up in past dreams and happiness, and there is a part of me that wishes to capture paradise lost. The reality is that those moments are just memories. They are not what is happening now, and if I compare them, I reduce this moment to being incapable of offering me sufficient happiness. I pray often to God to guide me and to help me fulfill my dreams. I am earnestly seeking a living, communicative relationship with my higher self, with the universal intelligence. I fall into frustration when I perceive no response to my prayers and to my requests for guidance. I go through the following process

• Maybe I am not aware enough to hear or receive the guidance.
• Maybe its been given in a form that I cannot recognize.
• Maybe the spiritual teachers have lied when  they have said that guidance is always given.
• I ask God why I don't  get a reply.

I still don't understand this process. Then, there have been other times when guidance has been immediate; when I have heard voices in my head, when fortune and opportunity has arisen. Reflecting though, I realize that I am fighting with reality. First, I drop into the ‘child' voice of disempowerment, seeking for a theistic authority to guide me. I think reality should be other than I think it is. I feel quite depressed. Then, the depression reveals itself to be driven by anger, and I find that I am angry that I am not heard. I am angry at not getting my way, and it's an old childhood script that plays out. I had some dreams.

A young man is complaining and bitter because he doesn't have the resources to do what he wants to do.

I am with a handsome rich artist, and then a talented sportsman. They are getting all the girls.

Getting stuck in the dualistic mind (wanting and not having; comparing; being a victim; having and not wanting) seems to be a huge impediment to Spirit in my life. Increasingly I suspect that Spirit doesn't act just to make me feel good and appease my childish wanting, no matter how much I implore it in my infantile states. Spirit is a tough teacher, and the way to happiness is  to drop the wanting and relax into the present. That' seems to be my lesson. Perhaps in my openness I am more receptive. Besides, when I am open, I am surprisingly happy and content.

I still don't always understand the process of prayer though. All I know for sure today is that when I resist reality, I suffer. With kundalini, that resistance is magnified and felt with a greater intensity. For my sanity and my health, I have no choice but to relax, to end my fight. Things are as they are. That's just the way of things. The sooner I accept that, the sooner I end my suffering. Suffering can be described as resistance to what is, and resistance manifests as emotionally driven thinking that things should be otherwise. Ending resistance ends suffering..ha..

I have found using Genpo Roshi's Big Mind process to be useful (or rather, to use aspects of it as voice dialogue). Getting to know the egoic voices lets me step out of them a litte easier. If I dont know how I am stuck, how can I get out? :)

I wrote this a while back, and came across it again...it was for a special friend..

 

‘An offering.

This is what I wish for these lines to be,

an offering.

My mind, my heart, drifts

to stars in the sky.

Stars I cannot see beyond the

rainbow lights of the city,

yet, I know the stars are there,

offering to the sky

the beginnings of light;

the breaking of the infinite darkness.

I know the stars burn bright,

offering to poets visions of far off love,

offering to mystics the still Voice of God,

to dreamers,

the unmet landscapes of distant horizons,

and to the bereaved,

the emptiness of dead, unreachable light.

A blonde foreigner

walks out an alley, conspicuous in

the black headed Chinese sea.

She stops, turns,

and for a moment, I take the sight of her

into my being, holding her secretly in my mind.

She doesn't know she has given herself to a stranger,

Doesn't know, for a moment,

for a few unrecoverable seconds,

she has been the centre of my dream.

I am thankful to her,

thankful I can take from her, receive her offering,

yet leave her untouched,

just like the stars after they have been possessed by the lovers.

The stars shine relentlessly in the sky,

reflecting the seeds of my dream

to stand, unrelenting,

hands outstretched,

in my offering.

My spirit wishes,

that,

from these full dripping cupped open palms,

Tired souls could drink,

And laughing souls could stare, struck by the love of their reflections.

I would like to remain full,

Thankful that others can receive my offering while

I remain, untouched and overflowing,

To stay untouched and overflowing,

I have to be drinking from my Source.

My Love, my God,

Has to burn within me,

My surrender fuelling the flames.

I am not always full.

I do not always offer;

sometimes, I am incomplete, and

hunger, search, hunt for a

source of light, or gracious smile.

I ache for somebody else's cupped and overflowing hands

from which to drink,

in which to fill myself for a little while,

blinding the craving.

Some days, beauty is lost,

love is absent,

and I have forgotten the cold vacant stars.

Still,

I know what it is to turn,

repeatedly with faith,

Up again towards the Eternal Voice.

My offering is this Simple Dream.

An untaintable dream held cradled within these lines,

to call you;

calling you toward your rightful home of

beauty, love, sacredness and wonder.

An offering of light in the blue night darkness.

A calling star on which to set your course.

Perhaps,

you could feed from these silent uncomplaining words once,

twice,

or three thousand times.

It's up to you.

The dream cannot be emptied.

The light can never lose itself in the hungry darkness.

 

I have been increasingly focused on the questions of ‘what is wealth? How can it be created? this week. I have realized that I cannot wait any longer, and that I must take urgent responsibility for what I want to do. What I desire doesn't exist yet, and I have to create it. I don't know how I will do it, but I can try. The goal is to create value, to create ‘good works', to enrich the lives of others. I feel that I will only realize my highest potential as a human being once I am creating original value in society.

I just finished reading ‘The origin of wealth' by Eric Beinhocker. Some key points that stuck for me are

• Wealth causes something to move from high to low entropy. That means that wealth creation results in an increase of order.
• Wealth creation follows an evolutionary pattern of unfolding. New wealth strategies emerge through differentiation, amplification, and then replication.
• Ways of generating wealth emerge for a while, continue then break down through periods of change.
• Wealth is the creation of valuable information (in the mind layer).

I had some other perspectives on wealth.

• Adding value enables greater freedom and more efficient use of energy.
• Giving people more choice gives them greater degrees of freedom.
• Value enables people to ‘unlock' energy within themselves.

Perhaps the greatest wealth is then the greatest freedom, which is enlightenment. When you realize your true self, then you are liberated, free and without restriction. Everything appears as being ok, ie there is no sense of felt resistance to what is going on. There is continually that experience of freedom, openness and spaciousness, which is what people ultimately want.

• Even if I was tremendously wealthy, then I would be limited by the body, by old age, by movement, by health, by my environment. I would never really be free, and if I got caught up in my limitations and perceived them as preventing me from experiencing a better life, then I would feel confined and frustrated. There would be little I could do about these conditions.
• However, when I relax my grip on conditions and boundaries and return to my identity with my true self, then I experience spaciousness, ease and lightness, which is really what I want from wealth in the end. I want the ease to be unrestricted.
• Wealth creation then has two major approaches. First, liberation of human energy through making use of other energetic sources, such as eating pre-packaged food and driving a car. This enables greater degrees of freedom in the world of form. Second, ultimate liberation of energy which is the freedom of the self, a return to the pure potentiality of the true Self.
• Technologies which provide liberation of the self are a way of creating value, e.g. Big Mind, meditation, Holosync, Shadow work, F.I.T, Integral Theory
• Maybe I can amplify (use) these modules.

What would a subtle energy economy look like? An industrial economy creates wealth through machines. An agricultural economy creates wealth through the production of food. An information economy creates wealth through useful information that lets people do different things. A subtle energy economy would create wealth through bringing subtle energies into the world? Releasing energy though subtle energy?

• I am trying to understand this process. It seems that kundalini energy is not released; rather, the chakras open up and energy streams into the body, attempting to circulate through it and around it. Spirit is the source, the beginning. What would it mean to increasingly tap into that source and use that energy and power.

 

Something I have been curious about for a while is whether Spirit is always speaking to us and we just don't see it or hear it because we are, in a way, blinded due to our perspective. I don't know the answer; this blog is just speculation. What got me thinking is that some spiritual teachers say that guidance is given from the subtle realm or from God or from the angels the moment we ask for it. However, in my case, it seems I have often been unable to see or receive the guidance, and looking back, when I finally did get the message, it was because I was looking at things in totally the wrong way, and my thinking, my perspective, was a lock that I was stuck inside.

Let me give an example. I was speaking to a friend last week, and she was telling me that she is finally over her ex-boyfriend, whom I know well. She said that it took her several months to realize that he was not the one for her, and to give up her fixation that she needed him to be happy and to have a successful relationship with. It was her egoic idea that she had to have him, and by holding onto (by holding onto, I mean identified with that viewpoint and unable to separate from it), all she saw was a world limited to relationship with that person. From that fixation, she was unable to open to other possibilities that may have been presenting themselves to her. Now, she has let go of that perspective and sees life as an abundant place of opportunity for many types of relationships. The closure was her mind, and through letting go, she opened up. She found happiness through relaxing. The freedom is in letting go. I want to say that again. The freedom is in letting go. The more you let go, the freeer you are, and I mean letting go of everything; of money, of power, of your body, of your thinking; a radical release of consciousness from the world of form.

I was noticing this process in me this week. There is someone I am beginning to like, and in the past, I may have emotionally exhausted myself from trying to be liked or trying to get this person. Now, I notice the contraction to be with the girl, and I let it be there, and I open again to the world around me. I open, as much as I consciously can, to life presenting itself in all its forms and shapes. By not feeding that grasping contraction with any attention or repression, it just dissapears. The freedom is letting go. My path now, finally, is one of relaxation and surrender, as contrasted to my previous hell of fearful grasping and trying to hold on.

Life is difficult when all you know is the known, and you try to hold on. There are terrifying abysses of surrender that need to be fallen into it, and the notion of letting go and trusting the unknown is horrendous when you lack faith and trust in spirit and the goodness of life itself. Until you know how to let go and surrender to life, until you know how to unconditionally relax your grip on how life should be and your role in determining its outcome, you will live a partial and blinded life. I did. I know everyone who has learned how to relax did before they learned to relax. And the funny thing is, the real secret to life is not about getting what you think you want. Its about being able to let go of what you think you want...and as Shakespeare would say..'Ay, and there's the rub.'

So, let go. The freedom is in letting go. Are you brave enough to do that? I you have nothing, what are you? Great question. And if you really know how to let go, then perhaps you can open to guidance from the world and from you intuition.  

I found this in some old writing I was doing during a healing phase...

Love
relentlessly whispers
in His everloving, everbeckoning
Voice.
‘Bring the pieces together.
Bring the dismembered pieces together.’
So, I search for my scattered fragments.
I search in my soul for my shadow that
has been innocently, brutally pushed into the darkness.
I hunt for my parts that have been cast into a loveless world,
(those stupid niggers, greedy Jews, bitches with sagging breasts and skewed eyes and lumbering stomachs, white skinhead fascist fucks)
painfully bringing them back into the light,
bringing the dismembered pieces back together,
welcoming back my outcast and my poor.

In my submission to Love,
I practice,
Often nothing more than a hamster on a wheel
Spinning through endless cycles of meditation,
studying, body-work, Who am I?
Who am I?
Who!
I drift out of the practice into fantasies of
the melon breasted jellybean nippled woman at the gym.
(Of course I will find eternal comfort in her succulent embrace).
Where was I?
Who am I?
Back to the practice; keep spinning the wheel
until the cage of my mind breaks.

‘Bring the pieces together.
Bring the strewn pieces together.’
I read Integral books,
trying to complete the puzzle of this kaleidoscopic world.
My sex drives and power drives don’t care about depth.
All they see is flatland as they scream for nothing but airbrushed surfaces.
(Given their way, slavery and rape and dictatorship would be the world order.)
Thank God for the higher.
Thank God for the salvation of the higher.
Thank God for transcend and include.

Love compels me to drop the ignorant illusions of a lying self
and superficial promises
Love makes me include the depths, the interiors, the abandoned, the fragmented, the exteriors, the people, the love, the complexity.
‘Continue on this journey into wholeness.
Continue until liberation.
Trust the sacred passageway.’

I have no choice but to listen to the Voice.
The first murmurings of Love
are heard as the gentle stirring
of the incoming tide.
Small waves caress the dry beach.
‘It’s time for you to move.
It’s time for you to leave your reptilian slumber
And move up the sand.’
When I hear that Voice,
I know not to fall asleep again.
I have learnt my painful lessons,
because if I do not listen,
if I do not quickly obey,
then,
Love will grow angry and stormy,
Love will flex Her infinitely powerful muscles,
throwing me, exhausting me, tumbling me
With relentless waves
Until I am left humiliated, broken,
washed up on the Higher ground.
(if She has not decided, by the mercy of Her grace, to drown me first).

A command echoes from the heavens.
‘You will listen!
Your will will listen to me!
Eventually, your will will become My Will!’
I have no choice but to listen to the Voice.
(unless I want to be thrown, exhausted, tumbled and broken)
I cannot fight the Infinite with worn out excuses of ignorance and selfishness.
I cannot try to find my wholeness in blind separation,
trying to preserve my comfort within the
ceaseless
exhausting
arguments of my desires.


‘Better. Truer. More beautiful.’
The Voice of Love will eventually win,

It’s all complete within you anyway.
Just this.
A chair scrapes.
A woman rides past on a bicycle.
The summer air is hot.
I watch myself writing, arising, awriting.
It’s all within you.
You are already whole; Love has already won.
Stop denying this.
Stop Denying This!
Stop Denying Who You Really Are!
Stop resisting your homeless parts.
Stop resisting wholeness.
Stop it!

When exhaustion finally breaks your search for separation,
You can rest, you can find rest.

 

What does it mean to love? What does it mean to live and embody and act as love? It simply means to stop turning away. Inner transformation happens from the ability to witness ones feelings and thoughts without an agenda. The witness is consciousness, and it's nature is love. SatChitAnanda...(Sat - one energy everywhere, making up everything, past, present, future, Chit - the one energy has consciousness, and is aware of itself being  everything, Ananda - knowing itself to be everything and therefore free from seeking, the energy is happy, peaceful and blissful.) Through witnessing oneself, and learning to rest in that witnessing, you bring loving presence to whatever has been hidden away inside you, and that presence ( or consciousness) is, in itself, healing and curative. You become your own best friend, or rather, you learn to trust and have faith in that friend which has always been silent and loving within you, yet which you have not turned to before. Unconditionally and consciously being with oneself is an extraordinary act of self-love, as you stop running from what you are, moment by moment, and you start to embrace what you are, moment by moment. Love is not an ideal; love is closer to an active, welcoming embrace of what is happening right now, right here. The funny thing is, that when I bring presence to the so-called ‘difficult feelings', and don't feed them or try and make them go away, when I allow them to be there, then that is when they start to disappear.

What about loving other people? When we are able to be stabilized in being within ourselves, and not turn away from anything that arises within us, and not wish for what is arising to be anything else, when we live the intention to be deeply okay with ourselves and our perfection in whatever form we are arising, then we are ready to finally bring love to another. When we can hold another in our presence, without wishing them to be any different to what they are; when we can stay unconditionally present to another's pain or difficulty, or to their happiness and joy, feeling what they feel as though it were our own, then that is love to another. It's the bringing of consciousness to another, where perhaps they cannot bring consciousness to themselves. The holding of that space is healing, curative and loving.

 

What do I want? I want to follow my heart, let my heart be open and let myself be drawn into a creature who wishes to dance. I can't make anyone dance; they either dance when they are with me, or they don't. I cannot manufacture it. Like with M. She either wishes to dance, or she doesn't. I have to return and find my magic; I have to do my dance. What is my dance? It's poetry and music and writing and creation; its love flowing, unobstructed, into the world. Love. That's what I want to do the next 7 years; let love flow into the world and create something that is good and beautiful and true.  How, I don't know. It's another journey, another search, another great adventure that is arising. How do I take this realization into the world? How do I share Spirit? I require a strategy, a model, a path, an ability to do this, a product. I need to establish credibility. The result? A work, a product, a service that adds value.

I understand now the way of Love. Love is patient, kind, unwavering, timeless, gentle. Those are the expressions of love. Love itself is a mystery and cannot be known, only felt. Love is everpresent and unwavering, never absent, never away. It is us who veil love, yet the very search for love blocks love. The very search, the very movement away, is original sin, original separation. Love through its touch is healing. When you stop turning away and hold yourself, thats love. Love through its touch brings darkness into the light. Love, through awareness, heals and restores. When form is held in unconditional awareness, that is love being present. When others are held in unconditional acceptance, that is love holding others and healing others. You never heal; love heals. That acceptance allows movement, that freedom of awareness allows the form to unfold. Love is in itself curative, Love is in itself liberating. Love never turns away, it's us who turn away, and us who can turn back. Love always forgives, if we turn to love, it's always always there, waiting to receive us, waiting to lead us again. Love is forgiveness. Love carries no memory, love heals. Karma, suffering, is transformed through the willing light of awareness into freedom and into peace. Compassionate exchange. I understand it differently again now; it's the heart in actionable-form in this body. When I bear the suffering of another, I transform their suffering. When I reach for higher beauty and truth and goodness, that is love lifting me, love pushing me, love calling me home, love reaching out to itself.  It's one love, shining through the world, shining through the heart. Finally I feel understanding and knowing has formed.

I was speaking to my friend, and I told him one of my biggest shifts in the last six months was getting real. By getting real, I stopped chasing ideals; ideals of my self, of success, of physical health, of achievement, and so on. I stopped all that and started to have a long look at myself. I started to look continually at my inner world, at my feelings, at my thinking, and I started to become tremendously curious about what I was, and who I am. I started to look continuously, without judgment, and with interest, at what was happening inside of me.

A curious thing happened. I started to see myself as I was, and started to see how my thinking and feeling drove actions and created my results. In effect, I started to realize what it means to be conscious, to be free of thinking and feeling, and from that space of freedom, I could jettison non-serving thoughts and feelings, and install ones that would serve me. Once you can see what is real, then you can start to create. If you haven’t got authentically real with yourself, in other words, if you haven’t carefully understood your inner world (your thoughts and feelings and stories and beliefs and so on), then you wont know how you are currently co-creating the current results you have in your life. So, if you try and take actions towards new goals and new results, you may get a mixed bag of results, as you will unconsciously continue to create the old results in your life. You may then wonder why none of this personal growth stuff works, and you may sense futility in making any changes in your life.

So, become conscious. Learn to see your inner world, and know that you are not that inner world. How do you know when you are ready to create, as compared to avoiding a part of yourself that you don’t want to get real with? It’s simple. When you are deeply at peace with a situation, no matter if its filled with pain and suffering and darkness or light and beauty or inadequacy, when you are deeply at peace, and everything is perfect just as it is, then, paradoxically, you are ready to create. If you are not deeply at peace, any attempt at change will carry your unresolved karma with it, and you will get funny and confusing results.

 

I was listening to a talk by Ken Wilber, and he defined suffering as being the sum of avoidance and pain. You stop suffering when you cease to avoid what is, and you can unflinchingly be at ease with what is arising, be it painful or pleasant sensation. One of the things that meditation does then, is to bring resistance into awareness, and by facing the resistance, it finally gets dropped by the body.

I wondered how people could get a quick taste for this process of having a resistance come into awareness, and then being dropped by the body, and being able to experience the freedom and ease that comes with the dropping of resistance. My mind came back to running and training. I used to do some running; noting major, just half marathons, which was long enough for me. My favorite runs were training runs of about 12 kilometers, as they were not too short and not too long.

I always used to push myself a little on the  training runs, as when you train for a sport, you have to take your body to a limit, and then, pushing beyond the limit, you get breakdown and growth in the form of increased strength and ability. I used to notice a strange thing happening if I was pushing myself. I would enter mental states during the run, thinking thoughts like ‘I am going to fast,' or ‘I wont make it' or ‘this is hurting too much'. With the thoughts would come a feeling of resistance to what was happening, and so the run would become both a physical and a mental battle. The feeling of mental resistance would increase as I became increasingly convinced that the run was dangerous for my body and that I should slow down. My stories were very convincing, and sometimes I did slow down. However, other times I just kept on running, and then an interesting thing would happen. My mental story would be dropped, and it was though my body had been released. I still felt pain and tiredness, yet I could run with relaxed open ease, and enjoy the run. My mental resistance and my story of limitation had been dropped.  In Wilbers terms, I had dropped the avoidance to what was happening, and so my suffering had been cured. I would then have awareness in motion as I ran, and would feel relaxed and open.

When I entered those states of non-resistance in running, then that's when I enjoyed running the most. The trick was to push myself to my limit, and then, just when I thought I had reached my limit, to muster some more energy and to push on through. It's a very masculine approach; a final drive is needed when things are most difficult. Once that self-created barrier of resistance was penetrated, it was though vast energy reserves became available to the body, and then the run was a more feminine embrace of what was happening, a joyful relaxation into what was arising in action, moment by moment.

I have practiced meditation for many years, and essentially the process of giving up attachments (resistance) is the same as in running; a resistance to a real or imagined situation arises, and by staying with the situation and being aware of the resistance, the resistance gets dropped....so, if you want a little taste of satori...start running, swimming or cycling, and find the freedom as you push through your self-imposed barriers..