Wide Awake Living Newsletter

Being and Moving

In the Mystery

As the dark of the year is coming around once more, I am personally in a time that feels transitional, with no idea of what will be the outcome. So many of the standard elements of modern life that let us know what our lives will probably look like tomorrow or next year are missing now in mine, and there is no way to see ahead.

This is not comfortable at all to the vulnerable human person who wants to know that it will all be allright. I am the same as all of us who think we know how we want it to be, and try to get life to comply. But as we mature and relax, we are becoming more and more able to see our ideas as just thinking--just mind doing what mind does. We relax our need to have it a certain way. And as we stand apart from our thoughts we see more and more clearly that there is something else here also...

There is a background of awareness (behind and with the discomfort) that is keeping us informed that all of it, right down to the irrational fears, is life/ourSelves giving us exactly what we need. What we REALLY need in order to clear out the remaining interferences to living the awakening that so wants to be here amongst us, so wants to have an entryway into earthly life through all of us, in the same way that a seed "wants" to sprout.

In the final chapters of Life Beyond Belief, I get down to being willing to call this energy that seeks to move through us Love, in spite of the way that that word is used to mean so many other things in our culture. With a slight chuckle about what a funny thing it is to quote oneself, I will include words from a chapter called Love Beyond Reason in Life Beyond Belief.

"The times of not knowing are so often seen as something to get through and get out of, but to live there permanently is what is being asked of us. It is a place of rich and potent aliveness. The incredible anything-can-happen openness that is so fertile with possibility is not a problem to be solved by the mind. This is exactly where Love flourishes, and where we interfere less with Love’s own agenda. This is the place that Love, the universal oneness that we truly are, is most able to express itself in the world. It is where our lives are generated from by Love, without our minds having to figure out first what needs to be done. This essential openness where we suspend our personal agendas and ideas is like the infinite wellspring from which spontaneous activity can flow. Our actions then happen in a way where we find ourselves in each moment knowing what to do, and then whatever we do, our doing magically fits with a scenario larger than our personal knowing could ever comprehend."

And from the end of the book:

"Awakening isn’t about getting out of the sometimes mundane and sometimes very painful world of human experience. It is about being willing to go all the way into and through all of the core content of being our human selves and at the same time staying in touch with the purity of our true nature. It is a matter of fully living out our stories, knowing fully what they are, and yet shrinking from nothing. We can then begin to have our down-to-earth humanness be an offering, and to value it as a most precious gift that life has given us, enabling us to become a bridge across the seeming expanse between heaven and earth."

As we enter into the dark of the year together, may we be reunited with any lost vitality that is waiting there--any life force that is now ready to be reclaimed and made use of by Love. May we be made ready by this darkness, as the fertile seeds in the ground are made ready in the dark through the grace and richness of what has been laid down from last year's growth and death, without knowing at all how it will rise again.

Other People's Wonderful

New Books

I recently had a visit from a delightful woman named Rita Marie Robinson who has compiled a book of twelve interviews with women such as Neelam, Pamela Wilson, Marlies Cocheret, Karen McPhee and Catherine Ingram. The book is called Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Wisdom, The Feminine Face of Awakening and I highly recommend it, especially for women. For me it provided a feeling of a family of awakening that all of us ordinary people are welcome into.

Another new book that I very much enjoyed has been written by Connie Kellough, Eckhart Tolle's original publisher in Canada. This is the first book she has written herself, and her writings give a very encouraging view of the issues of our modern world, and the immanence of our collective awakening. It is titled The Leap and Connie says that we are approaching a critical mass in our collective awakening where we are headed for this "leap" into full consciousness of our oneness. She points out that our journey into fragmentation has been necessary and as it needed to be. It was encouraging to absorb her insights.

And just a note on Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice which has been available now for a month, and has been slow in finding its audience. I am lining up book signings and talks on its subject matter around the Bay Area in the first months of 2008. I am open to the possible travel to other areas and would welcome suggested venues from you all. It is possible that I will be able to travel in April and May.

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