Wide Awake Living Newsletter

Two Ways of Moving

Through Life

One way is the movement to accomplish something; to know what to do from an idea of "how" it is to be done. To change something, fix something, improve something. This is "me" affecting something or someone else, or "me" adding to myself some experience, idea or thing with an intention to change myself for better or worse. It is movement following mind, following the core belief in the separate "me" being in charge of life.

The other way is a movement of revealing what already is inherently so. Nothing is being added that can later be lost. Nothing is being taken away that can later return. If mind tries to understand this movement it is confused, jammed. This movement has a feeling of vitality in it--a warm dampness quite unlike the dry deciding of mind. This movement is happening by itself, beyond comprehension, perfectly orchestrating the bodies and lives of millions of people, the ocean tides, the circling planets. It moves with ease beyond all reason or understanding. It moves because it is motion, it is life in motion, and at the same time total stillness. It is where stillness and motion meet.

The first way is useful and appropriate for practical matters, for taking an idea into form, such as for building a house. It is not helpful for deciding whether to build the house in the first place. It is useful for the "how" but not for the "what". To know what to do, it is much more helpful to rest the overactive mind and instead to open up to what is already true outside of mind, to see what wants to happen outside of all of our ideas about pros and cons. It is a relaxing into a more natural way of being, where all that is needed is already given, such as the needed energy to tackle building a house. The sweet at-home feeling of being in the house when it is completed may be available now, along with a picture of what it looks like. This already-complete knowing is the way that Love/Life/God uses our humanness, and directs our course. We block this flow when we try to use the "how to" way of moving at our life's decision-points. Our mind-made self really can?t do a very good job of being in charge of our life. It tries so hard, but it is just not capable. It is much more helpful as a servant.

We so often forget about the second way of moving until our situation becomes untenable, only then consulting the deeper intelligence that is also in us. But the possibility of moving through life--being used by a deeper intelligence than mind--is open to us at all times and offers us a way forward into a way of living that is a recognition of the one life that moves all things.

What is Going On

There is only being-ness, not separate beings, people, or objects.

This being-ness (call it aliveness or Life or Love or God if you will) is expressing itself in form in innumerable ways through the whole of creation.

As humans, our rather risky task is in developing our mental faculties. In doing so our noisy minds have overrun our other organs of perception and have dominated our awareness for many thousands of years. We have been blinded to the world that exists beyond our minds. This has caused us to live lives that do not connect with reality, but only relate to un-real mental versions of the world and each other.

The abilities of the human mind are worth the risk, or so it seems, because all this is happening. It must be important. The risk is that we will destroy ourselves and other parts of creation because of the fear that living in this insecure mind-mediated reality precipitates and the behaviors it engenders. We may end up destroying ourselves and our planet before we realize what is going on.

Is it helpful to read this? Possibly but not necessarily.

Mind would like to contain what it is hearing at its own level, disarming the revelation as being dangerous to its own control. It would like to make it just one more impotent idea mixed with many others. Mind stops there, unable to save us from our predicament, from its own fear.

Is there another way to let in this revelation about what is going on? Yes, but the cost is the whole version of reality that our mind-mediated lives are based on. Are we willing to see, to really see what is going on, even if it strips us bare and gives us no foundation to stand on? If all that you are screams yes with a certainty beyond all the objections of the rational mind for undertaking such a journey then it can be helpful to read this. It can be time to go outside our mentally constructed walls and discover an entirely new world.

Lost

Where
Is the familiar voice
In this internal world
Dividing the bright clear song
Of the robin
From the roar
Of the traffic
Like Moses parting the sea?

Where
Was that now absent point
Where the division
Split asunder the world?
A breaking apart of the one
Making two, disjoined,
Set apart.

With furious noise
A helicopter
Vibrates the air…
The sound overwhelming,
Encircling, containing all sound
In its power, in its moment.

Leaving behind
A crackling void,
An absence of itself
Into which the birdsong arises
Undiminished.

Where
Is the familiar voice?

Having been taken this far
I am abandoned now.
Lost
Where stillness and cacophony
Wrap around each other
Like bedfellows
Entangled
In a Love without edges
Unmoving.

Lost
In the expanse
Where all that appears
Is both made of
And encircled by
The same vibrant
And glorious substance.

Beyond all expectation
Even I am included.
Even this
Humble imperfection
This ungenerous self-concern
Is enfolded
And welcomed
As a golden thread
In a larger cloth
Than the lost voice
Ever realized.

Today is the official publication date for Life Beyond Belief . No party was planned. The day was passed quietly with me laying low and reading a really good book by someone else. I just finished and very much loved Jed McKenna's new book called Spiritual Warfare. Its harsh and disturbing, but it gets some things said that needed to be said. Jed probably doesn't observe Valentines Day but Happy Valentines Day to you Jed, if you exist. Happy Valentines Day to us all.

The photos are from a trip just last weekend to the Sierra Nevada. The top one is from Lake Tahoe, the lower one a natural snow sculpture near Carson Pass.

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