The Dark Ages and the Beautiful Ages

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It’s Saturday, or Reflection Day, so here comes something I’ve reflected upon today: “We are powerfully imprisoned in these Dark Ages simply by the terms in which we have been conditioned to think.” – Bucky Fuller

This is NOT pointing a finger at those who’ve done the conditioning.
This is also NOT about believing that others-than-I are being conditioned.
This is about inspecting how my thinking is imprisoning me.

Recently my heart-friend Jean asked, “What would happen if you totally embraced what is right now. In your life. In your community. In the world. Just allowed it to be. And then, after a deep breath you said, I am going to make the most I can of what is. What might happen?”

What has imprisoned me?

  • The assumption that imperfection is a flaw I need to work on. I got out of that prison by embracing my and everybody’s imperfection.
  • The assumption I need to make money. I left that prison by doing what really, really mattered to me. And I always got all the money I needed. And now even much more…
  • The assumption that without intimate partner I’m not whole. Even though that particular prison sometimes catches up with me I leave it again through the understanding that I’m a cornucopia of love and attention.
  • The assumption that I need to be more, better, smarter, more loving, more ‘enlightened’ and work more disciplined and harder. I left that prison by realizing that as long as I live I grow and develop because that’s just the way humans are; nothing to be done about that. And now I find myself getting better, smarter, more loving and more enlightened for the shere fun of doing what I LIKE to do…
  • The assumption that I need to avoid suffering, pain, and the abyss, and/or escape the cauldron of challenging relationships. I walked out that prison by actually staying with the suffering, pain, and looking into the abyss (without dramatizing!) until it reveals its treasures that hide beneath that fiery surface.
  • The assumption I need to be someone. I walked away from that prison by simply being many, and not trying to be or stay one and the same. I find that I have multiple identities that collaborate to form this whatever-I-may-be, or to use a grand word, this mystery I call my self.

So what happens, as I leave the prison? The Dark Ages end and the Beautiful Ages start. And in the Beautiful Ages I see us build Paradise. With our very breath, with our gestures, with our communication, and with all who have walked out, and continue to walk out their private prison.
Thank you for taking this path with me.

Shades of Blue

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reaching our very ends
when all that’s left is wounds
where blue hours don’t spell dawn
but dry days and a brittle sun
reveals dreams’ corpses

we board the ship
unfettered in the night
lonely stars eternities away
a broken heart’s compass
to navigate by
or the sound of the waves
reminiscent of storms to old to remember

a whisper out of the blue
a faint memory, perhaps
a color of tomorrows breeze

reluctantly we take our astrolabe
not wanting to raise false hope, possibly
and then we just hoist them, our sails

and as if it had waited for this
as if the stars had only wanted desperate kisses
these wounds do raise a wind
to kindred harbours
where we’ll meet
blessed by the blue

(for Jean)

The Original Must Disappear

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I’ve been experiencing the return of the Original amidst deep inner turmoil. And as said in the first installment, welcoming the Original back with a big sigh of relief, everything since the Original’s first dawning was a deviation of sorts, a subtle distancing from the Original. Even being an enlightened spiritual teacher who’s brought quite some enlightening experiences to participants in his seminars and trainings (here a link to a video of one of my last seminars): very significant experiences, according to some, even physical healings, I’ve been told. And yet, I said a week+ ago, all of these were significant, deep, mostly beautiful, but all of these experiences and ways to live were also almost-but-not-quite the Original.

When the Original first reached me, calling it Grand Disillusionment at the time, it was much closer to what I said in the second installment on this matter just 4 days ago. And yet, as much as it is true what I said there, and as true as it happened to be within the framework of the day, there was still a slight distance involved in writing about it, and subsequently in my way of putting it. And now it’s become much clearer.

There really isn’t any Original, except, of course for the Original, but since that is a happening in time, even if an utter “nothing is happening!” liberation of all that pretended to make sense before, it can’t very well be the Original that I’d taken to have returned. This may not be, or may very well be, a logical conclusion, but that didn’t get me irritated before I wrote this. What irritated me was that the Original is not Original! It’s the returned version!

I guess I got stuck on the resonance of the Original, mistaking it for the Original itself and then – as I hadn’t yet understood what I was doing – I tried to emulate it! For Chrissake! I stumbled right into the trap that I’ve been warned of so many years ago that I can’t remember when it was: “There is no It that is It!” And, I may add now, even the not-It isn’t.

My body, who upon waking up this morning demonstrated beyond any doubt how much Love it is, yes, that body IS love made manifest, my body knew it all along. And hence my body being irritated by me hanging on to the Original of old: the resonance with the Original that came to shake me out of my turmoil and returned me to a sense of lovely sobriety, or realism, of simple being-here with everything and every one that happens to be here. But instead of leaving it at that, and going on with living and doing what feels appropriate, I started to cling to the returning Original and invoke its noting-is-happening lightness of being.

It took me some time to really register the irritation and not filter it away, or touch it with my magic Original Wand. Ah! The amazing wisdom of the body, of embodiment. Should now I sing the praise of imperfection, irritation, the truth expressed in limitation, deviation, distances from the Original? I’m tempted to, but wouldn’t that be just another version of turning things and matters into IT, the  One IT whose realisation  is the Ultimate It, and in consequence the end of all other Ultimates, other Originals, other versions of this mysterious mystery we call life, reality, Goddess and everything?

Being human, always this two-armed, two-legged form embedded in many kinds of ecologies, outwardly and inwardly; ecologies we have hardly begun to understand and are already destroying grand style, while at the same time some of the most brilliant of us escape, sorry transcend, this madness into unearthly spiritual realms; not knowing, of course, that any angel would gladly give his eternal life for embodied, incarnated existence… just to know how it is to be human, at least for a while.

We’re mortal, even though some of us think that we may be among the first immortal generation – it’s not clear if I belong to the former or the latter. But even if we live to be a million, we’ll eventually have to face death. The end of being someone with a definite, even though slowly changing form. And as embodied beings there will always be some imperfection challenging us, causing some pain maybe, or a frustration, or irritation. Only the ignorant could possibly live in perpetual bliss, for some time at least, until whatever dawns on them and they lose some of their ignorance.

As long as becoming is also present, being will never be enough. As long as there is a human around, there is the return to limitation, the return to embodiment, the return to form. We wouldn’t be craving for the formless, if we weren’t embodied. We wouldn’t desire freedom of all, some final liberation, if we didn’t experience our imprisonment more often then not. We wouldn’t want to transcend our present level and state, if we didn’t feel quite uncomfortable here. We wouldn’t yearn for perfection, if we didn’t suffer from being imperfect.

Somehow, seeing that, coming to accept that actuality whenever it happens to be the case here and now, accepting my humanity and the mad, mad times of violent ignorance all around Spaceship Earth for what it is, feels good, feels just right, reconciles me with myself and my brothers and sisters. And in some strange way it restores my power, the Lion shaking its mane, the dragon that lay coiled up on the treasure that I’m to inherit, the iron snake that is my birthright.

[Thank you She Mystery that hid inside the Trojan Horse for completing your mission. Thank you Black Raven that dropped hourly feathers and dived into the Ancient Abyss enticing me to follow. And thank you Friends and Fellows all over this Mothership for being so fricking important to me that I want to share all this with you.]

The Original keeps on Returning

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“Do not cling to your timeline,” he said.

As I followed this directive down a few paths, I felt lost. The Orient had gone, no direction. So I said, “No lighthouse in sight. No sun, no stars. What can guide me? Which line to follow? Where to put my foot?”

He smiled. In his eyes I saw how he felt for us, how he was willingly entangled in our human predicament. And yet he answered, “If all lines would be equally good and equally challenging in the long run, if the multitude of possible destinies were of equal quality overall, which timeline would you really want to travel down? What would you want to be your guiding light?”

On a round planet a path can bring you anywhere, and will eventually, if you travel it long enough, bring  you everywhere. And I’m in love with the two-armed form, the never ending diversity, the manifold presencing itself uniquely and originally wherever I care to just look.

The Original hides in plain sight. It reveals its nature as nothing; nothing without a capital letter and a -ness at the end. Imagine, if you like, a completely empty space; and for you smart-asses reading this, a space completely without any energy fluctuations, virtual or manifest. Now, if anyone would be asking you, “What is happening there?”, you’d answer, “Nothing is happening there.” That’s what I mean by nothing. The empty space would be nothingness, but what’s happening there is, “nothing, whatsoever.”

That’s how the Original is hiding in plain view, and reveals itself to me as soon as I remember, and sometimes even without me remembering anything.

The Neverending Dreamer by Cameron Gray

As soon as you try to take hold of the Original, mentally, feelingly, in Spirit or Soul, or any which way, it hides in plain view again. Pretending to be nothing. But once you see, once you understand that you cannot understand, that it cannot be turned into anything whatsoever, even identified with or arrived at neti-neti or iti-iti or any other way, once you let go of letting go, once you re-member, the Original is there. And even though you cannot identify with it, it’s You, it’s Me, it’s presencing originally wherever you care to turn. And it’s nothing special at all.

When the Original returns, it doesn’t return as a realisation. Realisations may follow in it’s wake, and often do, but the Original is no realisation. No sky, no heaven lights up, although colors may return to what seemed like tinges, hues, and glosses before. No divine trumpets announcing the omnipresent, non-dual, eternal out-of-time happening, although a transparent joy may infuse all that appears in your awareness as the Original returns to its ancient homestead in plain view.

And the Original keeps on returning. Not once and for all times, although it may often seem to be that way. Until you discover yourself in the distance, taking yourself to be this, that or the other. Trying to be enlightened. Trying to be good, beautiful and true. Meditating in the divine and blissful regions of the never-ending realms of light and darkness. Or finding yourself stuck in this or that karma, this or that trauma, this or that complex, this or that pain and suffering, this or that desire; finding yourself in all the never-ending imperfections of the human form. And that is Original as well: everything in plain view is. So you do whatever you can, to get the stuck unstuck, to see through your powerlessness and powerfully embody everything you choose, to welcome all and everyone that happens to visit the guesthouse of your awareness. Because, you may conclude on the timeline you’re on, whatever you meet, you meet as the one and only Original one. And healing is its wake, the trail it leaves behind. (Thank you Jody for pointing that out.)

For as long as you try to wrap your head, your self around it, the Original will hide in plain view. But as you accept the impossibility of it all, as you allow for nothing to happen at all, it may unwrap itself for you, and recalibrate everything just for the pure fun of it, the simple and ordinary presence of whatever happens to be.

—

Nothing is as it is. (Yes, you can read this at least in two ways.) So what I do, whenever I feel like it, is bring myself and what concerns me, or whatever else I care to bring, to nothing. And then it is touched, or maybe recalibrated and brought to another resonance, or it simply stays just the way it is originally.

Nothing is gained, and magically everything is. So, letting go of your timeline, which line to follow?

(Take Two – Take One here)

 

The Return of the Original

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SelfportraitMy irritation with all teachings by any or all Masters, contemporary or not, has revealed itself to being irritated with myself, not staying with the Original, trusting the Original, embodying the Original, easing into, seeing with and inhabiting the Original.

It’s a  matter of trust.

So, even though the Original became obvious to me on a beautiful summer day almost 15 years ago, and I stayed with/as the Original for quite some time, it became obfuscated by second-hand or rather, the not quite original, again, and I became a spiritual teacher in a lovely, great, deep, beautiful lineage, for sure, and the Original shone through often enough, but it’s utter simplicity was somehow lost to me. And once that journey as spiritual leader needed to be left behind for an exploration into wefulness, close encounters with the Circle Being, and other mystical happenings, I did, but still the Original was gone, in some strange sense unbeknown to me. And then the journey of turning business into a veritable spiritual path began for me: defined 7 years ago as Collaboration Ecology, and now growing into an international company and “the rubber hitting the road” for real. And still, I didn’t miss the Original; I didn’t even notice its fading into the background.

And so, as I look at this now, my journey into the not-original, into the slight distances between things, the never ending stories of aims, purposes and goals as real, and so endlessly on took its course. I could and can still call on the bliss-energy on demand and transmit it, even to strangers on the train, but still that’s not the Original, as now I know. I guess I wanted to learn to include all this not so original matter, the divine entertainment, including the shaktipat, the chi, the turned on blisses simply appearing in my body, but most of all the deflation, the obscure, the shadow and the night where all seems lost and nothing gained…

And yet, when I look right now, the Original is presencing itself as every blade of grass, as a flip chart marker, a mobile phone, this computer screen.

I never liked the idea of consciousness as foundational, that consciousness manifests as everything etc. Recently, when I read Bernardo Kastrup’s article that rationally and elegantly shows the hypothesis of consciousness as a prior, fundamental “force”, like gravity for instance or the electro-magnetic force, I did a little dance, because it satisfied everything my mind likes so much about science. And I liked the consequence it has for rational thinking. Yet truly, I couldn’t wrap my heart around it or my soul. And still the Original was forgotten.

I have, these last two days in particular, been feeling, experiencing, reluctantly welcoming and contemplating the ancient fears around my power again, triggered by a deep sense of intimacy I’ve come to experience unexpectedly and out of the blue recently, where I got utterly scared because of some foundational drama on my life’s path, the fear of having  a ‘bad core’ because those I’ve loved most, and who said truthfully they deeply and utterly loved me (at first my mother, when I was 6), always sent me away… Because of my conclusion when I was 6, that there must be something really very wrong with me, that I’ll always hurt the ones I love most, I managed to mostly never let anyone come so utterly close to me personally again.

Oh, there surely where moments and even periods of deep intimacy with everything, like when the Original became obvious, but this wasn’t person to person, heart to heart, soul to soul intimacy. This is deep and all encompassing Spirit, for sure, it is Clear Space, Transparent Joy, yes, and certainly the person is effected in many ways, but somehow it’s not including these ancient wounds, these big and little traumas embedded in the body and psyche and acting as an injunction in ordinary life’s circumstance and relating.

And yet today, in my  whole body contemplation of this particular wound, coupled with the irritation about some actually great tantric teaching about Siva and Shakti i was reading, the Original became obvious again in a new, simple clear way, and strangely enough it has always been here anyways, it just wasn’t That Obvious to me, beautifully sidetracked as I’ve been.

The Original showed up as the purposeless, aimless, simple self-presencing of the trees right out there, and then spread out as every little being and thing that appears in my awareness. And I remembered again that, to me, this Presencing is foundational and that maybe that is meant when mystics speak about consciousness being at root of all. But really, it doesn’t matter what they say, cause I’ll stay simply with the Original, and now the ancient pain, my fear of power and intimacy, the wounds and possible wounding that still scares me is mysteriously “okay”, it looks like.

Being Lost, Embedded in Love

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blue dominant

Blue Dominant by Emil Schumacher 1958

Contemplating the sense of being lost, really lost in this world, this dimension, this life… contemplating feeling lost and how that feeling has tugged me along this Way and that Path… sometimes alternating with a sense of being found by Light, by what convincingly felt like Ultimate Truth, by energies of bubbling bliss encompassing me whole bodily, coursing through these very veins, at least for a while. And always returning to being lost…

Slow contemplation: not avoiding the silent desperation of being bodily anchored in the shallow waters of a backward planet pretending to be modern, even post-modern or post-post-modern, whose leading nations boast in being rational, level-headed, the heirs of the Age of Enlightenment centuries ago, but whose populations, however rich or poor they are, are haunted by the destinies they struggle so hard to deny and therefore avoid seeing clearly. Blind to the festering wound called capitalist economy: really a systemic way to rob those that cannot properly defend themselves, the whales in the oceans, the magnificent great apes and elephants, just as much as the overwhelming majorities of our own species so very populous. Blind to the continual bleeding of all that is kind, and humane, and collaborative, and symbiotic, the blood being sucked up by all the parasitic vested interest groups.

Contemplating slowly and without protection, without turning blind eyes but rather feeling the hurt, tears welling up, heart aching: this surely is a Lost Planet filled with lost tribes, lost people, lost souls. Empty of all true meaning, no substance anywhere, nothing that fills, or fulfills, rather full of emptiness, full of ritualistic forms no-one can believe in, full of priests, mendicant monks, potential saints, therapists, fixers, healers, change-agents, desperately struggling to turn the tide, to cause a sea-change, to stem the tides of unending ignorance glossed over with slick entertainments on all channels.

Original + Fälschung 17 by Sigmar Polke, 1973

Having utterly failed as a species, daily abusing our magic for destruction, fleeing towards transcendent potentials, aggrandizing people which lead our parade to a future full of shining promises never to be kept, promises dangling in front of the nose of the so very beloved self, the individual soul whose dignity is elevated in stories told a thousand times, yet a dignity trampled underfoot every single day…

I finally settle for the truth of actually and truly being lost. Refraining from healing, not even trying to change or transform this lostness; just sometimes going through the motions as to not unduly disconcert my contemporaries:

I walk through busy streets and see multitudes, see each uniquely individual, as if the wool gathered ’round the central void, the fabrics encircling the central hole of lostness, was what really mattered. And as long as it matters, it surely seems substantial, it surely looks like the thread  leading you out of the labyrinth… if you had the stamina, the power, the guts, the energies needed to follow the thread. Yet, upon exiting, you find yourself in an even greater labyrinth that is alive and well, the maze no human power, nor divine power, nor cosmic power can escape. You try transcendence, imagination, spirituality, fabrication, religion, philosophy, entertainment, dream, and all the myriad forms of making meaning.

Things may align for you, they may coincide. If you’re lucky, the Great Escape finally collapses, and you rediscover how all of your striving was to no avail, was nil and empty from the very beginning. You never escaped the void at the center of you. And now, finally, without any more hesitation you give in, you surrender to the inevitable.
Since now you stopped looking for the way out, and you see your friends, your acquaintances, your strangers, your anyone on the street, without the consolation of your compassion or any other soothing altruism, your eyes and all of you can really see. You see the Love that embeds it all.
The Love that cascades from the clouds, and the trees, and the stranger’s eyes. The Invisible Love that flavors the air. The Love that seasons the void from the very beginning of what naively is called time, which is really just the way you keep relating to it all. You wouldn’t possibly know what Love is, the Love that Embeds it all, and you surely couldn’t reduce it to a feeling or explain it even to your listening mind and self. Yet, you know this Love was there always, and you solemnly and irrevocably declare it to be prior to the void.

You state by Your Given Grace, as Prime Participator in this Ambiverse, “All, including everyone and everything, are embedded in love. This is how it is and always was.”

And you know this beyond even the Greatest of Doubts, that in the beginning you said, “Let there be Love.” And lo and behold, There Was Love.

 

PS: This is to be the core of the next Neuroplastic Experiment: All is embedded in Prior Love.

Interlude in Limbo

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in limbo

1. Lit. a region of the afterlife on the border of hell. (In some Christian religions, there is a limbo set aside for souls that do not go to either heaven or hell. This sense is used only in this religious context. (*Typically: be ~; remain ~; stay ~.) The baby’s soul was in limbo because she had not been baptized.

2. Fig. in a state of neglect; in a state of oblivion; in an indefinite state; on hold. (*Typically: be ~; leave something ~; put something ~.) We’ll have to leave the project in limbo for a month or two. After I got hit on the head, I was in limbo for about ten minutes.

In Limbo (my title) by Solve Sundsbo

My dreams, my hopes have shattered. The dreams still in waiting of fulfillment don’t have my spirited input in deed and consequence.

All my intimate relationships have broken up, and the one I intended to be true… it’s hopeless.
A deep understanding of my father’s words, five years before he seized the opportunity to die, that he was tired of it all and that he wanted to go.
As I’m entering into all this, deciding not to avoid the pain inside, the dark cloud of thoughts in my head, I see that unawareness doesn’t cure suffering, and never has. Escaping with organic chemicals, distilled or grown,  escaping into stories as told on flat screens and pages, drifting off in any way, may alleviate the churning sadness in the guts and heart, the actual emotional pain coursing through my innards. But it doesn’t alleviate the suffering, at best it postpones it. Until now.

And in the middle of this, as I walk the streets, an acute clarity of vision arises. As if the shallows were removed, the flatness of the mental screen. A fleeting shine in the eyes of a child far away hits the inner eyes with freshness, opening up the sky of clear vision even more. There is no hope in that, it’s the flicker of the inner sun. As if a star shows up momentarily in the clear dark.

Picture by Eve Sussman

Intentions? Face it and withhold nothing.
Feelings? Hopeless sadness.
Activity? Contemplating shattered dreams, broken promises, manipulations, the hurt and suffering I instigated, the wounds of treason and destroyed intimacy, and yes, sure, the friends that are not here in the flesh, the embraces I refused, the endless self-boycotts and failures I meticulously produced. The unawareness, the sleep, the obfuscation of the pain, the projections, the escape of thinking big thoughts and grand projects, and all the myriad ways to numb the sense of hell that humanity keeps warm for all creatures, the doom hanging over us all.

Ah, yes, calling on my enlightened oasis, energizing my inner bodhisattva, hopping into the non-dual dimensions … I could do that. But I’m not in the mood to leave the limbo, knowing these spaces to be truly empty whereas this limbo is substantially alive.

I’m lost. And accepting the intrinsic purposelessness of reality, of what is substantially alive, how could there be assurance or certainty? Where would you place a foundation in a bottomless polyverse?

I’ll stay here and be lost until I’m found, if being found is part of the pattern of my life’s reflection on the waters of the Mystery. As in my darker dreams where I know where I’m going, where I do have a goal to reach, but everything conspires to thwart me reaching any significant advance.
As my friend  says, “I got drunk in another place. Let the one who poured me the wine find me and bring me home, if that is where my steps are to lead.”
And over night, in my sleep, I left this place. Transported by my inner tribe to another sky.
There is an inkling somewhere of a meaning not translatable to any other spaces, like something lurking at the threshold of awareness, never to enter, always around the corner; like a dream just before we remember it.
And there is this other idea that I connect to my experiences with the Circle of the Heart. In it we always reach the place where we have to accept our utter failure to make ‘It’ (in that case the We, the Circle Being) happen; were we have to accept that we cannot do anything more to invoke, conjure up, install, (co-)create the “Next”. It is utterly beyond our reach, our grip, our power. We have to die to our ability. And then, of its very own accord, it may enter…

Raffaelle Monti, The Bride, 1847