Well, well, well. 
That pilgrimage is still working it's magic in the soul and things are still moving forward to sell my place~~ even though there's been some things that have come up, such as, ARE WE REALLY DOING THIS????!!!!  With a teenage daughter, a dog, a cat, and no set destination other than a sense of Mallorca as well as a vision that came a few years ago, of going across country in a motorhome on a book/singing tour.

Then this morning in an early meditation an image of a ship came sailing in, so to speak, and oh the freedom on that boat.  The joy that was present.  The weight and the burden that had been lifted.  The light that was shining and moving and being without worry or doubt or fear.   The deep safety and love that was felt was palpable.

The greater and more real our visions become, the more clearly we see the way the ego operates, i.e.  from a place of control and attachment.  It is grounded in fear and it receives all of it's comfort in the illusion of nouns.  You know, people, places and things.  It gets all of it's juice from outside circumstances and events.  When these are going according to how it thinks they should, then it feels good.  When they are not, it feels bad. It lives on a roller coaster based on wordly events and it is weak.  It is lost.  And in the end it is downright nothing.

I grabbed a quote from a workshop flyer that came this morning:

Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.
Japanese Proverb

Without Vision, the people perrish.  While America may have had a larger dream at one time, one could say that it has lost it.  And, it does seem that a lot of the dream even from the begining was about possesion, owning land, something the Native Americans and other indiginous people could not comprehend.  How does a human being own part of the earth?  And then there was the little blip in the history book about owning people.  Of course America wasn't the first to come up with these, but, we sure learned to play the game. The ego dream game, and we've learned it quite well.  In this game, this dream, the one with the most stuff, with the most titles and awards and status, the biggest house and the fastest toy is the winner.  The other game being played is the wake up from the illusion game.  Which one are we really playing?  I know which one I had been playing for years, but I'm getting a strange feeling that I've been sucked into the American dream game on subtle levels a little more than I care to admit.   In this game, we are attached to results.  In fact we get so attached to these little material results we  wouldn't really be open to the signs and synchronicities that were being reflected to our Soul asking us to move in a new direction.
And, what makes it even more challenging to live from a Vision is that this kind of material dreaming is perpetuated throughout the media all day long.  Although it is common knowledge that this dreaming without vision way of life is being broadcast all over the planet now, if you're not diligent in your effort to maintain the vision of the Soul and stay awake, you might just fall under the spell.  Many times I've heard from others that the best thing they ever did was get rid of thier tv.   All you have to do is turn it on for a few minutes to see how your well being, your joy, your comfort and your happiness depend on acquiring things.  Or, how horrible things are and you basically have no control over any of it.  I also know of those who use the news as 'prayer requests' and stay in that space of vision, seeing beyond the illusion and affirming good.  One might have to work up to longer prayer sessions incrementally though, so as to not be sucked in.

Something that I've come to remember in this recent house letting go possibility that  for those 'without vision' the material world becomes a ruthless taskmaster.  That the American dream has five year olds memorizing and testing in order to get a 'head start'.  We get them on the hamster wheel at younger and younger ages not out of vision, but out of fear that they will not be able to have that good ol American dream of the white picket fence, or be able to compete with their peers, if they don't.  That they will not be good little worker bees and keep the whole dream going. 

Of course there is nothing wrong with owning material things, it's just that most people don't really own things, the things own them.  Their decisions in life come from how to keep owning them and , god forbid, not losing them.  
Thank goodness we know that things are changing. More and more people are waking up from the dream and into the Vision.   Many have have stepped off the hamster wheel through exhaustion, only to discover that life still worked out once they got off and all the fears they had that it wouldn't where just illusions, some have had no choice but to step off due to extreme wake up call in the fom of an illness or unforseen tragedy which allowed them to reprioritize their values, and some have stepped off simply out of boredom and the realization that for all of their hard work, in the greater scheme of things, they were going no where. 

And I do have to say, the vision doesn't necesarily involve selling the house (we'll see!!) but it does involve being willing to.  The willingness to do whatever it takes.  And, instead of having to live out of that energy of fear and doubt and conformity, one finds they can sail on the seas of love, without having the know the exact destination, knowing and trusting they are being carried by something much greater than themselves, living for something much greater than themselves, and participating in a New Age, a New Edge, a New Life and a New World. No longer waiting for a ship to come in, but stepping aboard the one that is made of Love and Vision and Freedom and has been waiting for us all along,
Behold I make all things New.
Happy Sailing   :-)

the adventure continues.....

From the book Tao; The Pathless River by Osho:

The real order arises not from the outside but from the innermost core of your being.  Allow disorder, don't repress it.  Face it, take the challenge of disorder.  By taking the challenge of disorder and living it- living dangerously- an order arises in your being.

Tao is very much against knowledge.  Tao says that even if you are ignorant and the ignorance is yours- it is good-- at least it is yours, and it has an innocence to it.  But if you are burdened with accumulated knowledge, scripture, tradition, then you are living a false, pseudo life.  Then you are not really living, you are just pretending that you are living.  You are making impotent gestures.  Your life has not the intensity, the passion-- cannot have the passion.  That passion arrises only when you move on your own, into the vast sky of existence.
Why can't you move alone?  Because you don't trust life.  You move with Mohammedans, you move with Hindus, you move with Jews, because you don't trust life, you trust crowds.  To move alone one needs great trust in life....the trees, the rivers, the sky, the eternity of it all-- one trusts this.  You trust man made conceptions, you trust man-made systems, you trust man-made ideologies.  How can man-made ideologies be true?
Man has created these ideologies just to hide the fact that he does not know, to hide the fact that he is ignorant.  Man is cunning, clever, and he can create rationalizations, but these rationalizations are bogus-- you cannot move with them into truth.  You will have to drop them.  Tao says that ignorance is not the barrier against truth-- knowledge is the barrier.

As I was packing things in the house yesterday I found myself taking many mini-breaks, and one could say, stalling a bit.  I'm still wondering if I'm even moving.  But, as my friend Andy pointed out yesterday in a mini-break satsang conversation, there is an incredible and gentle power in wonder.  This is so true. The power of innocence is astounding.  We can fall under the illusion that it is the aquisition of worldly knowledge that make us effective, but it is that innocence and wonder that has the sight to see what is really going on behind the scenes so to speak. It is that wonder that can see that knowledge doesn't really change much of anything.  It merely rearranges the furniture on the metaphorical deck of the titanic. 

It was a child that pointed out that the emperor had no clothes.  As we go further on the spiritual path we begin to see many naked emperors on the road.  And, not only people, but metaphorically speaking, many things that once filled the ego with excitement or fulfillment losing thier juice, and in effect, their power over us.  We begin to discover the truth that only Love is real.  And, that although it is reflected to us in many beautiful and suprising and delightful ways,  it does not exist outside of us.

A few years back, by divine appointment, I was at the bank and was approached by a man who looked familiar.  It turns out this man was in fact a celebrity, a successful community service-oriented business man, with a strong religious focus and ties as well.  We talked for a bit in the parking lot and he invited me to come by his office sometime.  We talked on the phone a few times and I finally did make it to his office about a year later. 
The walls of the office were covered with pictures taken of him with presidents and celebrities around the world, and service awards covered the walls as well.  These walls seemed to command respect in themselves.  Or beg for it.   He had a strong, almost intimidating presence, but had a very sweet and charismatic side as well.  I really liked him.  After some chit chat came the real reason he invited me up in the first place.  For all of his connections, celebrity, religious studies and affiliation, fame and fortune,  he was not a happy man.  There was something missing and he wanted to know how he could find it.  In essence, he wanted to know how he could find love.
I was a little thrown off by the way the questions came.  He said, I have helped many people, I help them by doing this this and this.  How do you help people?  And, the first thing that came into the mind is that I don't help people at all.  I love people.  I see people.  I just do what I love, and in that doing, people seem to get a lot out of it.  And, when I am in that space of seeing, of really seeing, people, I see God.  How can one 'help' God? 
How to explain this to a mind that was only interested in a quick fix formula?  That was used to dealing with things in a certain way, and getting a certain result.  How to gently convey that it doesn't work like that in an authentic spiritual life.  In love. There is no quick and easy ten step process to surrendering your life to, as Rumi says, 'to the one who already owns your breath'.  And how can you tell anyone 'how to' when you are well aware that 'you don't' ?  

I don't remember what I said, I only know the more I talked it seemed the more agitated he became.  In essence, I wasn't giving him what he wanted.  A system to be applied.  The thing that was probably most confusing and upsetting was that the ego couldn't 'do it'.  That the true spiritual path, or 'finding love', is not about 'doing' anything, it is letting go of 'doing' and of everything the mind has taken on as truth-- and allowing the living truth within to surface spontaneously as a result of this letting go. 

He wanted to know what I did specifically.  But what could I tell him?  Get into an abusive relationship for eleven years, take drugs, gain one hundred pounds, have an existential crisis and let go of your mind to the extent that you feel like you are going to lose it altogether and tthen you do, and instead of finding yourself  in a mental institution, you find yourself in Heaven?  
There is no 'way' to get there.  You are already there.  You just have to let go of everything convinced that it is not there.
He obviously wanted answers but the ones I had were not the ones he wanted. And I understand.  This kind of talk is nonsense to the mind.  Like a friend said, the language of Truth is different from the language of the mind, and sometimes you may as well be speaking Swahili.  We really are here to learn and speak a new language.  One that connects us and liberates us all.
 
I had compassion for someone who was so obviously brilliant and had created such a "good" identity, how could one not help become attached to such a wonderful thing?  He definitely had his work cut out for him.  And even though giving it up would bring him the freedom and the love and the joy he longed for, from the ego's standpoint that would be a very unintelligent thing to do.  There would be nothing in it for him.  Why on earth would he do that when he had so much to lose?
All of those other things at least gave him something. 
The religious affiliation gave him the safety in numbers sense of things, even though he was still lonely, and it gave him the comfort that he was a spiritual man, even though he knew deep down he didn't really know God,
The awards gave him a sense of accomplishment, even though he knew deep down there was something else he was supposed to be doing,
The service he did gave the ego a boost and helped convince himself that he was a 'good' man, even though he hadn't done the inner work to forgive himself and didn't really believe he was,
And the celebrity gave him a sense of importance and love, a false love based on separation, but this, and these other things, he would only admit to himself when it got bad enough.  Most of the time all of this had been enough to keep him going. He was getting older now.  He was running out of time and his soul was in pain and no longer willing to play the game it had been playing.  He could no longer fool himself into the illusion that everything was going to be okay if he just did more of what he was already doing. 

It seems we all get hooked into playing parts and stories and identifying with those, and it takes everything we have to let them go and trust that there is something a million times greater than the we 'we' think we are.  And in order to find it we have to go within and begin unlocking the mysteries of the soul and stop looking to the outer world for 'it'. 
This might be too much to ask of him at this point.  I know it was too much to ask of me. It came only through the grace of a divine discontent that led to an inner hunger, curiosity, and obsessive focus in finding out who I was, and continues today after getting taste after taste and an ever deepening awareness of real freedom, real love and real joy and of connecting with others on the path through the expansive and beautiful energy of the heart. 

Another one of those divine appointments, which has become a regular weekly appointment, is with a group of inmates I have the honor of working with, who are doing sigfinicant inner work, and who with the satsang and fellowship is tremendously rich.  We're currently going through the Artist's Way book by Julia Cameron and one of the guys was talking about how he took a painting class when we was around 11 or 12 and his ability to paint was so great they had him paint a mural and got the whole school painting! He talked about his obsessive nature and drive, and about how he was put on ritatlin as a child.  His dad didn't approve of the painting thing, so he turned that energy towards working on gocarts.  Then later he turned it towards criminal activity, I'm assuming drug selling, then later while he was behind bars, learning an astonishing amount about the criminal justice system and the law.  He was actually incredibly successful at everything he turned that obsession, ie. love, towards.  More recently he turned it towards the stockmarket and even while he was behind bars made a lot of money with his wife doing the investing.  Someone else in the group wondered what would happen if he turned this energy upon himself.  If he got that interested and that focused on the inner dimension of his being.  Turned it to discovering his spiritual nature. 

It is very clear that this evergy, the wild and obsessive energy that school systems and parents seek to 'calm down' and supress, can also be seen as Love that has the power to move mountains.  It is a force all of it's own and when let loose it can do anything.  It is just a matter of where we focus that energy, that Love.  
The Tao is about letting that energy, that Love, flow, and allowing ourselves to surrender to that flow.  The western culture has become focused on directing that flow to serve it's own agendas.  Instead of flowing naturally, there are manmade channels that allow us to move off of our true path and true destiny and into the land of the 'shoulds' of society and of ego.  Ego meaning edging god out.  And, since these channels still look like rivers, and since they are still flowing, we think we are on the path.  But, we are on an illusionary one, a worldly one, and the water that it brings will never truly quench our thirst.   The waters may look real but they are not living waters.  They are not alive in the soul. 

These days we even give children drugs if they refuse to be redirected into a false current.  Into a manmade river.  And then we lock them up when they get older for participating in the same game.  Only it is a different game.  At least  the drug dealers on the street don't  force anyone to buy their drugs, they have enough buyers that need to use the drugs to supress that energy.  So, it is much different. Our children don't have a choice in the matter. They can't  "just say no".

It is true that whatever we put our energy into we can succeed at.  Whatever we are sincerely interested in we can materialize into form.  Whether we are conscious of these interests or not.  This is where we get the notion of co-creation.  We become conscious co-creators as we learn to stay awake and direct this energy.  We begin to see that we can have whatever we want.  Celebrity, fame, money, high positions and status, and, when those begin to bore us, or haunt us from their poor substitutes for the Real stuff, maybe we'll begin to turn our focus and energies inward and begin to focus on qualities rather than outer things.  We will begin to court freedom, or trust, or wisdom, or peace rather than a fixed outer goal that the ego imagines will bring it those things. 
And, shock of all shocks when we turn our attention inward, wisdom will show up, as an awareness of Who We Are.  A Peace beyond this world will show it's face.  Freedom will find us.  And, lo and behond things will manifest in the world from these inner states, from a solid foundation of spiritual awareness and reality ,and without attachment, because we are well aware they are simply reflecting.  Not even 'coming to us'.  But Us.  

But before we get to know ourSelves, before that inner Emperor is discovered
we usually come to know many naked ones.  Many disguises we wear.  Many stories we tell.  Many ways we block that love.

But once we get back in the flow, and unblock that river of love and begin to really flow again, in that chaotic and dangerous, that beautiful and innocent stream, and once we trust that life within above all else, unattached to results, we will begin to live by divine destiny rather than one that was created for us by someone else. We will begin to see through those naked emperors on the road, and we will discover once again our true face, our true self, our true home, and meet by divine appointment rather than manmade ones

and bless it all
bless it all
bless it all

There is a time to admire the grace and persuasive power of an infuential idea, and there is a time to fear it's hold over us.  The time to worry is when the idea is so widely shared that we no longer even notice it, when it is so deeply rooted that it feels to us like plain common sense.  At the point when objections are not answered anymore because they are no longer even raised, we are not in control: we do not have the idea, anymore, it has us.                                                         
~~from the book, Punished by Rewards, by Alphie Kohn

For the anthropomorphic view of the rat, American psychology substituted a rattomorphic view of man.
~~Arthur Koestler, The Act of Creation


While talking with a friend yesterday I remembered one of my favorite books and why it was one of my favorite books.  It's called Punished by Rewards, and it is effectively a case for why a simplistic reward system, based on behaviorist -Skinnerian psychology, is crippling us as a people.  It's not that it's a bad idea, it's just that it is too small.  Maybe if we were simply animals, maybe if we were just here to 'be good' by not peeing on the carpet and staying off the couch it would be enough.  But, for spiritual beings who have come to create and love beyond belief, simply focusing on good and bad behavior and subsequent reward and punishment lowers us into a more base nature, or what one would say as a relinguishment of power; our 'only human' nature and limits our true potential enormously.  From this frame of reference as to who we are, we may as well wear collars and pat eachother on the head, good boy.  Or, give eachother pops on the nose, bad girl.  We may as well design systems that tear eachother apart, bring others down, or build them up disproportionately, without the awareness that we are doing the same things to ourselves in the process.

There are so many assumptions we make, and the first is that we even know what is good and bad in the first place.  We base this on what we believe to be true or what we feel about something which is usually based on what someone else said or who we think we are as a human being.  But, as spiritual beings having a human experience, and from that spiritual frame of reference, good and bad takes on a very different  flavor.  As in, it does not exist.  So, in effect, most of us here on the planet are basing our entire lives on a false premise.  
And that's just number one.
And, that is my number one since the Punished by Rewards book is not a spiritual book per se, although everything is spiritual in my book.  It is actually full of scientific experiements (a hundred pages of reference notes in the back) which appeals to the rational, skeptic inside (and for all of the fun loving and free spirit attitude there is a hard nosed skeptic within that likes the utilitarian approach to spirituality- what's the point of reaching nirvana if you can't apply it successfully and realize significant changes in your everyday life experience?).

I read this book back around 1997, and a few times since, and it always sparks things for me.  It was one of those groundbreaking, mind altering, holy-cow!!  s.  You know one of those.  We all have them.  Those things that just knock our socks off and shake the foundations of what we have been told, as it plugs into something within that we have always known.

If you look deep enough into  the premise of the book and take the information it gives in the studies, our entire culture, is based on a system of rewards and punishment, a false premise which effects our ability to truly live in the most real sense of the word.  It effects our ability to experience real freedom and real love and real joy and that is why we constantly settle for poor substitutes through addictive behavior.
It talks about the way when people are working for a reward, they tend to lose their creativity and edge.  They tend to actually produce less, with less quality in the long run. 
They tend to play it safe, and get bored, out of the fear of the loss of the reward. 
This is just one of the things he talks about, and it makes sense.  If you think you have something to lose, you are looking outside of yourself and are no longer motivated by something within you, you are motivated by a subtle fear.  Fear of not getting.  Fear of making a mistake. Fear of losing.  And the bigger the reward, or the greater the punishment, the greater the fear.
In that fear you begin to look to others to see what they are doing, you look to the past to see what has worked before, you think of what the reward giver wants in order to get the reward.  All of this puts you out of yourself.  Out of the space inside where your unique genius lies. It puts you out of your life mission and why you came to the planet in the first place.  It puts you into mediocrity and keeping up with the Joneses.  And, if you're honest with yourself, it puts you into a prison.

And, if you take it even deeper, there is a huge belief in heaven and hell that many on this planet hold.  If you do good you will go to heaven.  If you do bad you will go to hell.  Eternal damnation.  Eternal even!!  If you are a good little boy you Santa will give you toys.  If you are a bad little boy you will get coal.  So, basically, God has become Santa Claus and people live out thier lives in fear of pissing off Santa Claus and ending up with clumps of coal in life and eternal damnation in afterlife.  
What have we gotten ourselves into?  And the belief is so subtle.  Even for those of us with signficant awakening experiences and conscious awareness of spiritual beingness.  We really have to look and see if there is anyone or anything we are looking to please out there.  Do we really believe we are free to do what we love, and that that will actually bring the desired 'reward' since we will be in the high frequency and energetic of love, or are we still trying to 'be good' to get the goodie from a 'Santa' outside of us?

That wonderful book title, Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow, really is true.  And it is my experience that you don't have to limit it to an occupation.  Do what you Love, what you are pulled to do, called to do, need to do, want to do. Right now in this moment without hesitating.  Not for anyone or anything else, certainly not for money, and then watch everything you need show up.  Only a funny thing will happen.  Since you are doing what you love, and no longer fearful of pissing off Santa or anyone else, no longer looking to outside rules or conforming to peers, when the rewards show up they won't carry the clout they did before.  They won't have the juice they once did, or give the high they used to, because the real reward has already been achived.  The real reward is within.
The real reward is that you get to be yourself and actually live.
The real reward is real freedom.

This is in many ways the premise that is used in the prison work I participate in- in that I don't go in with the attitude that I am going to rehabilitate someone so they can be productive members of society.  It is to help them to see through the illusion which that society has created and to ask the deeper questions of the soul.  It just doesn't make sense that I would want to help them to return to a system that is pretty much responsible for putting them there in the first place.  Not that they didn't have choice, and we could say it was a bad choice, but we could also say maybe it was a higher choice, a rebellion of spirit, to take of the collar and say, I'm not playing anymore.  Or, to actually play it after all, play it really well, and just be one of the ones that got caught.

It makes logical sense that if you just give enough rewards, or punishment, people will change.  But they will usually change into punishing, judgmental and egotistical people, thinking themselves superior to those who haven't made the 'good' changes they have.  Spiritual change, or awakening, or freedom, comes from letting go.  From forgiveness.  Once we can let ourselves and others off the hook and let go of everything we thought we should have done, according to some idea of what our life is supposed to be, according to some limiting idea of who we are, and really, truly, let go of all of that, we no longer think of ourselves as bad or wrong or sinners.  As soon as we don't think of ourselves as bad and horrible people we stop acting that way.  We get to change and to see ourselves as good people, we get to live out that belief, and we start to act like good people and become good people.  And, then we continue to let go some more, and some more, and some more, and after a time begin to not even think of ourselves as 'people' at all.
Aye, there's the rub, and in the rub the freedom.
Truly we are the reward we are seeking.



                                                                                

 

He who binds himself to a joy

Does the wing'd life destroy

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sunrise

                                        ~~~~~William Blake

Joy is who we are.

Contrary to popular belief, and advertisers, Joy is not something to be sought after and gained in the world through acquisition, be it acquisition of a material thing or a position of power or fame. It does not come from these things. It does not come from seeking a goal in the world and then feeling joyful when that goal is achieved. If we acquire joy in these ways we are nothing more than spiritual junkies dependent on our next worldly fix.

Joy is who we are.

We can ask ourselves if we would still be happy, assuming we are, if we had no goal to attain, no person to help, no ‘reason' to live.  Could we still be happy then?  What if we had nothing to do?

To have no agenda is to be free. In Reality, Life has no reason to live. It just lives. It has no agenda outside of itself.  This doesn't mean though, that nothing gets done, and enormous amount can be acomplished by 'doing nothing.'  It is a space that the action springs from, rather than a lack of action.

The Soul has no agenda. It is Joy. It is Freedom.  It is Love.  Since It is not under the illusion that It needs, it does not create the experience of needing.  It knows that it is joy, and from the worldly point of view, it sends that message to the universe, and in effect all the joy in the world is reflected back to it in its experience. It is no longer sending out the message that it needs it.  It is it.  It has it.  And the universe says, oh, you have it, here. And here is some more.  And here is some more. You have it.  You have it.

There is one catch though. 
Once you know you are joy you will no longer get high off of the joy being reflected back to you in the world. You will no longer be under the illusion that you acquire, or require, anything.

There is also a plus.  You will be free.

Joy is who we are.

We mistake the reflection for the real thing, the real thing being the Joy that is within us, simply because we have forgotten. Simply because we don't know ourselves. Simply because we haven't gone deep enough.  We rush out of the house ready to conquer the world when we have not conquered our sense of separation.  The only way to experience sustained joy, sustained love, sustained bliss, sustained freedom, is to live from the inside out.  To stay awake to the Truth of who we are and not fall under worldly spells of separation and any sense of a limited identity outside of God.

The average person lives in a constant state of low level separation anxiety.  They are under the mistaken impression that their abundance, health, joy, peace, love and beauty is separate from them, and they are here to find these states through experiences in the world.  They go on an outer quest, and do a lot of doing to ‘get' these things, and then a lot of continued and sustained and exhausted doing to keep these things,  rather than finding they are already these things within, and exuding them.  Being them. Living them.

From this vantage point even the above average person, one who is working for a greater cause than themselves, such as the freedom of others, the environment, is still usually doing this work from the illusion of separation and will never have the effect of one doing something from a state of inner union and joy.  From an inner state of union and joy there is nothing to fix, nothing to save, nothing to help, and ironically, things can be fixed, saved and helped, i.e. "seen rightly" and manifested, since one is no longer under the illusion that they ‘need' it, and are no longer feeding that illusion of need and separation, and unconsciously helping to create a world that needs fixing.

If you think about it, it is impossible to acquire yourself. You already ‘have' yourself. But it is possible to have yourself without knowing yourself. 
And, it is also possible to truly come to know yourself. 

And when you know yourself, you will know joy.  You will no longer need to bind yourself to anything in the world that you are under the illusion that can give you this joy. You will no longer feel the need to possess anything.  It is then that you will live in eternity's sunrise.  Out of time.  Out of space. Out of the mind of separation.

And, since you are not holding on to anything, free to fly yourself.

Since we have chosen to incarnate, to take form, to take on the illusion of separation and individualization, we are ever expanding into the awareness of our spiritual beingness and in our ability to remain in this beingness if we so choose.  In this expansion there are times of contraction. There are times we will fall.  Fall from that state of grace or state of knowing.  And we may find that falling is precisely and ironically the thing, the next step, that is necessary for us to remain in that space of joy and freedom. Usually on the brink of a creative or spiritual breakthrough the ego will try to stop the process.  It will not be able to understand what is happening, not be able to remain in control, and the experience of being blindfolded, whirled around, still trying to ‘do', hand held out trying to pin a tail on a donkey, will be a little too much, and it will take off the blindfold, resort back to physical sight and physical senses to guide it rather than intuition and faith.  It wil resort back to dealing with things it can rely on.  The world of illusion.  The physical senses.  It goes back to doing what the ego does best.  Remaining in control.  Doing things it thinks it can do, based on the information it receives from those physical senses and working with others who are living in that same world.
But in order to fly you must fall. You have to let yourself be spun around, let yourself fall from that safe nest and trust that you will fly. Trust that the divine beingness that you truly are will carry you, that wings will unfurl as you fall.  You have to trust that you will be shocked by your true nature and true beauty, as the illusion of weakness and powerlessness falls away to reveal who you truly are as a spiritual being.  

You don't learn to fly by staying in the nest. By doing things you know you are capable of doing. You only learn by jumping out of the nest.  Or, by being pushed out.

And when we are being pushed out of the nest we usually experience it as a punishment, but it is not.  It is a gift. What would a bird be if he lived his whole life in the nest, lived and died in the nest and never flew?  What would a spiritual being be if he lived his entire life from the egoic illusion that he was only human?  

Living one's life in the nest is the fate of every being that refuses the awakening of the Soul.  He lives his life in a nest and dreams of flight, but never actually follows his heart and takes that leap into the great unknown. He has to depend on, and is under the illusion, that things outside of himself feed him, or deplete him, rather than having the gift of flight and true autonomy and the ability to feed himself. 

If we have not yet allowed ourselves to fall, to fall into love, fall into joy, fall into ourselves, a falling which is experienced by the ego as falling into that unknown abyss, into sure death, we will never completely fall into the grace since we are still secretly living in fear of that flight, and of that death.

If we don't know we can fly we have to kiss the joy as it flies.  When we know we can fly we can fly with it, or even, fly as it and live from our true state.  Not needing to bind ourselves to anything, but to be ourselves as everything.

Joy is who we are.

 

It is a secret which every intellectual man quickly learns, that, beyond the energy of his possessed and conscious intellect, he is capable of a new energy (as of an intellect doubled on itself), by abandonment to the nature of things; that, beside his privacy of power as an individual man, there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. The poet knows that he speaks adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the flower of the mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves, not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. As the traveler who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. ~~

Excerpt from Emerson's The Poet

This last weeks class inside the prison was simply beautiful.  We completed the Artist's Way book by Julia Cameron the week before and poetry began coming up spontaneously. It has always been my intention to go in to that space without personal agenda or premise, leaving the teaching and direction to the energy that put me there in the first place, so poetry it is!

On Friday everyone was given a copy of Emerson's Essay The Poet and as I read over the above quoted section out loud to the group I could feel the energy in the room shift significantly.  There may be some in the room who haven't gone to college or who don't have the kind of vocabulary necessary to intellectually follow Emerson, but Emerson does not write to be followed.  He does not write to impress or to be loved or to be well liked.  And he would be the last person who cared what your vocabulary was or how well you could mimic others in speech and manner.  He writes to awaken, to inspire, to liberate. 
He writes so you could be who you are and never have to apologize for yourself again.

One of the guys mentioned after the reading that he had in fact been on a horse once and let go of the reins.  He said at first the horse stopped and seemed confused but then turned and instinctually began going in the direction of home. 

What a great metaphor for the Spirit within us!! What wonderful instruction for us to find our way home, day after day, moment after moment, to the awareness of that Spirit within us. To give up personal control, to let the reins go, to let go of all of the banal mental rules of right and wrong and good and bad, and to surrender into that deep knowing and wisdom within.  Surrender to, who Rumi says, "the one who already owns your breath." 

We live in a society of manmade rules, manmade boundaries, manmade concepts and false creations.  That we would believe we need outer commandments to guide us is a great example of just how far away we have gotten from our true nature and inner knowing.  I guess if you brainwash someone into believing they are separate from God, a hopeless sinner, that they are unable to make decisions for themselves because of their weak and pathetic nature, then you could give them rules to live by that would make them ‘better' people. Of course this would take away all of their true power but in exchange they would get to live under a false sense of security and freedom.  Live under the premise that someday they would be rewarded for being ‘good'.  And in reality they might not be any better than they were beforehand, but their image of themselves would be. 

But really now, does anyone in their right mind really not know it is wrong to kill someone else?  Does anyone really believe it is a good thing to bear false witness, to cheat on your spouse? And it's why so many people do these things, ironically, while they are trying to be ‘better' people and live by all of those rules.  It's not because they are bad for trying to be good, it's just that they are under the false impression that there is such a thing as bad and that they themselves are sinners.  That they are "only human" and weak and diseased.  If that is what they believe about themselves that is what they will demonstrate. And do we really think someone will come into their right mind by giving them more rules to live by?

It has been said that insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.  We think that by holding the reins tighter we will have better results.  But we actually get the same results, and in fact, even more of the same results, headed in the same direction.  Someone might want to be a good person, but a good person according to whom?  They can live in the image and likeness of what their ego thinks a good person is, or what others have told them a good person is, but that will never bring them peace because deep down they will never really believe it.  And they can't.  It's impossible to put limits on God.  We were created in the image and likeness of God, not of disease.  Not of sin.  All of this so called good behavior can temporarily bring someone into the illusion of home, but never true home.  Never true home because true home is the direct personal experience you are as a spiritual being.  Most are are still imprisoned by the idea that they and everyone around them are sinners, albeit good sinners.  Better sinners.  Better than other sinners. 

Emerson continues:

This is the reason why bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal-wood and tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, traveling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of the intellect by coming nearer to the fact.....

But never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick.....Milton says, that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a wooden bowl. For poetry is not `Devil's wine,' but God's wine.

The only way home is through authenticity. Through the stripping down of all that has been self-created in order that the Creator may be realized.  All of our distractions and business and addictions come by not being able to acknowledge or follow that inner instinct because it doesn't fit in with the idea of ourselves that the ego has created.  We ignore the voice of the poet within, we block the Love the Power the Joy that is within. And in that blocking we are miserable and we are lost.  You don't get home by following others rules or systems of thought, you can come into their house and live with them, and you can do a great job convincing each other you're doing great living in such a crowded house, but to find your true home you have to, as the poet Robert Frost said, take the road less traveled:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

And, in the end, it all comes down to intention.  Maybe that road less travelled is having a different intention for our lives. Most people never ask for eternal joy and love and the elimination of fear and doubt because they do not know the possibility exists.  They settle for less because they have been told the possibilities are limited.  That human beings can only do so much. That struggle is a part of the human condition.  And, this is true that istruggle is part of a human condition,
but,
'have I not told you, ye are god???'

And, the moment, the very moment, someone has an insight and believes that more is possible, their entire destiny can be changed.  As soon as wereally believe there is another alternative and another possibility our intention will automatically shift.  If we really believe there is a Home within that is free of negativity, that exists beyond all fear, living in complete and utter grace in every moment of every day, and that it is possible as a spiritual being with a physical body to create that experience on Earth, well, if we really start to believe that everything will change for us.   

We talked in the class about writing and just allowing the thought to take it where it would, without trying to control anything. Without trying to write a good essay or a good book or, god forbid, a good poem.  If an ugly experience came back to haunt us, it meant it was time to confront that ghost and see it for the illusion that it was.  If shame and guilt and rage were present it meant that it was time to go fully into the experience, without an ounce of resistance, just trusting that horse, that energy, to just take us where it would, and going fully into the present experience, and when we were really able to let go, recognizing them not as concrete realities as our former fear had led us to believe, but as the greatest of illusions, ultimately passing through them like clouds, and like gateways into heaven. 

Most of our energy is usually spent trying to resist these energies, these emotionally bullies, and we end up imprisoning ourselves with ‘good' thoughts.  Or trying to grab the reins and lead that horse to "better" behaviors. But what if it wasn't just about trying to control behavior, but allowing that horse to find it's way home? What if there was a deeper reason for us being here other than to just ‘be good'?

What would it mean to you to let go of the reins in this moment?  What would that look like and how would that feel?  How would it feel to know that you were completely taken care of and all you had to do was trust that inner spirit to lead you home?  What if you even stopped trying to read the road signs and just trusted that you knew what you knew? 

And, what if you were already home and didn't know it?