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What can I do? I can breathe.

I inhale deeply, slowly, and when I think I've gone the limit, push gently against it and breathe some more.

I surprise myself with how long a breath I can take in, and with how long I can hold the breath before I feel the need or desire to expel it. Sometimes thought creeps in and splutters: But... but you have to, you'll die if you don't release the breath! Interesting thought. One of these days/nights I will breathe and hold past that thought and see what happens.

Deep breathing creates calm within, and inner calm spreads into the outer, breath by breath, rippling into my immediate environment and so on. Someone else draws a breath and just that little particle of calm amid the chaos may be exactly what s/he needed to get through a tough day.

I have noticed this: I can be anywhere, I can breathe in anything. For me, the time has  passed when breathing meditation is best done on the cushion, in seclusion, or in the presence of like-minded people.

I am grateful for this: I no longer hold my breath in the presence of anger, whether it's directed at me or anyone else. I no longer fear breathing in chaos, sadness, death. Or fear.

I have discovered this: There is a tremendous amount of power (perhaps energy is a better word) that comes from mindfully breathing in whatever is out there (sadness, grief, etc.): breathing in, holding the breath, breathing out again. When I breathe mindfully, the breath I expel is a transmuted form of the breath I inhale. It doesn't put out sadness for sadness, grief for grief, anger for anger. The breath itself is altered, therefore it allows for and encourages change, without as within. It presents a new and different configuration of possibilities to the inside/outside world. Hasn't breath always been what makes everything possible?

 




RAD 5/03/09
[Photo source]

 




To say we understand love, or to seek to understand it, is to place outside of ourselves that which is our very nature. This is how the illusion of separation from self is created. And yes, this is what sets up the essential human journey. When we get that LOVE 'R US, all seeking ends.

Like seeking for what we already have.

Yes, that's how I see it. And to me the finding doesn't come from seeking, it comes from peeling away the layers of life we've unwittingly buried it under (perhaps including parts of *answers* we found outside ourselves in our seeking, but also, bits and pieces of ourselves that we and/or others in our world found unacceptable). And not so much a deliberate peeling as a becoming willing to expose ourselves, layer by layer, till finally the treasure is revealed.

And I don't worry about losing sight once we have found it. It's always there. It's in our very nature to come back to it when we're ready.

Experiencing all the facets in all the different lights.

Wonderfully put!

Recently I have been reclaiming parts of myself that have become disengaged throughout my life.

Yes, that has been my journey too. Peeling the onion layer by layer, accepting each formerly rejected part as it comes up. And layer by layer we come closer to the core, which is love, pure and simple.

Is that where love starts, when you can feel good about yourself you are more likely to feel good and love others?

I think we operate from the outermost level of what we've exposed. The closer we get to the core, the more intense the light of love that shines through. Early in the process, the light comes through dimly, as when the sun struggles to make its way through intense layers of fog.

Whatever we radiate, we radiate from the inside out. When there's no interference (e.g., from layers we've built up), when we operate from "an unreduced or unbroken completeness or totality" (OneLook's quick definition for integrity), what is there to radiate but pure love?

So yes, I see everything (love, peace, everything) as starting from the inside out (like the Gandhi quote about being the change we want to see in the world).

And for me, acceptance and love are pretty close to the same thing. I don't think accepting and holding at arm's length can live in the same room. No, if I'm truly accepting something or someone, I'm holding them in my heart.


On the way to LOVE 'R US, we go through many layers of love, many questions about the meaning of love.



We see the world through our own eyes. But our perception of and interpretations for anything can't help but be coloured by the worlds of others whose lives have touched our own. So in that sense there is perhaps no limit to the number of meanings that can be squeezed out of a word like love.

LOVE, though, holds all meaning and no meaning, it seems to me. It's beyond definition. It's beyond mind.

As soon as the mind touches something, anything, the thing morphs into a perception, an interpretation, something that can be understood through the mind. The mind is a translator. Some things, I find, can't be translated. They can only be experienced. That's how I see love.


[This blog came out of a thread about the meaning of love in the gaia group Now I Can See the Moon. Italicized bits in the body of the blog are comments/questions posed by others specifically in response to my posts there.]
 

Enlightened?

Who/what is unenlightened?

And what exactly is supposed to be the difference between the two? Is it quantitative? Would measurements show an actual variation in amount of light? Or would they show an invariant amount of light that is filtered to a greater or lesser extent?




We could, I suppose, think of unenlightenment as the total absence of light. (A bit hard to imagine, for me.)

Or perhaps it is a manifestation of light that we judge less, for lack of a better word, light-like? (And who is judging? And what are the criteria used for such judgment?)




Now here is a question worth considering: Who would we be if we couldn't think this thought we or anyone/anything else is unenlightened, and that there is attainment to be, well, attained? Who would I be? I ask myself this question, and pause. I hear and feel deep, DEEP silence, the silence of the universe going backward and forward in time (to the extent that such concepts exist outside the illusion). A silence where everything and nothing live side by side, or topsy-turvy-inside-outside one another.

And when you get right down to it: We here in duality we think/act in terms of sun, whether it's present or absent (day, night, sunny, cloudy, etc). But really, we know there is never absence of sun and light, although there may be days and nights when we feel its absence. It is always there, except when our thoughts inform us otherwise.

Light is everywhere around us and it lives in each one of us, whether we're aware of it or not. If there is *enlightenment* as such, what can it be if not simply seeing, being aware?

[Photos: 2  3 ]

 



[Image source]

It is alive, isn't it? I don't think I've ever doubted it.

Within.

RAD 5/08/09
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Well, ok, so it's still morning here on the west coast of Canada, but it's Tuesday, and afternoon will roll around soon enough. Anyway, I happened on samiyam's blog just now and it reminded me (which, if you look at its title, I'm sure it was meant to) of this song by one of my alltime favourite bands (and believe me, there are many).




Oh well, since I'm strolling down memory lane anyway, here's another:




Oops, would you look at the time! Gotta run.
 

I believe there is an innate order to life, a falling of things into place, given a minimum of interference (aka control) from no doubt well-meaning humans.

Where there is interference, I believe in letting the resulting chaos (if any) be; in allowing it to churn and roil for as long as is necessary until it again finds balance.

An innate order of things, a perfect state of balance (or however we want to put it) does not mean that everyone survives, or that no one gets hurt. It doesn't guarantee what we in duality might call a happy ending. But accepting that the universe knows what it's doing, brings peace. That acceptance is essentially all that is required to come to the understanding that things are as they should be; and acceptance comes gradually from an inner vigilance and from taking an observer's standpoint to what is happening around us.

I have learned that leaping into the fray is not useful. Following the heart into it could be---it depends on whether the heart is pure. Following the still small voice, which is not (necessarily) a voice at all, is the surest way.

There is no possibility of any of this coming *right* from any place outside of here-now. There are many voices clamoring to be heard. The still small one is the only one that lives exactly here-now and nowhere else.

 



Today is the anniversary of a death that happened a long, long time ago, and that was probably the single most important event, or at least, turning point, in my life. The time and circumstance of his showing up, the unfolding of relationship, the dying—all within the short space of a year and a half. Unless of course you count the decades it took me to come to terms with his dying.

It was only a year and a half ago that I first managed to write anything at all about how I was affected by that death. Much more recently I was finally able to write about the rest of it, a wider perspective on the living and the dying and the relationship, and about the important role it played in my life as a whole. The healing, when it came, took place on so many levels, extending into other relationships and events I’d struggled all my life to understand. It is only now, today, that I truly see the magnitude of the gift he gave me—today, while tears of gratitude and joy sweeten the oceans of sadness I fed over the years.

I had thought of posting Seal’s video "Prayer for the Dying," but then again, this is a tribute to life, not death, and besides, Al never was dying. He was very much alive, so much more alive than most people I’ve known. He was vibrantly alive until the moment his heart stopped beating. So how about this then?


 

 

 

RAD 2009

Is that true?

Come to think of it, I already ask it of myself, and far more than once a day. It's Byron Katie's way of questioning the validity of one's thoughts.

I would play them all. I don't think there is a single instrument that, having heard, I haven't wanted to play. But okay, just for today let me pick this one:




That's Milind Tulankar playing the jaltarang.

Here he is again, this time with Sunil Avchat on bansuri (bamboo flute), which may well be my very favourite instrument of all... ah, but I can't decide:



Such a pretty combination, in my opinion. The music is so peaceful, it soothes me, brings me back to centre every time I hear it.

 


 

Right here, right now, in the here-now that is this moment. Yup, after a lifetime of feeling like an alien looking for a planet to call home I have discovered the one place where I belong. Not that it was eluding me, I was just looking in the wrong places. Don't we always look outside ourselves first? But when we look inside, we find that home is there, love is there, everything we were ever looking for is already there.