There is a fundamental patterning to human consciousness that is a conditioning at such a fundamental level that it is largely invisible and acted from rather than observed. Attempting to bring this to awareness is difficult within the framework that we are talking of because it requires a pause from presumed identity and experience and a willingness to listen in trust and without defence.
The cliche; 'thinking outside the box' has an origin in true inspiration and clarity of a sudden shift of illumination. The 'box' is the mind as defined or reflected by its projected understandings or current 'knowledge. I try to articulate a perspective that is of an entirely different foundation; Mind unboxed.
To attempt to translate meanings into one's own definition set and thus pigeon hole and react via the database of the taken for granted, is not a process of real communication - but a defence against it. Discerning a meaning is a capacity we all have but only when we feel a relational trust within ourselves. Nothing is so blinding to truth as thinking we know. This doesn't mean we never know, but that the wholeness of knowing includes a truly relational receptivity rather than assertive combative attempts to prevail. That also has its own experience - but it is an expression of a self conflicted mind and thus an experience of conflicted and fragmented identity and purpose. Awakening TO observe such a 'mind' in act, is also becoming free of it as one's presumed identity. This has parallels with scientific exploration in concept - but transcends concept.
The above was a rewritten introduction. What follows beneath is what arose in me to write into the conversations and considerations of the seeming conflict between science and religion.
That you Are is self evident - because existence itself is a fact that only a fool could question - but proceeding beyond stark Fact of being - attempts to define or describe WHAT it is that IS - and there's where the mind begins to spin.
As well as extending the mind 'out-from' premises of its own definition, there is also inherent capacity to witness or observe; thought, emotion, sensation and the use of intention and attention in act. This capacity is always simply present but tends to be obscured by a dense and highly complex 'self protectiveness' of identity in thought.
Those who release such a wilful and often ingeniously hidden wish to be special in one's own right, come to be still and know - that is - to allow an awareness of being that expresses the qualities and nature of be ing directly.
This is uncoverable and recognisable because it is already true beneath the overlay of mind in its experience of its thought.
But is invisible and unimaginable when attention is bound up in wishful or theoretical structures of thought and strategy that seek to manually manipulate and exploit life, our fellow man and our world as if that were justifiably and inevitably necessary.
These latter propensities are endemic to the human conditioning and so we DO attempt to define the Un-definable Nature of Is, in symbol, image and concept, of its tangible qualities and effects. This is always an act of rejection and limitation of wholeness of being, and the reaction to such action generates a sense of external adversity that seems to be 'other' to what felt like an act of ownership and control. A self limiting and conflicting identity.
Identifying with its stories instead either of using them as sketches, signs and reminders to open into our OWN Intimacy of Being or discarding them as meaningless.
Without true grounding in realisation and demonstration, such terms as once attempted to speak of direct experience, become fodder for the manipulative deception of a masked identity. There is a 'baby in the bathwater' of religion.
The scientific exploration increasingly extends into specialisations that distract ever further from its foundation. Will the tower of Babel will be re enacted?
Heart AND Mind are a unified Singularity, but mind can 'go off in its thought' and seem to recreate (interpret) all things in its own image. But this is a disintegrating experience of what mind truly is, and therefore of perception and of self. Religion has generally become diluted and degraded to self-validating justifications without real demonstration. And simply another aspect of what asserts a personal and cultural presentation or persona.
Though there is inevitably a market and a circus associated with anything human, there is also a genuine desire to uncover truth in the heart and mind - such as to integrate and restore wholeness of being and brightness of presence.
Opening to alternate or expanded beliefs may provide stepping stones to a greater perspective, but the nature of belief is the programming that gives the interpretive experience of this and every moment of existence. For what we accept as true ABOUT any aspect of existence will BE our personal interpretive experience of what actually we CANNOT really separate from, in order to judge it. Discernment doesn't need to divide and rule. Trust doesn't need to manipulate. Nor does peace need to persuade or recruit.
There is Infinitely More to Life than the world that arises as our perception; the surface that seems to be our thoughts. But there is deeply hidden human taboo against uncovering it. Our so called sanity seems to demand we keep Mind hidden by thinking. But look at our world and accept that we are hardly sane!
Same old gods, same old sacrifice! Deception can play any side of any argument, but doesn't flourish in a genuine willingness to commune-icate.
Thanks for your attention!
2012/02/15
There are no such persons as alive
That which is Alive - perhaps more accurately, That Which Is - is our Source, our Truth and our Nature - Self Evidently So.
The use of imagination and desire can make images and identifications of meaning of Is, and give priority to a sense of self garnered from such identifications, but nothing really can or has happened to Is.
The Gifts of Love that thread our experience of illusion, are Heaven Sent, if followed to their roots. For even a partial love contains the echo of love's truth and Truth is One.
An identification with forms and meanings associated and given to forms, is loss and the attempt to escape or cover the feelings of loss. But love is not a story frozen in images of the past to be engraved in pain upon a broken and bereft life.
The true blessings of the past are with you always - closer than you think. But trust that attention and intent are guided by That Which Knows, and allow that which cuts through the reality we thought real to illuminate a gift that could not otherwise be received. Though staying open in such a love seems to cut our very life away as we believed it to be.
And with the living, let them be recognized in the Living. You are in the Presence of the Living One and your gift of acceptance is not of the desires of image and identification, but is directly felt and received, whether there seem to be observable effects or not.
In Peace
Brian
Note: This response arose from one who said 'there are no such persons as dead', in expression of the Intuition of Life. The 'person' seems self evident - but is a construct that serves as a basis for an unquestioned life - lived out on surface as if an independent reality and suffered through as the 'human condition', when perhaps it would be better called the 'human conditioning'.
The use of imagination and desire can make images and identifications of meaning of Is, and give priority to a sense of self garnered from such identifications, but nothing really can or has happened to Is.
The Gifts of Love that thread our experience of illusion, are Heaven Sent, if followed to their roots. For even a partial love contains the echo of love's truth and Truth is One.
An identification with forms and meanings associated and given to forms, is loss and the attempt to escape or cover the feelings of loss. But love is not a story frozen in images of the past to be engraved in pain upon a broken and bereft life.
The true blessings of the past are with you always - closer than you think. But trust that attention and intent are guided by That Which Knows, and allow that which cuts through the reality we thought real to illuminate a gift that could not otherwise be received. Though staying open in such a love seems to cut our very life away as we believed it to be.
And with the living, let them be recognized in the Living. You are in the Presence of the Living One and your gift of acceptance is not of the desires of image and identification, but is directly felt and received, whether there seem to be observable effects or not.
In Peace
Brian
Note: This response arose from one who said 'there are no such persons as dead', in expression of the Intuition of Life. The 'person' seems self evident - but is a construct that serves as a basis for an unquestioned life - lived out on surface as if an independent reality and suffered through as the 'human condition', when perhaps it would be better called the 'human conditioning'.
A personal history revisioned
I had uncharacteristically felt a desire to know. This feeling wasn't part of my ordinary everyday sense of myself. As if a depth was rising amidst a mind of surface.
I was unravelled all of a 'day' as many are over years, though time is not what it seems. That is, a dissonance of being rose as an awareness that I could not avoid. My attempt to evade it, was an enactmenting a wish for an independence of self. At a level kept beneath my focus of awareness, I was trying to manipulate attention so as to 'become' a something in my own right. I was uncovering truth, I was opening secret places. I was peeling away the layers of mind that constitute a state of ignorance as to the true nature of Mind itself. All was opening to me - except that at each revelation, did the dissonance rise again, (of which I was turning away), and so my attention was effectively shepherded in and up though the chakras of the structure of what body-mind appears through, without being able to rest or abide in anything found. As this consciousness approached its own root, time expanded immeasurably, worlds within worlds and lifetimes in an instant - for the seeds of mind contain and know all that comes forth thereof - and were revealed to me as infinite potential, though the nature of all seemed forever appearing and disappearing, as if each instant of experience is itself a birth or becoming.
Such was the loss of time's continuity that there is no temporal order for what fragments can be intimated here. For everything is happening at once and surely, none of it happened to me - but somehow in me - in a mind stripped of self reference.
Everything is directly.
Total Freedom seemed paralysis to any attempt to map or control.
Eternal Mind suddenly revealed the memory and motion of my born existence.
A force of will arose in blindness amidst an inseparability of Mind.
And the dissonance 'outed itself' at its root.
Within the grasp of life is fear of death.
And in the clinging to such illusion is a fear of evil born, for truth is abandoned and all else trod underfoot, that Eternal Mind be forgot and my will be done.
Yet beneath and somehow pervading this blind urge of a murderous terror was a stillness of a peace that simply revealed itself. Even amidst descent in oaths of pretence, lie and denial, was this quiet simply being - for though terror seemed total - and forcefully persuasive of being totally engaging - this calm and direct curiosity arose in a clear moment regardless of all attempt to collapse consciousness and regain a structure of solidity and boundary in which a world made solid and a partitioned mind in which I could think.
But whatever had Opened, hadn't in fact been able to be shut again, for I could not accept the evil as my self - nor could I put it out onto the Life. It had to be a mistake in my mind. Yet one that I was so identified with as to be without practical responsibility of discernment.
Whatever pervaded or Moved in the Immanence of Mind, was the Awakening of my heart - even though it was initially an awakening to a desecrated altar.
What was the nature of this story but of a dream of a life that hid within itself, a fear of its own evil - from which it attempts to turn inside out to 'escape' itself into an indirectness of its own story-justifications - identified as safety and self, and defended against all and any real relationship?
The seed of fear is a wish that patterns its shadow as denial, division and limitation. Identifying with disconnected thought, cuts off the heart's guiding and knowing of its own wholeness, and then 'acts' or pictures out as if it had been cut off and must survive and prevail against a now unrecognised Condition. For a thief sees its own mind in all and shrinks from the light of love as from threat of danger.
So I got 'my life' back, only it was no longer mine alone - for it could not go back to sleep and its thoughts were like sand castles. For what rose in me now, directly, was undoing of the mind of the lie - as it found my acceptance, one step at a time.
In a singular moment amidst the seed level of Mind had been a vision of the pattern of division and denial that was what I had accepted as 'my life in the world'. This pattern was symbolized to me as saying "No" to Life. In accepting that this had been my will and ceasing to hide it, had I been uncovered in a "Yes" to Life.
The "No" to Life was pictured out in time and space as event, relationship and situation, and my part in the undoing or healing of such a misalignment was simply to refuse or desist from enacting or accepting the "No". The "Yes" would be given as a Correction or uncovering of love, where a surface of form based meaning had seemed to enact a witness to a loss of love. It wasn't for me to do the "Yes" but simply to wake to the prompts that revealed my "No" to me, so that I could remember my purpose and function in truth - which is not an independent doing, but a shared awareness being. It may still look like doing, but all proceeds from a different motive than witnessing to independent will.
Where something of the nature of "my will" and "my life" had seemed a thief or even a murderer, the Nature of the healing and replacement of such thoughts was felt as a Gift and a Grace of Being. A Re-cognition prior to the play of the mind - in which 'self and other' have never been born, or suffered, or died, and yet which is the Source, Nature and Condition of love, truth, peace, joy and freedom, that abides with us despite every convoluted imagination in which we otherwise become temporarily identified, and slips through our defences to reveal to us as we are willing to accept.
In Peace
Brian
"You lose your grip, and then you slip, into the Masterpiece"
Leonard Cohen ~ A Thousand Kisses Deep
I was unravelled all of a 'day' as many are over years, though time is not what it seems. That is, a dissonance of being rose as an awareness that I could not avoid. My attempt to evade it, was an enactmenting a wish for an independence of self. At a level kept beneath my focus of awareness, I was trying to manipulate attention so as to 'become' a something in my own right. I was uncovering truth, I was opening secret places. I was peeling away the layers of mind that constitute a state of ignorance as to the true nature of Mind itself. All was opening to me - except that at each revelation, did the dissonance rise again, (of which I was turning away), and so my attention was effectively shepherded in and up though the chakras of the structure of what body-mind appears through, without being able to rest or abide in anything found. As this consciousness approached its own root, time expanded immeasurably, worlds within worlds and lifetimes in an instant - for the seeds of mind contain and know all that comes forth thereof - and were revealed to me as infinite potential, though the nature of all seemed forever appearing and disappearing, as if each instant of experience is itself a birth or becoming.
Such was the loss of time's continuity that there is no temporal order for what fragments can be intimated here. For everything is happening at once and surely, none of it happened to me - but somehow in me - in a mind stripped of self reference.
Everything is directly.
Total Freedom seemed paralysis to any attempt to map or control.
Eternal Mind suddenly revealed the memory and motion of my born existence.
A force of will arose in blindness amidst an inseparability of Mind.
And the dissonance 'outed itself' at its root.
Within the grasp of life is fear of death.
And in the clinging to such illusion is a fear of evil born, for truth is abandoned and all else trod underfoot, that Eternal Mind be forgot and my will be done.
Yet beneath and somehow pervading this blind urge of a murderous terror was a stillness of a peace that simply revealed itself. Even amidst descent in oaths of pretence, lie and denial, was this quiet simply being - for though terror seemed total - and forcefully persuasive of being totally engaging - this calm and direct curiosity arose in a clear moment regardless of all attempt to collapse consciousness and regain a structure of solidity and boundary in which a world made solid and a partitioned mind in which I could think.
But whatever had Opened, hadn't in fact been able to be shut again, for I could not accept the evil as my self - nor could I put it out onto the Life. It had to be a mistake in my mind. Yet one that I was so identified with as to be without practical responsibility of discernment.
Whatever pervaded or Moved in the Immanence of Mind, was the Awakening of my heart - even though it was initially an awakening to a desecrated altar.
What was the nature of this story but of a dream of a life that hid within itself, a fear of its own evil - from which it attempts to turn inside out to 'escape' itself into an indirectness of its own story-justifications - identified as safety and self, and defended against all and any real relationship?
The seed of fear is a wish that patterns its shadow as denial, division and limitation. Identifying with disconnected thought, cuts off the heart's guiding and knowing of its own wholeness, and then 'acts' or pictures out as if it had been cut off and must survive and prevail against a now unrecognised Condition. For a thief sees its own mind in all and shrinks from the light of love as from threat of danger.
So I got 'my life' back, only it was no longer mine alone - for it could not go back to sleep and its thoughts were like sand castles. For what rose in me now, directly, was undoing of the mind of the lie - as it found my acceptance, one step at a time.
In a singular moment amidst the seed level of Mind had been a vision of the pattern of division and denial that was what I had accepted as 'my life in the world'. This pattern was symbolized to me as saying "No" to Life. In accepting that this had been my will and ceasing to hide it, had I been uncovered in a "Yes" to Life.
The "No" to Life was pictured out in time and space as event, relationship and situation, and my part in the undoing or healing of such a misalignment was simply to refuse or desist from enacting or accepting the "No". The "Yes" would be given as a Correction or uncovering of love, where a surface of form based meaning had seemed to enact a witness to a loss of love. It wasn't for me to do the "Yes" but simply to wake to the prompts that revealed my "No" to me, so that I could remember my purpose and function in truth - which is not an independent doing, but a shared awareness being. It may still look like doing, but all proceeds from a different motive than witnessing to independent will.
Where something of the nature of "my will" and "my life" had seemed a thief or even a murderer, the Nature of the healing and replacement of such thoughts was felt as a Gift and a Grace of Being. A Re-cognition prior to the play of the mind - in which 'self and other' have never been born, or suffered, or died, and yet which is the Source, Nature and Condition of love, truth, peace, joy and freedom, that abides with us despite every convoluted imagination in which we otherwise become temporarily identified, and slips through our defences to reveal to us as we are willing to accept.
In Peace
Brian
"You lose your grip, and then you slip, into the Masterpiece"
Leonard Cohen ~ A Thousand Kisses Deep
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