Tag Archives: Aware-ing

nothing ever dies but a dream

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I’m celebrating an anniversary this morning. Three years ago the dream had a daughter holding her beloved mother as she breathed the breath that would never return.

I’m also celebrating because, for the first time in those three years, the pain has vanished. The passage of time is a great healer, as is the time spent silently aware-ing on the zafu.  But I also honor the beloved mentors who have appeared in the story, their healing tools in hand. They are many, but I particularly want to thank: A kind, wise Lama, who sent me away on a retreat to find “the mother” I mourned. And a dear, dear woman whose energy healing (EFT) triggered the release of volumes of stories held in this body’s cellular vaults. And – Byron Katie. The work of the Work leaves no lie uncovered, and o-m-g some monster furphies were happily beavering away in this wee dream called ‘me’. One of them, running below the limn of  consciousness in spite of intellectual clarity about and acceptance of impermanence and the impossibility of independent self-hood, was a subtle and sneaky belief in death.

Nothing was ever born but a dream.
Nothing ever dies but a dream.

Reality is the always-stable, never-disappointing base of experience.
When I look at what really is, I can’t find a me.
As I have no identity, there’s no one to resist death.
Death is everything that has been dreamed,
including the dream of myself,
so at every moment I die of what has been
and am continually born as awareness in the moment,
and I die of that, and am born in it again.
The thought of death excites me.
Everyone loves a good novel and looks forward to how it will end.
It’s not personal.
After the death of the body, what identification will the mind take on?
The dream is over, I was perfection,
I could not have had a better life.
And whatever I am is born in this moment
as everything good that has ever lived.
~ Byron Katie

One dream ends. And here’s the beauty of it – this unlit light | reality | primordial awareness – abides, even as new dreams appear.

And I can hear her l a u g h t e r . . .

Gladness! Gratitude! Grace!

.

bombs and birthdays and ashes

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What on earth do bombs and birthdays and ashes have in common? Well, while my Dad was celebrating his birthday back in 1945 as a soldier in the New Zealand armed forces, the city of Hiroshima was being obliterated. I always wondered what it would be like to have one’s birthday coincide with a horrific historical event such as that, but when I’d ask him about it he would simply reply, “It was the war, dear,” shake his head, and shut down.

Yesterday it came around again: the sixth of August. Hiroshima Day and the anniversary of Dad’s birth back in 1913. And two years exactly since Mum and I, with a few dear friends, walked out onto the Urangan Pier and scattered Dad’s ashes onto the turning tide.

 

Urangan Pier, Hervey Bay, Queensland

 

Dad was a dyed-in-the-wool Kiwi. He always wanted to return to homeland Aotearoa and we were on the verge of making his wish come true when he took off. It wasn’t a sudden death. He was, after all, 95 years old.

We deliberated about how best to get his ashes back across the Tasman Sea to New Zealand. A sailor friend came up with the suggestion that we scatter them onto the turning high tide from the Urangan Pier. This being Queensland, Australia, the next landfall would be New Zealand’s West Coast, his favorite haunt. It was a quiet happy ceremony, topped off with a picnic lunch on the beach.

This year, however, I was alone. No little Mother with her twinkling blue eyes. Her absence still takes constant adjusting to, even though more than a year has passed since she left.

It was a divine day, typical of winter in this part of the world. I bought a parcel of fish and chips – Dad’s fave tucker – and sat on the beach right about where this photo was taken. The chips didn’t need salt. Tears were streaming. And they were both sweet and salty. Fragments of this dream decade arose and floated around in mind, bits of deliciousness, bits of frustratedness and weariness and huge upswellings of love. It was all there, and it was all welcomed and named, and allowed to stream out with the tide.

(And this is what I want to share because I think it is so important, and because it took me so long to understand and accept, and because ignorance of it caused so much suffering: not one feeling or emotion or thought can be separated out from the aware-ing in which it arises. The full embrace of one’s experience is the full embrace of the Lover. It is the intimacy we seek. It melts the mind into the heart.)

Punakaiki, West Coast, Aotearoa New Zealand

 

A few months ago I stood there, on the rocks at Punakaiki on the West Coast of the South Island, and fancied I could hear Dad’s unmistakable cheery whistling rising up from the swirling kelp forests.

– miriam louisa

 

Top image: Urangan Pier –  Neil Paskin © 2007
Punakaiki image – Open Source

bright naked beingness

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What an odd sort of a night. The body is still somewhat travel-weary so it trotted off to bed early. There’s usually a time of sitting, settling, checking-in with Reality before snuggling under the doona, and last night was no exception. The mind was very bright. Sleep came instantly and went on for some hours.

Then suddenly one was jolted awake by what felt like an electric shock surging through the whole body. The really strange thing was that although I was asleep, something was aware of both the jolt and the waking up. “That was a bit weird,” thinking said.

So – I’m lying there wide awake in the moon-lit night wondering where all the energy now vibrating the body has come from. Feeling like a spring chicken and contemplating getting up to do something … then I hear a shout: “Be Beingness!”

Instantly, with no intention or volition, there was a turning, a converging of the energy we call attention … back. The sensation was physical.

“Back”? No. Backwards? Sort of. As though Aware-ing was falling out the back of the brain and into … space. And the whole of space was singing silence and it was breathing. This was not a dream; I have never felt more fully present.

There were no lights. There was no bliss. There was no center or reference-point. There was only this vast void, breathing.

It continued for some hours before sleep-tide washed in. And in the dawn, when Kookaburras’ cackling chorus rallied the sleeping world, it was still present. It’s here now, as I type and as your ‘I’ reads; it has always been here: bright naked Beingness.

This is what ‘I’ is.

~