Tag Archives: control

grounded by love

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This post is reblogged with gratitude from Pema Deane’s The Vibrant Heart.

Pema’s posts often have an uncanny serendipitous resonance with the unfoldings happening here.  I love her deep wideawake expression.  It gifts us that rare mix of savage wisdom and heart-full compassion.

Many of us in this extremely challenging and beautiful time of Self-realization go through periods where the experience of having a vital and energetic body is a distant memory.  And every attempt to restore wellness eventually comes back to ground zero.  We are left in ‘nothing works’ and ‘no control’.  Grounded by Love.

This is the time to let all ruminations about fixing go and simply receive the offering of the aches and pains of a broken body.  This is the time to see that every ache is like a kiss from the Beloved saying “Not here, love.  Not here.”  The answer is not here in the body.  Not only is the answer not in fixing it, it is nowhere near the body at all.

It is found in the seeing that a well body and a broken body are one in kind, they are both illusion.  That a clear, light body has no more value than a body filled with energy that is purging and releasing – they are both imagined into existence.

It is cultivated in the gentle, firm and knowing ‘so what’ and ‘nothing matters’ arising in the face of unwellness.

The body’s welfare is pre-ordained, the script already written.  Can we walk through the play holding its hand, letting the newly-shining truth of its unreality and ‘not mattering’ open the heart to great mercy and tenderness for all that is not real.  Mercy for the unresolvable issue in our lives, whatever that may be, for how in its unwavering relentlessness it is waking us up out of the heart of misidentification;  its tugs on our attention losing their strength through the sheer exhaustion of their known ineffectuality.

We rise up as true Self in the midst of the unfixable.  This is its job and this is its grace.  The rising up of the internal Real that sheds light on the unreality of all that is temporal.

~ Pema Deane

embracing life in all its messy glory

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the dream bus

To believe we control the movement of life is to believe we are driving a bus on which we are merely passengers. We feel as if we are in control when the bus takes us where we want to go, but when it keeps chugging merrily on its way despite our attempts to turn or stop or slow down, we are incredulous. We grip the frozen steering wheel and stare helplessly out the windows muttering that teenagers shouldn’t be having babies, corporations shouldn’t be exploiting legal loopholes for profit, and a cure for cancer should have been discovered by now.

Life asks many things of us, but suffering for our delusions isn’t one of them. The biggest delusion is that life should unfold in ways that make us happy. Since we weren’t even around when life began, our happiness could hardly have been a bullet point in its mission statement. Finding happiness is our job, and there’s more of it to be found when we meet life with open arms rather than with a fistful of angry questions.

~ John Ptacek – from Reality Check

I love John’s honest wisdom-wordsmithing. Find more at his website: On Second Thought

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free will and hash browns

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The notion of free will is such a hot potato*. It scalds the hands as it’s juggled around mind-space. Yet when it’s at home in its spacious place it makes delicious eating!

You don’t actually need science or experiments, philosophy or religion (although their conclusions can be fascinating) to find out for yourself all you need to know about the dynamic called free will or volition. The process couldn’t be simpler. It’s as easy as ABC, but not necessarily in that order.

Let’s take B first and let it stand for body. Let’s be very careful: can I honestly say that as a body I have any kind of free will? If I did, would I choose to fall down steps, get sick, be ugly, be fat, go bald, be hungry, grow old, die?

Let’s take C next and let it stand for cerebral activity. Mind: thinking, feeling, perceiving and all that stuff. Can I say that I have control over the things that happen in my mental world? If I did, would I choose to repeat unwanted thoughts endlessly, to have nightmares, to fixate on past events, to grieve, to compare myself unfavorably with others, to suffer?

If I’m convinced I’m a body and a mind it hardly seems sensible to claim free will for myself – it’s both masochistic and illogical. Yet if I can’t find my free will in them, where will I find it?

I will have to look elsewhere. This implies finding out exactly where ‘I’ am located. For some reason this prospect is frighteningly uncomfortable for many. The potato is burning their hands so they drop it and turn away from the inquiry. Which is a pity because clarity is only a question away, and Life is begging its asking.

It’s this: I have the feeling of autonomy. I feel as though I make choices. I feel responsible for the things I do, from picking up my cup of tea to abandoning my college course. Yet my experience refutes this. I cannot find volition in my body or my mind, which indicates that I am not my body or my mind. So what am I?

Sitting with this question and ticking off the what-I-am-not boxes unpicks the problem. Why is this so difficult? Wouldn’t you think any intelligent human being would leap at the chance to find out what they actually ARE?

There’s a story. It’s called ‘me.’ It’s scared. It knows it’s only a thought-up story and that if thoughts get looked at too closely it will be exposed. It’s afraid of extinction. Ticking off the I-am-not-the-story box takes some doing for most folk. I suggest ticking it off just to see what might happen – with an eraser handy. What happens? The eraser isn’t needed, for when you tick off the I-am-not-the-story box, you notice that there’s still something present that is aware of what’s happening – and weirdly enough, it feels just like dear old You.

Which brings us to A. A is for Awareness. Awareness is what’s left after all the boxes in one’s entire repertoire of imaginings have been ticked off and there are no options left. No way out. The ‘I’ sense is home in spacious Aware-ing and the potato is a gourmet delight. Down it goes, never again to whet mind’s appetite.

The View opens up, vast and free. Awareness reigns as the sole player in the Game. What does that mean? It means … you’re IT. Awareness is free to do and be and know and experience whatever it wishes, and it does, as You. You are its built-in modus operandi.

You, aka Awareness, are free to believe that you are a body/mind with volition. You are free to believe that you are an autonomous, separate entity. Or an awakened one. Or a striving-to-be-enlightened one. No worries! You as Awareness are also free to be a hot potato, to juggle them or to eat them boiled, mashed or hashed. How awesome is that?

You, as Awareness, are free will in eternal flow and flux.

– miriam louisa

*Hot potato? – If English isn’t your first language you might not know that this is a term for a very contentious and often non-negotiable idea or issue. I know, it’s weird, but no doubt all languages have a term for the ‘no-go’ areas of belief and fixation.

finding my mind … isn’t mine!

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Last night I watched a TV program called “Finding My Mind.”

This is how the program was described in the TV Guide:

This program unravels the mysteries of the brain. For thousands of years philosophers have tried and failed to come up with satisfactory answers to questions such as ‘who am I?’ But recently neuroscientists have made some fascinating and unnerving discoveries. Here, Oxford University professor of mathematics Marcus du Sautoy takes a journey deep into his own brain – a willing guinea pig for some of the most extraordinary experiments known to neuroscience – to discover where ‘free will’ and ‘self’ actually come from.

Marcus du Sautoy is a rather attractive and personable 40-something chap whose quest is, essentially, to find out whether cutting edge neuroscience can help him find his sense of ‘I.’

Over the course of an hour we see him zip from one part of the planet to another chatting to a cross-section of experts in their fields and undertaking an array of experiments and brain scans. And we watch as his basic beliefs and assumptions about things like the ‘soul,’ the ‘self,’ the ‘person’ become unstitched. He’s a courageous kid.

There’s plenty to interest intrepid explorers of nonduality in this doco, but for me one experiment in particular etched itself in pokerwork in the local brain-space. Marcus had his head all trussed up in a cap like the ones hairdressers used to use when ‘highlights’ were fashionable. This one exuded wires rather than hair. He looked like a porcupine. The wires were attached to computers, of course, and he was simply asked to make choices in response to given ‘problems’ by pressing one button or another.

Which he did, with all the confidence of someone who knows their own mind and believes in free-will.

His face. I’ll never forget the look on his face when the scientist told him – and backed it up with the computer print-out – that he had known what choice Marcus would make a full 6 seconds (no, that’s not a typo) before Marcus pressed the button. With 100% accuracy.

Anyone out there who still believes they are an entity with volition and control should see this doco. But be warned – it’s hazardous to the ego. Fatal, actually.

You can watch a video clip at:  http://www.sbs.com.au/schedule/SBSONE/2010-07-06/SBS%20Sydney

Update: The link above is no longer live at SBS.   However you can view the whole documentary (52:10) here:

http://video.dailytelegraph.com.au/v/416922/Finding-My-Mind