Tag Archives: direct experience

a duet of paradox and praise

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Two heart-healing poems from Chuck Surface.

I found these on the poetry blog – being silently drawn – one of my favourite online oases for mind medicine. Thank you Tina Koskelo.

First, the paradox of our wideawakeness: How can it be that we are not this or that but thisthat? How can it be that we are simultaneously wave and particle? How can we reconcile apparent dualism with the unsplitable reality of our experience? As it turns out, this endeavour on the part of the insatiable thinker is less paradoxical than it would have us believe.

Like, can there be more than one meaning to ONE?

And then, a little hymn to the Beloved.

 

Richard Diebenkorn - Coffee, 1959

 

cream, two sugars, please

 

Within… Fullness, Completion, and Bliss,

Without… She prefers milk chocolate to dark.

 

Within… nothing can be added, nothing taken away,

Without… everything comes to Her, and goes.

 

Within… Unmoving, Ineffable Sublimity,

Without… She experiences ever changing manifestation.

 

Within… joy and sorrow have never been,

Without… She Shines, even in the midst of tears.

 

Within… time and space have never existed,

Without… She is born, grows old, and dies.

 

Within… within and without never were,

Without… within and without ever are.

 

Within… no preferences, propensities, proclivities,

Without… cream, two sugars, please.

 

Within… The Sun Shines,

Without… All is Illumined.

 

 

intimacy

 

There’s no intimacy in talking “about” The Beloved,

Moving away from Her into words and concepts,

As if She is not Present.

 

How rude.

 

She exists in the Quiet Stillness of our Heart,

When Attention returns from outward wandering,

And falls into Her awaiting arms.

 

How Inexpressibly Beautiful.

 

Some have turned Her into a science,

And argue Her existence, lawyerly.

They know nothing of Her.

 

Arid minds.

 

She cannot be “proven” through argument,

Or anyone “convinced” of Her reality,

Short of direct Experience.

 

Direct… Experience.

 

Only Longing entices the Beloved,

From Her Secret Garden…

In the Cave of your Heart.

 

How Ineffably… Sublime.

 

Chuck’s poetry website is In the Garden of the Beloved – a place to rest, and be both soothed and intoxicated.

Richard Diebenkorn, Coffee, 1959; oil on canvas, 57 1/2 in. x 52 1/4 in.
[Did you notice the bindi?]

Collection: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

kitchen sink epiphany

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In her book When Fear Falls Away Jan Frazier gives us a privileged, intimate view of her mundane daily experiences in the light of her awakening. This little extract is from a piece she wrote titled “A Visceral Experience of Immortality: April 22.” In it, she is happily doing the dishes when she suddenly understands something “fundamental about existence”; a long-held idea moves from the concept compartment and becomes an experienced reality.

It brought to mind the words my mother uttered (shortly after she announced she was “going to die now”) as I leaned over her, whispering my thanks for being the perfect mother and friend to me:

But I always will be – it never ends!

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kitchen sink epiphany

I was standing at the sink doing the dishes, chanting, looking out the window. The kitchen sink is turning out to be the place where great realisations seem to happen. I love to chant, and I love to look out the window at the green world, where at a moment’s notice a creature might amble into the yard, its feet quick over the new grass, the sniffing nose collecting data, gathering intelligence of possible danger, possible food. I love the window. Do I love washing dishes? Well, I do. It is what gives me an excuse to look out the window and chant.

So I was doing that this morning, happy as could be. Tingly with happiness. (I get like this a lot.) I was feeling a really sustained surge of delight at simply being alive. The world outside the window pouring into my eyes, my nostrils, every possible portal – and I felt myself pouring out into the world. And I thought how great it is to be conscious, to be alive. I said to myself, I’m so glad to be alive. Consciousness is a total gas. I just want this to go on and on.

And that’s when I realised it. Viscerally, I mean, for the first time in my life. Oh my God, it IS going to go on. Forever. THIS is what keeps steady, this very sensation – even past death. I won’t have to do without, ever.

I have believed this for a long time, belief being a thing that lives in the mind. I have had the idea of immortality, of continuity between physical life and post-physical life. But that moment in front of the sink, experiencing the very body of continuity, I realised something: I only thought I got it before, the idea of consciousness being eternal. But I never really got it before, not until right this second.

I couldn’t get over it. I never have to stop! Body or not. This will be my experience, clear past death – which will be a little road bump, if I even notice it.

– Jan Frazier

When Fear Falls Away: The Story of a Sudden Awakening

If you enjoy Jan’s writing, you might be interested in another excerpt (on undivided perception) I posted over on the awakened eye:

I’ve lost track of which is which

Photo credit: katherinecollette.com

without thought the body simply disappears

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At the same time that there is the life and experience of being Vonna (this particular body); at the same time there is no Vonna to be found.  There is no boundary between inside and outside. Sounds, even sites, are “in here” as much as thoughts and feelings are “in here.”  In direct experience, without ideas superimposed of inside and outside, in direct experience, there are no walls on which to be on either side of; it’s all a seamless whole, all of it…

I don’t think big explanations and descriptions help toward the experience of absolute intimacy and knowing directly the inseparability of awareness and phenomena.

To either seek an out of body experience or to revel in one seems pointless at best, and imaginary only, just as an in the body experience is imaginary.  The body is a concept only, it’s made of thought.

Without thought telling us where and what and who the body is or “belongs to” there is no body at all!  Without the benefit of memory (thought) you couldn’t know anything about “your body.”  How old is it?  What size is it?  What is its gender? Without thought the body is only random sensations without an actual outline.  Without thought to hold it together the body simply disappears.

~ Vonna Smith

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Extract from a post to The Way of Light group

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like the blue sky on a summer day

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We have never been an individual body containing a personal consciousness. We have never been limited by physical skin, nor have we ever been located inside a solid body separate from an outside world. This is never our actual experience, although it may feel that way.

That in us, which experiences and shapes itself as thoughts, perceptions and sensations, is universal, impersonal and undivided. It is without limits and without a center. It is like the blue sky on a summer day, pure and open. From it, and within it thoughts, perceptions and sensations, like clouds, appear unfold and dissolve naturally.

The direct experience which we name body is fluid and alive, sometimes present, sometimes not. It does not refer back to a memory body, a habitual body or an image body.

The yoga of non-duality invites us to feel ourselves as the vast blue sky: open and welcoming. We listen to our bodily experience directly, without interpretation and without a goal. Within this simple and innocent openness, misidentifications with bodily sensations and feelings of being located inside a solid body dissolve naturally simply by being seen directly with and in the light of their own true nature.

In time, the body is knowingly experienced as a flow of amorphous sensation expanding and free floating in a quality of spaciousness. And as we live in this direct experience of the body as sensation, we feel and understand that it and the space all around are made of the very same reality.

~ Ellen Emmet

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Visit Ellen’s website for more information about her work. She teaches Yoga and Movement, and offers Non Dual Therapy. UK residents are surely blessed to have access to her wideawake wisdom.

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