Tag Archives: imagination

without thought the body simply disappears

Posted on by

4

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

.

Extract from a post to The Way of Light group

.

may all beings be happiness

Posted on by

0

Happiness happened when my back was turned.

It flowered in the absence of desire or need for it.
It crept up uninvited when I stopped imagining how good it would be.

How strange that no one ever tells us this secret –

When don’t-mind mind is the default mind,
happiness is another word for Being

 

May all beings be happiness.

 

– miriam louisa

not one iota of change, ever

Posted on by

0

First we had Simone Weil advising us to beware of imagination’s superglue at work patching up the rips in the ‘me’-cocoon.  Then Teresa Dunyati-Long, warning us not to get stuck in the imagination because its pretty pics and stories are sourced, by default, from the past, from memory.  So?

The movement of thought which we label ‘imagination’, and which we tend to value very highly, turns out to be an unhelpful tool if we are serious about what it might mean to know unconditional freedom.  The problem is that it’s so easy to – yes – imagine what freedom will be like, what it will mean.  Or happiness, enlightenment – whatever.  But as everyone knows, painted cakes don’t satisfy hunger.  And our stories, richly illustrated and annotated, are just painted cakes.  Yummy, not.  Thing is, we love our stories.  So much so that we starve for the very thing we hunger.

When it comes to Truth-being, even for one minute, we know how impossible it seems, at first, to simply … be It.  Right now, just this, here.  The movement of thought is faster than our ability to see it coming, and before one knows it – literally – it’s off spinning pictures, labels, formulae, strategies about Truth-being.  It’s the magic carpet zooming in and whisking one off to … fantasy land.  Again.

Sooner or later it’s understood that the very thing we idolize as being our major tool for awakening – for freedom from the manic boredom of our lives – is its arch enemy.

Don’t get me wrong, imagination is a cool tool.  It serves our lives in untold exciting ways.  It just depends on what we want.  Do we want endless entertainment?  Fine, perfect tool.  But if we’re after the godly goodie spoken of by all the sages and saints who have walked before us – the changeless peace that “passeth all understanding,” it is useless, and worse.  It’s the super-spawner of countless red herrings.

Check it out for yourself:  Whatever can be imagined, however potent or paralyzing, sublime or depraved, makes no difference whatsoever to the Truth-being that is aware of it.  Did Einstein’s e=mc leave one tiny trace?

Not one iota of change.  Ever.  This unlit light remains unsullied, unaffected, undivided.  Just so.

you can only imagine what you already know

Posted on by

0

Never get stuck in what you can imagine,
since imagination works from the contents of memory.

Get stuck in what exists in the moment,
which includes everything you have already experienced,
and everything that you haven’t!

 
~ Teresa Dunyati-Long
the oracular tree
 

Simone Weil was onto it …

Posted on by

0

12

‘me’-self lives within a cocoon
woven on the loom of its stories

biological structure is the warp, experience is the weft

image-ination is the technology ‘me’-self
uses to patch up the rips in the cocoon

but these are the rips “through which Grace might pass”

Simone Weil was onto it

 

 

~ miriam louisa
echoes from emptiness

 

a naked lie

Posted on by

2

I sit on my cushion holding a burning question:  What do I know that I can assert is real and true and beyond question? 

My brain is packed with knowledge: records of every incident and feeling from the past – including a constantly updated commentary; imaginings about what will come to pass, along with a mixed bag of emotional preferences and aversions.  I can’t claim any of this to be true – how can anything that constantly changes be true? 

There’s another brain category that fails my test for truthfulness: conclusions.  Conclusions are beliefs concretized, non-negotiable.  Conclusions about my ever–under–construction self.  Conclusions about my life and how it should really be.  Conclusions about the meaning and purpose of it all.  Conclusions about God and Creation and the sacred. 

I know lots of stories about all manner of things, and I acknowledge that they are only the current version of complex commentaries.  But I only know one thing for sure, and it’s not an ‘about’. 

It’s this:  Something exists here on this cushion.  Something is alive here.  Something is being breathed here.  Something senses Life here.  I refer to it as ‘I’, but I cannot claim possession of it.  It is just this.  Now.  Here. 

This is what I can call real and true.  It passes my test.  It has never changed one iota in this lengthening lifetime.  It can’t be fragmented, measured, observed, described or denied.  All that I call ‘existence’ appears within it, and cannot be separated from it.  There are no words about it that are true.  So I will tell a naked lie, and call it this unlit light.