Tag Archives: time

the body is the breath of the universe

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While it’s unarguable that any facet of our existence could ever be separate from Primordial Awareness, we are deeply conditioned to believe that the undesirable aspects of experience, and especially the mouldy contents of the compost heap called the unconscious, can’t possibly be valid components of Ultimate Reality.  It’s deeply heartening to see this illogical, fragmented view being explored and corrected sensitively and wisely by teachers like Ellen Emmet.

Ellen’s beautiful article was originally posted on contemplativejornal.com, under the title The Sacred Body: Returning Our Experience to Its True Source and Substance of Awareness.

Gratitude!

a child explores wild spaces...

She runs down a hill. Warm air caresses her skin, and the pounding of feet on earth bring an intoxicating counterpoint to the expanding of her heart. Her body unravels like threads of light into the the surrounding space, and in a moment out of time, she surrenders into its open embrace. The liquid dancing world anoints her vibrating body with its loving substance … 

We all remember blessed moments in which our true nature of pure undivided and universal Awareness echoes at the emotional, tactile and sensual levels of experience. Our body then is felt to be transparent, without borders, suffused with a subtle quality of vibrating sensitivity. It feels less personal yet shares itself intimately with all that is met.

For most of us however the body has been deeply and lastingly conditioned by the belief that “I” refers to an individual and limited person, located inside a body, separate from others and from the world out there. Thus the feeling of the body is rooted in a set of repetitive psychosomatic habits, creating feelings of solidity, density, emotional inertia and contraction designed to validate and perpetuate the projected image of the “I” that seems to live at its center, with one’s past and future on either side. Such a body’s inherited dynamism is ruled by the complex and restrictive impulses to protect, defend or affirm itself.

In this way, the body-mind seems to become the envelope or the cage in which “I” appear to live in and the stuff that “I” seem to be made of, whilst the real “I” of undivided Awareness seems to have shrunk itself into confinement, limitation and fragmentation.

When we awaken to our true nature of Awareness in the presence of a teacher or of a teaching, we submit our thinking rational mind to the pure light of intelligence that is its source and substance.

With open, limitless Awareness as our invisible reference, we hear and understand that the ordinary awareness that is perceiving whatever is perceived in this very moment, “I”, is not contained within a body or located in time and space. We hear and understand that “I” is the Open Awareness in which all experience arises unfolds and dissolves, including thoughts, sensations, feelings and perceptions (mind, body and world.) We hear and understand that this Awareness is not a perceived experience, yet is that which perceives all experience, and is not an object, yet is found at the heart of all experience as its only and invisible substance.

My identity fits not in any name or form. Nor am I held captive between birth and death.

I am not the blood that runs through my veins or the warm breath that flows through my nostrils or the mouth that breaths. I am not the memory of myself or the hopes that skips like stones into the future. Past and future ripple through me as the wind of time, whilst space is the echo of my infinity. I am not this I am not this I am not this, yet I am the lover of all things, and find myself at the heart of all that has a name and form.

However, it is important to further deepen our exploration to include the level of feelings, sensation, tactility and perception. Taking our stand as the field of open Awareness in which all experience arises, we listen to our experience of the body directly, as if for the first time, free of any labels, without any mediation from the past or any agenda for the future. We take our time, descending below the threshold of rational experience, allowing thought to relax in the background whilst opening to the flow of tactile sensation and subtle vibration that is our actual bodily experience. We are invited to see and feel that the body flows through myself, Awareness, as does all experience.

When the welcoming of the body is open, uninvolved and global, it is as if the body like a frightened animal feels an unconditional invitation to come out into the open space.

In this friendly loving field, the body stands naked and naturally begins to liberate what it had been holding in and as itself: the crystallized energy of separation that lives as layers of contraction and tension in the cellular, muscular skeletal and nervous systems of the body.

As the body unravels in this way, the “me” charge that lives embedded in its layers is returned to the openness of Awareness.

Gradually the body is left free to open to, relax into and reunite with the openness that surrounds it. It is as if each feeling and sensation like an offering, gives itself back to the invisible altar of Awareness, telling its true story on the way. In time this allows a gentle and natural realignment with the felt understanding that the body’s essential nature is this very openness.

When I make of my body a thousand paint brushes dipped in gold

Everything takes on the form of you

And buries itself in my heart to make it bigger and softer

So that the world can overflow from it endlessly and everywhere

Returning ordinary days to infinite life

Over and over in this exploration, for which we may use guided meditation, postures, visualisations movement and breath, we are led to see and feel that in truth we cannot say that a sensation appears in “my” body, just as a sound does not appear in the world out there and a thought is not to be found inside a head. We see rather that sensation, thought and sound all appear in myself, non-located open Awareness without any separate individual existence of a body mind or world.

Over and over again we realize that like sounds and thoughts, the bodily feelings and sensations are subtle in nature. They are not solid or tangible cannot be held or measured. Rather they are like vibrating ripples appearing on the surface of myself, intimately one with myself, made of my own invisible substance. We feel and know that the body is the openness that “I” am.

Unlike most of the conventional approaches to the body that are taught in the world, this one is not a pragmatic endeavour intended towards the physical or energy body, to increase well-being, strength or flexibility, or even encourage expansive states of consciousness.

Rather it is a sacred and devotional practice that surrenders the body back towards into its source of Open Awareness: what we only and always are.

Every time the offering is made, the body is returned as it truly is, limitless, transparent, relaxed easeful and loving. It is realized as the very breath of the universe.

– Ellen Emmet

www.ellenemmet.com

News about upcoming events, from Ellen’s newsletter:

The Awakening Body: A residential/non-residential weekend retreat in Mill Valley:
Friday 14th October to Sunday 16th October 2016.
A weekend in an intimate and peaceful setting during which we will share guided meditations, gentle explorations of the body in the tradition of the tantric path of Kashmir Shivaism, and conversations with the non-dual perspective as our shared ground.
There will be delicious lacto-vegetarian meals and time for rest and walk in nature.

Science and Non-Duality Conference, 2016:
Thursday October 20th to Sunday October 23d, 2016.
I will be offering a yoga meditation session and a talk entitled The Sacred Body and participate in a panel entitled Full Embrace of Life.

Image source

it never ends!

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a dream was born of love

like a flower, budding in the field of time
it swelled, spread its petals
shared its perfume with complete abandon
smiled under the sun’s kisses
was tossed by many a foul storm
surviving almost a century
of spinning orbits around its bright star

“It never ends!” she exclaimed, exuberant,
just a few breaths before her last exhale,
before she abandoned our solar lover
and melted into the arms of
our eternal Beloved

a dream died

yet the love, the love remains,
imperishable, inescapable
and always beyond the reach of memory

~

impermanence

A little memorial piece. It’s been four years today … by the day rather than date.
(How beautiful that this year’s remembrance falls within the Easter weekend.)
I remain amazed and more grateful with every passing year for that final teaching:
IT NEVER ENDS

See also:

nothing ever dies but a dream

what is it that follows me wherever I go?

wideawake women

Image source unknown

why you don’t really want to awaken

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Waking up can be
much more painful
than the agony
of your dream,
but waking up is real.

~ John de Ruiter

John de Ruiter, J Krishnamurti and UG Krishnamurti are alike in seeing clearly that the courage needed to turn to ‘look one’s self in the eye,’ to face the void or the faceless is far more than most of us possess.  This is why we invent esoteric worlds of power, magic, the paranormal, and fantasize about what we think ‘awakening’ might be – or endlessly read or listen to the versions put forth by those ‘in the know’ – rather than truly facing its shattering nature. UG’s words are uncompromising:

This state is not in your interest.
You are only interested in continuity,
probably on a different level,
and to function in a different dimension,
but you want to continue somehow.

You wouldn’t touch this with a barge pole.
This is going to liquidate what you call ‘you’,
all of you – higher self, lower self,
soul, Atman, conscious, subconscious – all of that.
You come to a point, and then you say “I need time.”

So Sadhana (inquiry and religious endeavor)
comes into the picture and you say to yourself
“Tomorrow I will understand.”
This structure is born of time and functions in time,
but does not come to an end through time.

If you don’t understand now,
you are not going to understand tomorrow.

What you are looking for does not exist.
You would rather tread an enchanted ground
with beatific visions of a radical transformation
of that non-existent self of yours
into a state of being which is conjured up
by some bewitching phrases.

That takes you away from your natural state
– it is a movement away from yourself.

To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence.

You are ‘blessed’ with that intelligence;
nobody need give it to you,
nobody can take it away from you.

He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.

~~~

It’s almost a decade since she-who-scribbles tumbled into the free-fall that would bring to an end her notions of who she was and the nature of self, mind, and world. Re-reading UG’s words today, especially the line “You are ‘blessed’ with that intelligence;” brought on an outpouring of gratitude. Who’d have thought that the estrangement and agony, the confusion and the sheer vertigo of dropping out of every version of a self would eventually be known as a blessing, a grace beyond words? But words are all she has, so the song goes like this:

the blessing

emelle says

homeless
I found the unassailable
rock of refuge

penniless
I found the treasure
that can’t be bought or sold

exhausted and ill
I found healing
in that which is ever whole

purposeless
I found delight
in every uninvited chore

outcast
I found my tribe:
the wild wideawake
wanderlings
whose only muse
is this nameless name
and whose only beacon
is this unlit light

 ~~~

do I want to bow down before a vaporous thought?

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.

.
See the Divine in everything

and everything in the Divine.

~ Mother Meera

.

In other words:  See with the eyes of the Divine.

Do I see thus?

If I say, “No, not yet,” I have stepped into time and out of the Divine.

I have stepped into myself and its thought-factory.

I have blindly accepted an unexamined thought.  I have placed that thought (No, not yet; not ready; not fully awake) between myself and the Divine.

Do I want to bow down to a vaporous thought?

Or do I want to melt into the Divine Awake Presence that I am, and that – in Truth – I can never escape?

No contest.

How about you, beloved?

~

Mother Meera in America

in Germany

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what is it that follows me wherever I go?

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There are so many lives packed into one.  The one life we think we know is only the window that is open on the screen.  The big window full of detail, where the meaning is often lost among the facts.  If we can close that window, on purpose or by chance, what we find behind is another view.

The window is emptier.  The cross-references are cryptic.  As we scroll down it, looking for something familiar, we seem to be scrolling into another self – one we recognize but cannot place.  The co-ordinates are missing, or the co-ordinates pinpoint us outside the limits of our existence.

If we move further back, through a smaller window that is really a gateway, there is less and less to measure ourselves by.  We are coming into a dark region.  A single word might appear.  An icon.  This icon is a private Madonna, a guide, an understanding.  Very often we remember it from dreams.  “Yes,” we say.  “Yes this is a world.  I have been here.”  It comes back to us like a scent from childhood. …

We are our own oral history.  A living memoir in time.

Time is downloaded into our bodies.  We contain it.  Not only time past and time future, but time without end.  We think of ourselves as close and finite, when we are multiple and infinite.

This life, the one we know, stands in the sun.  It is our daytime and the stars and planets that surround it cannot be seen.  The sense of other lives, still our own, is clearer to us in the darkness of night or in our dreams.  Sometimes a total eclipse shows us in the day what we cannot usually see for ourselves.  As our sun darkens, other brilliancies appear.  And there is the strange illusion of looking over our shoulder and seeing the sun racing towards us at two thousand miles an hour.

What is it that follows me wherever I go?

~ Jeanette Winterson, The Power Book

www.jeanettewinterson.com

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wideawake – to the nth

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I seek a shift in common language,
a way to say what is actually meant.
I speak of I, but don’t mean I
as a thing.

I speak of it as that (mystery)
which manifests function and
process.

I speak of I as ‘It’.
But It is no-thing either, yet thought
would instantly turn it into a thing in
time and space.

I as It occupies neither time nor
space, yet – magician that it is –
manifests both in order to
show up for the party.

I as It is never caught napping,
wide-eyed I is the eternal insomniac
wideawake – to the nth

– miriam louisa
echoes from emptiness