Tag: kindness

Dissolving the World into Love

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The world moves, everything changing constantly… familiarity blinds people.  So few notice that each object in the field around them is reforming moment to moment, it disintegrates and re-emerges in space.  Humans ‘know’ too much, it’s not really knowing in a wisdom sense, it’s data-compiling, an assumption that because something is perceived by name and can be identified that it will be enough to close the book on it and recall it from memory when needed.
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The Unknown Future
It can be difficult to face things that were on our invisible bucket-list that sits in our subconscious.  We make assumptions about the future and stumble towards it oblivious to what is going on.  Suddenly another new possibility and direction appears from nowhere and our world wobbles like it’s been hit by a meteor.  What we expected to happen ‘invisible-izes’ itself and dissolves into the ethers.  If we are crazy, crazy, we chase that unborn experience, reach to grab it and although we see its misty form, it’s not really there, we are just dancing with ghosts, phantoms of the past and non-real futures. Wise men let them lie and create new potentials, briefly looking over their shoulder as the universe recedes in the rear-vision mirror of life.
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Micro Bliss
I spend my days seeking the perfect coffee, it’s a minor side show but as a serious thinker I do need simple things, delicacies, stuff that generates joy, these things that give us micro-bliss are like life-buoys in space, the journey through the corridors of the world can get a little tough and having things to snap us out of seriousness is critical. Seek joy, seek peace; I know that wisdom is not enough to wander planet Earth. Dinotopia speak says “Breath Deep Seek Peace”, their civilisation did not know of chocolate and coffee.
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Mad World
The noise, the bustle, the bling, the ads, the show, fast cars, credit cards, a super-imposed reality, over consumption, upgrading objects and throwing away what was quite okay… it did its job, the losing of sovereignty by distraction, the Rishis watch on in wonder at the play of mice and men … wine is wondrous, just a mouthful, not a bucket to drown in and hide ones feelings.
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In this chaos and busyness, people throw away people, sadly we’ve all done it … I’ve learned too well that it is what I have done to others that hurts me more than what they have done to me, as time passes this truth in some way haunts me, it always has; in the moment other peoples antics hurt but as we move along the arrow of time, it’s our STUFF that bites us on the bum.  Even the small moments of unkindness are things that I struggle with, I have all the techniques, the tools required to resolve many of the problems of the Universe but I know in truth in the end I must just sit and feel into the disappointments as they rise in my consciousness, wait until they pass, to find a way to be comfortable in my uncomfortableness, to float through the tsunami of experience in the lifeboat of understanding and accept change.  Humans throw away people as if they are disposable cups, had enough of that one, get me a new model.  I know there is a need to stop and breath, to seek kindness, to aim at healing, to resolve, to acquire peace, without resolve it is difficult to CREATE the future, emotions block the flow of energy through the pathways of the brain.
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The Field of Life
The field of life brings many experiences, often those we don’t want… quick I am outta here. We are selective, we choose the happy and run from the sad.  And yes that seems fair ‘n’ normal.  I am reminded that the great Sage the Buddha reminded us that “the First Truth is that all life is suffering, pain, and misery,” I will go out on and edge and say that is not what HE said. That is an enslavement program implemented by those who came later.  It is twisted, a great Sage would not say that and I am not in any way being disrespectful to my great hero Gautama Buddha. A Sage would see the beauty of the creation, the bliss of unfolding life in the field of space; he would understand ‘entanglement’ but NEVER say that life is suffering.
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NEW DAWN
The new day breaks, I rise to the challenge of it, the beauty and mystery of it is what I seek.  To heal my heart, to share love, to grow, to resolve what troubles me, to BE the man I have dreamed of being, to be kind enough to myself to know when I am wrong, when decisions are or were poor and to accept them. I seek tenderness in the world around me, to be an ally when needed and to accept change, to allow others to BE who they are regardless of my opinions which are often bold.  To be vulnerable and stand on the edge looking into space and say “I accept what is emerging” and to adapt my dream accordingly into something wondrous, delicate, artful … I wander through space, may integrity always find me and light my way.  And in the unknowingness I will seek and find love in all things.
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Tilopa 2.0

Embracing the Phantoms of Eternity

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We walk such a fine line in life, between the polarities of joy and suffering, success and failure, we stand on the edge of forever looking out to where we may one day be and at the same time we sometimes bow our heads and look down, as if into an abyss of darkness forgetting the rising sun, the stars, the new blooms, the spring, unborn love and the sweetness reflected in the bees.
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The Cosmic Gatekeeper
The shadow of death passes over every house, only the free men are in some way detached from it.  Not that they don’t feel, they do, they rain tears down their cheeks like all others, it’s just that they see the chapters in the book of life as part of the totality that changes shape and allow the phantoms to pass.  Wisdom is the fruit of experience, we are feeling beings firstly, and as my dearest wise friend once said to me. ‘the Sage will never tell you the price he paid for liberation,’ those words have allowed me to embrace change when my heart has been taken to the limits of despair, it has been a light to guide me beyond my known limitations.
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Knock Knock
The knock on the door that everyone lives in fear of comes once for each one of our beloveds.  Knowing this allows us to live every other day rejoicing their existence, to look for ways to to resolve our petty differences, to hold them more often, to look into their eyes and see the wonder of their being, to rejoice in the miracle of their existence and when they dissolve through the veil of infinity we honor them by living a glorious life, to make sure our days are not wasted in trivia, petty things.
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Foreverness
As each person leaves the stage of the world, may we bow in reverence.  They have left a piece of themselves in us that lives on and becomes a part of us, a mannerism, a snippet of wisdom, a gesture that defined them, they walk with us over the horizon into eternity.
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May we always find love and in a state of forgetfulness bypass the misgivings, see the splendor in the meetings of the spirits that we are, and be gentle with each other.
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May empathy, compassion and kindness always be restored and rise again quickly even when we lose our way.

To Love or Not to Love

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Out of Emptiness emerged something extraordinary, a sense of awareness of being.  Wise men, fools, dreamers, the religiously arrogant, philosophers, liars, poets, mystics and sages have written much between that (imaginary) first moment way outside time when the awareness said, “something is doing something.”  We shall let all beings have their story, leave them be and attempt to come into our present state of awareness.
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An Uncluttered Present
This present, the supposed NOW that some people speak of is colored by the past. The experiencer has a history, deep in the subconscious and expressing on the screen of life as we know it is a story of who we are, concepts about the way the world works, the possibles and impossibles.  If we are clear that generally the NOW that many people talk about has baggage, there will be a slight shift in awareness, a deepening, we will be more inclined to stop for a brief moment and not just scroll past it like we do with social media posts.  If we robotically say Be Here Now and make assumptions and think that we have it sorted, it is possible that the flippant attitude that we apply to many of the other things in our lives will once again prevent us from digging in.  Constantly abandoning the past is something that can be done, it may be gradual, for some it may come as a quantum leap, there may be a light-bulb moment, it’s then that the work begins.
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That Elixir
By nature or better I say by habit, we are continuously calling up what we know, all those things that have impacted on us emotionally and also our understandings / conjectures about the reality / the world space we move in.   As humans, due to the cultures we are born into we have subtle prejudices. These ‘knowns’ are what stand in the way of LOVE.
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Love, that old word that has more definitions than a caterpillar has legs; love, that thing that people seek changing partners like an evening at a square dance in a country hall; love, that elixir that brings fierce looking grown men to their knees to weep buckets of tears; love, that wondrous misinterpreted something that is elusive as the quest for what God may or may not be.
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About ten years ago in brief a moment of ecstatic-ness I wrote on a blog post:

“LOVE, has no boundaries or judgements. It embraces the totally of all things born and still unborn. It waits patiently for us to take her hand and follow her to our greatest potential, it forgives our shortcomings and speaks quietly to us when we need her most. Love creeps through our life often unnoticed but catches us as we fall. Love is our only true friend, our faithful companion that walks with us from age to age, beyond the graves.” 
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Also the great sage Shams teacher of the Mystic poet Rumi tells us:
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The chemistry of mind is different from the chemistry of love. The mind is careful, suspicious, he advances little by little. He advises “Be careful, protect yourself” Whereas love says “Let yourself, go!” The mind is strong, never falls down, while love hurts itself, falls into ruins. But isn’t it in ruins that we mostly find the treasures? A broken heart hides so many treasures.
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In those words there is plenty to ponder.  Indulgent romantics will focus on the ‘broken heart’ always licking their wounds as if the world owes them something.  A Buddhist will remind us that attachment is our enemy.  Alan Watts, a great carrier of Zen to the West will echo the words ‘let yourself go’.  Shams wakes us up to the fact that the world of the mind and that of love are in contradiction.  Great men and woman know that we can only be a slave to one.  Take your pick, the mind or love.
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The Unknowing Mind
The mind likes to think it knows everything, it prides itself on information.  Love knows nothing.  Love dives in boots and all, it takes chances, it always stands on the threshold, right on the edge of the precipice.  Some people say love and hate are opposites, it is not hate that is the opposite of love, it is fear.  Fear is the gateway to love.  Fear must fall, it has no place in the world of love apart from being that which dissolves itself when love ultimately flowers.
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Love is Grand
When love becomes ‘personal’ it has a wondrous place but let’s move away from here, not because it has no value, self-indulgence only holds a small spot in the universe, we need to think big in the same way that the beings on this planet are only a dot compared to the other intelligent civilizations in the cosmos.   As confusing and as misconstrued as the word ‘God’, love has its interpreters and impostors.  The holier-than-thou religious babble nonsense about love, meantime looking down on their brothers and sisters, out-casting them with their hideous doom and gloom prophecies, and there are those New Agers who delight in ‘one day karma will get them back’, fully forgetting their own minds are filled with hatred and spiritual elitism.  Their version of love is poisonous, it has conditions, “be like me” and we can add to it “if you don’t, my God will get you you evil wretch”.  They fully forget the journey that got them to their present.
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The Alchemy called Life
On the journey into and through love there is accountability but it is not revengeful, it is self-perpetuating.  The great Gods, the word God here translates as those Beings who have journeyed out of original consciousness ions ago and learnt through experience, climbed out of the states of slumber and forgetfulness and become wondrous creative Beings with understandings that are incomprehensible to human intelligence, these great Gods do not have judgement.  They have patience, the virtue of acceptance of the diversity, they know that to get to be the extraordinary Gods that they are is not instantaneous, it is a trial by fire, it is alchemy, removing the gross metal to reveal the gold.
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Returning to Ourself
If we come back to ourselves and ask the right questions.  Who do I hate? What makes me feel better than others? What behaviors of others do I despise? Who do I look down upon? Why is my tribe, caste or social class better than others?  Why is my spirituality more pure and enlightened than others?  Do we see others as a lost cause and trailer trash? We will start to see how much love we have, when we hold the mirror up we will see our shadow and start to see that our love is selective. We can quote scriptures, speak in a manner that sounds pleasing to others, eat the ‘right’ foods, be part of animal liberation movements and do a lot of things that put us into the nice guy category but it’s an incomplete model of love.  Love is much deeper than this.
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Love is there in tenderness with our beloved, sure; it is in our empathy when something wells up inside us and we go past our normal limitations to help others; yes we have it for our families and pets.  But it is more.  Love is in acceptance of what we don’t like, learning not to despise the wickedness of human nature, and that doesn’t mean to delight in it, it is in understanding that the consciousness that underlies the totality manifests in ways that are incomprehensible to us.  We are quick to judge, often forgetting the path that leads us to now, not remembering that we have a story, that we were at some point whether in this life or way back in time in some other place we expressed in ways that were not kind, we betrayed, we hurt, we put ourselves first, we have added to suffering of others.  Love allows other things to be and that does not mean we have no boundaries in our lives and have a form of idiot-compassion that makes us say yes when the best solution is no.  It’s not just in our actions, it’s about our thoughts, do we vilify others just because they are different, because their wisdom is a dormant seed in their consciousness, that due to the experiences in their lives closed themselves down which lead them to actions that reflect a lack of self care or anger and animosity to others.  Is our ‘I am better-ness’ arrogant?  Are we at times the thing that we hate?
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Love arrives in a very strange way; it is common to hear the words “we cannot truly love until we love ourselves fully’; maybe not fully, that type of thinking leads to a feeling of worthlessness, never good enough, it creates an inverted ego.  Neither the ego or its upside down I-hate-me inverted twin have substance.  There is an open secret that we know but forget, every moment is new and this is an opportunity for new growth, the past season is over and although the winter may have been bitter, the autumn of our lives had a mix of joy and misfortune, the spring of new potential constantly remerges and there are new beginnings.  We can abandon our past and extract the wisdom of experience and wander with dignity into foreverness, touching everything on the way with kindness, creating a trail that brings joy to others where possible, being gentle on the world around us.
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I awake to a new day
Although the unborn is unseen out of view
I trust in the benevolence of the Universe
I am gentle, in this is my strength
I can bend and adapt to the changing fortunes that emerge
I am an embodiment of everything I have ever dreamed to be
I walk with dignity into foreverness

Tilopa 2.0

 

The Yoga of Being Kind

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We are born into societies where we are educated to ‘fit in’ and also stand out, to be seen a little bit above the rest; ambition is supposedly a virtue to some and something to drive us onward to a wondrous destination and do the clan proud.
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The Stupidity of Being Better Than Others
In our quest to rise up, we often find ourselves accidentally casting our shadows over others; life sometimes resembles two ‘suits’ fighting it out to win points in a legal case. Earth man has a tendency to adapt the ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude. When we go to school, once all basics are sorted, we find ourselves in the situation where we are taught how to do things, to retain information and then deliver something back to the teacher, our work is graded and compared to the other children.  All smiles for those who ‘got it right’ and a feeling of lack gradually develops in those who just can’t make sense of it.  In the middle a lot of others make up the numbers.
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When we move out onto the sporting field, ‘faster’ is better, ‘slower’ means you need to try harder, be a better version of your current fastest,  meanwhile the Road Runner flies by while you pant for breath, your legs that are possibly 1/6 shorter than you’d like them to be, the appendages resemble helicopter blades going in any way but the direction you want them to. The ‘sporty person’ finds a senior position in the pecking order and scores points on the subconscious ‘way we evaluate people’ table.
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The King of Nothing Syndrome
It may start at a young age but we begin to see ‘the survival’ techniques kicking in, thugs bumble and push their way through the micro-community they are part of, some day the victims of their thugi-ness may find their way to senior positions of government and live out their revenge on an unsuspecting community.
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Others have the knack of acquisition, they take the hunter-gather thing to new heights, drones do the gathering and hunting for them, the accumulation of ‘too many things’ becomes a yardstick on how THEY value themselves in the society they are part of, and other poor innocent bods believe that because someones empire is bigger than their own, it must be a better way to exist, so then they chase an empire of objects and in their failings, develop a feeling of worthlessness with an attitude of ‘life is not fair’ and suffer emotionally…… let’s go another way.
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Getting Off the Wheel of Life
The clouds overhead look ominous to some; the gardener within was hoping for rain today, the sun had scorched the garden bed, the wind had blasted and bashed the budding plants around, I was thinking ‘sprinkles from the heavens would be a bit of a blessing’.  We can learn a lot of nature, that’s a very old common adage; Alan Watts gave us a reminder ‘there are no straight lines in nature’, I will add ‘apart from the horizon, if we look from the sky we would see it’s curved’.  Many of us would remember school assemblies,  kids standing in line, every so often one would faint, or a fart may break the silence and great chaos cuts loose.  I am thinking that the tighter the school environment, the more a person becomes a slave to the system, some push ahead with tenacity to be the leaders in our social structure, but they are still insiders, it takes a lot of work to undo our programming. Communities don’t usually like outsiders, they are a threat.
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Getting Outta Here
Lao Tsu, Buddha, Jesus, Chang Zhu all rewrote the destiny of man, although people build religious cults around their words, they changed humanity from the inside.   They did not compete, they walked in the opposite direction to the rest of humanity, this in itself is a great teaching.  They broke through into new areas of thought, or more specifically ‘thought-less-ness’.  There is a tendency for the followers to focus on their words instead of the way they lived, Emptiness is at the core of these great men, it is easily missed. When we look at humanity, people prefer ‘fullness’, even if it’s a big bucket of crap, they are more comfortable with the pain and familiarity of the known than the potential of an unborn future, the unknown does not seem safe, it requires courage and trust.
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Win at All Costs
By inherited nature, humans compete all the time, being aware of what is healthy competition and what is debstabilising for others and what ‘weakens’ us is critical, i didn’t say damaging I said ‘critical’. When we are unnaturally competitive our values can go out the window and we make excuses for our actions, any excuse will do.  To have some kind of peace we justify things and point the finger away from ourselves and target others. When we take the time to think about how we treat others we can gradually over a period of time bring about some type of transformation in ourselves that will help us relax a little; relaxing doesn’t mean being ‘sloppy’.  All the mantras, wisdom, teachings are meaningless if we lack empathy and kindness, a softened heart is the fruit of all Spiritual practice and explorations into Emotional Intelligence.
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Every Moment Zen
Every day, every interaction we have with others puts us in a situation where we have choices.  Often the smarter we are, the greater the expert, the bigger the empire and the higher we are in a hierarchy, the more chance there is to be disrespectful to others, flippant, dismissive and lacking in understanding, our value systems can get skewed, and of course there are wonderful people at all places in the community but the quest for success can cloud our thoughts and we close down a little.
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As a musician I am constantly in the situation of having to leave my opinions out of things relating to music.  After many decades of honing my craft I am inclined to be critical to the point of annoying and wanting to ‘fix’ the music around me. We all have parts of ourselves that require work if we want to live happy lives, I am aware of where much of my work lies. Where this article was always going was to point out one simple thing, and it’s an ongoing process that constantly arises, ‘it’s better to be kind than right’, we know if we are well informed about things, and whether we have a great skill, we don’t need to prove anything, it is our actions and the way we treat others that counts. I think the process of softening takes our whole life, till the moment we pass into another part of foreverness.