Monday, May 29, 2017

The Day My Buddha Burned - part five

Rebuilding

Slowly, I started to reform myself. I started the inevitable building of myself around this body. I reviewed the past through washed eyes and I wrote letters of forgiveness and apology.  And I knew, in the depth of my being, that God existed.

God being within and part of all things. God being All. No thing exists without God. God as alive, awake and Life itself. A no thing and yet, a some thing that lies within the core of every thing. One is not different from another.

I realized that because of the enclosed shell of hate, fear and unhappiness I had built around myself  I had cut myself off from the human experience. I was judgmental, critical and arrogant. I couldn’t find a point of connection with humanity. Humanity was, for  me, a great mistake. I had believed that humans were basically evil. They lied, betrayed, killed, stole, cheated and were selfish to the core. I had watched the news as a teenager and felt that the world was about to explode with human stupidity at any moment. To maintain any level of sanity, I had to dissassoiate myself from being human.

After my awakening experience, I made a vow

Monday, May 22, 2017

The Day My Buddha Burned- part four

This is part of a novella. You can go straight to the beginning here, or go back to previous exert here.



A Light

At 21 I lived for almost a year as a caretaker of a farm. I wrote, gardened, took care of dogs, inquired into life and forgot about the world out there. I needed to get away from people. I needed to escape from the noise in my own head.

One day, walking the dogs, the dried up grass gold on the ground, Light struck the top of my head, changing my vision for ever.

For three days and three nights I was only light. My vision was clear, my body was nonexistent and I saw beneath the surface. The top of my head was aglow, burning bright and beyond. And I experienced, without doubt, down into the cells of my body, out into the apparent differences in shape and form that we were indeed, all One.


I saw underneath the apparent surface, everything was made up of similar ‘stuff’. This stuff infused all things, including air, and the space between things. There was no here, there was just everywhere that existed in one moment. Up close and far away were the same. Just ever increasing expression of shapes and colours. But we were all the same stuff. Glowing alive magical stuff. 

Loss

I lost my centre. I lost who I thought I was. Everything was washed away with a light so bright it penetrated every aspect of my previous self.  There was no me. There was only light.

Loss of identity.

Loss of ideas.

Loss of beliefs.

Loss of ambition. 

Loss of purpose.


Loss of all the things that came together to make me ‘me’. It was gone. There was nothing, at least for those three days.

Read more

Monday, May 15, 2017

The Day My Buddha Burned - part three


Part Two 

‘Wounded, abandoned, orphaned
How many of you value the ability to think independently? … to feel like you’ve taken the lead…
Archetypically '…   gods say to you.. pursue a` reality… that is independent…’ Jesus’s contract… by getting you strong enough to see, you need to be born into a family that doesn’t want you.’
- Caroline Myss

‘Sometimes it feels painful, but I promise you,
the effort of feeling and
allowing feeling,
is like discovering gold.’
- Tiffany Jones

Of course I cried. I cried bitterly. I was angry and confused. I felt abandoned and set adrift. I was left where I was not wanted and I felt defiant to the last.  ‘Let everyone suffer.’  I couldn’t go beyond that.

It was my 14th summer.  Some weeks earlier I had been dropped off at my grandmother’s house with the promise that my father and step-mother would come pick me up in a week.
It is a phone call I remember etched with detail; the beige telephone in my left hand, looking into the brightness of the old fashioned kitchen, my right fingers entangled in the spiralling telephone cord, the cold bench I leaned upon, the noise from the small TV behind me, the greasy scalp of my grandfather near my elbow. I was conscious of his withdrawal and active internal world and knew he wasn’t listening to my responses.

My step mother told me, over the telephone, that she and my father hadn’t had enough alone time. They had been together for seven years and they had been surrounded by children; children from their previous relationships.  They had decided I was to live with my grandparents, and they weren’t coming back.

My father, for the first and last time said ‘I love you’, over the telephone.

All I could feel was a rush of fury towards my step-mother, coldness quickly followed and then raging disbelief. I remember saying ‘OK’. I remember being obedient. I remember hanging up the phone and living through those hours in front my grandparents as if everything was alright. When I went to the fold out bed set up in the ‘best’ lounge room where nobody ever sat, I turned my face to the pillow and screamed with rage and frustration and hate. And I cried bitterly.  And I promised myself not to be hurt again. And to do that, I needed to hate. And that’s what I did.

On the Subject of Loss

On that day, over 25 years ago, I lost my father. I lost everything he meant to me. I lost trust, faith and protection. I lost my idealisation. I lost one of the foundation stones of my belief system.  I lost a story.

I had been a daddy’s girl. He had special rules. He was a thief and a conman. He stole for a living and he was paranoid and difficult to live with. He was also charming, personable and he was the only rule in my life.  There were rules for the inside of the house. There was another set of  rules for outside of the house. There were things we didn’t mention. There were things we didn’t talk about. Intuition was important and valued. Reading people was important.

Life drained out of me. Everything that had sustained me thus far in my life, my belief in my father, was taken away from me. I felt as though I didn’t have anything left. It was certainly death for me.

Between 14 and 18 I had the most stable environment I had experienced in my life. I slept in the same bed for four years. I ate at regular hours. I had a grandmother who cared for me and asked me how school was.  I had a grandfather who drove me places.  I made friends.  And I was festering with self-loathing, bitterness, rage and despair. By 17 I was suffering severe migraines and was on daily medication to cope with the pain.

At 20, for no apparent reason, I suffered sciatica so severely I was sometimes unable to walk. Doctors couldn’t find a reason. Massage and osteopaths didn’t help.

I had cut off my relationships with my high school friends. I felt like my life was a huge lie. I had never spoken about my father’s lifestyle to anyone.

Once outside of the structure of high school and the assumption of University for a bright girl like myself, I was lost. I didn’t know what to do. I was continually suffering rage, hatred, fear and confusion.

I decided to move to the country. And I did. I needed to get away from the maddening crowd. I needed to find answers. 



Monday, May 8, 2017

The Day My Buddha Burned - Part Two

Here I am holding my big sisters' hands in the early 70's.

This is part of a novella. Here is the first exert of The Day My Buddha Burned 

Ideas like Building Blocks

We are like small children with coloured building blocks.  We sit there totally absorbed in placing one block on top of another and either because we haven’t placed our blocks well, or because we get fed up, the blocks fall and quite happily, and without questioning what we are doing at all, we rebuild. We often rebuild without seeming to learn anything from the last structure we built. We build without any view to an end point. We build until it collapses.

And then we start again.

The coloured building blocks are ideas and belief systems we individually construct within the walls of our minds.

We are all born with the building blocks before us. Some of the ideas we build are based on the blueprints handed down to us by our family, friends, society, culture and country, and others are drawn up in direct consequence of what we have perceived as positive/protective responses to life’s events.

Deconstruction and re-planning occur in the teenage years when our hormones coupled with an expansion of perception create some of the biggest conscious changes we have thus far been aware of. Many people don’t change their mental landscape again until their retirement.

However, for others, we have been forced by personality or circumstance, to abandon ideas housed within our minds and perhaps to put up temporary structures to aid us in different moments in life. Perhaps some of us can even be called nomads, resting in easily constructed rooms for comfort and being able to adapt according to the changing seasons.
I’ve written down some of the changes to my thinking in the past 40 years.





Tuesday, May 2, 2017

The Day My Buddha Burned - Introduction

I've been writing this short novel for several years. This is the first instalment. You're welcome to leave comments.

Here I am writing in my journal on a train in India, 2007


This sacred journey through life hits upon moments of intensity that we know are special, different, as if they’ve been dabbed with a fluorescent marker, to stand out as important. I’ve written down a few.


I do believe we’re here to take another step or two further along the pilgrimage of our soul’s journey. The sacred centers are those moments that stand out high and above the normal every day scenery and represent moments of clarity, of learning, of wisdom, choice, power. They are the sacred centers of our life and sometimes we are so obviously shaken out of the normal, we know we are in vibrant times, though sometimes we only recognise them in the hindsight.

This book is dedicated, with love.



The second part of The Day My Buddha Burned.