Monday, August 14, 2017

The Day My Buddha Burned - post nineteen

Stories of broken hearts
What breaks my heart, in my every day, is facing my own divergence from the path of thy will. I don’t know many people who have felt as though they have met with God. I have read about them and I have listened to their stories, but I haven’t really met many people who talk about God at all. I am usually the only one who is interested in the topic and so far removed from caring about the opinion of my society that I mention God all the time.
If someone like me, who has had such a life changing experience can not follow the will of God with ease, who can? And it deepens my patience and it deepens my motivation to be able to somehow embody the Goodness of God in any moment so that somehow, through pure channeling, it can do what it has to do.. in this world.
Stories of Loss
Stories of
Step mother
On the Subject of Discovery
On the Subject of Loss
On the Subject of Integration
On the Subject of Embracing
My life without a Buddha

What did giving up truth give me?
It gave me, paradoxically, the truth.
When I searched for the truth, I also held it up high as a banner over my head, waving it as the highest most important value to honour in all endevours within and without.  When I found people not seeking the truth, but enjoying their shadows, I felt
Righteous
Superior
Judgmental
The observer just observes. To clear the glass through which we are seeing the world, we must remove obstacles. … example? When I gave up truth I saw with greater clarity, the Truth, and with it, came compassion for the fear people lived with. The fear of them, the fear of them selves and greater, the fear that there was something beneath the surface always looming but easily kept at bay by entertainment and constantly shifted attention.
Remember to turn around and bow to your path. Treat the past with respect. Turn every now and then and remember to give thanks to your path.
On the subject of surrender
Your physical flesh, your physical life needs to turn and embrace the life force. It’s like a child who has been constantly fed and taken care of and one day realizes that an actual person or a family had been choosing to take care of him, of loving him and helping him in times of need and when that consciousness arises,  the child feels love and gratitude for the first time for the force that had sustained him all these years.  In the same way, when we awaken to the life force within, we realize that nothing could have occurred without the life force’s support. And the life force, the spirit, responds to love, awareness and gratitude with joy and boundless support.

We move through samsara to nivarna.
What I thought would happen and what really happened.
There is one main problem  my students present me with.
The first is inability to accept reality. That is, there is a projection/expectation of what life is suppose to be, and then, there is the reality.
The only practice that helps this is deep level acceptance.
The physical body – exercise…. How to do exercises in acceptance… breathing, relaxing… 

The problems in accepting reality.. my beliefs are soo strong.. I am right, I am so wrong… my upbringing said, reaction for or against.
Insights
Induced Chi Flow
There is no why, there is just do..?
Finally, once I have developed a practice rooted in presence rather than rooted in the mind, the only information I gain, at this point in time, is to embody Life itself.  It’s very simple. There is nothing more to ‘do’. What comes out of this simple practice, springs from a bottomless well of love, joy, creativity.
Everything that is not acceptance, that does not align itself with life, is a contraction. Every no, every judgment, every criticism, every resistance is in itself a ‘no’ to life.
One of the typical fears arising from this practice is that if I practice acceptance, I am allowing the ‘bad’ things to happen in the world. I need to fight them and resist them.
If we take one concrete example, to work through understanding ‘acceptance’ means.

We see a program on TV about starving children in Ethiopia (?), and you come to class, and I say you must accept the starving children. Your first reaction is to say no, I cannot accept this… I must fight it, I must do something… I am unhappy, sad, frustrated and I need to do something to help them, even if it is just giving money.
To begin with, there is nothing wrong with this reaction. It’s a normal reaction. But it is also based on the story of ‘me’ giving and helping and alleviating problems of the world. I would feel better, if I give or help or ‘do’ something. I would gain something. And let me say again, there is nothing wrong with this. But it is based on the reciprocal movement of giving and receiving.
Now, if we look from a position of deep acceptance, just as an experiment, we just see what happens when we accept the fact of starving children, that it is, what happens?
We notice our own resistance. Inside of our own body we notice the physical ‘no’ to life itself. Life is playing out in an uncountable myriad of forms and any resistance to Life is a contraction and a movement away from life into suffering, despair, helplessness. Life is never like that. Life is love, joy, creativity, movement, truth and beauty.
Now, imagine that you can accept  the fact of starving children, your perception changes. Suddenly, without all of the emotion, without all of the blaming, without all of the story attached to the idea of the children, you can see quite clearly that giving 10, 20 or 30 euro to a children’s charity hasn’t really changed anything in the last 30 years of starving children. If giving money could solve the problem, it would be solved. There is a lot more going on than the outcome of starving children. What is the answer? That is for each of us to discover. For each of us to wake up to. For each of us to face.
Today as I was walking along the river near my house, I bumped into a friend of mine who told me that he knew someone who didn’t like the  river walk. I was surprised. It was pleasant enough. No, he said, because there was a slaughter house for pigs nearby, and some days you could hear the pigs screaming. Oh, I said, does your friend eat pig? Yes he said apologetically.
 There is a very simple way to stop one of those pigs from screaming in the slaughter house. And that is to stop eating them.

We always know what we need to do. That does not mean that we can do it, or that we want to do it, or that we will do it. But we know better than we behave, usually in all situations. 

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