If you'd look at nature truly

 One as all examine duly!

No thing's inside, outside neither:

In is out and both are either.

Grasp it quick, let nought confound you,

Sacred secret all around you.

 

Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe born in 1749 was a key figure in German literature. His work had a major impact on German philosophy and he became a well known figure all over Europe as well.

 

Goethe's words: if you look at nature truly make me stop for a minute and focus on the world I see around me. I wondered if I ever looked at nature truly or for that matter do I look at anything truly? Truly means truthfully but I rarely associate nature and truth or truth with animals. Truth stands in a corner of human society and waits patiently for me to notice it and use it. Nothing but the truth will do is the phrase I hear all the time but it seems to be lost in a house of fear and the corner where it stands is blocked by the debris of acceptance.

 

I only need to pick up a paper or turn on a TV to find shadows of truth, fragments of honesty that have been assembled to appear valid and noteworthy. These fragments are then connected in my mind and a belief forms around them. Once I believe something, truth comes waltzing into my life in an altered state of existence. This truth is then used to verify my perceptions and values. A world is created around my thoughts and I either conform or suppress these ideas and experience the probabilities that develop from them. I live a version of a fabricated truth and feel empty and wonder why.

 

As Goethe says: In is out and both are either. Truth can be described that way. It begins within me. There is no external truth that must be learned or adhered to in order for me to create. I am wired for truth long before I was born into this physical illusion and it does stay with me throughout my journey, I just forget where it is and use fragments of a mechanical truth to function in human form. I follow instead of lead and I am confounded by my actions.

 

Nature is a mirror. When I look at it I see my reflection. My inner world is there in front of me calling my name. The secrets I want to uncover about life and death are right in front of me, open and willing to awaken me from my dream of separation. I create my life and my journey is my experience. Truth is the vehicle I started with and it will be the light that guides me, once I turn it on.

 

Now I truly look at nature. I truly look at my self and I truly look at what I create and feel my connection to the scared secret of life. I examine the beauty of all life and see the truth that flows through it. I accept and forgive my self and the void within me is filled with truth, and the desire to expand my consciousness. I am experiencing a journey filled with too many truths to count, and one sacred secret that is countless in the truth of oneness.

 

When your spiritual center begins to manifest, your ego-consciousness integrates with it and you begin to be “lived through,” as it were, by the spirit. Your living becomes a spontaneous, effortless flow.

Eva Pierrokos wrote that in her 1990 book, A Pathwork Of Self-Transformation. Eva developed The Pathwork as a guide to remembering that the inner consciousness is the foundation and blueprint for my physical expressions. When I block my inner consciousness through fear and the fear filled emotions that manifest, my ego acts independently and creates a world filled with unnecessary pain and suffering. By believing in two separate worlds, one of filled with fear and the other a utopia after death, I experience both states as the true reality of life. I live in a constant state of fragmentation and all I see around me is fragments of my own blueprint and foundation.

By changing my thoughts about the nature of my own reality, I can experience both worlds simultaneously, blending them together in an effortless flow of love, instead of a never ending war against pain, dis-ease and suffering. I have the ability to physically manifest my complete foundation and use my inner blueprint to create a physical world that accepts pain for what it is; a tool for remembering. I am able to understand suffering as the manifestation of fear and change its destination. I realize that dis-ease is self created and I cure rather than infect the world I build around my physical self.

When I begin to accept my self for what I am now, I begin to change. When I ask for help from my inner consciousness, another self appears and my world becomes exciting, spontaneous, meaningful and significant. I feel the presence of other aspects, more selves, that guide me in my choices and the probabilities that manifest are filled with synchronicity. I begin to realize my multidimensionality and death becomes another choice and I continue to live and experience another dimension of my consciousness. In the awareness of my complexity, I find peace, abundance and my bliss and manifest them in this physical reality.

Eva used a simple prayer to connect to the inner consciousness she called spirit. It is a prayer of self transformation and awareness. Through this gateway of knowing I become whole and I understand that my physical life is just one thought, one drop of water in the clear ocean of eternity.

As Eva prays, so do I:

Through the gateway of feeling your weakness lies your strength.

Through the gateway of feeling your pain lies your pleasure and joy.

Through the gateway of feeling your fear lies your security and safety.

Through the gateway of feeling your loneliness lies your capacity to have fulfillment,
Love and companionship.

Through the gateway of feeling your hopelessness lies true and justified hope.

Through the gateway of accepting the lacks in your childhood lies your fulfillment now.

So my forgetfulness is my road to remembering who I am. I create separation in order to remember unity. I do battle in order to remember peace. I fear in order to remember love. I create a world filled with illusions in order to experience physical life as a whole consciousness and enjoy my truth. Now is an awakening. Now is all there is, everything I have experienced in fragments has gotten me to where I am now. It is the no time of all time where I begin to remember what the word living really means and manifest all its beauty in an effortless flow of consciousness.

 

 

My poems resemble the bread of Egypt...one night passes over it, and you can't eat it anymore.

 

So gobble them down now, while they're still fresh, before the dust of the worlds settles on them.

 

Where a poem belongs is here, in the warmth of the chest; out in the world it dies of cold.

 

You've seen a fish...put him on dry land; he quivers for a few minutes and then is still.

 

And even if you eat my poems while they're still fresh, you still have to bring forward many images yourself.

 

Actually, friend, what you're eating is your own imagination.

These are not just a bunch of old proverbs.

 

Rumi's poetry has stood up to the test of time and space and lives immortally in the hearts of millions of people. The freshness of his words brings peace and unity to the table of physical life. How and when I begin to feast on his wisdom is my choice. I always have a choice and another probability to experience. My mind is a lake filled with the fish of thoughts and I pull one of these fish from the lake every minute. Some of them quiver and after a few seconds they are still. Others begin to breath and take on another life as physical expression. I am constantly fishing and constantly catching the same fish. I don't realize it, because part of my lake is blocked by the debris called unawareness.

 

Eva Pierrakos born in 1915 explains it this way:

 

If in the smallest atom...so small that it cannot even be perceived with the naked eye... a power exists to release untold energies for building or destroying, how infinitely more is this the case with the power of the mind: the power of thinking, feeling, and willing. Just dwell on this significant fact and it will open new vistas to you. Why do you blindly assume that the power of inanimate things is greater than the power of the mind?

 

The power to think, feel, act and decide is consciousness manifesting in physical form. I underestimate my own power and just see one part of the lake and the fish that swim in it. My mind is unending and stocked with every conceivable variety of thought and I have the ability to live each and every one of them. My life is a poem and I restrict its fluidity by neglecting and negating my imagination.  Even when I pull a destructive thought from the lake, I have the ability to change it into a constructive life experience. I can take a quivering dying fish and make it breath again, by believing in the power of my inner consciousness.

 

My imagination is like a winter stream that runs under the frozen snow of my ego. Little by little the snow begins to melt because I am fluid, ever changing and expanding in awareness. I am a constantly renewing myself like the stream and branching out spontaneously. I am a pulsating vibration of consciousness which is free at any moment to think different thoughts that create new life expressions and experiences. My imagination melts the fear I have accepted as an unchangeable emotion and transforms it into a clear brook that flows over the rocks of contrast and finds itself in another part of my lake. My physical life becomes a poem written by my imagination and it is read by the world I call real. I am a fresh thought that becomes reality. My perceptions manifest and I am like a repeating verse in the stanza of the poem that Rumi finds, in the warmth of the chest.

 

In order to explore other aspects of my mind I must allow my self the freedom to do so. No matter how my fixed life appears now, it is just part of my poem. It's just a word in the verse of a never-ending story of self expansion and awareness. By expressing my imagination and believing that it has the power to manifest physical experiences I change my personality. I believe in my self and the poem I am writing. I become a new fish in another part of the lake and learn to breathe above and below the illusion of time while I'm swim in the waters of my eternal consciousness.

 

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

 

Because the stake was driven

In that rice paddy,

World was buried in mud.

 

Rocks dropped like birds

From the crater:

Being is mildew spread on non-being.

 

Rocks that were women stand,

Wooden stakes, everywhere,

Give birth to stones.

 

No-minds...whirling, flying off, birds.

 

Shinkicki Takahashi poetry lives in another world. He paints a picture with words and it expresses humanity's separation from its true nature. Ordinary rocks and stones are symbols for other aspects of my self that wait patiently for my mind to awaken and remove the stakes I have inserted in my belief system.

 

I have designed a value system within my beliefs about reality and those beliefs form my experiences. I may believe I must be perfect in order to be good, because my spirit is perfect, so I proceed to produce that perfect spirit in the flesh as best I can. To this end I deny all imperfect thoughts and emotions and my own negative thoughts sicken me. I can become frightened at mental or actual expressions of an aggressive nature. I find my self in a rice paddy with a stake driven deep within the mud of my own mind.

 

 The word perfect holds many pitfalls, for it presupposes something completed or finish and beyond change. It's something beyond motion or creativity and further development. It is actually a stagnation of consciousness that does not exist, because consciousness is change, action and constant motion.

 

My consciousness is always in a state of becoming, always changing, supple, and it has no end or a point of beginning in my physical terms, so it is in a state of non-perfection in its natural state of being. My thoughts however can be magnificent, trivial, frightening or glorious. I discriminate among these thoughts and incorporate the ones that I choose to believe at any moment. Thoughts are the stones that are born in my physical reality and become the rocks I believe in.

 

The crater of my inner consciousness is filled with thoughts. It is a never ending flow of ideas, dreams and creativity. When I block or deny the flow of certain thoughts, they still are energy and do manifest in some way physically. My body and mind usually feel the effects of this blockage in some form. Thoughts are chemically propelled and they travel through my body just like a virus and create a state of well being or dis-ease. Just like a virus, thoughts create the reality I experience in one way or another. I have a choice to live one thought or a combination of thoughts and create the rice paddy of my dreams or a paddy of fearful separation.

 

 There is no need to drive a stake in my paddy unless I create it by blocking certain thoughts and allowing others. Allowing my self the freedom to accept all my thoughts, and then choose the ones to believe in, I will create the reality I want to experience. Thoughts that do not become beliefs continue as energy and manifest in other ways. By releasing and forgiving my self for negative thoughts and changing them to positive concepts, I change my perceptions and I expand my belief system. 

 

As Takahashi points out, being is mildew spread on non-being. My belief system creates mildew or a blanket of love and it expresses itself in thoughts. My rice paddy is free of stakes when I allow my thoughts to create and reflect the nature of my crater of inner consciousness. My mind is a melting pot of thoughts and my belief system is in a constant state of motion. I am free to choose how I want my rice paddy to look physically and from that choice I will express and become the product of my own planting. The rice from my paddy is the reality I experience and I know there is always another moment to plant a seed of thought that forms a perfect paddy of imperfection.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May the wind blow sweetness,

The rivers flow sweetness,

The herbs grow sweetness,

For the people of Truth!

 

Sweet be the night,

Sweet be the dawn,

Sweet be earth's fragrance

Sweet be our Heaven!

 

May the tree afford us sweetness,

the sun shine sweetness,

our cows yield sweetness...

Milk in plenty!

 

Those words are found in the Rig-Veda which came into existence around 1500 B.C. The Vedas are a collection of four ancient book of Hinduism which consists of psalms, chants, sacred formulas, rituals, incantations and scripture; Hindu tradition holds that the Vedas are eternal, revealed from time to time to sages by the divine principle. The Rig-Veda is the oldest book of the four and was actually put in written form around 300 B.C.

 

Yesterday while talking to a friend I found my self using the word sweet in a sentence. "That's sweet," I said. I was commenting on a situation and I used sweet to describe it. I think I learned to use that word that way when I heard my kids using it to define something they thought was good or great. But it seems sweet has been used that way for centuries, the kids were just tuning into a phrase they remembered from another reality. Sweet is good, sweet is great, and sweet is life. When I opened the book Earth Prayers this morning I found sweetness used again in the form of this ancient poem and it is as old and graceful as any poem in existence.

 

As I read the poem, I related to it immediately, it was familiar and yes it was sweet, but it was much more than that. It felt like I was vibrating in truth, in another form of awareness, and I read it again and again. At first I thought it was a native Indian chant perhaps from the Navajo or Pueblo tribes. Its cadence was resonating within me and I knew I had used sweet many times in my physical lives and was remembering something about my self. I come from grace, I am grace, and I share my sweetness when I remember that I am filled with grace. I can ignore it, but it is always within me.

 

That may sound a bit egotistical but Webster definition of sweet includes the phrase, sweet on something, which means to be in love with it. Love is the essence of sweetness and grace. Sweetness is a quality, a taste, an odor, a sound, an appearance, a preference, an action, and a positive or a negation. It is what I think it is. I create it, experience it and at some point become it by beliefs about it. So if I believe I am sweet, all I see and experience around me will reflect that belief in some way. The writers of the Rig-Veda understood that and incorporated sweetness into their physical being and shared it with the worlds around them. There was no discrimination; everything was sweet, including the rocks, the wind, the birds, bees and the sun. How gracious is that?

 

Sweetness is grace. Jane Roberts describes grace this way:

 

The state of grace is a condition in which all growth is effortless, a transparent joyful acquiescence that is a ground requirement for all existence. Your own body grows naturally and easily from the time of birth, not expecting resistance but taking its miraculous unfolding for granted; using all of itself with great, gracious, creatively aggressive abandon.

 

You were born in a state of grace therefore. It is impossible for you to leave it. You will die in the state of grace whether or not special words are spoken for you, or water or oil is poured upon your head. You share this blessing with animals and all other living things. You cannot "fall out of" grace, nor can it be taken from you.

 

The work from the Rig-Veda explains the sweetness of my grace. It is who I am. It opens another channel of remembering that looks back through itself. I begin to experience my external world using my inner senses. I accept the world and everything in it because I know I have had a hand in creating what it is. I forgive myself for my physical actions that were less than sweet or gracious and forgive those who continue to act that way. I allow my sweetness to express itself in my thoughts and actions and I take responsibility for what manifests. I do this because it is my truth; it is my innate consciousness expressing itself graciously. Sweet is a state of being one in consciousness, and by freely expressing my being I unite with other aspects of my self and become the cow that yields the sweet milk of graciousness!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Without the transcendent and the transpersonal we get sick, violent, and nihilistic, or hopeless and apathetic. We need something "bigger than we are" to be awed by and commit ourselves to in a new naturalistic, empirical, non-churchy sense. Perhaps as Thoreau and Whitman, William James and John Dewey did.

 

Abraham Maslow born in 1908 was a psychologist that conceptualized a hierarchy of human needs, and is considered the father of humanistic psychology. Maslow saw human beings' needs arranged like a ladder. The most basic needs at the bottom were physical; air, water, food, sleep; then came security and stability, followed by social needs for belonging, love and affection. At the top were self-actualizing needs; the need to fulfill oneself, to become all that one is capable of becoming. Maslow felt that unfulfilled needs lower on the ladder would inhibit the person from climbing to the next step. Humanistic psychology teaches that people possess the inner resources for growth and healing and each individual is capable of climbing this ladder once obstacles are removed.

 

 When I'm feeling moments of love, understanding, happiness or rapture I have a sense of wholeness and I experience forms of truth, justice, harmony and goodness in those moments. I'm motivated to maintain those emotions and I continue to self-actualize them in one way or another; I want more of the same and try to force them to manifest in some way; the need to express my desire to be more than what I think I am, is evident in my dreams and imagination. Something extraordinary is lurking within me and I try to use my ego to manifest this otherness only to find my self experiencing disappointment.

 

As Plotinus said:

 

We must close our eyes and invoke a new manner of seeing... a wakefulness that is the birthright of all of us, though few put it to use.

 

This new manner of seeing is really not new; it just has been forgotten as I climbed the ladder of needs that Maslow wrote about. My external needs are my top priority and the fundamental aspects of my consciousness sits behind this house of illusions until a tornado hits the house and it collapses around me. Once the illusion is revealed for what it is, I begin to use another mode of knowing to rebuild my house.

 

William James explains it this way:

 

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness... we all have reservoirs of life to draw upon, of which we do not dream.

 

So what Maslow was referring to when he said transcendent and transpersonal is this other portion of consciousness that waits for me to remember it. It's the next step on this ladder of transformation. It's me redefining my self and how I perceive my role in my own humanity. In a sense I live in a cloud, a distorted manifestation of my own thoughts. I am a prisoner of my own mind; I'm in one cell and believe it's the entire building. I stay in the cell looking out through the bars and see nothing but sameness.

Maslow realized that this sameness makes me sick, violent and hopeless. My world is a pot filled with poison and I'm waiting to die from the recipe I used to create it. Other ingredients are available to change the mixture but my beliefs prohibit me from using them.

 

The shift in awareness is bringing a purification of thought to the table of my external world. I am remembering more about this journey through time. My perceptions are expanding and I am connecting to other aspects of my own mind. I realize that there is more to me than my physical and spiritual beliefs. In fact there is much more to me than the fragments that I call whole.

 

William Blake poetically explains that:

 

If the doors of perception were cleansed

Everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

For man has closed himself up,

til he sees all things thro' narrow chunks of his own cavern.

 

Infinite is a word that I never can relate to; it suggests a never ending process of expansion and I'm taught to believe I am a finite being. I believe I have an end and expect it and that expectation is interwoven within my belief system. Why if I expand that belief? What if I connect the dots and find another picture of my existence? What if those dots were just one picture within another picture, but I have to be aware of other dots before I connect them? Perhaps that is the transpersonal ladder of awareness that exists within me. All I need to do is see the dots first and then one by one I connect them at my own speed.

 

The dots seem bigger than I am when I consider my self finite, but when I change my mind and expand my beliefs I begin to see the infinite side of my consciousness and start to go from dot to dot and create a new picture to hang on my wall of beliefs. Maslow's ladder reaches new heights as I step into the bigger picture of my cleansed perception of reality. The narrow chunks in my cavern become a pathway to another reality that expresses another, then another and I find my self in a non-churchy sense of oneness that is my naturalistic consciousness expanding infinitely.

 

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Loud as a trumpet
In the vanguard of an army
I will run ahead and proclaim.

My words will be sweet to hear.
My people will drink them like wine
And not get drunk.

And on spring nights, when few remain
Around my tent, I will make music as soft
As northern Aprils, that hover,
Late and tender, around each leaf.

So my voice becomes both a breath and a shout.
One prepares the way, the other
Surrounds my loneliness with angels

Rainer Maria Rilke's poem, Ich will ihn preisen. Wie vor einem Heere, written in his Book of Hours collection translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, is a voice of spirit. Rilke uses simple metaphors to describe the inner feelings of awareness. Written over 100 years ago, Rilke played a trumpet of enlightenment in a world covered with ignorance, confusion and fear. His sweet words started to change a narrow-minded society's concept of their own consciousness.

In his loneliness he found his angels and felt another aspect of his life that had been hidden by a form of educated brain washing that began long before his physical appearance in the collective consciousness. He was a subjective messenger that used poetry like a cleansing wind that separates the dead branches of fear from the tree of physical life. His work is a cornerstone in the foundation of subjective awareness that is now called post conventional or transpersonal thought.

The 20th century Japanese poet Shinkichi Takahashi explained poetry as a light form that brings subjectivity to the dark filled world filled of objectivity. I find myself living in a world that focuses on my objectivity and pays little attention to my subjectivity. It's hard for me to comprehend the complexity and diversity of my own inner consciousness, so I block it from my mind and cruise through life consciously using my ego as the vehicle of choice. It's my choice to function physically as a partial entity, and then I create a mysterious story about the other aspects of my self by using objectivity and logic as my basic tools. My other tools sit in my garage of forgetfulness getting rusty and dusty while I build my flimsy concept of truthfulness.

This concept of dualistic forgetfulness follows me through physical life as I create a personality that conforms to the laws of objectivity until I begin to sense something deep within me. It's like the faint sound of a trumpet that is playing a familiar song. The melody gets louder and I find myself listening more intently to notes of this enchanting harmony. Suddenly without warning my ego begins to project visions of destruction on the computer screen of my mind. I question my purpose and the meaning of physical life itself and my role in it. All the objective answers fall off the table of my one reality and land on a floor of illusions. The reality of my subjectivity has begun the process of enlightenment and I begin to open my mind to its existence. When the winds in my mind become filled with the music of my inner consciousness, I taste life for the first time and my faint physical voice becomes a shout of awareness.

This scenario is a rerun of consciousness, but its manifests as an expanded version of itself. I am constantly changing in consciousness and I use my ego as a guide in order to experience the contrast that fuels the winds of awareness. If not for my objectivity I would be unable to remember other aspects of my self. Forgetfulness is the essential ingredient for the awakening of my subjectivity. All my physical experiences lead me to that one moment when I begin to hear my internal trumpet. There is no right or wrong way to forget or to remember, it just happens as I create it.

As Rilke explains my voice is both a breath and a shout. My objective breath prepares the way for my subjective shout and my life becomes a Mecca of awareness where loneliness no longer traps me. My angels surround me drinking the wine of oneness and toasting poetry for its Godliness.
www.shortsleeves.net
http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

Our greatest blessings come to us by way of madness provided the madness is given us by divine gift.

 

Socrates the Greek philosopher was born in 469 B.C. He is credited as being one of the founders of Western philosophy. Plato born in 428 B.C. was a student of his and it's through Plato's writings that Socrates became a master figure in the fields of logic and epistemology.

 

Socrates understood there was a fine line between madness and divine inspiration; in fact the line is so fine it's hard to tell the difference especially in the world that I live in. There is madness living next door and divine inspiration is his roommate. The distinction is made by a society that has the qualities of both lodged in their psyche, so it is an individual choice how to label thoughts and actions that do not conform to fundamental rules of normal behavior.

 

No matter what I may call this foreign way of living life it does change society in some way. Madness can completely modify a standard of acceptance once it is recognized as divine inspiration. History explains that fact in countless stories and images. Webster defines madness as lunacy, insanity, great folly or wild excitement. Divine is defined as of or like God, pleasing, attractive and is found by conjecture and intuition. It seems that I could confuse the two words and take one for the other and label it, treat it and put it in a category marked insanity.

 

There have been countless stories told through the centuries of mad men becoming saints or sages. A crisis in life is actually a stage of development and growth. While experiencing a crisis I am mad in a sense, it's a creative illness, a mystical experience with psychotic features. It's a form of positive disintegration that results in divine inspiration. I no longer see with the same eyes or hear with the same ears. Everything appears as it is, and I begin to accept my self as a madman who has divine inspiration.

 

Old beliefs, goals, identities and life-styles are reassessed and more life affirming modes of knowing are adopted. It seems my decline in conformity is not a psychological disease, but it's a transition; a development of another self that is a functioning part of my consciousness.

 

This transformation can occur spontaneously whether I want it or not on an ego level. Terms like individuation, self-actualization, and self-transcendence define the dynamic tension of a madman who is being pulled into awareness by another aspect of consciousness. This aspect is far from being mad, it is inertia of my spiritual existence that brings me in line with who I am.

 

John Perry a Jungian analyst explains the process this way:

 

Consciousness is constantly striving for release from its entrapment in routine or conventional mental structures. Spiritual work is the attempt to liberate this dynamic energy, which must break free of its suffocation in old forms...

During a person's development process, if this work of releasing consciousness becomes imperative but is not undertaken voluntarily with knowledge of the goal and with considerable effort, then the psyche is apt to take over and overwhelm the conscious personality... The individuating psyche abhors stasis as nature abhors a vacuum.

 

John is saying that I create a crisis in order to avoid stagnation. I create signs of madness in order to express my divinity. My path to remembering other aspects of my self is littered with the debris of a madman. But once the process is recognized for what it is, I cross the boundaries of physical experiences and enter the transpersonal level of awareness where my inner consciousness guides my physical journey.

Maslow said:

 

 If I deliberately plan to be less than I am capable of being, then I will be deeply unhappy for the rest of my life

 

Joseph Campbell labeled this form of madness as:

 

 The refusal of the call and that the world's myths warn that it exacts a heavy toll on the self.

 

 The crisis of being a madman comes in many forms; a midlife crisis, addictions, social unrest and other events that change my perception of reality. I substitute them and look for the instant gratifications they express. They are low level equivalents of the spiritual thirst I have to become aware of other aspects of my consciousness. But I never get enough of what I don't want so any substitute be it money, sex, power or prestige results in my inevitable frustrations and I become a suffering madman, who wants to be a divine inspiration but is in a conflict within my own consciousness.

 

So Socrates statement makes sense. I am a madman inspired by the divine gift of inner consciousness; all I need to do is to remember that fact and believe it. One way or another I do remember, but it's my choice when I begin to live as a divine madman that accepts all aspects of his multidimensionality.

 

 

 

 

I have been tagged by two beautiful people, Sherri and Aki. I appreciate the opportunity to participate and to interact with them and all who play and will play the game. 
 

1)      What are you thankful for today?

For each moment and the choices that manifest

2) What do you appreciate about the Earth?
Our connection and unity

3)  Who is the last person you said "Thank you" to?

Max the mechanic who put brakes on my car last night on his own time to save me money.
4) When was the last time someone thanked you?

Max thanked me for the opportunity to put the brakes on my car.

5) What is your favorite way to say thank you?

By  poetic expression and by appreciating every person, place and event for what they are: a lesson in giving and sharing the gift of awareness, connection and abundance from a never ending stream of energy.

Love,
Hal

 

Growing a Coat of Mail

 

Light going dim. Is it my eyes, or a cloud, or the sun itself,

Or the window? I can't see the point of the needle,

Or the other end of the thread.

 

I want that moment again when I spread out

Like olive oil in a skillet.

The same heat makes iron steel. Abraham,

A bed of jasmine sitting quietly, or talking.

 

Unmanned, I'm a true person,

Or at least the ring knocker on the door where they live.

The prophet says, Fasting protects. Do that.

On dry land a fish needs to be wrapped in something.

In the ocean, as you see, it grows a coat of mail.

 

The words of Rumi shake my foundation of beliefs. His poems are like a gentle stick of dynamite that blast small holes in my narrow-minded perception. Externally I am like olive oil that never leaves the jar. I sit on a shelf of complacency and wait for something or someone to come along and twist off my cap so I can begin to spread out in the skillet of awareness and smell the aroma of connection.

 

Once I'm in this skillet I realize that my perceptions heat the steel of my beliefs and I experience reality. My perceptions are the tools I use to create reality. The fascinating thing about perceptions is that no two people experience the same ones. Like fingerprints they are unique to me, based on the specific qualities of consciousness I am expressing in each moment. Understanding that, I then realize that no two realities are alike. I may agree with the perceptions of others but what I create will be different, but I can be united in the diversity that manifests from my expressions. I can be the ring knocker or I can be the door, or what's behind the door. Each aspect is connected in its uniqueness.

 

My perceptions are not limited to my thoughts and emotions; they are so much more than that. They project my energy and awareness out into the objective world and as that energy is received others interpret it using their perceptions. This process is the mechanism for external growth and learning. Different qualities of consciousness are interacting physically in order to expand the ever changing manifested reality.  Combinations of mental enzymes create physical life and I perceive them as events, places, people and all other things.

 

Each second I perceive and create my physical life. I can create a dry fish that is wrapped in fear and flips and flaps around waiting to catch a breath or I can be the fish that swims in the ocean of my own awareness. The light of connection is always shinning, all I need to do is perceive it as my light. My eyes and ears my be weak, but I am always the energy that creates and experiences my own reality.

 

 I can look out a window and see a sun covered in clouds and fret or I can accept the shade and appreciate its assistance. I can watch the rain fall and perceive it to be a problem or I can rejoice in the energy it brings into my physical life. I can complain about the state of the economy or I can understand the adjustment and changes it offers me. I do all of these things using my perceptions.

 

As Rumi says the same heat makes iron steel.  When I perceive my life as different qualities of consciousness that express and manifest reality in order for me to realize there are no perceptions in my non-physical reality, I quietly sit on a bed of jasmine and shed my coat of mail.

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