In linear time another year has arrived filled with dreams, visions, prayers and sorrows. The year is only a stage on which these events manifest in physical form, I am the one who creates the realities I call experiences. I find my self in a constant state of change and motion. My entity displays an emotional consciousness that expresses and expands in diversity. Action is my real name and when I begin to remember I am a ruby, as well as an ordinary stone my experiences make sense not only rationally but spiritually as well. Rumi wrote the story: The Ruby in his Mathnawi I, 1126-1127 over 700 years ago. It gives insight, purpose and value to the illusion I call my life.  I disappeared like a drop of vinegar in an ocean of honey. My consciousness is the light of God which is pure and connected to the self I call a ruby and the self I call a stone.

The Ruby

At Breakfast tea a beloved asked her lover,

"Who do you love more, yourself or me?"

"From my head to my foot I have become you.

Nothing remains of me but my name.

You have your wish. Only you exist.

I've disappeared like a drop of vinegar

In an ocean of honey."

A stone which has become a ruby

Is filled with the qualities of the sun.

No stoniness remains in it.

If it loves itself, it is loving the sun.

And if it loves the sun, it is loving itself.

There is no difference between those two loves.

Before the stone becomes the ruby, it is its own enemy.

Not one but two exist.

The stone is dark and blind to daylight.

If it loves itself, it is unfaithful: it intensely resists the sun.

If it says "I," it is all darkness.

A pharaoh claims divinity and is brought down.

Hallaj says the same and is saved.

One I is cursed, another I is blessed.

One I is stone another a crystal.

One an enemy of the light, the other a reflector of it.

In its inmost consciousness, not through any doctrine,

It is one with the light.

Work on your stone qualities

And become resplendent like the ruby.

Practice self-denial and accept difficulty.

Always see infinite life in letting the self die.

Your stoniness will decrease; your ruby nature will grow.

The signs of self-existence will leave your body,

And ecstasy will take you over.

Become all hearing like an ear and gain a ruby earring.

Dig a well in the earth of this body,

Or even before the well is dug,

Let God draw the water up.

Be always at work scraping the dirt from the well.

To everyone who suffers,

Perseverance brings good fortune.

The prophet has said that each prostration of prayer

Is a knock on heaven's door.

When anyone continues to knock,

Felicity shows its smiling face.

The light which shines in the eye

Is really the light of the heart.

The light which fills the heart

Is the light of God, which is pure

And separate from the light of intellect and sense.

www.shortsleeves.net
http;//halmanogue.blogspot.com/

The void is what I call the space where everything exists before it is formed. It is as if you had an image in your mind of a figure, and then you carved the figure out of wood. Before the wooden figure emerged, the idea of it was in your thoughts. It is the same with everything that exists; an image of everything exists in the void before it was created.  An image is fully formed, including all of its states of change, from its birth to its seeming death, all at the same time.

Fu Hsi was the first emperor of China over seven thousand years ago. He created a mathematical model of the universe with all the conditions and changes using sixty-four six-line figures which he called Kua; we call them hexagrams. His wisdom has been studied ever since then and it's known as the I Ching; the first recorded teachings of the I Ching in written form dates back over five thousands years. Two hundred years ago when the German mathematician, Joseph Leibnitz was inventing the numerical system of zeros and ones which is called the binary system, someone sent him a copy of the I Ching. The binary system is the foundation or language that computers use and when Leibnitz compared his system with the hexagrams of the I Ching, he realized that if he substituted zeros and ones for the broken and unbroken lines of Fu His Kua, the language is the same. In other words, Fu Hsi developed the binary system over seven thousand years ago.

It's difficult to understand that something exists unless I actually see it. I have been taught to believe seeing is believing and I build my physical life around that premise. Believing that I was fully formed in some way before birth and it happened simultaneously is a very hard concept for me to accept. The notion that I existed pre-birth is usually explained in fairy tale fashion and I accept that explanation because heaven and God exist as a separate existence. I was cut away from them and landed on earth to repent so that I can return to complete bliss when I die. My religious and personal beliefs are built around something I have never seen, but do accept because I fear I will never see them again. I can't remember what they look like, but I believe they are worth dying for.

Fu Hsi believed another story. He believed that everything is connected and never separated. He understood that change was the only constant in physical life and that change is the tool of expansion. We are in a state of expansion and the computer is connecting us physically so we can see it for the first time with our physical eyes. The world as we know it is connected in consciousness that has not been manifested or remembered. I am part of an unbelievable work of art that I am finally beginning to believe.

The next few linear years will be filled with change; the mold of consciousness is in a constant state of expansion. My consciousness is action and motion and resonates in harmony with this consciousness. All the external changes will make me remember more about consciousness and the energy that sustains it. Like the wooden figure that was a thought before it was physical form, my consciousness has the freedom to express what has already happened and make it real in linear time. Remembering that the language for computers has been around for over seven thousands years makes me realize that everything is connected and everything is the way it should be.

As Fu Hsi explains:

The same intelligent, aware force that created and sustains the Universe, which is the Universe, created and sustains us. That intelligent, creative, aware force endlessly shapes and alters us, changes us, to the purpose that we will ultimately come to achieve our true nature and therefore will keep us forever resonating with great harmony.

As I remember I expand; the unseen becomes visible as the void reveals another mold for me to connect to.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

The recipe for perpetual ignorance is: be satisfied with your opinions and content with your knowledge.

Elbert Hubbard was born in Illinois in 1856. He was an American writer, publisher, artist and philosopher. He is best known for his essay: A Message to Garcia.

Elbert reminds me that it is easy to fall in the trap of complacency and ignore change, especially the changes that take place within me. There is a constant stream of knowledge available to me, but by closing my mind with ideas of contentment, I throw myself in a well and only hear the echo of my consciousness. Life moves on and I am frozen in the ice of old opinions and judgments. My world becomes the well that has little water but lots of echoes. Unable to climb out of this mode of thinking I wander through life filled with obsolete thoughts and the pain of reliving them.

That statement describes how I live my physical life and still do although my well is filling with more water and less echoes. I want to think and fill my well but when I don't think about it; more water seems to rush into it. The less I focus on the well and the echoes the more I begin to swim and keep my self floating in this additional water of awareness. Then my objectivity takes over again and I ask my self why I ever focused on the well in the first place and more echoes bounce off the walls and I'm right back standing in the well with no water and lots of echoes.

Awareness like Zen is an awakening to ignorance and seeing bliss. The ignorance still exists but I rename it and am satisfied with it in a subjective way. I accept it and am content with the knowledge that in this moment all knowledge flows through me at the appropriate point in physical time. I have already built that framework in my subjective consciousness which means everything that is happening now is the way I planned it to happen. Everyone has a plan and ignorance, contentment and limited knowledge are all part of that plan and that's just fine. Part of the framework of consciousness is to exist in a deep well with lots of echoes, and be frozen in the ice of old opinions and judgment at the same time.

My framework builds the water level and freezes the ice in order to release the knowledge that remembers a self; my focused self. Perpetual ignorance is the recipe for awareness and awakening. It is my path of choice. Others choice a different path and experience there own well, echoes, water level and ice. Those choices may contain more knowledge but I still can choose to be ignorant as long as I like. It is part of my framework of consciousness that contains the consciousness of all life in various qualities of ignorance or knowledge.

Zen happens at the moment when I sense the framework and accept the well and how it functions. I appreciate my choices and my self for being ignorant, opinionated and content in my well of echoes. Knowledge whispers the secret word of change and wisdom jumps into my well. Its echo vibrates and my beliefs expand as I swim in the water from my own ocean. My ocean and my well as well as the echoes exist simultaneously as I sift through the sand of perpetual ignorance and discover another well.

We are supposedly living in the same world, but who can tell the thing we popularly call a stone lying before this window is the same thing to all of us? According to the way we look at it, to some the stone ceases to be a stone, while to others it forever remains a worthless specimen of geological product. And this initial divergence of views calls forth an endless series of divergences later in our moral and spiritual lives. Just a little twisting, as it were, in our modes of thinking, and yet what a world of difference will grow up eventually between one another!

D.T.Suzuki was born in Japan in 1869. He was a professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Otani University in Kyoto. He is considered the greatest authority on Buddhist Philosophy and the greatest authority on Zen Buddhism. Reading his work is certainly a mind opening experience. Just a little twist in a belief and the world changes and everything in it become distorted or sane depending on how I look at a stone or anything else. My dualistic reality becomes a battle field over words that communicate my beliefs. The hinge on a door can swing in or out depending on how I hang the door and so it is with my belief structure.

Suzuki mentions a monk in the same essay. The monk says:

Drinking tea, eating rice

I pass my time as it comes;

Looking down on the stream, looking up at the mountains,

How serene and released I feel indeed!

My perceptions paint a reality and I live that reality through my choices. Everyone is connected in that behavior, but drinking tea for me is not the same experience as anyone else. I sit eating rice and think and those thoughts become things that are unique to my experience. The tea and the rice are different in the thoughts and perceptions of others. When I accept those common acts and sense an awakening, I enter the world of Zen or enlightenment and never leave my seat. When I look at a stone and sense its consciousness, I find Zen sensing me in the common act of being. When I hang a door to swing in and am at peace with the hinge and the door, Zen is the wind created between these two energies.

I could call those experiences by a different name and still sense the oneness of the thought. I could use my religious training and call them the Christ consciousness or the greatness of Allah or the sign of a new savior or find something in the bible that matches my thoughts and I would still experience Zen. The names lose their meaning in enlightenment. The thought and how I perceive it creates a different experience for each thinker. But as a human connected to a society, I want to merge all these thoughts into one common experience and call it a name that denotes compliance and that's when Zen and enlightenment move down another stream and over a distant mountain.

There is a collective consciousness but within that energy there are different energies that create experiences that are not shared in physical reality. They are individual manifestations that are the catalyst for consciousness to expand in the diversity of physical experiences.

 Suzuki goes on to explain:

Even in the twinkling of an eye, the whole affair is changed, and you have Zen and you are as perfect and normal as ever. More than that, you have in the meantime acquired something altogether new. All you mental activities are now working to a different key which is more satisfying, more peaceful and fuller of joy than anything you ever had. The tone of your life is altered. The spring flowers look prettier and the mountain stream runs cooler and more transparent. The subjective revolution that brings out this state of things cannot be called abnormal. When life becomes more enjoyable and its expanse is as broad as the universe itself, there must be something quite healthy and worth one's striving after its attainment.

When I sit and eat my tea and drink my rice and I look up to a stream and down to a mountain I discover a world that is mine in the sense of me creating it. How serene and released I feel to know there is no abnormal.  My quest to be like everyone else is achieved in my uniqueness. I become the air between the bubbles or the flutter of an eyelash.

www.shortsleeves.net
http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

Time like a lake breeze

Touched his face,

All thought left his mind.

One morning the sun menacing,

Rose from behind a mountain.

Singing...like hope...the trees.

Fully awakened he lit his pipe

And assumed the sub-inhaling pose:

Time poured down...like rain, like fruit.

He glanced back and saw a ship

Moving towards the past. In one hand

He gripped the sail of eternity,

And stuffed the universe into his eyes.

Shinkichi Takahashi wrote that poem and titled it Time. Takahashi's work can be read and understood on a variety of levels. No matter what level I choose, his poetry has a special tone, a unique beat that is in synchronicity with different qualities of consciousness. Time as he describes it, is like a lake breeze that touches my face as I travel through it. My consciousness moves through waves of choices and I measure them in time. I then judge time for what it has done to me, rather than thanking it for what I have become through the filter of time. My collected beliefs paint another picture about my age in time and I begin to feel another breeze touching my face, then I allow my mind to drown in a lake of dried-up creativity.

My narrow-minded educational process sets a stage for old age. It's the time when my branches begin to crack and the sap of energy that motivated me in youthful time drips instead of flows. I resign my self to a death sentence and wait in a lonely cell of a has been, feeling like the victim of a merciless future. I plan to be planted, so the menacing sun of youth no longer burns my thoughts with physical vitality. I design a time when I will awaken and inhale the smoke of eternity.

The old saying that age is relative is certainly a fact. As the baby boomers move into the fourth quarter of life, a new belief system is developing from the obsolete one. Consciousness is action and continues to expand and express itself regardless of age. If I choose to experience physical life filled with the energy that propels me through it, I continue to expand and I feel the abundance of value fulfillment all around me. My thoughts allow me to look back and touch the past with new beliefs as I change my now into the only time there is. I become a teacher of agelessness and the collective consciousness conforms and assimilates the lesson. Age is no longer a ship docked in a sea of yesterdays; it's a vessel of expansion and projection of consciousness that contributes by educating and changing a belief structure that keeps living in the past. Time stands and waits for me to change it.

My attitude and beliefs about age and time are choices I make as I journey through them gripping the sail of eternity with my consciousness. It's my choice to accept and allow my self the freedom to create a physical life in a manner that brings me joy and value fulfillment. My ripe fruit is filled with the nectar of awareness as I look into the eyes of the universe and smile.

Hal Manogue

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

January 3, 2009

What make up things are not more things; what makes up things are ideas, concepts, information.

Fred Alan Wolf Ph.D. says a lot without saying much in that statement.

 Fred also writes:

If we add up all the energy in the universe, including all contained in matter and antimatter, and including the attractive kind in gravity, we come up with a big zero. It all adds up to naught. But if we add up all of the information in the universe, it appears to be nowhere near zero. Indeed it's infinite. And that is where human beings come into the picture.

That statement takes time to absorb, but I realize that I am forming my own corner of the universe which is a part of another one. Whatever talents I sense I have, I can develop using the energy of my consciousness. Consciousness is the energy that supports the universe. That is what Fred is saying, but the energy of universal consciousness can not be measured scientifically at this moment, even the energy of gravity is a bleed through of energy from consciousness.

 My thoughts and beliefs are within that universal consciousness and then I manifest my life physically. The ability to form my own life comes from my inner entity which I can call many names because it has many selves that are being expressed physically.

As Jane Roberts says:

The path of experience is nowhere settled. There is no one road that does not have avenues to another. There are deep veins of probable actions ever available to you at any given time. Your imagination can be of great value, allowing you to open yourself to such courses; you can then use it to help you bring these into being.

In your mind see those probable abilities or events taking place. As you do, the intensity of your desire brings them into your experience. There are no boundaries set about the self.

At some point science will be able to explain consciousness in terms that can be understood. When I pull all the science, religion and beliefs out of this reality I free my  self to experience other forms of energy that are completely foreign yet familiar. I am standing on the steps of a new world each moment, all I need to do is open the door and let the energy take me where I choose to go. I am a probable me and my experiences are the results of my beliefs; by altering my beliefs which any self can do, anything within certain limits can be actualized. From a field of action or consciousness, I choose the happenings that will physically materialize,

As Fred said, things don't make more things; my beliefs and the energy of my consciousness is the force behind them. Just imagine how incredible that message is when I believe in my self and begin use my imagination, dreams and ideas to shape my life. There are no boundaries except the ones I build by my thoughts of separatism.

My present builds my future and it can change the past. The energy of consciousness makes it possible even though science, religion and education have a hard time explaining it. Energy is now making more sense because I'm using my inner senses to measure it.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/