Sky

 Climbing the wax tree

To the thundering sky,

I stick my tongue out,

What a downpour!

Shinkichi Takahashi born in 1901 was a Zen poet. His work emerges through time into the natural world of awareness. He once said: Thought of a poem's difficulty never troubles me, since I never consciously make a poem difficult. The thought of not making things difficult is a lesson I learn everyday.

How easy it is to create drama in the script of life. It seems I need to feel the pain of separation in order to understand it. I do climb a wax tree of contrast everyday and the stand next to the thundering sky of my perceptions and choose to stick my tongue out and taste the gentle rain of awareness or a mighty downpour of fear. I believe I know the difference between the two, but there's not two on top of the wax tree, there's only me and I create two. I believe the gentle rain becomes a downpour and it knocks me down the tree and I find my self back on the ground of illusion surrounded in fear. I look up at the tree and it appears bigger and slicker and my beliefs lock me in the mud of anxiety. My beliefs tell me not climb the tree again and those thoughts are greater than the desire to taste the sweet rain of awareness while climbing up the wax tree of this reality. Destruction rather than deduction fills my physical mind.

Takahashi's poem Destruction reminds me that I can change my thoughts:

The universe is forever falling apart

No need to push the button

It collapses at a finger's touch:

Why, it barely hangs on the tail of a sparrow's eye.

The universe is so much eye secretion,

Hordes leap from the tips

Of your nostril hairs. Lift your right hand:

It's in your palm. There's room enough

On the sparrow's eyelash for the whole.

A paltry thing the universe:

Here is all strength, here the greatest strength.

You and the sparrow are one

And should he wish, he can crush you.

The universe trembles before him.

It does seem like the universe is falling apart when I'm surround by fear. What I see of it is scattered all over creation and it is hard to make sense of it. I take the word of science and live as a separate part of this outer world I see around me, failing to realize that it is a snapshot of my inner world expressed physically. I do push a button and try to fix what I see around me, but the button controls an illusion filled universe that doesn't need fixing, I am the one who sitting on the ground of fear creating two worlds in order to experience one.

The wax tree, the universe, the sparrow and I, are one and we express the same desire; the desire to expand, to pro-create and to identify a sparrow's eyelash, which exists to support the energy that trembles and vibrates in unison with the illusion of the thundering sky, which jolts my nostril hairs with a downpour of awareness.  

I am constantly changing from sparrow to universe, from tree to sky. I'm falling and ascending with each blink of my eyelash.  I'm conscious of my inner consciousness which is in the palm of my hand, the wax in my ears and hair in my nose. Eye secretion is an action as the universe crushes the grapes of mindlessness. The sparrow in me climbs the wax tree and I stick out my tongue and sense the sparrow touching tongues with me and the universe trembles inside of us while it holds fear in an eyelash of strength.

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http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

Ah but I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

Robert Allen Zimmerman better known as Bob Dylan was born in Duluth Minnesota in 1941. He is a performer, songwriter, poet and one of the music industries most influential figures. He continues to write and perform and released a new album in 2006.

My course through time seems to be an established route. I expand from young to old and back to young again. I'm like a human accordion that moves with the motion of energy and with each push and pull of consciousness, I exert a sound that's age related. I measure my self in years, months and days, but generally years is my measurement of choice. My self worth accumulates in years of training and education and my success is measured in years of service. I am always defined by a certain day in a year and have a clear understanding of my birth, which tells me nothing about my self other than I became aware of a linear aspect of my self at a specific energy point. I was before that point much older than I am now.  The history of my age is unrecorded knowledge but it is an aspect of my existence.

The measurement of my life is an incomplete one; it is just a snapshot not the album of my existence. If I trace my consciousness using my mind, I find footprints that belong to me on the bedrock of eternity. I find channeled energy lock in vault of separation waiting for me to open it and release other aspects of my self to linear time. I sense the urgency of nothing as it creeps from one reality to another growing ageless in my creative imagination. I remember my youth when consciousness dressed me in a gender of completeness where I became a vibration of endless frequencies. Warping through my memory I see a galaxy of sublime agelessness that rivets me to the subsidiary method of awareness I call age.

The process of aging is not a left to right process; it is a circular movement of energy that is constantly refreshing itself with new paths around my circumference. The center remains the same, but the diameter continues to expand.   I am the center and the circumference and I choose the diameter and how to express it. Each path I take has the different point of entry and the path rotates using the power of my consciousness. The age of a path is directly related to my thoughts about it. The path itself has no age.

So Dylan in his unique wisdom is expressing the circular motion of age on his path around his center, where he is much younger now and I am too.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

Presume not that I am the thing I was; for God doth know, so shall the world perceive, that I have turn'd away my former self.

 Shakespeare was born in 1564 and is considered the greatest writer in the English language. His work continues to be read and performed all over the world, so you might say he does know something about multiple selves. The ability to take a thought and create a world around it using more than one self is something everyone does, in fact that is one definition of physical life.

I am not the thing I was yesterday or last week and am certainly not the thing I was ten years ago. I do try to identify this self with those physical selves and that is easier to accept than to believe that there are multiply versions of the me who inhabits this physical form. The same old me is never the same, although it is less complicated to consider my self a single rather than a group. Dual personalities have been studied for centuries and those individuals have always been considered sick. But perhaps they are not that sick after all, maybe they are experiencing a dual focus instead of a single focus, meaning two or more aspects of their self are merging at the same point in linear time and manifesting connecting thoughts. Not only are they manifesting thoughts they are manifesting their own personalities in a blended act of merging identities.

The concept of multiple selves brings up all sorts of questions, but the basic concept is rooted in consciousness. Consciousness is action, not a thing or place or anything tangible. Consciousness has the ability to be shaped into different forms; all I need to do is look around me to confirm that truth. Consciousness using electromagnetic energy and other unknown forces is capable of expanding in its own awareness. I am a particle of consciousness, but there are other particles of me contained in consciousness, which are expressing and expanding through their own experiences at different points in linear time and some of those particles are not restricted by time. Each particle of me is a whole, which is the whole of an entity that expands through the waves of experiences that permeate each particle.

As I expand and become more aware, my entity which is not restricted by time flows through me as well as through the other particles and a bleed through effect occurs at a specific points in linear time. One self can and does become aware of another self and a physical meeting of sorts takes place. On an inner consciousness level these particles or selves are constantly aware of each other, and at times I physically sense and feel them.

 An action of self has an impact on the other self particles. Each self has its own form as well as personality and a linear time frame to expand in, but in the realm of inner consciousness they are all happening simultaneously through my entity. I look at past lives or future lives, but in essence they are all happening now and that is why they can be recognized. They are all connected through what I call spirit or entity, or an aspect of consciousness.

If I did access these other selves constantly, my focus would vacillate and my ability to expand within this reality is affected. If my focus does vacillate my self becomes a confused mixture of different selves with different realities, which is considered sick.

Shakespeare accessed his other selves to express his work. His spirit met his flesh and created what the world calls masterpieces. Every self has that ability but rarely uses it. But that is what expansion and awareness is all about; the ability to see my self as I am and to express my self as one particle riding on the wave of eternity, while communicating with other aspects of my self through my inner consciousness and learning and incorporating parts of all of them into my physical reality.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

The Seed Market

Can you find another market like this?

 Where,

with your one rose

you can buy hundreds of rose gardens?

Where

for one seed

you get a whole wilderness?

For one weak breath,

the divine wind?

You've been fearful

of being absorbed in the ground

or drawn up by the air.

Now, your waterbead lets go

and drop it into the ocean,

where it came from.

It no longer has the form it had,

but it's still water.

The essence is the same.

This giving up is not a repenting,

It's a deep honoring of yourself.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,

marry, at once, quickly,

for God's sake!

Don't postpone it!

Existence has no better gift.

No amount of searching

will find this.

A perfect falcon, for no reason,

has landed on your shoulder,

and becomes yours.

Rumi, the eternal teacher is sharing some of the wisdom that surrounds me. Physical life is not a repenting; it is expression of consciousness in a school of diversity. This new human form is like a water drop, I'm still consciousness; my essence is the same, but my shape has changed. There's no need to prove my existence, no need to question my purpose and certainly no need to explain this beautiful market I call my reality. I live for the experience of watching one seed turn into a lush tropical island. One rose transforms itself and express energy by quietly communicating love; I need no explanation for that action. Fear like a thorn surrounds me, but there is no need to create it. I can learn to absorb it and ground my self in consciousness just like the rose does with the thorn.

What Rumi is saying is relax and enjoy this journey of expansion, because it is a choice. I have the ability to marry my self and live harmoniously within that union. The perfect falcon has landed on my shoulder and its time to acknowledge it. It has always been there, but I have been too busy trying to see it, feel it, touch it and control it. The searching is over; I now sense what I have always known. The physical world is a market and I wander from aisle to aisle helping my self to whatever I believe I see. What I don't see doesn't matter, because other aspects of me see it for me.

With one weak breath I create the divine wind that moves me through the market and I honor my self and all life. I appreciate every drop of this reality and remember the nature of my own consciousness. That awareness takes me back to the root of existence and there is no better gift than the honoring the self within that whole.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

Will there really be a morning?

Is there such a thing as day?

Could I see it from the mountains

If I were as tall as they?

Has it feet like water-lilies?

Has it feathers like a bird?

Is it brought from famous countries

Of which I have never heard?

Oh, some scholar! Oh some sailor!

Oh, some wise man from the skies!

Please tell a little Pilgrim

Where the place called morning lies!

Emily Dickinson asks  the brilliant question about morning, but already knows the answer. The place called morning is not a place; it's an expansion of thought.  It's a space-less intersection where one life becomes another. It's an energy point where dreams become manifested realities, as well as tangible physical experiences. Morning is fresh air and symbolic messages wrapped in a blended blanket of consciousness. I create mornings to express the beauty of being, because I'm much more than a forgetful wanderer, who is lost in his own dream. My physical awakening is a gesture of the universal metamorphosis which continually expresses change without judgments. A morning lifts the oceans and spreads them through the halls of consciousness where waves of energy sip from flexible straws of eternity.

Emily understood the meaning of mornings and delightfully dressed them in questions to wet humanity's appetite for what is already known, but ignored. Mornings launch rockets of desires, which become experiences filled with diverse beliefs and fearful illusions. A morning has feet like water-lilies basking in the sun and ruffled feathers, like a bird who bathing in a shady pond. It graciously turns into a day like a loving butterfly that turns back into a worm, in a cycle that repeats itself. Dualistically stable, the morning feeds a herd of broken dreams and mends them back to health again.

How easy it is to get caught in the simplicity of a morning, which majestically and seasonally brings me to the doorstep of awareness, where I patiently wait to recognize what flows so magnificently through my mind. One morning is a million mornings covered in a fine mist of time which I ignorantly call one, in order to identify my linear behavior and presence. Conceived in the flash of an electro-magnetic wonderland  morning looks into the reflective face of consciousness, while another morning sits in the clay of another tomorrow, which is silently grinning at the dawn of a new age.

http://www.shortsleeves.net/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/

Notice how each particle moves.

Notice how everyone has just arrived here

From a journey.

Notice how each wants a different food.

Notice how the stars vanish as the sun comes up,

And how all streams stream toward the ocean.

Look at the chefs preparing special plates

For everyone, according to what they need.

Look at this cup that can hold the ocean.

Look at those who see the face.

Look through friends' eyes

Into the water that is

Entirely jewels.

Rumi is expressing awareness. Rumi understands that life is diverse; it's a plethora of realities and experiences. There are metaphors everywhere that point out my multiplicity. I mentally make note of them, but ignore them. It's fascinating to see myself focus on just one standard of life, the linear standard, which has a beginning and an end; every other life is out of focus. To me the distance is short, the road is bumpy and joy is limited. In fact everything seems to be limited; there's just not enough stuff to go around, or that's what I believe. I have been taught that I have one go at this method of existence and must get it right in order to make my mark and be what I was born to be, but I forget what I was born to be and allow someone else to remember for me. I get lost in the woods of judgment and my sole purpose is to survive and I make it as hard as I can on my self.

Rumi talks about diversity in his work Special Plates. Every particle or consciousness has its own plate, its own food, and moves to a different vibration. Physical consciousness shares a plate of diversity in order to expand. Water, stars and all the planets vibrate and move with me, but they express that movement in incredibly different ways. Everything is dependent on my perception, on my belief and then they become real to me. My five senses judge what is true or false in the standard back yard, I call physical life. Everything else I reject and throw in the basement of mental illusions, but in that basement particles continue to move and flow. Consciousness is always in action regardless of my awareness of it.

 That basement door is opening. I'm opening it. Now is time. Conscious particles that have been swirling around waiting for me to open that door are entering my awareness and I'm expanding. The chef of consciousness that prepares food for all life is living through me and adding desert to my table. I am sensing my expanded presence in the ant, in a rose bush and a palm tree filled with nectar. I swim in a melting pot of consciousness and hear the tones of beauty that bubble through it.

The face of a star reflects my face as I dream of bouncing on the moon just as the sun comes up. The stream of consciousness within me becomes an ocean. It's another world filled with food for thought. It's a special plate as well as a cup that holds water filled with friends and the jewels of eternity. The special plate is a plate for everyone.

http://www.shortsleeves.com/

http://halmanogue.blogspot.com/