discovering a path of healing

Awareness of our energetic life body-being as non-separate, changing, empty original nature is the unmistakable ground of humanity. I desire to heal into the Way as such. Yet, as an egocentric karmic conditioned thinking, feeling, sensing person I am currently rather identified with the attachments common in this enculturated society.

I am suffering through this disillusionment, disidentification, and detachment process. This is essentially a parasitic purging, and I must absolutely come to know that all of ego karmic conditioning is merely a relative assumption and imposition of this being I tend to describe as “me.” I am not my ego; I am not conditioned thinking, feeling, and sensing; I am not separate, permanent, nor all-knowing. I am, which is quite precisely why living in this delusional contemporary world of human construction is a delirious circumstance.

“How do I function in this bizarre mass consciousness of egocentric karmic conditioning?

Both the Buddha and Jesus are helpful informants for understanding how to live the Truth of being in the mayhem of delusion. Knowing the Truth herein, the One continuously utilizes this relatively bound human vehicle for enlightenment and healing in all directions and media. This is a unique journey for each human practicing True realization because of the natural conditional relativity of being living physical energetic form.

At this time of my life, I am discovering a door of convergent/contingent possibility to allow “me” to enlighten and heal in the movement of the Way. I need to describe it this way, seriously. I need to deeply and thoroughly recognize this is the Truth flowing through me as unique manifestation of enlightening and healing for me and others inseparable. Until this pestering conditioned ego subsides enough for I and I to step forth in confidant, compassionate Oneness in being, I shall not mention what this particular worldly door may be.

sharing what is with me

When you are in doubt,
be still, and wait;
be still until the sunlight pours through
and dispels the mists—as it surely will;
then, act with courage.

Ponca Chief White Eagle

The sun is shining in my life, unexpectedly, yet I have been largely still, observing, waiting, and listening. Recently, I have been intentionally taking up awareness practice and activity in my life experience to live the challenges. This is a lived perfection of uncovering into unknowable manifestation. Not easy, though transforming, naturally. It’s not a fulfillment of mind (thoughts, ideas, goals, etc) it’s a lived test of faith in mind in the Way things are. I suppose I could say that the subtle Truth has been revealed and I have been listening, mostly. Thus, the sun in shining right through the clouds of conditioning, mists of mayhem, and delirious doubt. I am sitting now with calm presence with mind and body that I simply haven’t experienced in the dark daze of disillusionment that has been occurring. It’s still foggy around these parts, dew and moisture abound. Where there is water, and the sliver of sun, possibility of life exists, the conditions are perfect for making love, manifesting creative life in cultural existence. Alignment with the cause in the way things are, this presence is fruitful. May I never be grandiose with pretending any of this begins with me! Gratitude.

Peaceful abiding, healing practice.

darkness and awareness

Stuck, alone, misunderstood, mirred in the effect of convoluted nurtured (humanly conceived) karmic conditions;
fearing the future, wanting simplicity, not knowing what to choose or what may happen, desiring authentic connection–
even as I may have subtle sublime groundedness in a variety of peaceful practices–
it is through awareness I can see my life appears to be lived largely in the darkness.

It is rather obvious I “have” intellect, knowledge, experience, consciousness, mindfulness, attentiveness, authenticity, intentionality, skills, and awareness. Yet nevertheless, I appear to be immersed in darkness. Is this simply the limitation of being a (contemporary) human–ignorant, desirous, selfish, inauthentically networked with humanity and nature? Or, is this simply the way life is–unknowable, immeasurable, inexact, unpredictable, imperfectly perfect, bound by physical form for a while? Why do I feel so disconnected from Truth in this contemporary social living human being form? The dark depressing disconnection IS CAUSED BY psycho-socially enculturated ego identifications with the worldly ways of activity. In short, we’ve brainwashed ourselves and continue this onward. When there is no seeming freedom from these ways that appear to be the only way to live and options for living, then the rest is unknowable darkness. I may ostracize myself, you may enjoy partying, she may focus on the role of mothering, he may concentrate on making money for survival for his family and community–however, the brainwashing continues like the plague and suffering is the effect.

I’m way too aware and have tread far enough along this spiritual journey so as not to omit the obvious universally inherited state of ignorance of humanity. And, now, in our contemporary culture, with all of the potential along with the problems, we cannot seemingly secede in the attempt of recreation! We are not free from the conditions that humans have created! I am entangled in the mess I’ve been born into. Even as awareness informs us of the eternal and infinite qualities of nature, we’ve enslaved and continue to condition ourselves with separated, permanent, and finite understandings of life. Based on my own experiences and my frequent listening to amazing spiritual humans, it appears quite impossible to find worldly harmony without thorough unification with that which is unknowable (aka God, Source, the Way, etc.).

Can anyone or any culture any longer live Truth as it naturally is in authentic aware co-creation of harmonious living despite worldly conditions? That is the only life I want to live, but I know not how to do such, nor what activities to choose in this worldly existence that may be actually beneficial. The myth of

The Healing I am going through is thoroughly transformative; I’ve been simply graced with one enlightenment period that allowed me an authentic experience of Truth and Beauty in human being and living. And in retrospective memory, while it did last an entire year, it was a mere taste of freedom from suffering, like a warm vacation from the coldly contradictory borrowed consciousness we karmically inherit being born as humans in our culture. Some cultures don’t have it quite as “bad” as most contemporary Westerners.

I make small steps to arrive into conscious awareness; this is my authentic practice. Meditation, inspiration through art, movement, journaling/writing, discussions, listenings, receivings, givings, gratitude, nature, experiences, understandings, and such ways gracefully allow me to open to this thusness here and now as it all is. I “have” or am awareness, though I am also in the dark, cold and alone. The only reconciliation at this point is unity, wholeness, oneness. I do not and cannot seem to know how this will occur nor what I should choose in activity beyond what I already practice that may suffice for actualizing the manifestation of thorough oneness of the Way in my relative and absolute human beingness. I suppose I mention this last sentence largely because most people seem to hold the opinion of me that I am already obsessed and over-thinking all of this spiritual process and transformation to my detriment. Fortunately or unfortunately, I continue to live in not knowing what or how oneness may manifest in my life.

It seems as though human life must become reintegrated somehow from this disturbingly divisive split from natural being and oneness. The only reason why we impose and brainwash ourselves with a separated, permanent, and egotistically ignorant knowledge is because we do not see beyond what we’ve learned and do not realize it is possible to live beyond these worldly confines of culture. Will the government imprison me for claiming this earthly existence with the authentic authority of being sustainable nature itself? I, aware nature itself, recognize and declare this inseparable, impermanent, immeasurable planet a natural preserve! On what more realistic ground does any identified human have to counter such obvious Truth?

Personally, I recognize I am uninterested in creating new myths or art of entertainment. I love authentic creative art of all forms–such is natural and beautiful Truth. However, I am much more heartened by the seeming need to convey the underlying universal Truth which we must honestly wake up to and harmonize with, if we are to survive with nature in living with the energy of all being beyond suffering. My disconnection is not only my own suffering, but the suffering of humanity on a universal scale that I am particularly sensitive to and aware of as caused by the contradictory enculturation of contemporary civilization. I live here and now, in the midst of strife and beauty inseparable, impermanent, and beyond knowing. My journey continues as I recommit to being this force of the Source of transformation from separated mind to aware natural being. I know not where this life manifestation will take me, yet it is clear I must be a True Way Follower, not an automaton of karmic conditioning. Such is my authentic life purpose, may I be graced with the ability to continue.

a mostly true story

She didn’t know what to do, nor how to go about finding it. Nevertheless another day has gone by the wayside, because nothing much different happened and all the usual things did. She had a few terrible headaches during work, even an episode of subtle tears where she rested her head in the dilapidated break room. Just a few moments away from the computer, emails, and work she didn’t want to do in order to take a few breaths and regain some composure to finish the remaining couple hours of a typical eight hour day. Every legal break is a necessity, and sometimes a little bit more too.

Life is getting very unbearable at work. This isn’t what she wanted to do, nor what she was hired to do when she started working there. She began well enough doing front-end code and creating templates for new websites. Every so often she’d have to fill in the content supplied by the client, come up with meta keywords and descriptions, adjust some graphics, figure out some browser specific rendering solutions, and fix code that wasn’t integrated properly with the programming. Those were the accepted aspects and details of website work. Though only a few weeks ago she was swiftly relocated to the Customer Service department to train in fielding service requests from a roster of clients she was forced to put her name on as the leading Customer Service Representative. She was given a few Power Point presentations to look through and was told to ask questions whenever she needed help.

“HA!” she said, “this is ridiculous. I didn’t sign up for this! I would never have applied for this job if this were part of the description.” But she didn’t have a choice; all of the front-end developers are destined to go through training in Customer Service and given their own chunk of the company’s clients to serve. It’s a larger scale transition for the company, maybe partly due to the downturn in the economy and an attempt to utilize their current technological workforce for more reliable and better quality customer service. However, not one person who has gone through the training is smiling anymore. No one appears to be happy with this transition into Customer Service, and no one has gotten a raise for their increased responsibilities.

what is real

What is real? That’s the question that is oft asked within our selves and in the worldly society. Us humans have successfully blurred the definition of real with all of the sur-real and fantasy of borrowed consciousness made manifest. What is this life that I live day after day? What is life? I’ve been asking what life is for a very long time; so long that maybe I can’t stop questioning these experiences of reality, job activity, possessions/ownership, entertainment, and ways of living in the USA.

In Zen, it is not so much the what, but the how that is important. This and that, all changing over a day, seasons and years, is simply what we have to attend to. Each of us have unique confluences of conditions causing us to be the small self we tend to identify with in living life. Yet, shifting from the identified perspective of ‘what’ being real to a much wider, deeper view of seeing how we live through everything is the key. This is a serious life altering key, which doesn’t allow for turning back, playing games, or pretending. Everything becomes very real, even the ignorant acts of delusional defiance and culture-soaked hedonism and idealism. The delusion is separation and will cause suffering if it doesn’t already. The ism’s fearfully defy change and will also cause suffering if it doesn’t already. The known is a mirage against the empty way, a temporary vantage point where we see what is, but any clinging to ‘it’ will certainly cause us suffering if it doesn’t already. “Is that so?” asks the Zen teacher. Will you cling to these thoughts too?

How to live my life? That is my question as I sit to write here and now about my dilemma of choosing activity. I feel as though I have lost a great deal, but that’s just cause I’ve been identified to it. I am largely alone in my conscious awareness of living life, longing to live intimately with another of great awareness. I am confused regarding activity to choose for maintaining my survival in this contemporary society, desiring a bold, creative, helpful vocation that manifests in coherence with the Way everyday. Even though these thoughts essentially plague my mind as potential dreams of how life could possibly be other than it currently is, they may exist to maintain my suffering. If this and that ‘what’, then I may live the ‘how’ I’ve always dreamed! Of course I want a dreamy life where I may live happily ever after doing exactly what I want how I want it, but that’s just not real.

True happiness is allowing and being present with everything as it is. This is the doing of being beyond thinking, unmeasured by any thought whatsoever. Bringing thought into the view quickly distorts, fragments, and destroys our crystal clear ability to see how things already are with awareness. Now, how can I utilize this aware consciousness in transforming my lonely living and contemptuous career into a path of practice with what is? How do I come to know what needs to be done and how to do it through being with it all? This is where I have no answer and have been struggling to find some sense of authentic direction. I see not here and now; I struggle and suffer with the disharmony and disgust in the separation from finding the Way in relationships and work. I don’t know what to do next, nor how to go about knowing such, for I have tried so much already and have not found the Way manifest in my life. This is terribly bizarre, to see with awareness and to not see what nor how to manifest the Way within my own life. This is my unique struggle with purpose.

healing our understanding

I was listening to Tavis Smiley’s special radio segment called “The Medicalization of Race” (December 20, 2009). It’s a roundtable discussion about race in light of The Human Genome Project and contemporary cultural and scientific understandings. They were talking about how race is a culturally created designation.

I recall in my Cultural Anthropology studies how xenophobia is near to the root of making fearful generalizations of the other; hence, race an easy catch-all for the other colored humans. We’re all colored. In this way, the race designation isn’t entirely about color or physical differences, be they hair, body types, or genetic mutations, it’s about a fearful, culturally conditioned, dualistic, karmic identification with and against the concept of race. Race is a conceptual separation of humanity, based on egocentric karmic conditioning.

Our true nature is essential, free, healing and beyond the separatism and contradictory nature of egocentric karmic conditioned thinking and doing.

In my deep and lengthy investigation into reforming my path towards an authentic livelihood within culture, I realized something central and inspiring at the end of Tavis Smiley’s race panel discussion. It appears everyone needs healing of understanding. If we are openly honest about our co-existence with nature, humans are in a quandry as well another growth phase. The averting socio-environmental disasters and enabling a beneficial co-creative growth phase is dependent on re-under-standing (healing our understandings) as a function of disidentifying from egocentric karmic conditioning and re-co-creating our living practices in accordance of compassionate awareness, loving acceptance, and our indisputable universal true nature of oneness, change, and emptiness.

To be a little more specific about how this realization is important in my personal vocational path, I have needed to re-understand life in order to live it. The personal and cultural conditioning I’ve learned has brought about significant suffering in my identified life. I’ve also observed that there are many people who don’t perceive or feel like I do; which is further evidence of the grounding fact that identification with our constructed views is largely our existential understanding and worldly doing mode. However, the universal human commonality is the same: identification with our karmic conditioned enculturation and idiosyncratic coping mechanisms causes suffering for ourselves and others. While our contemporary social understanding may be that this is an unfortunate side of our limitation as human beings, this is not the truth. Healing our understanding is re-under-standing that views, beliefs, opinions, values, goals, purposes, and such complicated, conflicted and fragmented thinking is not our true nature; it is egocentric karmic conditioning, borrowed collective consciousness, and learned historical enculturation. Hence, healing our understanding is vital towards over-coming our stubborn egos, sheepish complacency, and oft hidden suffering.

I suppose one of the amazing previously uncherished strengths of my character is the ability and tendency to investigate my and others’ experience of life with the curiosity of it’s universality. In this sense, I am more like an adventurous mountain climber, independent avant-garde artist, or homestead permaculturist. Typically, I care much less about a fleeting view than the intuitive intention that causes it. I both experience and observe gut wrenching suffering and physical pain, unexpected crisis and the woe of lament, though I recognize a deeper aspect to this living. As such, I simply consider myself a bodhisattva because my path has been an investigation of suffering–it’s causes and cessation. Unwittingly and authentically, enmeshed in my experiences of suffering due overwhelmingly to the firm grip of egocentric karmic conditioning, original nature is known within me as the opening door of conscious awareness that is finding original harmony with being alive here and now amidst everything as it is.

In conclusion to this particular post, “healing our understanding” may be the authentic work that I may be capable of and suited in doing vocationally. This is about healing my understanding into original nature as much as helping other people heal their understanding and healing our collective human understanding too (a paradigmatic shift towards natural, original being). “How?” is the practical question I must also attend to, fortunately there are uncountable directions for manifesting this Wayward purpose. The arts are certainly a viable means for engaging re-under-standing, however, seriously cultivating authentic conscious awareness practice is inescapably at the core of personal actualizing and enlightening. Also, I enjoy how this phrase so caringly addresses the possible change from a limited egotistic view to a healthy aware conscious presence. The idea that understanding could be healed is truly heartwarming rather than judgmental and conditional. Like the body, our mind (as if there was ever any separation) may heal naturally too. Oneness is our original nature.

living this self

I am. Being is. The Way is not an intellectual understanding.

Fortunately or unfortunately, I frequently feel very jailed within this body/mind and karmically conditioned self. All through childhood, I’ve been rather alone whether I realized it or not. I vaguely recall a moment of staring at my brothers laughing and being silly, and I was thinking “I can’t talk with them, because they can’t talk with me.” They were too young and unconscious. However, this is still my projection of most people in this world. I take my conscious awareness so very seriously, but cannot seem to share in such consciousness, nor open aware presence with nearly anyone. I am often aware, but still longing for very deep intimate connection with a significant other. I want an aware and open exploration of relationship, like an improvisational dance for a lifetime. The choreography is all ours. Sadly, lamentably, none of my relationships have gotten this deep. They got scared, they don’t dance like that.

There’s a massive conscious/unconscious gap that most people don’t seem to even see. This isn’t much of an assumption either! This gap is the difference between being giddy after seeing a movie you just enjoyed in the theater and experiencing the radiant energetic presence during and after resting in alive, aware, spacious being in meditation. If you’ve experienced both, then you know that not only are they so very different experiences, they are also “not two!” So, herein lies the typically non-understandable aspect: non-dual being is all being. The energy of living is within all our lives at every moment. We’re already dancing through our lives. Let’s be with one another, let’s lay here together, why are we missing this vital connection?

When I have conversations with others, I easily get caught up in (attached with) the things, thoughts, and stuff. At work, I may be grumbling and annoyed by the stifled workflow or pressures of expectation piled onto the situations. At home, trying to return to peaceful presence by letting go of and attending to the pained and suffering bodily, emotional, and mental bodies, I am often alone. This is healing work that most people in my life don’t understand and can’t seem to embrace with acceptance and peace. Often, what I hear from others is some version of “why aren’t you responding or attending to me or my concerns?” Maybe I need to reply with “I am working on healing myself so that I may attend to you too with authentic care.”

Life isn’t so much about doing, but about truly being in our living. I say “our” because there isn’t any separation. I emphasize “being” over doing because everything is changing (and clinging to action/activity is no different than any other egotistic stronghold) . And I use the word “truly” because everything is naturally empty. When we’ve gapped from identified borrowed consciousness to spacious conscious awareness, then we are truly seeing. As Krishnamurti said, “the seeing is the doing.” You do change (immeasurable by “time”) when you’ve seen and continue practicing seeing. This is the subtle, yet profound difference between common consciousness and conscious awareness. So, “I am healing with awareness bathing me in the truth.” I am changing, which means I am more Wayward. May egocentric karmic conditioning recede and fade away.

Thank you for your presence in reading, in “being with,” as I like to say.