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Peter
ParticipantJust saw your poem – beautiful, sad.
And the time has come for me to pay for yesterday – When I was young.
“Creation is eternal birth. A beginning without end. It happens in every instant of time. The same power which burns in the stars burns equally in us. Our being is a miracle equal with the creation of the Universe, each day is created anew.” —Terence Malick.
Yesterdays make no demands
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
Thanks for the response. I feel a need to clarify – A need probably linked to some past trauma. At least I’m aware. I know its not necessary but I do enjoy analyses 🙂 kind of masochistic.You acknowledge that despite changing the order of his practices—meditation, contemplation, prayer, dance, art— you were still engaging in method-based healing, rather than allowing life to unfold naturally. You contrast two approaches:
The intent wasn’t to contrast two approaches but a unification of a change in order – even though I fall into old habits and temptations. Silence/stillness before analyses vice trying to use analyses as away to stillness.
If I fully embrace my emotions without resistance, I can stop being defined by my suffering, allowing transcendence into peace. In essence, acceptance clears the path for transcendence, while rejection creates internal barriers. I wonder if your transcendence, Peter, is involved with fully embracing your emotions with no resistance?
I am uncomfortable with the wording of ‘your transcendence’. That has a progressive feel, or something set as a goal to be achieved. I need to hold the word lightly…. My sense is that transcendence is a happening vice a doing or willing or achieving.
I’m not sure it matters what comes first, in dance the Lead is follow and follow lead. Does it matter?You acknowledge that you still fall into analysis, then remember, then forgets again—implying transcendence isn’t a permanent state.
Transcendence as a state implies a something that can be possessed. I would say transcendence transcends the realm of time, measurement, and language and leave it at that.
you see the Eternal as offering immediate relief from suffering—not because trauma doesn’t exist, but because in the Eternal, trauma no longer holds weight or control over the self. Identifying too much with suffering keeps it alive, whereas stepping into an awareness beyond time allows suffering to dissolve naturally. — rather than processing suffering as something to be worked through, you view detachment from the entire concept of suffering as a way to transcend it.
In stillness and silence there is nothing to cling to so yes, no suffering. Perhaps the experience happens at the moment of freefall, weightlessness when the arising transitions to the return and return to the arising of a breath?
To clarify I’m not attempting to address the trauma in the ‘Eternal’ realm that can only be addressed in the temporal. The experience of the Eternal, of being Love, and the composition that arises… provides a kind of foundation to examine the trauma. The memory of the trauma viewed through the memory of the experience of the “weightlessness”
You suggest that this realization shifted how you engage with past memories—seeing them as just past, rather than something that needs direct fixing.
Not found of the word ‘just’ but yes, the realization has shifted how I engage with the life – Life being motion, time, measurement, duality…. Life a playground that calls out to be felt and known.
I have not been particularly good at communicating. I am not dismissing the past or viewing it as only. I am not pretending not to feel what I feel. The notion of fixing has been problematic for me. I don’t always get to healing, but dealing, hopefully with healthy boundaries, is a step forward. Its not a permanent temporal state… question to self – is that what I’ve been trying to do, find a permeant state? – that won’t work life is motion
The habit of analyses is difficult to break but I’m “going to put down the bag of chips now”. Progress! I don’t see a need to identify with that habit, it just is, and enough to be aware.
Is it that I was stuck analyzing shame and fear in efforts to chase them away via understanding that kept them hanging on tight, while trying to understand them with an attitude of befriending them would have made all the difference? In other words, it’s not the analysis itself that kept them strong within me, but my efforts to divorce myself from them through analysis that kept them powerful within me?
I have know that game! With the same results.
As I have gotten older sadly it now only takes few chips to make me feel sick and with that the interval between craving for chips decreases. At the grocery store when I pick up a bag the memory of a future sick feeling arises, and most time I put the bag down. 🙂
LOL I see I used the word sadly. I so liked my salty snacks, I miss them, but they don’t like me.
Peter
Participant“I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us, and we change things” – Mother Teresa
“Prayer is sitting in the silence until it silences us, choosing gratitude until we are grateful, and praising G_d until we ourselves are an act of praise.” – Richard Rohr
“You cannot have youth and the knowledge of it at the same time;
For youth is too busy living to know, and knowledge is too busy seeking itself to live.
You may sit at your window watching the passersby.
And watching you may see a nun walking toward your right hand, and a prostitute toward your left hand.
And you may say in your innocence, “How noble is the one and how ignoble is the other.”
But should you close your eyes and listen awhile you would hear a voice whispering in the ether,
“One seeks me in prayer, and the other in pain. And in the spirit of each there is a bower for my spirit.” GibranPeter
ParticipantGoing over what I wrote I see that I fell into the trap of talking to much about method as a path. Method fascinates me but too distraction. Put another way I fell into my temptation.
I ought to have just pointed to the TAO – “Tao: The Pathless Path” “pathless” as it is not about fixed rules…. Rather, its a state of being of the natural flow of life.
Reading over what I wrote I noticed I was still engaging in the same methods just a different order. Mediation, contemplation, prayer, yoga, dance, art… then addressing any specific past happening/trauma, feeling the feelings…. Vice allowing a memory of an trauma to take my attention, working to address it, usually mind trying to understand mind, and then trying to find a balanced state of being.
(I still fall into the trap of the latter, then I remember, then I forget… Analyses is like continuing to eat chips when you know you have enough and that continuing will leave you feeling sick yet you still don’t stop, and you end up feeling sick.)Also noticed I might have answered the questions with a simple meditation/contemplation.
Movement is time, stillness eternity.
Movement creates life, Stillness Love,
To be still Yet still moving – That is everything!
– after Do Hyun ChoeSitting in that meditation and contemplation has changed how I engaged with past memory (all memory is past).
Its not my intention to ‘sell’ that experience as ‘The’ or even ‘A’ Way to do things.Peter
ParticipantPart Two
If trauma is “not real” in the ultimate sense, does that mean the suffering attached to it doesn’t warrant full emotional acknowledgment before moving on?
The mistics experience and wisdom traditions do point to a notion of immediate enlightenment. I can only refer to my own experience of contemplation. Sorry I am going to use the sun contemplation again.
I observe my breath rising and returning and contemplate the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening and how that measures out our day. An experience of time as a river where one moment flows into the next, into the next… each moment appearing as separate. This is the realm of maya were motion and language (measurement, judgment, attachments, duality) create our experience of life. In this realm we suffer, life is suffering. Everything experienced in the realm of maya is real and calling out to be felt and addressed.
Observing my breath rising and returning I select a moment from the river of time. In this moment I notice that somewhere the sun is both rising and somewhere setting. This is an experience of the past, present and future merging. A moment where every happenings I can imagine taking place at the same time. Here someone being born, there someone dying… someone’s first kiss, someone’s first slap, someone typing on a computer, someone reading… differences fade, we are all connected, we all suffer. Compassion rises.
Observing my breath rising and returning the moment of infinite happenings becomes the earth spinning and traveling though space. I notice the Truth that the sun neither rises nor sets but is and I am, we are that. This is an experience of interconnectedness where nothing is sperate, the All is one. This is the source from which my breath, all breath arise and return.
Observing my breath rising and returning – motion arising from and retuning to stillness, I am, we are stillness. Language arising and returning to silence, I am, we are silence. Time arising from and returning to the Eternal, I am, we are Eternal.
Motion, language time creating Life. Life arising from and returning to Love… Life arises from and returns to Love.
Awakening the mountain once again a mountain, life remains life, relationships need tending, emotions need feeling only… the desire to posses, to seek, to fix, to become has changed. What has changed… an awareness that to possess, to seek, to fix to become create conflict, suffering but no need to attach, no need to identify with suffering. The realm of maya is the playground for life and we all called to play.
Love and Compassion naturally arise. Nothing had to be fixed, addressed, processed… noting had to be done for this Love and Compassion to arise. It always was and I am, we are, That. From this arsing will still address traumas, process, feel, wonder, maybe even try to fix. Only now when I peer into past traumas, they no longer have the same wight, the same hold, still very real, only… well yes the possibility to dismiss.
Does trauma exists in love/eternal? No. The experience of the Eternal is silent and still, duality/language does not exist in this realm of experience. Eternal Love has no opposites. Love is and we are that. It is in the motion and naming of the arising that creates a experience of life, duality and the infinite happenings, the wonders, and its sufferings. Life as it IS.
The experience of maya is real and more imminent grabbing our attention while the experience of the Eternal is real but still… Neither path cancers the other.
In dancing I learned that when we were really in the dance the Lead was also a Follow and Follow also a lead. The question or real and path fade away.
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
In 2016 I would say I headed out into the woods gathering information, words in a hope to understand and understand arrive as some imagined something. Information isn’t knowing and not surprisingly I got got stuck. In hind sight I would say I was dealing but not healing. The two years ago I asked a different question. What if I actually believed in the things I learned were Truths?
I am going to attempt to answer your other questions but not knowing what the answers are this may be a mess.
Here’s my question: Does detachment need to be preceded by acknowledgment and emotional integration, or do you see transcendence as an immediate path forward?
This surprises me but Yes I see Transcendence as a immediate path forward. I’ve had glimpses… to be addresed in part two. Yes their will be apart two.
Krishnamurti questioned whether detachment is truly the opposite of attachment, suggesting that if one pursues detachment as a goal, it can become another form of attachment, creating conflict and striving.
That matches my experience of detachment as a goal. Removing the notion of ‘goal’ detachment changes from something one does or seeks but a way of being, an awareness of allowing? Such a detachment is not a denial of trauma, emotions, or the investigation into such things but to paraphrase Millo no longer identifing with it anymore.
Does that mean suffering doesn’t warrant full emotional acknowledgment before moving on? Now I hear Krishnamurti asking what acknowledgment means. If acknowledgment means holding on to what we discovered, then we have just created a different version of what we will suffer from. If acknowledgment means flow and no longer identifying with the trauma then I think we get closer. We still suffer as life in ‘time’ (measurement) – in maya – is suffering but what has changed is a possibility of flow.
Is full emotional acknowledgment a path to healing – Yes
Has it worked for me, no.
Have I observed it working for others not really. But I have a biasFrom my earliest memories I have been taught that to get to Love I must do the work and follow the rules, (rules that included full emotional acknowledgement) and then just maybe I would deserve to be Loved.
The experience of maya is real and more imminent grabbing our attention while the experience of the Eternal is real but still…
Neither path cancers the other. My experience is that the realm of maya is more likely to separate us from the experience of stillness and Eternal. While the experience of the Eternal immediately addresses maya.A note on Love from Krishnamurti
“When the mind is no longer projecting itself, pursuing its particular sensations, demands, urges, hidden fears, seeking self-fulfilment, held in bondage to belief – only then is there a possibility of love.
So, we must be concerned, not with love, which comes into being spontaneously, without our particularly seeking it, we must be concerned with the things that are hindering love, with the things of the mind which project themselves and create a barrier.My doing the work had only created different barriers. The wisdom traditions all suggest a work that is no work. What if I lived what I said I belived
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
I’ve been asking myself how I could express my thoughts without being dismissive are making it appear I was suggesting thier was only one path.
How does one express that the world of Maya is a vivid and compelling reality, but ultimately, it is a temporary and illusory manifestation, not the ultimate truth. and not sound dismissive?For me the path of rumination doesn’t work as another Truth I’ve come to know is that – “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it,” Albert Einstein
Rumination has helped me gain better understanding and come to terms with past hurts but never healing. Never the Love that I also desired. For that I’ve had to ‘transcend the world of maya’ only to surprised that I already was, what I was seeking. These tend to be momentary realizations as you noted Life is lived in the world of Maya and it is thier that we must find our way, or own path… Only something did changed the past pains that had hunted me no longer had the same power over me. I still had to deal the repercussions of the past but…yeah that’s going to sound dismissive.I’ll let Anthony de Mello speak for me (though I don’t think myself enlighten – “Before enlightenment, I used to be depressed: after enlightenment, I continue to be depressed.” But there’s a difference: I don’t identify with it anymore.”
Hi Alessa
I agree, I’m a fan of Krishnamurti but in small doses. I’m still coming to terms with how he totally dismantled my notion of belief. Which I will spare everyone. “)I also would not say I was a happy child. Anxious child seems a better description yet when Anthony said -“Happiness is the natural state of little children” I knew what he was saying was a truth…. so I must of had moments… yes thier were moments.
For me language is a problem as you can’t use it without creating duality. Anything one says eventually has to be unsaid. I think this is why Krishnamurti came to the path of negation in his path to know Love. For me language and duality are intimately connected so belongs to the world of maya.
I’ve been exploring the thought that its motion and language that creates our experience of life within the world of Maya. AI wrote that as ‘our perceptions and understanding of reality are filtered through the lens of language and shaped by the constant flux of experience (motion).’ And of Allan Watts noted most of the language we use was given to us and not our own…
Anyway their I go again and again I apologize
Peter
ParticipantPerhaps a better question. When does the seeker get to be one who found?
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
I have the same problem with Krishnamurti. He is often viewed as being dismissive the problem IMO is language. For example my poor attempting to differentiate the difference of temporal relationships with others, real, and Relationship with Self, Very Real. The thesis being that healing arises from the latter more so then the former as that has been my experience.
The following I Know as Truth.
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot
“We work for that which no work is required” T Morris
I know this at the Core of my Soul is true. We already have/are what we are seeking!These Truths have allowed me the freedom to hold words lightly which I know can be experienced as being dismissive and make communication difficult.
I see that I made a assumption. From what I’ve read from your posts I assumed that you have indeed done the work and processed the betrayal. That you have come to a place of “Innocence” (after much dying) to do no harm and capable of healing others and yourself all arising from compassion. Being candid I have been perplexed why you keep returning to the story. Thankyou for clarifying.
The experience of being gaslit is the worst. To the issue of not believing if something actually happened or not?
As a young boy I used to have these very vivid dreams only to be told dreams were not real. Older I recall Shirly MacLaine talking about her experiences with past lives and noting how the conversation went to trying to prove the experiences were real. Even though I never had such experiences I recall thinking that they were asking the wrong questions. Later investigating Jung I happened on a story: During her first meeting with Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz was startled when Jung mentioned a patient who claimed to have been on the moon, and she suggested the woman might have been dreaming or fantasizing about it. Jung looked at her very seriously and replied: “No, she was on the moon!”. Later reflecting on this incident she suddenly realized that what happens psychically, is the true reality. This realization change her life and for me put the question of what is real to bed.
The question of whether a resonating experience is real or not has never interested me much. That the experience resonated such a question resolves itself, the experience was and is real. The better question IMO asking what have I “learned” from it? What might I, learn from it to close the distance to the ‘Natural Self’.
You are correct there is a time for going deeper and I apologize if I jumped the gun.
“The distance from my natural self has been real. I know you say it’s real only in the temporal realm, but we live in the temporal realm—and for as long as we exist in it, we cannot escape its reality.”
Here I think I’ve been misunderstood. The distance from our natural selves is very very Real. That it is also real in the temporal is what creates the distance from our “natural Self”. My experience in the second half of life is that addressing the temporal experiences (now a long in the past memory) while needing to be processed leads to “dealing with” but not healing. Healing coming from closing the distance to the Relationship with Self. My experience has been that when the latter is addressed the temporal now long past experiences resolves by de-solving.
You may notice I only tend to comment on stories that happened long in the past and were a person is at the point where the “Innocence” Clarissa talks of is possible. A “Innocence” you express many times in your posts… So the question what are you seeking?
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
I’m curious if you feel I’m suggesting that our betrayals aren’t real or that any literal separation of relationship needs to be justified? I am attempting to step past the notion of temporal relationship that we tend to project outwards…
We talked of the problem of rumination. That each retelling of our stories is an act of reliving them often reenforcing the illusion that the past happening is happening now vice the reality that its the memories/labels/measurements that are happing now. To the body there is no difference between the happening and the memory of a happening. The danger is that we become attached to our story telling and its this attachment to that creates the illusion of distance from our natural self and so we suffer.
My feeling is that everyone has been betrayed at some point in thier lives, probably multiple times, and oddly a something that connects us. I suspect betrayal is at the root of the divide and is very real. Just as even though the sun nether rises or sets the experience of it rising and setting is real, real enough that we measure our experienced by it. Awareness reveling that it is in the latter that we suffer as it separates us from the former. Stepping past a notion of ‘temporal relationship’ the “issue” moves from betrayal to the separation from Self.
Early life betrayal is real and as we have explored, we tend to entangle ourselves and measure our experiences by it. Anthony de Mello suggests the task is to get back to The Reality where “Happiness is our natural state” – where the sun neither rises or sets but Is and We Are, we must drop something. My thought is that we drop language, and or hold it more lightly and in this way reduce the space/illusion of separation from our “natural state”.
Aside: religion often unintentionally teaches that we must work and follow commandments and in that way become compassionate and loving. When the reality is that compassion is a natural arising and that from the natural arising such commandments aren’t required. Do you see what I’m pointing at? That the question of our betrayals being real or not may be second half of life distraction. We don’t’ need to fix our betrayals to get back to our “natural selves”. Awakening to the realty that we are already and always Are… the question of betrayal and justifications fades. Compassion and interconnectedness naturally arises. It really does!
I’ve mentioned before the notion that the reality of each breathe being a “birth, betrayal, death and resurrection”. Birth a state of innocence betrayed, the betrayal, very real creating the illusion of separation from ‘Self’ and the suffering that results, death a process of detachment (not indifference) removes the illusion of separation, resulting in resurrection the return to what Is as It Is, as We Are. A rebirth of innocence…
”The word innocent is often used to mean a person of no knowing, or a simpleton. But the roots of the word mean to be free of injury or hurt. In Spanish, the word innocent is understood to mean a person who tries not to harm another, but who also is able to heal any injury or harm to herself.” – “Innocence is knowing everything (life as it Is) and still being attracted to the good.” ― Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Sound familure?) 🙂
Peter
ParticipantHi Alessa
“Happiness is the natural state of little children” When I hold such words lightly, I feel the truth of them and wonder at those flashings of memory where it was so.Hi Anita
Pondering the words that “everything is deeply connected until it isn’t” What happened between connection to disconnection? Language, thought, measurement… space created between thinker and thought, the thought separated from the thinker becomes other.
The illusion of language and thought disconnecting what is always connected. – The sun neither rises or sets yet its rising and setting measures out out our day.“the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.” ― Anthony de Mello
“The poet’s greatness is contained in his words; yet the study of his words will not disclose his inspiration.” – Anthony de Mello
“Surely, we must all have had experiences of those moments when the mind is absent, and suddenly there is a flash of joy, a flash of an idea, a light, a great bliss. How does that happen? It happens when the self is absent, when the process of thought, worry, memories, pursuits, is still. Therefore, creation can take place only when the mind, through self-knowledge, has come to that state when it is completely naked.” -Krishnamurti
Peter
ParticipantHappened upon Anthony de Mello today as I was pondering the notion of separation. the problem of man’s assumed separation from nature in relation to the notion of the separation of observer from the observed, the thinker from the thought… how this false sense of separation may be the source of illusion, maya, of suffering?
“As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. … That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life… Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.”
― Anthony de Mello“People mistakenly assume that their thinking is done by their head; it is actually done by the heart which first dictates the conclusion, then commands the head to provide the reasoning that will defend it.
“Happiness is our natural state. Happiness is the natural state of little children, to whom the kingdom belongs until they have been polluted and contaminated by the stupidity of society and culture. To acquire happiness you don’t have to do anything, because happiness cannot be acquired. Does anybody know why? Because we have it already. How can you acquire what you already have? Then why don’t you experience it? Because you’ve got to drop something. You’ve got to drop illusions. You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings. Do you know where these things come from? From having identified with all kinds of labels!”
― Anthony de MelloPeter
ParticipantHi Anita and Everyone
Reading Anita struggle to untangle anger, ‘mother’ and frustrated desire to help… I also felt frustrated knowing that at best we can offer support but that this task one walks through in their own way.
An early memory, sometime in my twenties, arose… I can hear myself saying ‘family can’t help family.’
I do not recall the events leading up to that realization… or maybe I do…The statement wasn’t about the everyday but about the deep wounds. Wounds often exacerbated by notion of family itself and the ghosts we each carry and project as family is the first crucible in which the self struggles to emerge. In trying to help family our ‘ghosts’ can’t help themselves from ‘playing’ and haunting, triggering old pains. Pain that only distance is capable of seeing…
I wonder if in such moments witnessing is the role left to us, perhaps to acknowledge the ‘tears in things’… doesn’t feel enough. The Hawaiian ritual Ho’oponopono coming to mind as memory of family, mother, father arise… I love you; I thank you; I forgive you, please forgive me…
I recently came across a Youtube video – Like Stories of Old – ‘Why We Can’t Save Those We Love’ that explores this notion. That in the stories we tell and witness we are not alone… Its worth watching
“Each one of us here today will at one time in our lives look upon a loved one who is in need and ask the same question: We are willing to help, Lord, but what, if anything, is needed? For it is true we can seldom help those closest to us.
- Either we don’t know what part of ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted
. And so, it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can still love them – we can love completely without complete understanding.” ― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
“When I looked, I knew I might never again see so much of the earth so beautiful, the beautiful being something you know added to something you see, in a whole that is different from the sum of its parts. What I saw might have been just another winter scene, although an impressive one. But what I knew was that the earth underneath was alive and that by tomorrow, certainly by the day after, it would be all green again. So, what I saw because of what I knew was a kind of death with the marvelous promise… ” ― Norman Maclean
Peter
ParticipantHi Anita
“seeing with the eyes of another, listening with the ears of another, feeling with the heart of another.” ― Alfred Adler
Untangling…
The Heart breaking
Keeps beating
How can this be
The way of an open heartPeter
ParticipantI love what Hermann Hess had to say about trees
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that G_d is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.
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