Just 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

“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.” Gibran

Part 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.

Hi 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

Hi 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?

Hi 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

Hi 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.

. 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

I 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.