Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

Some more thoughts on the eyes and what happens when they don’t focus come up this morning, as I get ready for corrective surgery. Since most people have single vision, they never experience the battle for dominance that goes on when the brain sees two images of the world instead of one. The brain must choose which one to favor because to see two separate images of the world makes it dizzy. So one image overrides the other, even to the point that the brain actually doesn’t even notice that there are two worlds out there.

But this double vision doesn’t end here. When it comes to our perception of reality, we are all seeing with two eyes. There is the conditioned perception seen by the collective brain, which layers itself into our family perspective, our religious perspective, our national perspective and finally, our human perspective. This is one eye.

The second eye, which has been dominated by the vision of the collective eye, is the eye of our Spirit, our Soul, if you will, or, one could say, the eye of Truth. No matter what we call it, the experience is the same. On occasions when the collective eye blinks, our Truth eye will send its vision of reality to the brain, but this happens so quickly that the brain doesn’t compute the full vision, since it believes that the collective eye is the only eye and its reality the only reality. But our Self, which is our true Self that sleeps behind the collective eye and it false self-image, sees this flash of truth, and stirs in its sleep. “What was that?”

As Truth awakes within us, we hunger for more flashes of insight, and something suspicious is noticed about the collective world the false self believes in. The awakening Self begins to doubt that the reality of the collective false self is real. It almost seems like a dream. “Who is asleep, and who is awake?” we ask.

We begin to notice the difference between the two eyes and their interpretations of the world. The collective eye sees the world through a cataract of the past. Everything must be interpreted with the past as a reference point. It doesn’t see a tree; it sees the name of the tree.

While the sleeping eye of the True Self, sees reality as it is directly. No cataract. When the True eye sees, the world looks like HD TV! And the world seen by the collective eye is like antenna television in comparison.

When the True eye begins to open, the collective eye begins to recede, because it has nothing new to offer the brain but an inferior and false impression of reality. Finally, when the True eye is completely open and the Self is awake, the collective worldview disappears as if it were the dream.

The path to Truth is through seeing with single vision, then seeing with double vision, then seeing with single vision again.

Posted under General Observations

This morning, hopefully, will be the last time in my life that I see two instead of one. At noon, an eye surgeon will weaken a muscle above my right eye, which will allow the said eye to find it’s mate and focus. All my life my two eyes have been at odds, one looking up while the other looks straight ahead. To correct this double vision, I wore prisms that pulled the eyes together, but in later years the tension grew too strong for this artificial focusing, and my eyes kept drifting apart like lovers after the honeymoon.

With competing images to choose from, the brain was forced to make a decision as to which would be the dominant eye. I think my left eye was chosen because when I look without glasses, I can notice my brain going with the information my left eye delivers. But, this choice of one eye over the other has thrown the brain into a bit of a fix these last three months when I haven’t been able to use glasses after the cataract removal. After the veil of cataracts was lifted, my right eye was granted 20/20 vision and my left eye—I guess as retribution for its favored position all these years—ended up with a little less, and some stigmatism as well. But the brain couldn’t compute this change and still favored my left eye, leaving my better eye in the shadows like Cinderella.

Anyway, this sad story of the two eyes trying to find love and harmony with the brain will end today. With a few snips and a tuck, my brain’s windows on the world will no longer be one shade off.

Posted under General Observations

Let’s Start a Dialogue
We all want to be spontaneous. Well, this newsletter is spontaneously acting on an idea that just surfaced in my mind. As you know, if you have been following my e-journal, I have tapped into an underground spring of words that usually comes to the surface through relationship, such as an email dialogue. All I need is a heart felt question of a spiritual nature to fill up several pages with words. Since I have no idea what these words are going to say, I can only assume that they are helpful to the questioner. Most of the time they feel very pure, and I always welcome any indications that my water is contaminated with self-interest. We all want pure water.

So, here is the idea. I would like to create a space on this site for questions and answers for those who are in search of their truth. Actually, every thing we seek is a search for truth in some form or another, so there is really no conditions placed on the question, other than it be heart felt. When the heart asks, the heart responds.

Here is the format. E-mail a question, and I’ll respond. If the Q/A seems of larger interest, I’ll post in on the new page for Q/A, leaving out your name, of course. Yoga is a spiritual path, but not a religious path. Yoga is a recipe of liberation that can be used in any religion. Just some of the names have to be changed to protect the intolerant. But, the point is that yoga is experiential, in the same way that a drink of water is an experience. Yoga leads us to the experience of God within, and that experience has no name.

One can say what an orange tastes like, but no matter how detailed or poetic the words are, words will never substitute for the experience of tasting the orange. The same with God. All the religions and scriptures in the world cannot replace the experience of That which dwells within. Yoga is the practice that points us in the direction of this direct experience, and this direct experience of God is the goal of all religions. As my guru says, Truth is One, Paths are Many.

So, I’m willing to give this idea a try. Who knows, it just might help someone who is thirsty. It could also be interesting to see what people are feeling about the meaning of their life and why we are not finding answers in today’s noisy world.

Finally, these questions and answers are not for a “talking head” argument that we see on TV. We are not after opinions and perspectives and which is right or wrong. In a dialogue there are no right and wrongs, but only the inquiry that goes deeper and deeper, expanding as it goes until the pairs of opposites are transcended with a truth that is larger than the parts.

I begin from the experienced principle that I don’t know the answers, nor is what I say the last answer. One never arrives and claims truth for one’s own. Truth is a process which always begins and ends with the awareness of unknowing. To find truth one must be comfortable in not knowing, because truth is always a living discovery, and not a dead piece of information. To search for truth is to be alive.

Posted under General Observations

There are no more front porches on our homes, unless you still have a home that was built before WWII when front porches were as important as a kitchen and a living room. Today’s front porches are just for decoration and are not the wide enclosed porches that wrapped the front of our houses with space for chairs and swings for the whole family.

Front porches faced the street where a family could view the passing world or just sit in the evening and listen to the crickets and other night sounds that drew awareness away from thoughts and into the stillness of being. On the front porch in the evenings a deep and abiding sense of being okay filled the night air, and there was no need for the next moment and the fulfillment it might offer. A front porch invited you to sit and feel completion. No need to worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow would take care of itself, and no need to fret about the past, because the past was buried and gone. On the front porch there was just Now, and it was okay.

Homes today are centered on the television, one in each room for most homes, and we have forgotten the peace and the stillness of the front porch in the evening. Instead of watching the lightning bugs dance like fairies across the lawn, families huddle around television as if they were crystal balls that held their future. The light of the tube has replaced the light of awareness.

We have given up our front porches where we could experience the depth of the present moment, and we substituted it with television and its dreams of artificial fulfillment. Now, we cannot sit anywhere ilike we did in the comfortable stillness of a front porch; we must have an amusements, our distractions that  “entertain” our minds to keep us from remembering what we have forgotten.

Posted under General Observations

We joined Netflix last week, upon my daughter’s insistence that we would love it, and the first movie that I chose was Forever After, a Cinderella story with Drew Barrymore. Now you know what kind of movies I like…movies with happy endings.

We all love movies with happy endings, not only because they make us feel good, but because we believe deep down that somewhere, somehow life for us will have a happy ending, otherwise, what’s the purpose of it all? Can all these unique forms we call us be just chance occurrences that appear for a moment in the universe and then disappear, with no more significance than the blinking of the light of a summer firefly? I don’t think so.

We want to live forever after, no doubt about it. And if we can’t figure out a way to do it in this life, then we will draw up plans to do it in the after life. Cinderella, however, is about living forever after in this life. But that’s a fairy tale, we say, not reality.

Okay, let’s get something straight before we continue. All fairy tales, movies, and myths are about reality, only they speak not only to the light of the waking self, but to the light of the eternal Self. The light of the waking self, which is controlled by ego, is like a light bulb. The light of the eternal Self, which is the formless consciousness that is the background of the waking self, is like the sun. To the waking self, the eternal Self does not exist; to the eternal Self, the ego does not exist. Two lights cannot see each other because there is only one Light.

Our stories, fairy tales and whatever, speak to both lights at the same time. If our stories only speak to the ego, then they usually have unhappy endings. “See,” says the ego, “I knew there was no forever after in this stupid world. There is nothing but death, so get it while you can.” Unhappy stories affirm the ego’s narrow view of life and make its limited light seem stronger.

If a story only speaks to the eternal Self, then the waking self will just fall asleep or find it so boring that it will get up and walk out before the story ends. So stories that last have to be ones that speak to both lights at the same time, and stories that speak on the relative and the absolute levels at the same time are timeless stories, such as our Cinderella. These are stories to wake us up.

“Wake up from what?” the ego might ask. The timeless stories are like portals into our eternal ever-present consciousness, and the reason we feel good and uplifted by them is because we recognize who wrote the stories. We see our Self in the story, because our eternal Self wrote them.

“What? Now you’re losing me,” says the little light bulb. Okay, listen without thinking. Our eternal Self is eternal because it is without form. It is the ever present I AM that is aware of the content of our mind, all the forms, feelings, and thoughts that we see there, even the Me called the ego. This I AM always is.

Forms come and go, IT remains. IT is free from death and the fear of death. IT writes these stories to wake up by. When the eternal Self is conscious of itself, wherever it goes IT is always there. All the myths, scriptures, and fairy tales, even our Oscar winning movies, are written by IT…because there is only one IT….and we are IT. But we don’t know IT because we are asleep to IT.

We are Cinderella, and if we saw that, I mean really saw it, then we would have a flash of realization like the sun suddenly bursting into our room and making our little table lamp of ego disappear, and we would know who we are in our totality.
We would be IT….and that’s all there is to it. We all live Forever…After we wake up.

Posted under General Observations, reviews

Did you ever have this sense that you are eternal and that all these dramas of life  that we go through are just movies that we have chosen to watch as we sit back with God and enjoy some popcorn. And whenever we get too deep into the movie and forget we are the eternal viewer, and we think the suffering is us, God punches us and passes the popcorn bag. “Want some popcorn?” He says learning over with a smile, and we look at Him to say, “How long have we been in this theater?”

“Oh, for as long as I can remember,” He says, not looking at the movie. “I just love movies, but I can’t stand to watch them alone. I need You to give me the joy of waking up to the experience of being alive, of being Me, after getting lost in the movie and disappearing.…”Want some more popcorn…I have plenty. Look, I can create some fresh right now.”

We are all watching movies with God—and He doesn’t even see the movies! It’s not that He doesn’t like or dislike movies, He just can’t see them. But He loves to wake up from the movie and know that “I am that I am,” and when one human totally wakes up and no longer believes the movie is real, that viewer merges with God. But God doesn’t worry because another human is always buying a ticket and sitting down, never even realizing in the dark  that he is sitting next to God.

And this movie is not like our normal movies—which are movies within this larger movie—because here everyone is watching his/her own movie, and many of the characters are playing in several movies at once. Also, the credits never roll in these real-time movies because each human viewing the movies is writing and playing in all the parts at once.
After the movie has been run thousands of times, the urge for some popcorn comes up from nowhere in one of the viewers.  That’s all God needs. ,,,Nudge…”Hey, you want some popcorn?”

We only see the credits when we completely wake up from the movie for the last time. Then applause fills the theater, as if the whole earth were waiting for this moment, and the lights come on, but just for the person waking up.

Posted under General Observations

“I need to change ‘em a tad,” said my wife after we finished her excellent pancakes. “More egg white will make them just a tad lighter.”

It seems cooks are always adding a tad or taking away a tad, and I thought it would save a great deal of time if we could just get a box of tads at Wal-Mart and add them as we needed. We need a universal tad, because there are tads mixed in with everything. “He’s a tad late, “ we might say. Or “She’s a tad overweight.”

The box could say Add a Tad, cut you work in half by mixing in these pre-cut tads.  Think of the jobs a few Tad factories could create. In addition to the box of Tads, we also need a Tad measuring spoon, so we can dip into anything that needs to be a tad less or a tad more.

I think I’ll stop here. This piece is just a Tad too much.

Posted under General Observations

The one thing that holds common to all those who have been or are going into the Submarine service, called the “silent service,” is that you have to qualify and earn your Dolphins, which is a coveted and proudly worn silver pin sporting two dolphins nosing up to each other. As a submariner from 1957 to 1961, I can speak from experience about this rite of passage, which includes three months of submarine school and “qualifying” on a working boat. (Submarines are called boats instead of ships. And I assume that the time for sub school is the same.)

To be qualified in submarines means that you have a working knowledge of every part and function of the boat, from how to close a valve in the engine room if there is flooding, to helping load a torpedo in the forward torpedo room. Each man on a sub must be everyman on the sub, so that no matter where you are on the boat, you can be depended on to function correctly in that department if an emergency happens. On a sub, everyone’s life depends on everyone, and everyone is expected to be responsible for the whole crew and boat. One feels that, “I am this sub, and this sub is me.”

Qualification is the process of learning all the systems in the boat and passing a test. In tradition, once passing the test, the sailor is thrown overboard. But with the pollution of harbors, this practice has been stopped. Being qualified should not be life threatening.

The silver dolphins were worn with such pride, I remember. And next to “surface skimmers,” as those sailors of the surface fleet were called, a submariner had the secure feeling of the Three Musketeers, all for one and one for all. Being on a submarine gave you the sense of wholeness that departmentalized surface sailors never knew. In the surface navy, the self was broken and shelved into a hierarchy of ranks, while in the submarines, ranks existed, but everyone was on a personal basis and valued as a possible rescuer in a moment of danger. On the surface, even if the ship sank, one could still float. No so in the submarines.

That feeling of being qualified, of being all for one and one for all, has been lost to us “surface skimmers” in modern America. We have forgotten how to dive beneath the waves of our mind and swim in the ocean of being to which we all belong. We have been chopped up into ranks of status and have forgotten the sense of being on the same boat together with each responsible for that boat’s safety and course.

“Let the officers (politicians) take care of us,” we say. “Just tell me which deck to swab.” And we let the media chart out our thoughts for the day. The ritual of “qualifying for democracy” has been forgotten by our educational systems, which tell us what to think instead of how to think. And being “proud to be an American,” is just so much lip service on the surface of our minds.

Yet, each of us has within the call of the “silent service,” which takes us deep into ourselves where we explore and learn how our conditioned surface mind works, and as we inquire into whom we are, we discover who we are not. And just as the submariner realizes that in his service, one is for all and all is for one, so we discover that we have a greater service to humanity.

When one realizes in the depths of his own existence that he is one with all, and that all is one with him, then the passage has been completed and upon his or her chest, God pins the silver dolphins. The duality of separation has been pierced, and You are One.

Posted under General Observations

“I never seem to have enough time,” almost everyone says, especially when it comes to adding something like yoga to one’s hectic schedule. Time gets partitioned out like chips, so many chips here, so many there….”Oh, oh, I’m out of chips,” we say when our week is crammed full. “No time for you.”

And we often look down on other cultures or people who don’t value time as we do, and we take critical note of  their indifference to the importance of “being on time,” as if “being on time” were the hallmark of a civilized people.

This ‘being on time” is a very interesting phrase, and it says something very profound about us. But first, let’s ask if there is such a thing as time in nature. I mean, is time real. There is a clock-time that measures the unfolding of form, like the budding of a flower, and there is mind time, which is our concept of time that is overlaid onto the unfolding of nature and us (we are nature, don’t forget), mind time is where we experience ourselves.

If there is “being on time,” then there must be ‘being timeless,” otherwise we could not know that we were “on time.” If “being on time,” were our natural state we could not even name it. Do we say “being on air?” There is no opposite of being on air so we aren’t aware that we are on air.

We normally equate being on time with its opposite of being late. But, let’s go to the bottom of this thing. We are aware in the back of our minds that there is a timeless state of being that does not experience time as a line of moments, minutes, hours, days, months, and years. Being timeless is the background experience to “being on time,” in the same way that the movie screen is the timeless background to the movie, which is in its own movie time.

Imagine you are in a movie (do this the next time you are there): when you are lost in the movie you are experiencing movie time, which is the time the characters are living in. Then you partner taps you on the arm and offers some popcorn. Bam! you are in present time. Then back you go into movie time. You can experience time in two different ways like this. Back and forth you can go between present and movie time. But you don’t need a movie to notice this. When you are lost in thought and someone taps you, Bam! you are back in present time and out of mind time, which is thought. Coming to present time is like waking up. Here’s an example of the timeless experience.

Last week my daughter and I went to Charlottesville and back in one trip. Our conversation was flowing and free, going down this road and that without a map, and we seemed to be no time. We had been right here together in this moment our whole life. Our past and our future were rolled up in this moment. “I wonder what kind of car we’ll be in when I’m 96 and your are driving me,” I said.

I had the experience of sitting in one place, in one moment talking with my daughter as if I were in a movie chair with a 360-degree panorama of changing forms and sound flowing by me (the changing scenery of the road to Charlottesville and back.) We had the experience of only one present moment that was eternally present, and we were the ever the same—only the exterior world of forms was changing.

When you sit in a movie, you stay the same and the movie world changes around you. What makes the movie work for us is the suspension of disbelief, and we experience ourselves in the movie, forgetting our present.

The experience of timelessness is just that, only without the movie. We remain aware of our present moment body sitting here, while the exterior world of form changes around us. When this experience happens, we are essentially free from the world of time (which is only of the mind or the movie).

Being free from time is being free of a tremendous burden, which is the accumulated weight of all our past and future problems, because that burden is only experienced in our mind as time. We are conditioned to believe our personal movie is us and that we are experiencing ourselves in it.

In reality, we are just sitting in one place, eating popcorn, and enjoying the show’s tragic and comedic turns. “That was a great movie,” we say when we die. “I didn’t even know I was watching it.”

Posted under General Observations

We have lost the keys to our kingdom, God’s Kingdom on Earth, and we don’t know where to look for them. I’m reminded of a recent movie, Avalon, where a family was broken into parts by the simple act of cutting the Thanksgiving turkey before all members were present. “You cut the turkey!” cried the brother who had been left out. He never came back.

And so we have cut the turkey of our Kingdom and built two separate worlds, leaving our brother out: one secular, where we dance to the music of material gain, make our livings, our relationships, and dreams; the other profane, where we go to church and beg for forgiveness for what we have been doing in the other half of our world. Isn’t this kind of insane, to have two selves where God lives in one side but not on the other? The Kingdom that we have lost and long for has no divisions and no civil war between its divided parts, and because it is not split it has no guilt. The Kingdom of God is not divided, yet it has many parts.

One of the veils that hides the keys from us is our language, the religous language that used to be the Keys to the Kindom. The Words of God have been taken hostage by the “heaven” side of our two kingdoms and aimed like a weapon at the “earth” side. “Repent, repent,” the Heaven side yells in it’s lines of demonstrators or in just the everyday commerce of words that fly back and forth over the wall that separates us. And the other side throws the same words back. “Stay on your side of the wall, you Devil.” We are not good neighbors, what with the “saved” on one side of the wall and the “unsaved” on the other, and with both thinking they are the chosen ones. But, truthfully, each is the Chosen One, because each has chosen itself; each has chosen to divide the Kingdom of God and cut the turkey without their brother being present.

Let this be our road map out of this civil war as we try to understand the insanity in which we find ourselves caught. The eye that sees the wall dividing us from each other is a dead eye. The eye that sees the other as an enemy and in need of attack or defense is a blind eye. The eye that divides cannot find the keys to the Kingdom of wholeness because wherever it looks it can only see half the Kingdom. The darkness that hides the keys is the belief that there are two kingdoms and that God exists in only one kingdom.

Let’s get real. How can love take sides? How can the One Without a Second be on one side of the fence and not the other? If we take our stand in Unity consciousness and look within, we’ll see that the divided Kingdom is within us and not without. Here is where we begin to look…and when we enter the darkness of our own unexplored corners without the attack weapon of judgment, we will be given a light called Self Forgiveness or Atonement.

When we hold up that Light to see what it is coming from, we’ll see that it is the Key we’ve been looking for.
“Hah! It’s been hanging around our neck it the whole time!”

Posted under General Observations