Take Everything to Heart

"One Tibetan monk... who had spent more than 18 years in a Chinese prison labor camp... told me that on a few occasions he really faced some danger. So I asked him, 'What danger? What kind of danger?', thinking he would tell me of Chinese torture and prison. He replied, 'Many times I was in danger of losing compassion for the Chinese.'" --The Dalai Lama

There are multiple ways of seeing. Seeing with our eyes helps navigate through our everyday world. We also check out our thoughts to see what we think, and often give our thoughts more validity than anything else. Blind people see with their fingers and ears; red feels different than green. To see clearly and deeply both within and without, see with your heart. Without a completely open heart though your seeing will be like looking through half-closed eyes. If you close your heart even a little bit, your view will be distorted where you shut it down. The more you close it, the more distorted your view. In an attempt to manage heart pain, some people close so much of their heart they become one of the walking dead. 

"Heart Portal"  12" x 12"   Acrylic

It is only through kindness, softness, openness and honesty that we can go all the way into core heart reality. A wide-open, tender heart that has no need to protect or control what comes in will naturally surrender to what is most profoundly real within. It is only such a heart as this that will give the profound within free-reign to all aspects and levels of you, enabling you to become what it is.  

Opening your heart, unzipping it, in this manner may run counter to what you have told your self would ever be a prudent thing to do.  Others have probably advised you against this kind of vulnerability as well. If you look though you will notice that the second you go tight in your heart, even a little bit, everything you love within you instantly stops. You will no longer be able to see clearly within what you most love. It will remain illusive, out of your grasp and safe from what you cannot at that moment be trusted with. This is why you must match what you are being to what it is being, and why it will never match what you are being because it can't. If it ever compromised itself even once to match you, then the fabric of all existence would no longer be real, and that will never happen. It is not within its capacity to compromise, and that is one of the things we love about it. It is inherently trustworthy and we love that. Our actual desire is to match it.  The way to matching it is through kindness, softness, openness and honesty and then it is all there again, right where you left off.

I recently become re-acquainted with someone I knew 30 years ago. For 35 years this person has been helping people transform the quality of their lives. She is considered a master in this field. What I saw while watching her work is that in some ways she is fundamentally missing the boat herself, and hence, so are the people she works with. While it is possible to be successful at this line of work one can still be unkind to oneself and tight inside. So while a certain level of transformation may occur within herself, and for others, other areas cannot be addressed because of her internal imbalance, and, therefore, whatever transformation occurs is incomplete. This is why I say what you are being is most important and that every aspect of you has to move forward in balance.  

What you are being determines the quality of everything that you bring into form.  The form, quality, direction of what you do is always determined by the qualities of what you are being.  You are responsible for all that you are and your potential as a human being.  This simply means that you are in your care.  Take especially good care of your heart.

"Openness and softness of heart is the door to everything true within.  It is your most basic first beingness.  It requires no prior experience; it isn't dependent on who you are.  Your unconditionally being openness and softness of heart will change everything of who you are."  John De Ruiter

May we all shimmer light especially in the face of darkness.

God bless your heart in peace and love...

Coming Out of the Absolute, Part 2

To define meaning as used in these two posts:  We are in relationship to all we are aware of through the meaning of what we know.  Some meaning is inherent and some is assigned.  We are able to relate to the meaning of so many things because we first are meaning, even before being an individual.

To be here on this planet, you shifted your fundamental orientation, home base, to that of a self having a person and a life, and inwardly a being that knows.  In order to become this as awareness required a split within you.  

Here is what it looks like.  As awareness, you continue breathing as you have always done. The breathing goes from your self as your home base into your person and your life and then back out into the self.  It stops there.  You don't have to think about this; it just occurs.  There is another breathing as awareness, which is also from your home base as a self.  It goes out toward being meaning, and then back into your self.  In both, the breathing is generated from the self, one moving outwards and the other moving inwards.  This is the split within.

Even though your home base is as a self, you can relate to being meaning because it is what you once were.  As a self, you can partially relate to being meaning going all the way back to coming from the Absolute, but it is tethered to the self.  What you experience as being meaning in the tiniest subtle ways, while connecting to the Absolute, benefits the self and the orientation that you have become.  It all belongs to your home base, the self. We are almost unable to even consider another home base.  

While there isn't anything wrong with all this, you actually are able within your awareness to completely shift your home base.  You are able to be what you once were, while being here, in form, as a person.  You have the ability to be the Absolute that breathes, instead of you that breathes.  You have the ability to take up where you left off, to continue, breathing as the Absolute in form.  You have the ability to be what It is in form.  

This is why I have been saying in all these posts to give everything of you to what you first are, not for you, but for what It is.  None of this is for you to have to keep for your self.  Everyone of us can do this.  It isn't hard.  It isn't far away, or even close.  It is inseparable from what you are.  You cannot get rid of it; it is what you are at the core, in your heart.  It is as natural as your breathing.  

In your development there is much more that is possible.  We can't even imagine what lies in store for us, you might re-read the post "An Experience that Changed Me Forever."  That is only one possibility as a future self.  The more you let go and shift your orientation as a self, the more that can open for you as the Absolute that breathes.

As you give all that you are to being the Absolute that breathes, as you become grounded in that, giving it all power within then the split within your heart heals.  Then what is next becomes possible.  The work you have done enables you to just barely sense more than being a self.  

What is next is being a being, which is completely other than anything to do with your experience of being a self.  We know what being is, but not being a being.  We cannot try to be this or even move toward it. It is like trying to hold onto something you do not yet know.  In your awareness you might know there is something there that is other than, and you might faintly resonate with it, yet you do not know what it is. 

To be able to know the beginning of what this is requires someone who can be an example of what this is in form, someone who lives from this and no longer lives from their self, although they have a self.  There are very few examples here on this planet.  My teacher is one such individual.

The first step however, is to build a solid living, breathing, internal foundation based on openness, kindness, softness and honesty--all heart.  From there be the Absolute that breathes; you being meaning.

Lastly, a question:  If you give yourself over to living a superficial life of comfort, a life just for you, would you be willing to die without ever really knowing what your life is for just so you could preserve your comfort?  You heart knows the answer.

Peace and love...

Coming Out of the Absolute, Part 1

I offer the following for how we came into form, out of the Absolute.  This is pretty dense stuff, so hang onto the guardrails, and just let it resonate.  See what is true for you.  I bring this up now as we are running out of time to leisurely consider our own development. Extraordinary changes are about to occur, and we will need every available resource both within and without.  

What we are now as a person is based on what we have realized and chosen while moving out from the Absolute until fully landing here as a person.  We are no longer moving outward so much into more form, rather our focus is to now move inward, going back, realizing what we are and have originated from.  We are coming full-circle, being everything that we truly are while living here as a person in this world.  

"Losing Forms"  12 x 16   acrylic, watercolor, acrylic ink on canvas board

Our movement inward is like realizing a vast internal ocean, a vast holy ocean appearing as streams of beingness. In our movement back to the Absolute we lose internal forms.  We find that we are both here in form and losing our old identification with it. These inner forms might be called inner coverings over what we first are.  As we let go, we begin to identify with what is more than us.  This enables us to see more of ourselves, and each uncovering allows us to see a new level of meaning.  As we go back in our awareness, we see that we more than let go, we actively respond to what is next.

*  *  *  *  *  

In first coming out of the Absolute, Source, you did so as a response to an available form, taking you as meaning into its first form--the very beginning of I.  Your very first movement, first breath and expression out of the Absolute was meaning knowing meaning. There was no ability to reflect on anything because there was no self yet. At this stage you could only be meaning knowing.

What follows is a movement out and then a movement back, much like breathing.  Each movement back is less than the movement out. First, as meaning you breathed in form and became what you breathed in.  You first movement breathing in was meaning knowing.  You next movement was to breathe out, all the way back to being meaning that has no need to know. There is now a pattern that has begun and your response is to breathe in the next level of form. This form is being knowing. Beingness has been added as a form. You could now be knowing, a new form. After this inhale of form, you exhale back to being meaning, but this time you move from being knowing into just knowing, and then into being meaning. You had to move through a level of form into another level of form, into meaning.

From here, you breathe in and out through more and more forms because of the pattern that has begun and because there are always more forms.  You move into a self and then into a person. Each time you exhale, return, you are more aware of your ability to move.  You realize there is a power to move, to choose to move almost all the way back to the Absolute. You also realize that as awareness you might be able to have more, and you also realize you can direct the more. You now have an ability to relate to creating more as a self, instead of the next true more. You can now use your awareness to alter, even distort, the rhythm.  

In our power to distort, we change our awareness, our home base that we come from.  It shifts from being meaning, to knowing, and later being and even later self.  The breathing in and out always continues.

What matters here is that as awareness how far back do you breathe out, and then as awareness how far do you breathe into form. You home base changes because you have the power to make that happen, and that shifts your fundamental orientation until what you create is a self. You become a self that has a person and a life.  At the same time, you are also a self that inwardly has a being, and knowing.  There is more than that, but it is almost unconfrontable.

Be the vast holy ocean of awareness within you. Go home. Be home, give it all that you are at every level.  What you know of reality will be so much more. I am That I am.  I am This I am.

"Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances."  -- Mahatma Gandhi

"You always get what you are willing to settle for."  --Werner Erhard

Some of the above comes from notes of a conversation with John De Ruiter.

Peace and love...

Thresholds Within

As we begin to awaken, we have a sense of, and a pull within to other realities.  We all have thresholds in the self that keep us safe from wondering beyond what we can be responsible for in the present. The wonderings I refer to are about other realities that exceed our current ability to relate to such complexity and awareness. Thresholds keep us grounded here, and also require that we integrate the self so we do not move too quickly.  

Integrating thresholds enables us to realize at a deeper level within how to move, how to be, and use what we already know.  A pure heart allows us to relate to our self and to this world in a way that is true.  

"Thresholds"   11 x 14 in.   watercolor & white acrylic on paper

"Without integrating what you can see, how can you possibly integrate realities that belong to you that you can't see?" - John De Ruiter 

The voices within us are a reflection of our different levels of self.  They have a complexity and tend to pull us about until we begin to relate to the voices as simplicity while in the midst of everything that comes at us in life.  We then begin to notice there is a difference between us and all these different levels of the self.  The thresholds in all these levels of the self make integration necessary.  It helps us to learn simplicity within complexity.  

What then arises is an awareness that you are much more than you thought.  You develop the ability to move beyond a simplistic approach.  Heart understanding is of greatest value here.  Your heart gives you a capacity to hold everything together with no limitation.  Heart understanding allows you to move within your awareness as living knowledge, direct knowledge.  This heart understanding prepares you for being more than just moving within the various levels of the self.  Heart understanding enables you to realize that you are more than just a self, that beyond the self there is what you are as a being.  It is a very very subtle touch of beingness within the self.

This awakening to what you are as a being beyond a self gives you the ability to know deeper complexity within from a vantage point of simplicity.  The complexity isn't about levels of self, but something more subtle.  It is about a beingness that moves through you, affecting all levels of the self.  It can affect all levels of the self because it precedes what the self is.  It is a container for the self.  As you recognize and realize this, you won't just be a self any longer.  You will have the ability to discern different levels of beingness, and not just moving in them but grounded in them as living knowledge.  You will be more than a self. As you become more than a self you will discern and integrate these new subtle levels of complexity of what you are. 

It is then that you will begin to resonate with and relate to other realities, which are not known solely as a self. You will not just resonate with living knowledge, you will be grounded in it, deeply rooted in it. It will have you incorporating the much more of what you are.  You will have new seeing within real heart understanding and that makes you ready for more, what you truly are as a being.

In what you are as a being, stay close to, resonate within to other realities and you will begin to realize these realities as what you are.  It is realness appearing as a result of awareness moving into knowing.  

"Awareness gives knowing certainty." -John De Ruiter

Please note:  If you are not clear in your self then your learning will be fairly basic.  The finer your awareness becomes, deviation from your clarity will not be tolerated in reality almost at all.  As you operate in such clear awareness and knowing, there is less tolerance for not getting it right.  At these levels the stakes are much higher.  You can get away with nothing. On these levels the smallest shift will bring great change in your self.  There is less and less room for deviating, even by mistake from your awareness being and moving as knowing.  Your foundation becomes alive, moving as living and real knowledge.  This will give you the ability to understand what you are as a being and how to move within, and through life as all that is profoundly real.

If you know someone who is being this, stay close to them.  

Pitfall:  Do not allow yourself to be enticed by anything, a way of being, or a want as that is moving into limitation.  Do not  attach to any particular feeling or experience as that will instantly remove you from being it. When you get caught by this, you are in an old pattern.  Stop everything and gently go back to giving everything you are to being it, because of what it is and not for any other reason. 

I've stepped into every pitfall there is of course, so I know the pain of it.  When that occurred I felt so empty, even desperate, because I knew better. Finally, I stopped thinking there was something for me to get from life. I just let go, and let go more, one thing at a time, and then I just let go completely. At first, it was a scary place to be; there was nothing to hold onto that used to be there. What I found is, and always will be, is what I know and a most wonderful I.  

Then, from what I know, I discovered the ability to be streams of being.  This means the ability to move without using the self.  Being able to move in levels within that are deeper than the self.  

As you become this, you will be living knowledge, which is generated from both within and without you.  The deeper you go into the self, as you are being a being, the rules change.  

Stay close to your heart, move close to all this by being heart-forward.  Lead with your heart.  The heart is pure and real.  

You will find the eternal continuity of all things, in form and non-form.  Once you know, you can never again say you do not know. Give it everything of you, let it become you. Turn into what it is.

"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes."   -Marcel Proust

Parts of this post are based on notes from a conversation with John De Ruiter, my teacher. 

Peace and love...

Loving Balance Within, Part 2

A reminder:  do not believe what I say is true unless you know for yourself it is true.  Ask yourself, "Where am I looking from to know it is true, or not true?" 

When the self creates the perception of separation from God, Source, and believes it, what remains is the individual, which then has to become more important than anything else.  Oneness and deep grounding in truth evaporate to be replaced by a desperate need to survive, and self-interest, self-importance or even self-absorption.  Some people find it very difficult to find their way out of this, to let go, to stop strangling their life with their ego.

"Creative Power Within"  22 x 28 acrylic on black paper

Even if one small part of you is not included in the whole of you because of self-interest or picking and choosing then what you came here for is suffocated.  As more of your life is led by self-interest, and personal survival of the ego then you will not see what you came here for.  To realize what you came here for you can't make your life about what you want.  It can't be made into something that is not real and pretend differently.  If you know you are missing something within then you know what is actually real, but it will never be what you want. It will only be what it is.  

You also cannot use truth to try to make what is real within into something you want, nor can you use it to make something real that is not real.  This way of being has no balance to move anywhere within; it can only lead to more imbalance.  From this place whatever little bit you are actually able to see of truth you will not be able to use because it will be distorted and you will know that. Justifying your actions will seal the blindness.

Balance is found by first seeing where you have created imbalance within.  Do not gravitate toward or move away from any part.  Just notice gently what is there.  Shift into seeing the whole from your highest awareness then you will be able to hold the whole.  When you find you are moving toward or away from aspects of you, gently stop and be the whole of you. Exist for the very highest in you and you will be able to hold the whole.  Love being the whole of you, there is no effort in any of this.  If you begin to identify with a particular part of you, whether positive or negative, simply go back to loving being the whole of you.  Being the whole is easy because it is what you actually love.  If you experience effort or frustration then you are looking from a part of you to see what is true, simply let go and go back to being the whole.  If you justify the effort in anyway then you are blind again.

Remain on the highest and finest level.  While being that, see the ways in which you are not being the highest and finest levels within.  Be gentle with you, see everything you are being without protecting anything. You can only become, tun into what you most love, by being gentle and honest with you.

Watch where you try to get way with something, cut corners, within.  In gentleness within come back to being the whole of you.  If you are not gentle with your self then you can still see and know what is true within, but it will be on a coarse level.  You can't turn into what you first are, God, without gentleness within.

It is easy to be gentle within while in stillness.  Practice being gentle within through all parts of you as you move through your day.  This cannot be done unless you are balanced inside.  As you become more balanced, your seeing with be finer and the love of that fineness will show as a love of balance, all moving into form.

You will discover many loves within.  You will find a deep love of what is real, of moving forward, of being still, of being clean inside.  Love of balance enables everything to work well.  The more loves you have the deeper your joy.  The deepest joy and sense of freedom is that everything is one, not just as an intellectual thought, but as your everyday reality.

Your calling cannot manifest, nor does it matter, until you are whole.  Don't worry about trying to get it right, just be balanced within and you will be on the right track.  The power of the whole is the same as being at one.  Realize that in every part of you and be it on the highest level you know.  

"You can't know God without turning into God and there is no status in Godhood."  -John De Ruiter

"The cost of not being whole and balanced is that it costs the whole of the universe when you are not whole."  -John De  Ruiter

There is no actual veil between form and non-form, except what you have put there for your own comfort.  When you are completely trustworthy as a being and with your entire life, when you are entirely whole then the other side opens.  Beforehand, we get glimpses and we know there is more to this life than what we can presently see.  There is so much more than just this life.  

Be the other side, on this side.  Be non-form while in form.  This does not mean go to the other side for a nice visit.  It isn't about going back and forth, or in and out.  It is about being it always.   It is also not about letting it wash over you.  It is about letting it wash into you, and not like a flash flood that inundates and then is gone.  Let the other side wash into you like a deep clear pool, healing.  

What you love and what you know is true are not always the same thing.

Peace and love....