Shifts

It's amazing how shifts can happen, just like that!

Energies can build and block, and then turn and find direction in an instant.

Emotions can immobilise you as they mount internally and struggle with each other, and a single incident of the seemingly slightest magnitude can suddenly move mountains.

That's how enlightenment happens. It is simply the biggest shift.

Everything is a preparation for it: your comfort with solitude and silence; the awakening of your consciousness; the finding of your true self and the standing for it in the societal storm.

As such, it is not an achievement, but something evolutionary that wants to happen and suddenly happens when you are ready. Your living is your preparation, a getting out of the way. Then the shift comes.

Other shifts happen all the time. You can be overcome by concern that has reached fever pitch, and then be relieved by a phone call, a message, a song in the background or a sign of some sort.

All the built-up energy suddenly floods towards something, and you see that the intensification and agony were all part of the process.

Shifts often happen at the least expected times in the quietest ways. They are seldom about big outbursts of emotion, although these may follow.

At the point of change, the power is too profound, too true for you to speak about it. Something has opened up and you deal with it lucidly.

The clarity is part of the shift, part of the energy moving instantly, part of things opening up. A gap is suddenly there, you are suddenly aware and ready, and you act without hesitation.

Emotion comes later, when you share the experience or release the catharsis, when you have the space and the need to process what has transpired.

Shifts are total when they happen.

Meditation

Have you ever tried sinking into yourself?

That's what meditation is. It's that simple yet it is infinitely deep. It is an ongoing sinking.

You can never get enough, you can never reach the end, and you can never lose what you have found. You can never undo what you have achieved, you can only proceed from it.

No matter what you are doing out in the world, when you return to yourself, the journey continues.

Sinking happens in silence, which is where I am writing this. Silence and sinking go together. They cause and feed each other.

If you are silent, you will sink into yourself, and if you sink into yourself, you will be silent.

It is raining gently outside in the early hours of the morning, which is softly sending me deeper into myself, deeper into silence. I have been sinking all day and night, since realising that I needed to do so, and I am sinking further.

I went through layers of emotion and now I am serene. Everything has perspective. I have found myself. I have picked up where I left off.

Sinking soothes. It takes you into the darkness where everything is light. Everything is weightless. You are relieved of all burdens and released from all tensions.

In the wall-less womb of nothingness, you float freely. Only consciousness prevails, the true you. Nothing can touch you, yet you are as sensitive as a strand of silk.

You are suspended yet absolutely alive. There is no noise yet a silent hum, no death yet an ongoing freedom from form.

You sink beyond happiness into peacefulness, through sadness into silence. You are solitary yet communal, disintegrated yet solid.

Duality is in the distance, the arc of a sunrise on a planet seen with perspective. You are outer space, floating in your inner space.

You keep sinking deeper in, deeper down. You keep lifting higher up. You are nothing and everything. Deeper and higher you go. More and less you are. Softly, strongly. Home.

Sinking inspires. It takes you to source where life force floods you. You almost want to act but sinking further is more seductive, more sincere.

Sinking simply brings better results, although it is not results-driven. It is the opposite of ambition, the converse of achievement, the antidote to action. Yet it accomplishes more.

You fill with profound, ordered and patient inspiration, and you trust its process and pace of coming to pass in the world. Within yourself, in silence, doing nothing, you are your most creative.

Sinking solves. Problems evaporate as you plummet down the shaft of your inner goldmine.

Sinking enlightens.

Lids

Life really is way beyond what we know it to be.

We are kept in little containers of our minds by lids of our fears. Society, too, has us in cells.

Our passions and longings are like the sky and our actions are those of earth-bound prisoners. The pain of tension is actually the process of birth, yet we miss the blooming and choose the darkness.

Everything wants to be born and to flower. You want to send your scent into the breeze and disappear blissfully into the infinite. You want to be who you are.

There is a lid on that when there needn't be. Open up.

To lift your lids, you need to be brave. You need to take and manage risks. You need to live. You need to see past political correctness, step out from behind facades, and anchor yourself in authenticity.

You need to know what works for you and live by it, regardless of society. You need to keep finding what works for you by risking what you feel within in a wayward world without.

Observe your tensions, they are wanting to resolve, to explode into ecstasy.

Most people are lost in their tensions. They perceive them as problems and then turn to their conditionings as a way out. Their mind-messages, of course, tell them to toe the line, but that line is a mirage on the horizon they will never reach.

Where they are suffers severe shortages because they are not there, they are living in an illusion given by others They are lost in fear.

When you feel your tensions and watch them rather than identify with them, your consciousness shifts and those tensions instantaneously unravel like roses in the summer sun. Be conscious and allow yourself to flourish.

Do not fear society. Do not fear disapproval by the disapproving, that is their energy not yours.

Do not judge yourself using the template of the trapped. Do not deny your inner urges, they are instinctive and inherently intelligent.

Do not allow pain to prevent you from proceeding, stay conscious as it turns to profound pleasure.

In the absence of true knowing, people cling to their illusions, their agonies, their dramas and miseries. That keeps their lids lodged firmly in place.

They go round and round in a resentful romance with their traps, rather than lifting the lids, loosening their wings, and leaving their cocoons.

You need to be a rebel for freedom, a lover of life. You can't play it safe, you must move in the realms of risk. The most marvellous manifestations are brewing within you.

Are you in love with your lids or with being alive?

Construction

My days at the moment are wall-to-wall construction work. I'm not building per se but I am surrounded by builders.

I am speaking ten times more than usual, despite being a professional speaker, and I am doing so over electric drills, angle grinders, and hammers.

I am competing for a voice with loud labourers, fighting to be heard above foremen. My phone rings all day, often when I am busy with dusty decisions about finishes, cupboards, placements and payments.

This home renovation is a full-time, hardcore, hands-on business.

Yet it is a spiritual experience. The worldly is no less spiritual than the other worldly. They are one, two sides of the same mystery.

Each takes you into yourself, one indirectly and the other more obviously. It's easy to be meditative in the mountains, can you do it with a jackhammer down the hall?

Can you access the eternal, and love humanity, when twelve apostles of bricks and mortar are rearranging your sanctuary? That is the test!

I have often felt like I am failing it, or at least spending round after endless round against the ropes. But if you aren't being boxed, you might just be in a comfort zone.

Love is a verb, awakening is a hard, cold noun.

Today I did and did and did, and while I was driving back from a supplier, I had this burst of elated ecstasy that felt like a shard of sunshine from behind a rich rain cloud.

Of course, it disappeared again but I kept driving.

Synchronistically, the glazier asked me about what I do and then said that meeting me made amazing sense. He wanted to go to the Himalayas and I said that the construction site was as enlightening. Life is not an 'either/or', it is an 'and'.

You are the ultimate 'and'.

Turmoil

Are you in turmoil? If so, you are not the only one. If not, you probably are the only one.

Unless you are unidentified with it. Then you are awake and the turmoil is transformation.

There is so much change now that it is absurd to call it that. The assumptions required for change to apply no longer exist. What is simply is. There is no conceptual reference point. All we have is now.

All we have is experience, the existential. No mind is anything but a hindrance, a clinging, clanging curse. No-mind is anything but a hindrance, it is the opening, the way.

Presence is the antidote to turmoil. It is the ultimate outcome of it.

When you have nowhere left to turn, you finally find the moment. When you are in the moment, you have nowhere left to turn. You have arrived. You are found.

When you are present, turbulence is trustworthy. How else do you grow? How else does transformation transpire?

When you are present, turbulence is tactile and you are transcendent. The tangible doesn’t touch you, it teaches.

You want all these things. You have dreamed these dreams, and you have chosen for them to form. Now they are coming. And you, what are you doing?

Are you fighting your own evolution? Are you resisting and asking your actualisation to agonise?

Or are you watching? Are you aware, unidentified with the idiom, liberated from the language of materialisation?

Are you letting life be while you soar into crystal consciousness? Are you watching?

Presence is watching. Presence is accepting. Presence is love. Presence is rising gracefully on the warm lift of turbulence.

Presence is patience. Presence is the sky. Turmoil is transient, presence is permanent. The now is forever.

You are eternal.