Sharing

Whatever you are is what you will share.

The work to be done is on ourselves, then whatever we share has the quality of our highest selves at that time. The work is not out there, it is in here. Out there follows.

You will see, if you are sensitive, where someone is coming from. They may be very polite, charming, but you can sense their motives. Their intentions are in their energy, their aura.

They are ambitious, or greedy, or needy, or subversive and cunning. They may be saying all sorts of seemingly beneficial and helpful things, but they are really sharing where they are coming from. A clear eye can see.

What are your motives? What energy do you bring to bear with your presence? Are you at home in yourself?

You share what's there.

Available

Don't seek, make yourself available.

Whatever is ideal will come to you, be ready. Be aware, present, able to respond.

The work is on yourself. All wonders pour into you when you are available.

When you seek, you leave the moment in search of some fantasy. It may be a beautiful dream, a profound vision, but pushing towards anything pits you against the way things are.

Rather bring yourself back into harmony with what is, and look. Everything is arriving, no seeking is required.

Be available, that's all. Take care of the area beneath your feet, the space you take up, and don't interfere with anything else. Attend to your consciousness, no more, no less.

Concern yourself only with your domain and get that right. This includes becoming available. The effect is readiness, optimal occurrence, and total experience.

Your conception was not a goal you set. It happened. Your birth was not your achievement, attributable to your ego, it came to pass.

Your life does not belong to you, it is an act of grace. So stay graceful and flow with it.

Some self-styled ambition can never surpass surrender. The part can never outsmart the whole. Be the whole. Be available to all of it.

The more available you are, the more everything arrives.

Real

Being real is sexy. People love it.

It's an art, of course, and not as rough as it may sound. Being direct means being discerning as an extension of being real. It speaks to the hidden urge in others for authenticity, and it seduces them with its artfulness, too.

People long for intelligent communion. When you express yourself sincerely, you speak to them - and for them - by putting purity onto the table. This feeds the flow of self-insight and articulation.

It's a turn-on for everyone locked in a world of appropriateness. They feel the liberty of release and the thrill of openness. Tension turns to tingling.

There may be some ambivalence on the threshold, some turbulence during transition, but steadiness is assured. Nature will prevail in its wild and windy wisdom, a thunderstorm of sensuality, a paradox of perfection, at once spiritual and physical.

People are afraid and aroused, beguiled by the bridge, succumbing to their need for seduction, stepping out of their shadow ...

Dwelling on their dew point, they are drawn into the dance of transformation. They want nothing more than to surrender to spiritual precipitation.

Being real is an irresistible invitation to allow the evaporation of their sense of separation.

Alchemy is in the air.

Spring

Warm sun
Cool breeze
Bright colours
Happy sounds
Sweet scents
New music
Frisky feelings
Magnificent days
Slow motion
Few words

Wonder

The degree of wonder we experience is inversely proportional to the knowledge we have.

The more we know, the heavier we get, and the less able we are to engage life directly. What we see, then, is what we think, not what is.

Knowledge is the enemy of awareness, and a false substitute. It gives the impression of understanding and it closes the consciousness.

Real knowing is an openness and realisation that all is unknowable. This brings understanding and insight, plus the capacity to see, which just brings more wonder.

Understanding is not knowledge, it is awareness. It is a disappearance of the self, a merging into the mystery.

In innocence, we become wonderful.

Inconvenience

Pause when inconvenience appears. Two things have happened.

First, an opportunity has presented itself; and second, your preconceptions have been confronted. So pause and, in that gap, move through your reaction, then explore what awaits you.

Your reaction is based on existing understanding, a limited and outdated view, your comfort zone. You don't want that disturbed. You act unconsciously. Some issue is bothering you and you are irritated. But wait ...

When you see that you are reacting and, therein, resisting, you immediately let go of the bubble of bad vibes. Now you see the situation with new eyes. It is not what you interpreted it to be, it simply is. It has presented itself and you accept that. You trust it. There may well be something in it, too ...

So you move into the opportunity openly. You are mindful and conscious as you encounter whatever it is. This is already enlightening because you are awake. That is always primary.

Then, the circumstance unfolds optimally because you are empty, offering no obstacles. And, as it reveals itself, you experience it in alert acceptance. Nothing but more good can come from it.

The inconvenience has taught you about yourself. It has helped you release your inner obstructions to life. So it has been an awakening.

And, of course, it has turned into a path of possibility, an uninterrupted manifestation, for your pleasure.

Staying centred, you effortlessly enjoy the emerging mystery.

Uneasiness

Your problems do not exist outside you, they are within. They are all facets of one problem, one factor.

You are uneasy with yourself. This is the only problem there is.

From uneasiness, we act, and everything is an expression of the inner feeling. Our relationships with the world are uneasy encounters with projections of our uneasiness. And every encounter is an attempt to resolve the discord and settle the anxiety.

But, of course, that never comes to pass. The problem needs to be seen and solved at the root, where the uneasiness arises. There, we realise that there is no problem.

There is only uneasiness. But why? Why are we so unsettled inside ourselves? And how can we calm our inner waters?

There is uneasiness because you are at war with yourself. You feel inferior, inadequate, and you do not look into the feeling. You act it out and try to compensate.

Every action is a compensation. That's why you want to win, to be the best. You want to conquer, achieve, make money, and be famous. You want power because you feel empty. You cannot just be at home in yourself, so you are constantly at odds with the world. It's an endless struggle.

You want to change everything, control everyone, and own the world. And if you did ever attain such things, you would be more miserable than ever! You would then realise that you have gone to the ends of the earth and found that you started in the wrong place on a wasted journey in search of the wrong things. You would have to start again.

So stop right now and start again.

Start with the uneasiness and bore into it. Stop exploring option two, which is the long way round, the lost route. Get down to the root of the only real option and sit with your inner dissonance. Address uneasiness directly. What is it? What is troubling you?

You are unhappy with who you are. You don't know who that is. You cannot simply be. You cannot settle into complete acceptance with no need to do anything, go anywhere, or become anyone.

Your sense of self is synonymous with struggle and searching. That is all that's wrong. Your mind will argue that there are worldly reasons but you know that you are avoiding the issue. You cannot face yourself.

The endeavour to become somebody is really all about avoiding being nobody. And nobody is who we are. Emptiness is our essence. And this emptiness is fullness.

Everything is as it should be. If you can see and accept that, all uneasiness unravels. All endeavour evaporates. There is nothing to run from, nothing to work towards, no fear or desire, no past or future, no problem and no solution. Everything has already arrived.

You are here and nothing more is needed.

Friction

When you are at war with yourself, it generates a friction within you, which is reflected outwards in circumstantial conflict.

The inner friction and outer conflict waste your energy. And you need that energy.

You need energy to change and grow. Just to see things as they really are, you need tremendous resources. In fact, you need all of your attention in the here and now. You need to be total. That brings transformation.

Life as we have known it in human history has split us within ourselves. We have not been allowed by society to be who we are, and to grow into our potential. We have had our authenticity ignored and invalidated, and a host of ideals imposed on us.

So we have never tasted what it is to be natural. We haven't even begun to bloom. We are against ourselves, which uses up and wastes almost all of our life force.

To regain access to our energy, we need to see and accept ourselves as we are, the good, the bad, and the ugly. We need to observe the beautiful and brutal within us, with no judgement, no preconceptions, and no avoidance.

Our full attention needs to be brought into the present, and the light of this awareness needs to be shone into our being in one total act of seeing. No time delay, no thinking, no analysing. No steps or sequence. Complete clarity in an instant.

Only this way can we move from the energy-sapping ego to a state of insight. We go suddenly from split to whole. We move from being wasted to being integrated. Here, a new energy can be felt.

This fresh resourcefulness is our natural state that we have lost touch with. Reconnection results in freedom from conditioning and psychological bondage.

It aligns us with the greater intelligence, dissolving the separate self and mobilising the flow of unifying energy.

This energy, we can call love. We can call it truth. It is live-wire awareness, a state of unclouded consciousness. In it, we begin to function as we are intended to.

Internal friction is gone, so outer conflict cannot continue. Energy is no longer lost, so we are no longer empty. Cleaned out by total clarity, we are at home in ourselves. Finally, we feel full, brimming with essence.

We are no longer separate selves. Just the whole remains. And with that, intelligent living ensues.

Friction-free, we come to be.

You

You are part animal, part human. The animal is your history, the human is your potential. We are all in an internal struggle between the two, and this inner conflict is manifest all around us.

We are both base-level beasts and beauty from the beyond. Within us and around us, there is brutality and divinity.

The dissolution of this conflict lies in the individual, in you and me. We want to shed our animal heritage, because it isn't working for us and the world, plus we know what we hold within.

We know we are one with all existence. We know we are filled with love and joy. We want to get on with ourselves and one another, and share our humanity. We dream of it, long for it. We are aching with affection, bursting with light.

But we are still fighting, with ourselves and one another, openly and subversively. We are racked with rage, caged by guilt, and inhibited by instinct. So we pretend to be good while acting badly, living as hypocrites, hurting and betraying ourselves and each other in a state of masked anguish. It happens in our hearts, our homes, our businesses, and our politics.

The stakes have got so high now that we can take no more. The cracks are chasms, gaping gorges. Leaders are liars, systems are crimes, and the planet is a ball of pain. It is also a glowing orb of possibility. Each of us can relate to how it feels. You can relate.

Never before has the need been more urgent to live our potential. Never before has the inner anguish been more pressing, and the outer situation more obvious. Never before have we been turned in on ourselves with such ruthlessness. Never before have we been violated to such a degree by the powers that be.

It is time to harmonise ourselves as individuals and become whole. We are each responsible for our consciousness. The outer will continue to reflect the inner, so the world will heal with our awakening. You can feel it happening. Everything is pushing you into your core, your truth.

Scientists can discover and explain the mechanical workings of life. Poets can open the chambers of you heart and lead you in. Mystics can clear the cobwebs and show you the way to the light. But only you know.

You know.

Situations

It can feel, at times, like you are lost in the deepest darkness, making your way who knows where through the thickest fog.

The ground beneath your shaking feet is shifting. You are emotionally overwhelmed and entangled in externals that draw you away from yourself.

Just to know where to step next, you have to find yourself first. Everything depends on you knowing who you are so that you can proceed. You are searching.

You have always been searching, one way or another. Choosing to believe in a religion or a political leader is an easy way out, a pretence. It gives you a false sense of security, which means you can go off to other pursuits, to do well in the world.

But deep down, you are still searching and you know it. Believing is not going to help. Only awakening in your own right will make a real difference. You will continue to search until you do that.

Sometimes the search will seem to overcome you. It's as if every false form of security forsakes you. The subliminal quest becomes central and, intentionally or not, you become consumed by it.

That is when you are feeling your way through the fog. Then, your lifetime of effort seems to be in the balance. Everything is culminating, cresting and crumbling.

Moments move from meaningless to momentous, from destitute to divine. Slowly you make profound progress.

In the context of all this tension, situations arise that shift you. All your searching has prepared you and an insight happens. Then another.

Your being quakes into place. Some circumstance synchronises with your state, and you jolt into awakening. You see where you are and who you are in an instant. Everything has been your preparation.

The situation galvanises you. Maybe someone suitable gives you a push. You learn to fly.

You remember who you are.

Waking up

You know that feeling when you have had too little sleep and are woken by your alarm, when you just want to go back into dreamland.

The noise draws you out of unconsciousness just enough to shut the trouble off, and then you disappear again into slumber.

But you know you have to get up. There is something important to do, something essential, and you must move from sleep to sobriety. You feel the strong pull back into the warm comfort of unconsciousness, as well as the other attraction into the light of day.

Maybe for a while, with a few minutes to spare, you sleep a little longer, risking not waking up in time. And then, perhaps after repeated hits on the snooze button, you begin to choose consciousness.

The benefits of waking up become clear, and you select, in that moment, to steer yourself towards consciousness.

On the whole, we live in a deep sleep, and we are on the path of waking up. We love the comfort of unconsciousness, where we needn't be responsible and can cling to our dreams. There they mean the world to us.

We sense that there is a real world waiting out there, but we want just a little more slumber. We will fight for it. We will sacrifice our lives to stay asleep. Yet we want to wake up and live.

Most of us are on the cusp, making this choice moment by moment. We are in a darkened room still, but we know the sun is shining outside. We have seen it, tasted it. We have felt the freshness.

Just as you make that choice in bed, on the brink of a new day, so you can choose to awaken your whole being.

The sleepiness of socialisation is seductive but expensive, and less and less appealing. The lucidity of awakened being is a transformation, a new life. You can, with enough awareness, distinguish between the two.

Compromise calls like a heavy comfort blanket; consciousness calls like a clear day.

Gently yet certainly, shift into the sunshine.

Change

There is only one way you can change your life and that is through consciousness. There is no other change, everything else is more of the same.

You can move one thing from here to there, which may appear, at least at first, to look and feel different. It may bring a little more comfort or efficiency, or perhaps a perceived decrease in something negative.

You may choose a direction or set a goal, and then set about achieving it, which may make you seem happier or more driven. But that does not change you. It merely distracts you, and sets up another cycle of strife.

Change is not something you do, it happens. And it happens through awareness.

With being awake comes automatic and natural increases in intelligence. The word for it is transformation. Change means more or less of the known. Transformation is from the beyond.

With change, you remain the doer, the ego, just fooling yourself with your own tricks. With transformation, you are less and less separate, more and more integrated. You are your being beyond the self.

Transformation is awakening. What changes is your bubble of awareness, your understanding, your world view. Everything else, like your behaviour and relationships, evolve as a natural consequence.

You do not need to change them, they simply cannot remain those that they were, those of a less conscious person.

So all your attention needs simply to be centred in awakening to the now.

Love

Watch yourself as you go into love. Watch yourself.

Love blinds you, sweeps you into a sort of slumber, so stay awake. Love itself is wild and beyond control. Observe as it arises and takes you with it.

Do not tumble into it and fall, as, at some stage, you will have to get back out of it and up again. You have had this happen over and over. Watch this time. Stay a witness. Do not fall in love, let it take you up.

Do not lose respect for yourself or lose touch with your mindfulness. Your presence and impeccability are your responsibility, your hard-earned realisation of who you are. Stay with them.

Then you will not lose yourself in love but bring yourself to it. You will not get lost in love but be found. Yes, you will disappear in its depths, merging more and more with its magic and mysteries, but you will stay centred. It will add to your presence. You will really know what love is.

Watch yourself. Associated with love itself are many murky memories and unconscious catches. You have been badly bruised before and may easily flinch.

You have inherited cages from your parents and ancestors, assumptions and patterns that they lived with, struggled through, and inherited themselves. Watch.

Your insecurities will arise and you will want to blame the other. Yes, watch.

You have been born into an unconscious society where love is misunderstood and misrepresented. The marketing can mislead you. The socialised associations with love can cost you.

Stay with yourself. See the difference between the real and the rubbish.

Relish reality, release fantasy. Relieve yourself and others of the painful partition between expectation and experience. Let experience awaken you, let expectation go.

Let the gap close between what you see and what is. Let love bring you together, integrate you further, help make you whole. Let yourself and the other be. Stay mindful and meditative all the way. Watch.

Love can be the cream of your consciousness.

This Too Shall Pass

The famous saying, 'This too shall pass', is generally used to console someone or oneself during times of distress. Taken at its superficial meaning, and manipulated to suit one's needs, it means, 'Don't worry, things will get better soon'.

This can be comforting but it misses the true meaning of the saying, plus it makes little if any use of the moment.

'This too shall pass' applies to everything. Good times are just as transient as difficult ones.

If you are the type of person who clings to clichés, you probably have more negative experiences than positive, because you have not yet awoken to how life is. You are still stuck in duality where you run from one experiential pole, and hanker for the other.

You are still a victim of ego-based existence and have only had the occasional taste of transcendence. At best, you have a kind of empty pleasure, with pain always nipping at your heels.

The famous saying actually means that everything soon shall pass. Wake up to what is eternal! Don't depend on external factors as much as you do your inner connection with your being.

Get into the part of yourself that does not go up and down or swing left then right. Understand how life works and watch it with mindful awareness. Everything shall pass but awareness keeps watching.

Your whole life soon shall pass. Are you wishing it away? We need both sides of experience to make sense of being alive. Are you missing the big picture?

When you can say 'This too shall pass' during a happy moment, you are starting to grow up. When you can say it during a distressing time and not wish that time away, you are starting to find your way into the now.

Ecstasy and agony both come and go. When you use experiences of either to bring yourself into the moment, you are making the most of duality by transmuting it into eternity. You are employing the transient to access the transcendent.

'This too shall pass', like everything, should take you deeper into presence.

Head and Heart

Are you talking yourself into what you really want, or out of it?

Do you know what you really want? Perhaps, at least, you are being nudged towards it.

Is circumstance seeming to push you out of one way of living or into another? Do you carry an unlived life around within you?

Are you full of frustration, even grief and rage at the choices you are making? Or are you just numb?

Do you know what you really want? Have you even considered what that is outside of all you have been raised to do and pretend to be?

Are you living a connected or a conditioned life?

What you really want is simple and associated with what your heart tells you. Can you access what that is?

Can you detect the difference between your head and your heart?

Your head is full of what everyone else thinks and says. It has a notion of right and wrong, plausible and impossible, desirable and unacceptable. It is probably in control.

Even when you access your heart, your head is difficult to overcome. It can talk you out of almost anything. It analyses and paralyses. As a tool, it is useful, when you know what you want. For that, though, you need your heart.

Your heart is closer to who you are. It cannot lie or confuse. It knows the way and doesn't bother about details, because those work themselves out. You can use your head for them, once you have found direction. Until you have done that, your head is a problem.

Your head is your inner dialogue. Your heart is your guide. What you really want is seeded inside you and entirely plausible. You may be using your thinking to materialise or suppress it. Your thinking may be using you.

When your head serves your heart, you shift into gear.

Rejuvenation

The single source of real rejuvenation is nothingness.

Just a small taste of that during sleep each night refreshes our consciousness. Without it, the world is a dark place. With regular contact, the world becomes beautiful.

We understand ourselves as a conglomerate of complexities: personality, memory, aspiration, mind and body. These are all tensions, struggles, things, that occupy our energies all day.

Every night, we return to source, or should do, to rediscover ourselves in our essence.

At first, before falling asleep, we need to stop doing and let being take over. Then sleep comes of its own accord. You cannot make yourself sleep, it is a state of passivity. You allow it and it swallows you. You stop and it starts.

Then, as it takes over, you disappear further and deeper into it. Each layer you descend through leaves less of you. The mind, still active in dreams, eventually drops, too, until all of what constitutes you is absent. No more personality, thinking or tension. Just nothingness, a reconnection with source.

In a full night's sleep, this happens only for a short time, and, with our modern lifestyles, not nearly as much as we need it to. When we don't it get enough, we feel as if we haven't even slept. We may wake up more tired than when we laid down.

When we do commune sufficiently with absolute stillness, we wake up feeling vital. We live quality lives. Time out of ourselves brings us back with essential energy.

The other way to integrate with nothingness is through meditation. This does not imply any particular practice, posture or penance, just presence. It can come through sitting or lying still, being in nature, exercising, being creative, or doing your work mindfully.

Anything that silences the mind, takes you inwards, and brings a feeling of time standing still is meditative.

The difference between meditation and sleep is that in meditation you are conscious. In deep sleep, you are not there but you are not aware of it. In meditation, all the layers have fallen away, and you have disappeared, but awareness remains, crystal clear, unclouded.

Meditation rejuvenates too, and, combined with sound sleep, reveals what life really is. In time, the tensions lose their grip and blissfulness surrounds you as you go about your business.

Connecting with nothingness brings happy resourcefulness.

Arguing

Who argues?

Unhappy people with a bee in their bonnet. Arrogant people who want to prove their importance. Ignorant people who don't know better. Partners in a power struggle.

When you are aware and awake, you are not going to argue.

What is there to argue about? If you know something, you will listen or share but not defend or impose. If you don't know, you will discover.

You will not be attached to your position, because knowing needs no attachment, and not knowing needs openness. The other may help but cannot hinder.

Who is there to argue with? Someone who knows when you don't will supply you with insight. Someone who does not know will either be receptive to your sharing or insistent on their ignorance.

Someone who thinks they know when they don't will be a pointless pursuit. And someone who knows as well as you do will commune with you in silence or stillness, a joyful resonance.

Some people define themselves by arguing: drama-addicted lovers, power-hungry parents, philosophers, politicians. Children.

They strengthen their egos in the name of love or intelligent debate. Or childishness. They use beautiful words to conceal their ugliness. Or simply don't know better.

You may feel somehow left out of their self-important endeavours, and drawn to get involved. But there is no need to be insecure or to argue.

What is to be gained by arguing? Tension, sharpened cunningness, and false victories. Ruined relationships and reputation.

Argument-free is the way to be.