nobody seeing

~ Hugh ~ Leave a comment

the problem with concepts is that, if misdirected, they can seemingly justify the belief in a limited knower. who is the “I” who knows anything? consciousness – not a mind. but the mind, subtly, seems to be able to appropriate the understanding to a belief in being an awakened, limited being.

perhaps the true place of concept and thoughts (beyond practicality) is to point to the truth. but once that’s done – once the belief in separation has been un-checked – there’s not really any need for spiritual concept.

we can ‘ride’ a concept to the experience of Being – in a moment of availability, the old belief system drops, and there is a glimpse beyond the mind – a glimpse of consciousness. but when the body points to awareness – points in its transparency towards the infinite – we experience ourselves again without the use of concept – and the sensation is felt as the emotion of the moment.

to feel the surrounding objects as an extension is to release the body from habitual contraction – but sensation continues. the body points towards consciousness – is a vehicle to that experience – but still, sensation continues. in the present sensation there is a whole world beyond concept.

how do you describe a sensation? failure is inevitable, although you can be poetic and try – fail more or less beautifully.

naturally, the body seems to become the guide through life – although ultimately the guide is consciousness, is life itself – the body in its wisdom seems to function organically, no need to superimpose an agenda.

it is seen in the sensation that I am the nobody my mind cannot see.

this still deepening moment

~ Hugh ~ Leave a comment

the deepening of experience, the deepening of intensity, the growth of a life and of living: this all arises within formless consciousness like a wave cresting, rolling, foaming on the surface of an endless ocean, its natural home. at depth, nothing changes; but as this changeless-nothing is refracted through the lens of mind – in other words, on the level of what we call manifestation – everything changes.

reality is non-phenomenal in nature; everything is empty of any substance apart from pure consciousness. the dynamic motion of consciousness, however, creates this cascade of phenomena, Life. Life is really sensation, an expanse of consciousness creating for itself a body, and it’s through the vehicle of the body that we reconnect to the felt expansion, blossoming non-duality on a sensory level.

the body is extremely intelligent. it knows intuitively through a wisdom not accessible to the mind. when freed from the cage of limiting belief, the body is free again both to feel its natural expansion and to continue, unhindered, in an open exploration of felt experience that deepens and opens ever onward. thoughts are mostly superfluous, they come and go like the wind, what matters more is the sensory engagement with the moment, and what matters most is Being.

one conductor

~ Hugh ~ Leave a comment

this little vessel made of sand and stone – this shape that reforms itself anew at each moment – is but a moving pictogram, struck, as they all are, by the light of the origin. cascading waves of desert grain create, in the blink of the eye, a remnant of perception; a bare shift of energy within the creator’s reality. what remains after the glimpse of eternal being is that same sandstone: ever refining, ever deepening, ever opening – a dance of mind and body coagulating into the varying forms of Life’s celebration.

the wry musculature of this formed body asks for release…and simultaneously yearns to be rebuilt, a construction project built on the grounds of peace. It is a failing attempt to contain the multitudes of feeling within – failing because any container will soon overflow where Love is concerned. 

In this little corner of the infinite, I – although which I, I don’t know – learn somehow to play this instrument with a little more precision and a little more grace, to tune in to the harmonic symphony of the absolute where we all all played by the same Conductor. The conductor is fully in charge, and in fact he too is the only one musician with a million faces and a million bows. We could say he works through our bodies and minds as we learn to live in greater harmony with what is here, and all we can do is to truly disappear – to become transparent to him – to rest as our self and allow his work to be done.

Past Those Palace Walls

~ Hugh ~ Leave a comment

even in those times when we have no choice
but to offer our humble lot to the Above,
when we are undone by life’s firm grasp in
that way she shakes us free from what we are not –
could it be that this too is perfect?

there and wins and then there are losses
our lives tend to flow between the two
but some become so distracted by winning
never seeing in fact, past those palace walls,
that true Freedom only comes from loss –

the loss of everything you took to be you.

this is not a somber loss, it’s only the mind that thinks it must be so –
firmly attached as it is to the belief to be separate from the hand that holds:
it is a loss and yet the deepest gain – a gain of nothing, really, but what a nothingness,
the nothingness of divine peace and an opening to Love within.

it comes when we put down the heavy load we’ve been carrying
when we finally surrender our love to nothing but the truth –
all these judgments and resentments and projections and frustrations
must be thrown into the sacrificial fire and burnt to ash
we’ve only held onto them because we are afraid to stop complaining!

life does not punish but rather she is forced to give us tough love
she’s not sentimental – why would she care about those precious feelings –
she wants us to release ourselves into and as the wide open and nothing less,
to stop pretending to do everything ourselves in the face of all she does for us…

so, let’s not worship at the foot of Frustration,
pretending like we are justified in a revolt against Life –
it is simply arrogance to believe that life has wronged us,
when she gives us every opportunity to drop the pretence and Be.

at some point we must recognize that our prayers are answered
at any moment we stop fighting, and let Life pierce our heart open to love;
it’s not about having a bowed head, it’s about saying ‘Yes!’
and getting out of Her way for once.

we have to recognize that suffering comes when we fight against the universe
it is the reminder that we have shelled ourselves away from Her.
peace and love is our nature, begging for us to let them in –
and if you fight the universe – who do you think will win?

image source: Catf

Eternity’s Hourglass

~ Hugh ~ Leave a comment

without even the gold-painted husk that once I held as mine own,
realms of rapture become felt now as recalcitrant glimpses,
waves upon a distant shore lost to the horizon,
somewhere barely reached by time,
that false prophet
of mind.
what
emerged in its
retainer, after the slow merging
of sensory murals splayed with seductive colours
and expansive promises, was a return to conscious transparency,
as it was before I was born, transforming this life into its detachment.
there remains an equanimous stillness wherein the seeming continues to grow,
germane to freedom and to the musings of peace, but openly restful within,
without worry nor even care to stop and reconsider
the mind’s former stratagems of self-sabotage;
the wonder without has met the
knowing within.
and so,
consciousness,
the self-recognizing presence,
naturally works its way out of the planted shell
of inquiry and eventually cascades itself outwards to reform
the entirety of the self-experience, until there remains nought to pursue,
other than what, in this very moment, could best reflect the beauty of timelessness.

Some Thoughts on the Collective Unconscious

~ Hugh ~ Leave a comment

the waking state mind is like a narrow film of seemingly concentrated objectivity, i.e. through these human minds we typically only have a thin view of the goings on here, our attention firmly attracted to the seeming density of objects. however, this objective denseness is only an assumption – through the investigation of the substance of what is here, this denseness dissolves into subtler and subtler fields, the mind becoming more and more transparent to the reality from which objects arise. in other words, through relaxation into the ‘space’ of consciousness all aspects of our perceiving, the seeming density of perceivable mentations becomes looser and less fixed, and even the waking state can become invisibly permeable to deeper realms of Mind-at-Large. these deeper realms are shared perhaps by a collective space acting behind the scenes, a realm wherein objects are only half-formed and have not yet broken through the veil of the viewable transcript of what is known in waking. creative inspiration and deep, vivid dreams are two examples of the arisings of information from a deeper realm of mind.

it is sometimes called the collective unconscious, not because it’s ultimately unconscious, but because we typically don’t have access to it in the waking state – it’s more like the ‘collectively unattended’. it is possible that our actions and thoughts and perhaps all our endeavours are informed by deeper realms of Mind to which we have no perceivable access, but when distinct material arises from this deeper well-spring it comes with the stamp of primordial, perhaps archetypal creativity. so it’s not that you can ‘see’ the collective unconscious, as per the limits of the waking state, but that what streams into this waking state can be ideas not bound to the rigid patterning of our typical mentations. the human mind has its limits of attention – but the objects arising within this attention can be informed by deeper realms as we relax into presence and openness.