Dear Persphone,
Just recently I wrote an article entitled ” The questions that are never answered ” Persephone intimated that it may be provocative in it’s content; Which I believe to be true. So I would like to take this opportunity to go one step further.

In my life I have trodden many paths that others had trod before me. The searching, the seeking and the therapy; very often reaching fanatical status. During a seminar in Australia, I was approached by a fellow teacher. Taking me aside, he said, ” I have to tell you the truth. You think, that what you are doing in front of the group, is all about you, and no one else! ” I stood for moment and could do nothing other than agree with him. In that moment I could find no other reason for doing what I was doing other than to serve myself.

Who else was there? I have to admit up until that point, I had followed the assumption that the closer I came to enlightenment, the further I could take my students and my clients. But after that encounter with the truth, as I now know it to be, changed everything. Not in the way I had planned it however, quite the reverse. The many “how to become enlightened books” that had, at one time become breakfast, dinner and tea to me, no longer served any purpose; other than to adorn my book shelves.

I completed my last seminar in Denmark, with a question ” Do you think that all you have learned, will make the slightest difference to anything?” Everyone in the room nodded their heads and said, “yes”. It was the second time that this clear thought had entered my mind. I was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. And then fear struck; if not this, what else is there? The journey, the path, the search for awareness, consciousness, all that at one time had been so important to me, now became irrelevant.

I desperately tried to console myself with the fact that all of the foregoing had brought me to this point. But this time, the point felt like standing on the edge of a cliff with the Indians not that far behind. Very clearly, I could not teach that which I no longer had faith in. So I stepped off the cliff and I’m still decending or ascending, I can’t really tell as there are no signes to show the way.

Each day, I meditate or self hypnotise, giving my thoughts their freedom. I suppose one could say that this is what Osho meant when he used the words, “Bliss or Joy.” In these very relaxed states my thoughts just simply wander, I can reach the stratosphere and hang in space or I can be so small I can enter my own body. You might say, “it’s an illusion,” and you would be correct in your assumption, but so is everything else. When you have entered this state of expansion or contraction, without the limitations of the physical body and no attachment to anything whatsoever, it is then you can really know you are god and all that entails.

In this state I’ve come to the conclusion that life and death are actually the wrong way round. Our true selves can only be actualized when we are free of the encumberments of the physical body, which we have named death. Yet it is the ultimate freedom; the releasing of us from the illusion, and all the limitation that go along with that which we call life. We seek home, the returning to what we are, pure energy, pure life. And the most beautiful of all is, that when I know I’m god, there comes with it a silence like I’ve never heard before.

Love James.

You may need to scroll down a little if you want to read the lyrics:

Isn’t it rich? Are we a pair?
Me here at last on the ground and you in mid-air
Send in the clowns
Isn’t it bliss? Don’t you approve?
One who keeps tearing around and one who can’t move
But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns
Just when I stopped opening doors
Finally finding the one that I wanted was yours
Making my entrance again with my usual flair
Sure of my lines
No one is there
Don’t you love farce? My fault, I fear
I thought that you’d want what I want, sorry my dear
But where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns
Don’t bother they’re here
Isn’t it rich? Isn’t it queer?
Losing my timing this late in my career
But where are the clowns? There ought to be clowns
Well, maybe next year

Dramas of grief, loss, fear, worry, physical and emotional pain, shame and pride have all occupied my mind in the last month. Remembering Gangagi’s words, “Welcome them all” – I did just that. The grief and loss were honoured for a while, then joined the others in the truth: that in fact, they were only dramas. I understood, helped by the gentle Buddhist monk, that I actually had a choice. I could choose to hold on to drama, or in an instant, take charge and banish it. Actually that’s not true – there’s nothing to banish, it’s just letting go of another pattern of thinking.

I know, I know, it’s easy to say not so easy to do. Maybe that’s because it’s always easier to stay with the familiar than jump into the new. However, one simple insight from a peaceful and joyous monk catapulted me into taking action. There was a key to open the doors that I walked through. The key was to honour my shame. I discovered intelligent support and advice, loving friends who offered open ears for listening and, somewhere deep within, a new attitude towards money that was struggling to appear. This change in attitude is new, very new and welcome.

Some of you will have read my story about Money and Trust. If you read it again you will see now that it was just another drama from which I really did learn. However, obviously not enough, even ‘though at the time I called it a miracle! Today is different. There are no bells and whistles with my current money story. This time I have had to look deeper, much deeper and not get carried away by other stories in order to solve this one. I realise that way back in 1993 it was more about my belief systems of the time. Now it is more practical and responsible. However, Trust is still there – waiting patiently for me to, yet again, do what needs to be done. I have finally become honest with myself, no-one else, and created no more stories to distract my attention. This is painful at times. However, with patience, my own and others – I’m getting there. It’s heartwarming when some communication, a letter or a poem drops unexpectedly into my mailbox seemingly out of the blue and oh so apt and welcome. Yesterday came a long and full letter from a dear friend reminding me gently that actually, ‘I’ am not in charge! Then this morning, browsing amongst saved material – came this:

Correction

The burdens of the world
on my back
lighten the world
not a whit while
removing them greatly
decreases my specific
gravity

~ A. R. Ammons ~
(Web archive of Panhala postings: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html)

All in all, I feel held, and in that holding is some peace. So, my humble thanks go to Mattieu Ricard (the monk) and his father whose enlightening conversations woke me up. And to the other dear ones, sitting quietly supporting me, who already know who they are, I send my love.

“Life is paradoxical

Reality is composed of opposites and they are related in a way that to assert the one is to assert its opposite as well.

The paradox of having is that the more one has the greater is one’s discontent.

The paradox of pleasure is that self-control is the very first condition of pleasure; the pleasure that is unrestrained kills itself.

The paradox of intimacy is that distance is the first condition of intimacy: the intimacy in which there is no distance turns very soon into resentment or even into hatred.

The paradox of sexual pleasure is that all those factors, which create sexual pleasure and sexual happiness, lie outside sexuality.

The paradox of self-interest is that the only way of serving one’s interest is to serve the interest of the other, that is to say, the pleasure and the happiness of the other is an essential condition of one’s own pleasure and happiness.

The paradox of the self is that without the other, the self will be inconceivable.

The paradox of language is that silence is its highest function.

And there is the paradox of limits, which consists in the fact that one becomes aware of one’s limits only by transgressing them; there is no known way by which one can know one’s limits in advance.

Above all, there is the paradox of life itself, which consists in the fact, even biological, but emotional and spiritual equally, that it is by dying that life is. One is impossible without the other

~ Chaturvedi Badrinath ~, from The Mahabharata: An inquiry in the Human Condition published by Orient Longman.

I read this in the exquisite magazine, Resurgence: info@resurgence.org

At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated:

“If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25 cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill Gates comments General Motors issued a press release stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

1. For no reason whatsoever your car would crash at least twice a day.

2. Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.

3. Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.

4. Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.

5. Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive; but would run on only five percent of the roads.

6. The oil,water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single ‘This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation’ warning light.

7. The airbag system would ask, ‘Are you sure?’ before deploying.

8. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.

9. Every time a new car was introduced, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate the same as the old car.

10. You’d have to press the ‘Start’ button to turn the engine off.

PS: I’d like to add that, when all else fails, you could call ‘customer service’ in some foreign country and be instructed in some foreign language how to fix your car yourself!

One: Last week, sitting at my desk, in physical and mental turmoil about all this ‘too much’ – ‘ping’ went my email. It was a message from a friend, mentioning a friend of hers called Wanda Whiteley, who was starting up a new website. This is a site for authors trying to get their book together! Wanda has worked for the last twelve years as a non-fiction Publishing Director with Harper Collins, and has just become freelance.

Two: That is a high recommendation, so I immediately contacted her and we ‘clicked’. I am now doing what she suggested as my first step. Yes, my first step – I am starting all over again from the beginning totally changing my idea of ‘how it should be’.

Three: However, this story is about Serendipity – you will have understood the first bit, but now comes the next. My first teacher, Michael Barnett and I have been in touch recently. Click Video: Michael Barnett – The Truth Comes Sideways Yesterday, I started reading his book mentioned on said video (now out of print unfortunately), and discovered that it is written in exactly the style suggested to me by Wanda! Not so much a typical autobiography, more a collection of stories.

Four: A SINGLE STEP
Today, by email arrives my daily quote from Osho:

The phenomenon of witnessing has no ABC or XYZ. It is a simple phenomenon. It is a single step. It is one process. The journey of one thousand miles is done by the simple step, one step. You cannot take two steps at one time. Step after step, just a single step can be stretched to ten thousand miles or to infinity. Watchfulness is a simple step. There is no alphabet in it. There are no beginners in it, there are no amateurs in it and no experts in it. Everybody is in the middle, always in the middle. You are moving perfectly right. Just go on. Osho

I guess there’s no more comment needed . . . .?

. . . . A Louisiana costal resident was driving down a road alongside the beach that is being hardest hit by oil at the moment. He was complaining about the lack of any clean-up crews on the beach and was venting his anger at BP. He had a large mustache that quivered with his indignation as he spoke, and his voice was rough and strained with his fury. Suddenly he stopped and jumped out of his truck. Running down along the beach with the news camera man right behind him, he suddenly stopped and plunged his hands into the oily sand. He then pulled up a bird small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. It was covered in oil, but it was still alive. “Oh, this poor bird,” he said, cradling it, his voice softening to one of caring and compassion. “This poor, poor creature.”

The news report ended at that point, so I don’t know what happened next, whether he was able to get the bird to one of the shelters where animals are being cleaned from the oil. And I have no idea how he had spotted this tiny bird from the road when a moment before he had been so focused on his rage. But in the twinkling of an eye, he went from shouting at the cameraman, his attention focused on BP and his anger at them, to someone perceiving the plight of another living creature and shifting his attention to doing what he could, revealing the depth of his caring. I found this very moving.

Over the next few months, I have no doubt there will be thousands of words written analyzing this event, assigning blame and expressing anger. This may well become the equivalent of an environmental 9/11 in terms of its impact on our society except that where the terrorist attack and the collapse of the World Trade Towers occurred in a two-hour span of time, the Gulf oil spill is a catastrophe unfolding over weeks and months, leaving us twisting in the wind with the uncertainty of how it will end. If as many fear, the storm surges and winds of the hurricanes expected this season carry the contamination of oil much further inland, including to populated areas and farming country, or if the oil enters the Gulf Stream and heads around to the beaches of America’s eastern coastland and then on to Europe, then the impact of this disaster will be much greater than it appears now and the ending may be years in the future.

If ever an event were worthy of our anger and sorrow, this is it. This is particularly true because this is no random act of nature like the earthquake that hit Haiti. It was an eminently preventable event. That it occurred comes as no surprise to many who have been predicting such a disaster for years, but it also comes as further indication of the deep structural flaws in our civilization, from our increasing dependence on resources that in fact are running out and are harder and harder to get, to the financial pressures and expectations that lead individuals and corporations to take shortcuts and neglect safety measures in order to save a dollar here and a dollar there. Yes, greed is involved, but it’s not just corporate greed. It’s our collective greed for a certain kind of lifestyle, a certain kind of dominance upon the earth, a certain kind of anthropocentric power to do with the world and its web of interconnected life what we wish, as we wish, when we wish. . . .

But if we are going to work effectively at a spiritual level through subtle activism with this event and its unfolding consequences, anger and sorrow must be set aside. Like the man in the news story who suddenly switched from expressing anger to taking action to help another living creature, we need to go beyond our anger and find our compassion and the presence of a healing light within us.

So, from my perspective at least, there is no single unified response of the inner worlds to this event. What this means to me is that I need to look to my own response. What do I feel? What do I think? And likewise, dear reader, what do you feel and think? For it’s out of our hearts and minds that we fashion our imaginative, mental, emotional, and spiritual responses, and our physical ones as well if we are in a position to take physical action. I don’t need a nature spirit to tell me it’s angry for me to feel anger myself or for me to feel compassion and sorrow and a need to do something to help.

Subtle activism is a way of offering help through the use of subtle energies of consciousness and life when we’re unable to help in more physical ways. It’s never a substitute for meaningful and appropriate physical action, but it can be an important complement. This is not the place to go into the whys and wherefores of subtle activism, its principles of operation and the theory of how it works; I have classes that do that if you are interested. What I would like to do here is just offer some specific inner responses you can make if you are inclined. However, there are two key ideas to keep in mind. The first is that all subtle activism is ultimately intended to create and foster wholeness. The subtle environment of the world is a place of important connections along which life energies flow, and when events like this occur, it’s these connections that get broken. The second is that inner work is done in a spirit of compassion, love and service. Wholeness is repaired or re-created through life-affirming energies, not through anger or blame, judgment or revenge. We must be like the man in the news interview, switching from our outrage to our compassion and reaching out to hold in our inner hands of love the life that has been impacted and that is threatened.

. . . .

You can help in this process by making available your own energies of compassion and wholeness to the situation through your loving attunement. You cannot do this in a state of anger or agitation, so don’t attempt this if your emotions about what is happening in the Gulf overwhelm you with sadness, anger, and so forth. Wait until you can find calm and peace within yourself. But when you do, then here is one way you can offer your help. Attune to a spiritual source of wholeness that is meaningful to you, that is, a source from which you would draw inspiration and presence to find wholeness in yourself. Draw that wholeness into you and merge it with your own calm presence, your own integration and sense of wholeness. In imagination and contemplation, project your presence into the affected areas of the Gulf where death and disruption are occurring to the life of the sea and the coastlines. Be a presence of wholeness and connection, as if you were a nerve cell connecting the spiritual worlds with the earth and water itself. In effect, you are offering your assistance and the energy of your presence to those beings who are seeking to “reknit” the subtle environment.

4: Be open to grief. Grief is part of the healing process of binding up broken subtle ties and connections. I’m not talking about wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. Grief can become mixed up with dramas of self-concern and victimization (the “poor me” syndrome), and you want to be clear of such dramas. You want to feel honestly the pain and sorrow involved with what is happening to the nature and the people of the Gulf. Grieving is part of the process of acknowledging the broken connections I spoke about earlier and thus of beginning a process of healing. Don’t be hesitant or resistant to grieving with the nature spirits and with the life of the Gulf that is being affected. You can share your own emotions of pain with them. At the same time, however, don’t assume or project that nature spirits feel that grief or pain in the same way; don’t anthropomorphize, in other words.

5: Eventually the Gulf will heal. Depending on the amount of damage that is done by the time this spill is cleaned up, that healing could take a long time, but it will happen. Harmony and balance will be restored, though it might look different than what is there now. . . .Here you want to gain the long view, the perspective of centuries and millennia. In attuning to the Gulf and the coastlines where death and damage are occurring, hold an image of these areas in their perfection when healing has taken place. See the area connected and whole. In other words, tune into the template of wholeness held by the vaster consciousnesses and hold the joy and beauty of that template; it forms a matrix around which healing can take place.

These are just some suggestions of things you can do, and they focus on the natural world. But the same suggestions, slightly modified, can be used to hold and bless the humans who are involved and who are being impacted. This goes for the engineers and others trying to repair this situation as much as for those whose livelihoods are being lost or whose health is being affected.

One important thing we can do is to hold the sorrow and grief of this event in our hearts without flinching. This takes courage because it’s a painful thing to do. And it takes wisdom and strength to hold that pain without being overwhelmed or constricted by it. Becoming despondent or despairing doesn’t help, but standing in solidarity with the people and creatures that are being affected and not turning away in denial can be very helpful. From an inner standpoint, it means our Light is available as needed.

No pun intended, but there is a gulf between where our society and our collective human consciousness are at the moment and where they need to be to fashion a world that is sustainable and that works for the benefit of all species of life. To write off this tragedy as “just another oil spill” and part of the price for doing “business as usual,” is to lose an opportunity to recognize the need to revision ourselves and our world and to move in a different, more holistic direction. If this tragedy has a deeper meaning, I believe it manifests in how we can seize this opportunity. (A new book that looks at how we can make this change in a most positive and creative way is Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, by Juliet B. Schor, an environmental economist; I highly recommend it.)

Many years ago a friend of mine was involved in drilling oil wells in Louisiana. One day he gave me a small bottle of crude oil brought up from a mile or so under the earth. I was interested to see that it had a reddish color, which made me think of the way many indigenous peoples refer to oil as the blood of the earth. In many spiritual traditions, the spilling of blood in sacrifice is considered transformative. Perhaps we might see this oil spill as Gaia spilling her blood to effect a transformation in our consciousnesses that we may learn to truly think like a planet and to care for the world that sustains us. If so, my prayer is that this sacrifice is not being made in vain.

From Lemurs to Lamas ~ Confessions of a Bodhisattva
By Prem Purushottama Goodnight

This e-book is really worth the paper and ink to download. It is an autobiographical account of one man’s spiritual journey, and from the very first introductory page – as vibrant and honest an account as I have read.

We knew each other some years ago and he wrote to me: “It is a little rough with some typos but once it was put together I just wanted to release it to the wind.” So, I am doing just that!

download: From Lemurs to Lamas (B)
added: 26/05/2010 | clicks: 54
From Lemurs to Lamas ~ Confessions of a Bodhisattva by Prem Purushottama Goodnight (size -5.7 MB)

Hello Persephone,
Now the sun is shining again; I feel that there is so much to be done, and so little time in which to do it. It’s as though overnight, I’ve become the white rabbit in “Alice in Wonderland.” But having said that, I still find the time to enjoy your News Letter and the wonderful postings. It would take me hours to comment on them all, so I thought it best to express my feelings through this one e-mail.

As I read each posting, and believe me, I do — I find the diversity of them arouses so many different feelings and reactions. It’s like being on a roller coaster. I can feel fear, panic, tears and finally an extreme clear feeling of joy. They always create the possiblity for me to view my life from a new vantage point. Often it can feel as though the postings are particullarly there just for me, and of course they are. Each video, each poem, each written word, even those of my own, stare back at me as if I had never seen them before. This may sound a little melodramatic, even I can hear it as such as I re-read this e-mail. But believe me when I say that even the political videos give me something to mull over.

From Pratchett to Osho, from Obama to No arms, No legs — no worries, all have their effect on me, in their own special way. I have great difficulty believing that you judge people as being irritating, and not, deep down inside you, know that they are just as much a miracle as all us other idiots. Sometimes I feel the conflict within me that raises this question. How is it that I see the uniqueness and the indivduality in all that there is…….. and yet still know we are one?

James