Joy Being

Joy is the dynamic aspect of Being.
The creative power, conscious of itself, manifests joy.
The joy of being is the joy of being conscious.
What is extraordinary
is what comes through you into the world.
This essence you share with all beings.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth

Every human heart beat is a universe of possibilities… every human will has the power to transform its fate. I’d always thought that fate was something unchangeable, fixed for every one of us at birth, and as constant as the circuit of the stars. But I suddenly realized that life is stranger and more beautiful than that. The truth is that, no matter what kind of game you find yourself in, no matter how good or bad the luck, you can change your life completely with a single thought or a single act of love.

Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram, pg 933

I am a hole in the flute that the Christ’s breath moves through. Listen to this music!
Hafiz

The Wisdom of No Escape

Frozen on the side yard, perched still as a statue, he trains one perfectly round black eye at me. I wonder what he sees; how he knows me and what he’s saying. My vision blurs with the coming darkness, enough that the rabbit’s mottled gray is camouflaged into the bushes beyond. All but transparent, his white rimmed eye remains. Rabbit is one with this place; as he becomes invisible, I turn my attention to the sea of green waving in the wind and lit with the last yellow of day. Recalling the depth and texture of a Monet canvas, I enter into its whimsy and watch the greenery pitch and roll, moving in the whole of my vision. And then the vision fades. I stare at the bunny on the lawn who holds my gaze as he remains frozen. The instant I signal my continued approach, he surrenders with the flip of a white tail.

Sometimes the teachings emphasize the wisdom, brilliance, or sanity that we possess, and sometimes they emphasize the obstacles, how it is that we feel stuck in a small, dark place. These are actually two sides of one coin: when they are put together, inspiration (or well-being) and burden (or suffering) describe the human condition. That’s what we see when we meditate.
We see how beautiful and wonderful and amazing things are, and we see how caught up we are. It isn’t that one is the bad part and one is the good part, but it’s a kind of interesting, smelly, rich, fertile mess of stuff. When it’s all mixed up together, it’s us: brilliance and the suffering are here all the time; they interpenetrate each other. For a fully enlightened being, the difference between what is neurosis and what is wisdom is very hard to perceive, because somehow the energy underlying both of them is the same. The basic creative energy of life–life force–bubbles up and courses through all of existence. It can be experienced as open, free, unburdened, full of possibility, energizing. Or this very same energy can be experienced as petty, narrow, stuck, caught. Even though there are so many teachings, so many mediations, so many instructions, the basic point of it all is just to learn to be extremely honest and also wholehearted about what exists in your mind–thoughts, emotions, bodily sensations, the whole thing that adds up to what we call “me” or “I.” Nobody else can really begin to sort out for you what to reject in terms of what wakes you up and what makes you fall asleep. No one else can really sort out for you what to accept–what opens up your world–and what to reject–what seems to keep you going round and round in some kind of repetitive misery. This meditation is called nontheistic, which doesn’t have anything to do with believing in God or not believing in God, but means that nobody but yourself can really tell you what to accept and what to reject.
The practice of meditation helps us get to know this basic energy really well, with tremendous honesty and warm heartedness, and we begin to figure our for ourselves what is poison and what is medicine, which means something different for each of us. For example, some people can drink a lot of coffee and it really wakes them up and they feel great; others can drink just a thimbleful and become a nervous wreck. Everything we eat affects each of us differently; so it is with how we relate with out own energies. We are the only ones who know what wakes us up and what puts us to sleep. So we sit here on these red cushions in this brightly lit room with this fancy, colorful shrine and this huge picture of the Karmapa. Outside, the snow is falling and the wind howling. Hour after hour we sit here and just come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds, come back to the present moment as much as we can, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds, follow the out-breath, label our thoughts “thinking,” come back to the present moment, acknowledge what’s going on in our minds. The instruction is to be as honest and warmhearted in the process as you can, to learn gradually what it means to let go of holding on and holding back.
The message is that each of us has all that it takes to become fully enlightened. We have basic energy coursing through us. Sometimes it manifests as brilliance and sometimes it manifests as confusion. Because we are decent, basically good people, we ourselves can sort out what to accept and what to reject. We can discern what will make us complete, sane, grown-up people, and what–if we are too involved in it–will keep us children forever. This is the process of making friends with ourselves and with our world. It involves not just the parts we like, but the whole picture, because it all has a lot to teach us.
Pema Chodron

The Maker

The Kybalion (book of purported ancient wisdom teaching 7 basic alchemical principles leading to mental transformation) was perfect because it put into total context all the things I had experienced on acid. The universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time & space, and dreaming what we are. Everything is connected, because it’s all being created by this one consciousness. And we are tiny reflections of the mind that is creating the universe. That’s what alchemy says.
Owsley Stanley, Rolling Stone, Jun 2007

The Maker is one who is part of what he makes. Alvin ran to the bellows and pumped up the fire till the charcoal was glowing hot enough to drive any regular smith outside into the night air to wait till the fire slacked. But not Alvin. Instead he walked right up to the forge and climbed right into the heart & the flame. He felt the clothes burning right off his body, but he paid no mind. He curled himself around that plow & then commenced to healing himself. Not piecemeal, not bit by bit, but healing himself by telling his whole body, all at once, stay alive! Put the fire that burns you into this plow!

And at the same time, he told the plow, “Do as my body does! Live! Learn from every living bit of me how each part has its purpose, and acts on it. I can’t show you the shape you’ve got to be, or how it’s done, cause I don’t know. But I can show you what its like to be alive, by the pain of my body, by the healing of it, by the struggle to stay alive. Be like this! Whatever it takes, however hard it is for you to learn, this is you, be like me!”

It took forever, trembling in the fire as his body struggled with the heat, finding ways to channel it the way a river channels water, pouring it out into the plow like it was an ocean of golden fire. And within the plow, the atoms struggled to do what Alvin asked, wanting to obey him, not knowing how. But his call to them was strong, too strong not to hear, and it was more than a matter of hearing him, too. It was like they could tell that what he wanted for them was good. They trusted him, they wanted to be the living plow he dreamed of and so in a million flecks of time so small that a second seemed like eternity to them, they tried this, they tried that, until somewhere within the golden plow a new pattern was made that knew itself to be alive exactly as Alvin wanted it to be; and in a single moment the pattern passed throughout the plow and it was alive. Alive. Alvin felt it moving within the curve of his body as the plow nestled down into the coals of fire, cutting into it, plowing it as if it were soil. And because it was a barren soil, one that could bear no life, the plow rose quickly out of it and slipped outward, away from the fire toward the lip of the forge. It moved by deciding to be in a different place, and then being there; when it reached the brink of the forge it toppled off & tumbled to the smithy floor.

In agony Alvin rolled from the fire and also fell, also lay pressed against the cold dirt of the floor. Now that the fire no longer surrounded him, his body gained against the death of his skin, healing him as he had taught it to do, without him having to tell it what to do, without need of direction at all. Become yourself, that had been Alvin’s command, and so the signature within each living bit of him obeyed the pattern it contained, until his body was whole and perfect, the skin new, uncalloused, and unburned.

What he couldn’t remove was the memory of pain, or the weakness from all the strength his body had given up. But he didn’t care. Weak as he was, his heart was jubilant, because the plow that lay beside him on the ground was living gold, not because he made it, but because he taught it how to make itself.

-Orson Scott Card, Prentice Alvin

It was never about transforming substances. Those were all allegories. The lead and the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. Alchemy didn’t talk about lead into gold until it had to deal with the church in the early Middle Ages…

-Orson Scott Card, The Tales of Alvin Maker

In every seed is the promise of thousands of forests.
But the seed must not be hoarded;
it must give its intelligence to the fertile ground.
Through its giving, its unseen energy flows into material manifestation.
Deepak Chopra, Seven Spiritual Laws

Clarity through Cosmosis

Gaining clarity prior to any action taken is a skill that rarely has been taught or even talked about in its depth and importance. Clarity is not intention and it’s not choice. Lack of clarity is a sign of lack of connection to our souls, Higher Self, Pure Divine Guidance or even pure patience. Clarity is a power that we must claim, immediately.
Clarity when proactively attained (steps to follow) is one of the most vital ways to shift the paradigm of lower human nature that otherwise works through the emotional and mental body against us, rather than for us.
Rushing to decisions without first getting clarity in regard to the decision has far reaching consequences. Those consequences carry a powerful negative momentum and the emotional and mental body utilizes those consequences to embellish the illusion that we are already living in. No doubt if any of us look back upon our lives we will see how operating without clarity has weakened us in various ways.
It’s important to be aware of this fact. We are living on a Planet with a mass consciousness whose every thought vibrates out into our fields of energy every single second of every single day, often attaching themselves to us and filtering into our own personal thought systems. That, in part, is why we are often confused and thrown our of clarity.
Imagine thousands and thousands of thoughts daily being hurled at you through the ethers and often disguising themselves as if they were your own. They are not. That is why, in great part, we are a Planet and a species in chaos not clarity and we have to DO something about it, rather than keep being informed about it.
It’s vital to understand this so we are moving into action, by harnessing our own thoughts through clarity in any given situation by our souls, or our Higher Selves, or PURE Divine Guidance; not from mass consciousness, nor through what I call “Our Agree With Me Club.” (Those are our friends that love us so much they just want to agree with our perspectives.) That’s a lovely gesture but not powerful inner clarity.
Please know I am not saying that we can’t get various vantage points and point of perspective from others, because we can. However when it comes to personal clarity about your life, only your purest heart, soul and Higher Self have your answers.
It is our job to take the time to intentionally, without ANY distractions set up an environment for ourselves to get clear in. I will share the pathway to clarity.
First, Create a quiet and sacred place for yourself without any form of distraction whatsoever. Some people create sacred space in their gardens, their living rooms, by a lake, in the mountains. Just place yourself where your surroundings are visually sacred and spiritually calming. Wherever you are, please have a paper and pen near you.
Second… Always begin by breathing. Your breath is your greatest ally and we all must learn to Master its full potential to derive the full benefits. Breathe deeply and consciously in and out, in and out for as long as you must to calm your nervous system and to move your focus in the opposite direction of your mind into the portal of your heart.
Use whatever tools you need to get you there; invocations, mantras, a crystal on your heart chakra sound healing music etc. Please don’t stop one second too soon. You will know when to stop when your mind quiets down and you feel your entire energy field shift into a calm and even one. Some of you will actually see a soothing color surround you and some may actually get the scent of fresh air. (The breath is truly amazing.)
Third… identify specifically what you are in need of clarity about. I can’t tell you enough how important it is for you to be specific. It must be specifically about you, not someone else. This pathway is not for you to gain someone else’s clarity, it is for clarity whether it involved another or not.
At this point I suggest that you are prepared to write down whatever you desire to be clear about (or have clarity in regard to) as well as speaking it out loud to the outermost reaches of the Universe and speaking it softly, internally, to take up residency inside of your body.
Fourth… remember you will need patience, stillness of thoughts, and control of your breath to allow the request to be sent forth, sent in, heard and responded to. Make a sacred covenant with yourself that any of the above actions that are required of you to gain clarity over confusion you will attend to vigilantly in order to birth the clarity through you.
The reason for this promise is that you may not get immediate clarity and your mind will be prompted to run to others for answers. You may have to re-visit this process a few times (or not). This is a promise of integrity to your heart and soul, giving no room for the impatience of the mind and ego to take over.
And Fifth… detach from the outcome. In this case you are asking for clarity not information for your mind and ego to barter with. Once received, don’t touch it with a thought. Lead with your heart, lead with the love for yourself and proceed from there. Clarity is a beacon of Light and one of the most powerful tools a human can have at his/her disposal. Particularly now.
Namaste,
Maureen Moss, Executive Producer of The World Puja Network