Most of us live in the world but rarely see where we really are. I mean it's crazy. We rush around, notice this and that, race on to the next perception, and NEVER STOP until we crash late at night. Even then we can't turn off our minds and struggle with insomnia.
In recent blogs, I've been sharing what it's like to quiet and even stop the mind, and enter the silent stillness of divine consciousness pervading everything in present moment. The first key to this experience is to "stop thinking." Of course that's not so easy, but there is a way to get close. Consider the phrase, "Come to your senses!" People have long used this confrontation with someone who seems out of control, hysterical or crazed, someone stuck in an emotional state that creates self-distressing illusions of danger and drama not evident in the immediate moment. Sometimes, as in the movies, they even slap the person in the face, to evoke a sensory stimulus powerful enough bring them back to the present, to the sensory here and now, to reality.
No need for violence, of course. The key is simply to shift attention into the sensory mode of experience and then intensify it. You experience this when you're doing something very carefully, such as painting trim or balancing on one foot. What we often fail to notice in this wide-awake state is this: In the sensory mode, when your thinking stops, everything stops - time, beliefs, problems, everything, and you discover eternity, for a moment at least. In this pure consciousness, all chatter ceases, cleansing the whole thick filter of thought that pollutes and obscures divine consciousness. In this silent awareness, we discover that nothing is what we think it is, but infinitely more amazing, because we are seeing directly into the divine world. Then the magic begins because you start to see the world the way it really is. We make the world ugly and wrong with our judgments, thoughts and expectations, the Buddha explained, and we suffer for it.
Enter the world as it is. Discover a radiant, colorful, joy-filled experience of Creation all over. It's already here. In aging, we have lots of time and opportunity to enter this Heaven on Earth. Too rarely do we do so. Aging is about returning the direct experience of the enchantment we knew as young children, enchantment that could last a whole day in a green field full of bugs and birds and flowers and dirt. And now in this new aging, it's not about being heroic or important, it's about being. In being we are transformed; in being we transform the world. This is the new aging available to everyone. We were never kicked out of Creation, we left of our own accord.
I close with the words of Fra Giovanni, and 16th century priest: "No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take Heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in the present little instant. Take Peace. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see, and to see we have only to look I beseech you to look. Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by the covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor woven of love, by wisdom, with power…you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home." (You'll find this and other descriptions of Heaven on Earth in Finding Heaven Here)
I beseech you to look. It's why we are here.
In recent blogs, I've been sharing what it's like to quiet and even stop the mind, and enter the silent stillness of divine consciousness pervading everything in present moment. The first key to this experience is to "stop thinking." Of course that's not so easy, but there is a way to get close. Consider the phrase, "Come to your senses!" People have long used this confrontation with someone who seems out of control, hysterical or crazed, someone stuck in an emotional state that creates self-distressing illusions of danger and drama not evident in the immediate moment. Sometimes, as in the movies, they even slap the person in the face, to evoke a sensory stimulus powerful enough bring them back to the present, to the sensory here and now, to reality.
No need for violence, of course. The key is simply to shift attention into the sensory mode of experience and then intensify it. You experience this when you're doing something very carefully, such as painting trim or balancing on one foot. What we often fail to notice in this wide-awake state is this: In the sensory mode, when your thinking stops, everything stops - time, beliefs, problems, everything, and you discover eternity, for a moment at least. In this pure consciousness, all chatter ceases, cleansing the whole thick filter of thought that pollutes and obscures divine consciousness. In this silent awareness, we discover that nothing is what we think it is, but infinitely more amazing, because we are seeing directly into the divine world. Then the magic begins because you start to see the world the way it really is. We make the world ugly and wrong with our judgments, thoughts and expectations, the Buddha explained, and we suffer for it.
Enter the world as it is. Discover a radiant, colorful, joy-filled experience of Creation all over. It's already here. In aging, we have lots of time and opportunity to enter this Heaven on Earth. Too rarely do we do so. Aging is about returning the direct experience of the enchantment we knew as young children, enchantment that could last a whole day in a green field full of bugs and birds and flowers and dirt. And now in this new aging, it's not about being heroic or important, it's about being. In being we are transformed; in being we transform the world. This is the new aging available to everyone. We were never kicked out of Creation, we left of our own accord.
I close with the words of Fra Giovanni, and 16th century priest: "No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take Heaven. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in the present little instant. Take Peace. There is radiance and glory in the darkness could we but see, and to see we have only to look I beseech you to look. Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by the covering, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering and you will find beneath it a living splendor woven of love, by wisdom, with power…you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage, then, to claim it, that is all. But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are all pilgrims together, wending through unknown country, home." (You'll find this and other descriptions of Heaven on Earth in Finding Heaven Here)
I beseech you to look. It's why we are here.