Non-Locality

Non-locality

This is a condition

of our true Self

along with others

infinite and luminous

and simply Awareness...

Non-locality cannot

be known by the mind

so how do we approach

and experience this

 placeless place..

The words immediate

or simultaneous

or quantum leap

may be hints

to help us recognize

a simple pull...

Acceptance

Jeff Foster (www.lifewithoutacentre.com)

5 hrs · 

ACCEPTANCE IS NOT SOMETHING YOU DO, IT'S WHAT YOU ARE

"Awareness is radically inseparable from everything that arises in awareness. And so, it’s not awareness OF thoughts – awareness IS thoughts. It’s not awareness OF pain, pain is saturated with awareness, it is made of awareness, it is awareness. 

Every wave is 'made of' the ocean, so to speak, and so in the end you can’t even speak about the 'waves and the ocean' at all. You can’t even speak about awareness and 'everything that appears in awareness'. But perhaps it’s a useful, temporary metaphor, to point to the deeper understanding ... that the recognition of wisdom, of clarity, is totally incomplete without the recognition of love, of compassion. Really they’re inseparable, love and wisdom, heart and mind, nonduality and duality, the human and the divine, the absolute and the relative. However you say it – it all points to the inescapable fact that every thought, every sensation, every feeling, however uncomfortable, however intense, however unexpected, is welcome in you!

You are the capacity for it all. You are the room for the unloved ones. You are the home for the homeless, the uncontained container...

It is this radical embrace which we have always sought, beyond all ideas of awakening and enlightenment and trying to be free. 

It is what I call The Deepest Acceptance - not the acceptance that you do, but the acceptance that you already are..."

~Jeff Foster

Seamless piece of cloth

Seamless piece of cloth

Awareness is likened 
to a seamless piece of cloth..
Parts and variations
do not exist in the pureness
only Awareness aware of itself..
But then we see in examining
the cloth that fine variations
are there to behold..
Awareness has apparently
produced variations 
out of itself...

Happiness

Happiness

We search the branches

black friday branches

to fulfill desires

relieve dissatisfaction

in the place we stand..

This searching

experiences pain:

a message 

 unexpected

from the tree

from grace...

We cannot know happiness, we can only be it;
we cannot be unhappy, we can only know it. 

--Rupert Spira

Lingering comments on my Thanksgiving walk

Lingering comments on my Thanksgiving walk

He Is Just So Weird she said

young women after greetings exchanged

this comment not intended for my hearing..

A voiced contribution to world conversations

taking place in that moment..

A voice it seems from a separate self

reaching for common experience

on a level where difference reigns..

Then another encounter

he said Who Cares? his response to

an inaccurate greeting of Good Morning

as our watches recorded PM..

Thus chronos time took a rap

in a culture where chronos reigns..

We might wonder at the messages of

many other conversations occurring Now

on Thanksgiving paths...

Happy Thanksgiving to all...!

The honking horn

The honking horn

You have heard it

the honking horn

in a parking lot..

Sequence and timing

repeating and reporting

distress and worry..

Our own distress

is quite similar

a broken silence

linear expressions

announcing separations

in our illusory world...

Black Holes

Black Holes

These unimaginable Holes
are becoming prominent
in our earthly minds..
Inconceivable they are in
swallowing all matter
with arguments of passage
of data and light..
In another light:
these holes of blackness
cloak our true nature
egos protected in separation..
Let us right Now
dissolve the darkness
in our perception
with a rightful discovery
of an Awareness:
How each of us
carries the Light...

Interstellar Adam

Interstellar Adam

Our real Self

resides in dimensionless

space-like presence..

Future and past reside

in this Now..

Attending to wormholes

we confront the darkness

which veils understanding of

Our real Self...

reflecting on the movie:

Interstellar...

Adam awakens

Adam awakens

Adam

is each of us our name

naming in androgynous sense..

Each filling holographically

our multi dimensions..

body mind and universe

assemble in our Now

coloring awakening Adam

who is realizing at last

an eternal identity

new Awareness of who

am I...

Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait

Words seem as ingredients of intimate self-portraits

 words are pointers to spaces between above below

 spaces seem empty but are the birthplace of words

So our words of conversation need be asked:

do you point to the space or to other words..?

Such are the choices which compose our 

Self-Portrait...

Dark branches line the autumn sky

Dark branches line the autumn sky

The leaves have fallen leaving dark lines

reaching skyward in praise of a new season..

These dark thin lines leave room for the passage

of light lifting the veiling of summer leaves..

 We see more directly that the light beyond

penetrates and surrounds us here..

Our infinite essence breaks through..

is remembered...

Noise

Orpheus, do you hear

the new sound
droning and roaring?
Many now exult in it.

Though the Machine
insists on our praise,
who can listen
with all this noise?

See, it rolls over everything,
weakening us
and taking our place.

Since its strength is of our making,
why can't it serve
and not possess us?

Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 18

“I don’t agree with the idea that you can only achieve clarity through dialogue. Clarity of story, clarity of emotions – I try to achieve that in a very layered way using all the different things at my disposal – picture and sound… Broadly speaking, there is no question when you mix a film in an unconventional way as this, you’re bound to catch some people off guard, but hopefully people can appreciate the experience for what it’s intended to be.” (Christopher Nolan on

his new movie, Interstellar).

“There are particular moments in this film where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect, so sometimes it’s mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is. It’s not that nobody has ever done these things before, but it’s a little unconventional for a Hollywood movie.” (Another Nolan quote).

The Obelisk

The Obelisk

What is the secret

of this obelisk

we are to uncover..?

That:

The French historian 

The hieroglyphs 

The Rosetta Stone

The ancient civilization

The Philae lander

The Rosetta orbiter

The shadow

The Solar System

and

the comets 

All of these

are simply made

of the SUN..?!

Philae is the island in the river Nile on which an obelisk was found that had a bilingual inscription including the names of Cleopatra and Ptolemy in Egyptian hieroglyphs. This provided the French historian Jean-François Champollion with the final clues that enabled him to decipher the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta Stone and unlock the secrets of the civilisation of ancient Egypt. Just as the Philae Obelisk and the Rosetta Stone provided the keys to an ancient civilisation, the Philae lander and the Rosetta orbiter aim to unlock the mysteries of the oldest building blocks of our Solar System - comets.

Philae had landed in a dark shadow after a bouncy triple touchdown Wednesday. It did not get enough sunlight to recharge its batteries sufficiently to extend its mission beyond its initial 60-hour work program. Mission engineers do not rule out making contact with the lander in the coming months as Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko moves closer to the Sun.

The touchdown did not go entirely as planned -- hardly a surprise in an operation some gloomily predicted had only a one-in-two chance of success. Philae landed smack in the middle of its targeted site, but a pair of anchoring harpoons failed to deploy. It rebounded, touched down again, bounced up once more and then landed for the third time at a place believed to be about a kilometre (half a mile) from the landing site.

Philae found itself in the shadow of a cliff, tilted at an angle that left one of its three legs pointed to the sky.

Appearances

Appearances

Polarity in Play

is a lens

to find truth

in what appears 

in ourselves and

out there..

Start with a fraction

and know then

that the numerator

that top number

is aware only

of itself..

But what of

that denominator?

This is the 

movie appearing on

the numerator screen..

Thus we see

this bottom number

is made only

of that number

on top...!

Or perhaps better
consider the simple
I
the top horizontal
a vertical connector
and bottom horizontal..
That connector dissolves
our belief
in the appearance
of
separation...

451

451

This temperature

the spontaneous burning of paper

finds a replacing screen

words are now 

projections of acting..

paper and screen

metaphors of Awareness

aware of itself
Indestructable

and

making temporary colorations

of itself...

based on Ray Bradbury's

Fahrenheit 451

A poem from scratch

A poem from scratch 

After many distractions

the mind seeks to prepare

before reaching for

a fresh blank page..

There is searching for

prompts for words coming..

An urge for perfection before

greeting that waiting white page..

Then this thought:

alas I may never be ready

perfection will never be near..

At last the mind surrenders

to a recognition 

my page is infinite in its space

asking an end to thought

 to simply record

new words as they rise

in my space... 

The cat sniffs the door frame

The cat sniffs the door frame

She is neither in nor out

a hesitation over noises external

sniffing the door frame is interim curiosity.. 

So I as tender of the door

am asked for patience

awaiting a decision most weighty..

What is the quality of patience here..?

Some irritation or might it be

a recognition that this moment

glows equally with that better moment

I wished to see...

Do not go gentle into that good night

Do not go gentle into that good night

Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(in Interstellar movie...meaning..?)

November light

November light

The leaves have lost their color

yet they shine in occasional

November light..

We see much in which 

former color seems departed

yet all is made of inner light..

November is the time

we learn to see...

Expressions of Non-Duality

Expressions of Non-Duality

Non-dual teachings have been around for thousands of years. They are the basis for some of the world’s major religions. At the moment, it seems the message of non-duality is breaking free from its religious history. It is being re-invented, translated, and adapted into really straightforward and simple language. The new teachings are making non-duality available to many people who would not have otherwise heard the message. 

--Non-Duality America website..

One of the most divine, sacred, deeply religious things that can happen is a total loss of your personal religion, a dropping of your second-hand belief in God and a waking up to what the word ‘God’ has always been pointing to, beyond words and sounds and images and the passing of experiences. To confine God to a word, a belief, an image, a feeling, a concept, a story, a dream, an ideology, to imprison God in a time-bound religious system, is to put limits on the vastness and give God a boundary, an inside and an outside, a shape, a form, a time-frame. To believe in God, to think of God, to dream of God, to argue about God, to claim God as ‘mine’ or ‘ours’ in any way, is to separate ourselves from God and each other, and create division where there is none. That is idol worship, the worship of form and story and mental truth, and it is not a sin but a vast limitation, a human forgetting of what can be only ever hinted at by the metaphor ‘God’.  
---Jeff Foster

At the heart of experience, there is a fire that

burns all we know.  Offer everything to that

fire.  What remains--the ashes of love--is that

for which we have longed all our life.

---Rupert Spira

The old board fence

The old board fence

Steady it seems

through many seasons

discolored orderly straight..

anchored in earth

an endurance recorded

in our memories..

But now considering

what we remember

as a veiling of a fence

real and shining

and by forgetting

our fence prepares for

 winter wind and cold...

Thoughts and Feelings (Jeff Foster)

THOUGHTS AND FEELINGS

Thoughts and feelings
do not have power over you
until you give them power
by forgetting your true nature. 

You are the ocean; they are the ever-changing waves.
You are the unfathomable sky; they are the passing clouds.
You are the uncontained container;
they are welcome guests in your infinite embrace.

Thoughts and feelings are not you, friend,
but you are vast enough to hold them,
to allow them to come and go,
arise and fall,
emerge, stay for a while, and subside into deep sleep.

You remain, awake. 

- Jeff Foster

Experience

Experience

Our walks in the woods

these experiences

in the woods sometimes

of horns and traffic

of thoughts unwelcome

and welcome..

On this crisp fall day with

autumn aromas rising..

All of our walks

made of Experience

experiencing itself...

Mollie

Mollie

Her days in the sun

together with hers

these bright times

spreading of warmth

penetrating both

within and without..

Blossoming experiences

now in autumn chill

are not dimmed

but have become

as always they were

what they Are...

by Charlie for Lucy

STRETCH: What is Non-duality..?

STRETCH:  What is Non-duality..?

Monday, November 10th, 4:00 to 5:30

MacKenzie Place (Fillmore and Union)

Cost:  Free

From the viewpoint of the earth, the sun comes and goes, whereas it is, in fact, always present. Likewise, from the viewpoint of the body and mind, our essential nature of pure Awareness comes and goes, but, in its own experience of itself, it is ever-present. (Rupert Spira)

Since every wave in the ocean is ‘made of’ the ocean itself, since it has the same ‘substance’ as the ocean, pushing away a wave of yourself – a thought, a sensation, a feeling, a sound – numbing yourself to it, rejecting it, denying it, trying to escape it – is equivalent to pushing away the entire essence of the ocean. Pushing away a moment of sadness, or pain, or doubt, or fear, or joy, or delight, is the same as pushing away all of life. (Jeff Foster)

The light of consciousness has no mind to change or alter anything. When you start to see the light that you really are, the light waking up in you, the radiance, you realize it has no intention to change you. It has no intention to harmonize. It has no agenda. It just happens. The Truth is the only thing you'll ever run into that has no agenda. Everything else will have an agenda. (Adyashanti)

Do you resonate with these quotations?  These are expressions of non-duality. We will discuss this important topic after viewing short film clips of selected non-dual teachers. YouTube has a wealth of videos by these and other teachers, and it would be beneficial to take a look.  Following are recommended in addition to those named above:  Richard Lang, Prajnaparamita, Marlies Cocheret, and Francis Lucille.

See you on Monday..!

Saturday waiting

Saturday waiting

Remembering 

a quiet porch with 

table and chairs

empty and waiting..

These a frequent witness

of conversations

children's excitement

dog and cats..

But now emptiness

a filling quiet

not waiting Now 

quiet only knowing

the joy of knowing

itself...