Monday 26 December 2016

ROLES & REALITIES

Comment:


Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Sailor, Rich man, Poor man, Beggar man, Thief.

A role is anything  you identify with, which has a beginning and an end. It becomes the past and moves into the future. It squeezes out the present in between. It is anything that can be put after “I am....” or “I was...” or I will be...” It is the dwelling place of the Ego.

You are not born playing a role, unless the karmic pressure is enormous.

Being born is being part of the continuous flow of reality in present time.

Reality lasts forever as a variable continuum and is always there underneath the roles (you can have cancer while acting Hamlet or stockbroker) or between roles (you can have a real broken nose if, between sitting waiting for a bus and jumping on the bus, you trip and fall on your face).

Roles have beginnings and ends. Reality is forever...

So what is Reality?. Buddhists call it Suffering. Some call it “fun”, some a “drag”, a “veil of tears”, an “accident”, “a wondrous miracle”..  
First of all, it is Not its Name.  It is whatever is truly here and now at all times. Call it what you like...

Roles can be projected onto others (so that they will conform to a role you yourself are playing).  An excuse is a role. “That is the enemy! Therefore I can  (have to) kill him.”

Postscript: 

While you are playing a role, you draw in memories, “facts”, environment, and especially people that will support it. Or, if all else fails, will OPPOSE it.
Even if your role is a monologue (in the centre of) an empty stage, the least you can get by with is one member of audience.

Otherwise, the caretaker will come in and turn off the lights.

Curtains.



New Project: THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE





Tuesday 8 November 2016

THE TENDENCY OF THE MIND TO DRIFT

If you keep drifting off on your way home on the motorway, it may take longer than you expected. (You may even end up at an unexpected destination sooner.)

'The Tendency of the Mind to Drift '- Project picture comment.

Forks in the road are presenting themselves all the time, big and small, and each one has its consequences for ourselves and others. Driving on motorways and byways (and no-go-ways) gives a clear visual image of the mechanics of this. Our movement through Life (Life is always moving) 
demands a response, even if it is only a frustrated attempt to stop moving.


There are three levels of location on which these forks in the road appear:

The physical, where our bodies are: longitude and latitide, in a town, a house, an aeroplane, a workplace, a school...
The mental, where our mind is: thoughts, mental images, points of view, a job, beliefs, memories, plans, emotions, relationships...
The spiritual, our ethics (or non-ethics).

They interact with each other, often are in conflict.

Our ethics (or non-ethics) is a (semi) invisible component in almost every single choice of direction we make. And its consequences. If it is non-ethics, i.e. incorrect ethics, our choices will be contaminated from the start and will always lead us astray, and, ultimately to disaster.

Check your past, present and future life and those of other beings and see if this is true...




Friday 23 September 2016

EGO, EGO, GOD OF THE JUNGLE

WHAT IS TENNIS?
 
Tennis is a game. A game is for enjoyment and recreation.
 
Knocking up WITH someone, you stop just as soon as you’ve had enough in the Present. Then you go off and enjoy yourself doing something else.
 
Playing tennis AGAINST someone is not playing for enjoyment and recreation. It is not “playing tennis” at all. It is competing to WIN. Purely for EGO. Once the stakes get higher (i.e. for money), it is fighting to win. The language used to report it reveals this: “Murray fought back from two sets down” and the behaviour and language of the players on court emphasises it. 
 
Instead of enjoyment, you get Egoic victory and excitement if you win and Egoic defeat and despair if you lose. You don’t know which it will be until it finishes and you can’t  “stop just as soon as you’ve had enough in the Present”. You have to wait until it’s over. The “game” might last hours and all the time victory or defeat lie in the Future, i.e. thoughts in the mind.
 
Even the spectators get contaminated by this, especially when the stakes are high. They experience excitement or despair since they tend to identify (ego again) with one or other of the players.
 
Why do we waste our time on all this? We don’t. EGO wastes OUR TIME
 
Then he stores it in our memories to fashion his CV.



~~~


                    My task
            (and yours)
             is
            (and always has been)
             to get rid of you and me
             to get rid of us and them
             to get rid of was and will be
             to get rid of should and should not
             to get rid of might and mightn’t
             is
            (and always has been)
             to wake up
             from the dreams of our identities
             and find ourselves
             Here
             where we have always been
             Now
             where we have always been.



~~~


Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452, and there was no Holland and Barrett in those days, but he was far in advance of most people today and refused all animal food because of his deep compassion for animals. He fully realised the implications of the barbaric carnivorous diet for every other creature on earth.  In his Notebooks (published by Oxford University Press) he describes the human carnivore as follows:


“'King of Animals', as thou has been described. I should rather say, ‘King of Beasts’, thou being the greatest, because thou dost only help them in order that they may give thee thy children for the benefit of thy gullet of which thou hast tried to make a sepulchre for all animals.---Now does not Nature produce enough simple vegetarian food for thee to satisfy thyself? And if thou art not content with such, canst thou not by the mixture of them make infinite compounds as Platina describes, and other writers on food.”
 

Leonardo accurately predicted the present day destruction of the environment and the abuse of all living creatures - In a section of his Notebooks, entitled Prophesies, he states:


“Of the cruelty of men---Creatures shall be seen on earth who will always be fighting one with another, with the greatest losses and frequent deaths on either side. There will be no bounds to their malice; by their strong limbs a great portion of the trees in the vast forests of the world shall be laid low, and when they are filled with food the gratification of their desire shall be to deal out death, affliction, labour, terror and banishment to every living thing; and from their boundless pride they will desire to rise towards heaven, but their excessive weight of their limbs shall hold them down, Nothing shall remain on the earth or under the earth or in the waters that shall not be pursued, disturbed,  or spoiled, and that which is in one country removed into another. And their bodies shall be made a tomb and the means of transit of all the living bodies which they have slain. O earth. Why dost thou not open up and hurl them into the deep fissures of thy vast abysses and caverns, and no longer display in the sight of heaven so cruel and vile a monster?”  


Leonardo’s Notebooks (published by Oxford University Press)




Saturday 27 August 2016

WHEN YOU COME TO A PLACE, WHAT PLACE DO YOU COME TO?

NAME OF PROJECT: WHEN YOU COME TO A PLACE, WHAT PLACE DO YOU COME TO?


NEW PROJECT: EGO, EGO, GOD OF THE JUNGLE

Saturday 4 June 2016

FOR HUMANITY, MEMORY HAS COME TO REPLACE UNDERSTANDING

Memory cannot, of itself, lead to Understanding. It can only shape Points of View which are endlessly subject to change.

Understanding based on Memory, it follows, is also endlessly subject to change. It will also have to compete with other competing "understandings".


Real Understanding only comes into existence with Direct Seeing in the present moment. As soon as it enters Memory, it also is already subject to revision because it has become detached from Seeing...


Test this out on yourself and others, vegans and carnivores alike, with sentences such as, 


"What is on your plate?"


What you remember is filtered by your window frame. The man at the upstairs window will see something different. The man at the back bedroom window will doubt your sanity.

NOTES

The circle represents the confines of a system in which duality operates. In our case, this is the field of Humanity.

A & B represent any and all conflicting opposites. The list is endless.

AB passes through the centre of the circle at R. It indicates the maximum polarity possible for AB within the circle. This provides the maximum distance between the contestants A and B.  The arrows on AB and AC indicate the direction of flow. The arrows on CR, one below C pointing towards R and one above R pointing towards C also indicate the direction of flow.

On AR, to the right of A, there are two arrow points facing each other thus: > <.  On RB, to the right of R, there are similar arrows. These arrows represent the confrontation points which are continuously appearing anywhere and everywhere throughout the plane of conflict which is the line AB. These confrontations are interminable.

If A were ever to succeed in defeating and occupying B, B would immediately reappear in another guise at A and the confrontation would resume. History illustrates this very clearly.

C represents the upstream point at which humans are reconciled by abandoning A and B. It is both an exit and an entry point.

The dotted line through C and parallel to AB represents the plane of reality occupied by Humans who are, just that, Humans. They have abandoned the identifications which create the AB conflicts or have never descended into that lower world in the first place.

R represents the linear point, within the horizontal field of conflict, where, by abandoning A and B, reconciliation is also achievable. This is unlikely, however, because of the momentum accumulated by the Pendulum of Conflict in its ongoing advances and retreats.  This momentum reinforces the differentiations of A and B.

C = R.

The diagram is static. In reality everything is dynamic; every atom, every cell, every solar system.

For the sake of simplicity, the diagram is two dimensional and shows one AB line. Actually, there are an unlimited number of AB lines spreading out in all directions from R to the circumference, just as there are an unlimited number of issues on which humans are divided and are in unrelenting conflict with each other.

Each and every one of these issues on which humans are in conflict with each other has the same Reconciliation Point; the complete surrender of identification with the points A and B. This is replaced by direct seeing the way things actually are in the present moment.

Reconciliation is rediscovery in the living present of sameness – our real and eternal Identity. This replaces identification with “differentness” which occurs when understanding is based on memory of the past and the points of view it conditions. These points of view include corresponding projections into an imagined future.

Furthermore, the two dimensional diagram represents a three dimensional sphere, the sphere of human existence, within which an infinite number of AB lines radiate outwards from a single immaterial point.  On the material plane, this includes the planet on which our dramas are played out.

Because of the enormous powers of destruction which human beings have obtained, our continuing failure to solve our ongoing and worsening AB conflicts now endangers the Earth itself.

The apparent vacuum within the circle itself is actually full of events, incidents, hostilities, revenge, justifications, memories, points of view, understandings and misunderstandings. All are movements of the conditioned mind.

Full and expanding.

It is a rich compost in which A and B continually seek and find the food to support and nourish their differences rather than resolve their conflicts. It is like a thistle growing next to a lettuce. Each takes from the same soil what its roots need to keep thistles quite different from lettuces.