And my lesson was clear ...

In 2008 whilst filming his BBC series about the Amazon Bruce Parry had his own ayahuasca experience, which was: "Bruce - stop thinking you know better than everyone. Yes, you’ve had some great life experiences and you have a respectable insight to some subjects, but you’ve got to deflate that ego of yours, stop thinking of the clever riposte before the other person has even finished talking. Be in the moment and listen, yes listen to others. It’s not about being better than other people and establishing your place in some invisible hierarchy, it’s about sharing this worldly space with others. Occasional experiences are beyond rational thought. They cannot be explained. We live in difficult times and we are in danger of losing our connection to the natural world. Some answers will only come from listening and experiencing the world in its natural state." I can relate to this very much, as I feel this physical need to get out of my own way, to stop the chattering of my ego and to listen to those around me. I'm finding it hard to do that with the incessant demands of work. In my confused state I think it maybe time to step away from the University and sit awhile and listen until the next action finds me. Enough searching, striving, looking, acting. Now it's time to be.

Sweet Song

What am i to do

someone here is really not happy

Put myself on a line

It seems i never got thru to you

So i ween myself off slowly

I'm a darkened soul

My streets all pop music and gold

All our lives are on TV

You switch off and try to sleep

People get so lonely

I believe i believe i believe

Everything's out to sea

I believe i believe i believe

That is the way it should be

I hope you feel the same

Everyone is dying

Stop crying now here comes the sun

I didn't mean to hurt you

It takes time to see

what you have done

So i ween myself off slowly

I believe i believe i believe

Love is the only one

I deceive i deceive i deceive

Cos i'm not that strong

Hope you feel the same

And now it seems that we're fallin apart

But i hope i can see the good in you

Come back again

Coz i just believed in you

- blur -

The point of no return

You know that moment just before the champagne cork pops, or the feeling just as you take your foot of the ledge to bungee jump, or just when the string from a bow is released but the arrow has yet to move ...

Well this is it ...

All the forces of nature are pushing in one direction, the point of no return has been crossed and there is a nano second of time when you realise you can not go back and the future has yet to begin - that moment of NOW is so real, it's like the everything that is and ever was or will be. Life is 3-D, 4-D, 5-D ... infinite - D, all your senses are working to the max, AND YET in this moment of extreme awareness, of presence there is a knowing, a feeling of calm inevitability, of impending futureness.

It's scary, intense, overwhelming IN YOUR FACE no ducking, no diving, no hiding and from this you are drawn to the possibility, the newness, the excitement of it all.

WOW - this is happening to me, to the people I love, to acquaintances, to people I meet on the street and just get talking to.

I am witness to these moments occurring around me.

There is a palpable shift going on, no judgment, no good or bad, just change. As the saying goes, it's a stepping off point onto the field of play, have your game head on people, get ready for the B of the Bang, for the lights to go Green, it's all going on.

You better be a player or you'll get played !!!

Hang onto your HATS, coz here we go ... whoosh ..!

Dopeness versus Wackness

"Instead of looking at all the dope things in your life

you look at the wack, it's like, stop caring about the wackness."

Chuckie Chick in the deep stuff ...

When the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even,

brightly shone the moon that night, as Chuckie Chick lay freezin',

he still keeps his head held high, despite the winter cool,

coz he knows the snow about, is made of crystal jewels.

Our Deepest Fear

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone.
And as we let our light shine, we consciously give others permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

- Marianne Williamson -

Now is the time to open your heart ...

"FIRST OF ALL, ABANDON ANY NOTION that anything you humans do will ultimately destroy me. That is because I am your mother. It is impossible to kill one's mother. You may shoot her a hundred times, but alas, she has already given birth to you. She is your forever. What you are destroying is your own happiness. Your comfort, which I put so much playful effort into creating. Your peace of mind. Your joy.

There is no potion, no poison you can create, that will do anything but rearrange the pattern I have made. And, let me add, you were created in such a way that you can do this. So destruction too is part of the overall design.

The biggest problem is thinking the fate of the world rests on you. It does, and it doesn't. The 'saving' of the planet, as you humans think of it, can be done really easily. All that is required is that everyone becomes as one mind. The mind, actually, of clay, she said, and laughed. Television creates this global mind to some extent, but the programming is so bad.

Then there are the languages people have which have become a completely unnecessary division. There is no need to talk, really. It is something humans started a long time ago - I don't even remember why - and they've clung to it. Clinging to speech they've lost the ability to read one another, to feel one another, to know one another at a glance. Or with a sniff. It is entirely within human capacity to do this.

When you witness the various peace talks that occur on a daily basis somewhere on earth and you see how far everyone is from peace, and how they get no nearer the longer they talk, well, this gives an indication of the problem."

- Alice Walker -

Sometimes ...

Sometimes you don't know you've crossed the line,
until you're already on the other side.

The First Elegy

If I cried out, who
in the hierarchies of angels
would hear me?

And if one of them should suddenly
take me to his heart,
I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty is but the beginning of terror.
We can barely endure it
and are awed
when it declines to destroy us.

Every angel is terrifying in that way.
So I hold myself back,
and let my scream for help
be swallowed by sobbing.

Oh, to what, then, can we turn
in our need?
Not to an angel. Not to a person.
Animals, perceptive as they are,
notice that we are not really at home
in this world of ours. Perhaps there is
a particular tree we see everyday on the hillside,
or a street we have walked,
or the warped loyalty of a habit
that does not abandon us.

Oh, and night, the night, when wind
hurls the universe at our faces.
For whom is night not there?
Longed for and softly disappointing,
it envelopes each solitary heart.
Is night easier for lovers, who
can hide from their fate in each other?

Do you still not know how little endures?
Fling the nothing you are grasping
out into the spaces we breathe.
Maybe the birds
will feel in their flight
how the air has expanded.

Can you see? Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.

As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?
Were you not always distracted by yearning,
as though some lover were about to appear?

Let yourself feel it, that yearning.
It connects you with those
who have sung it through the ages,
sung especially of love unrequited.
Shouldn't this oldest of sufferings
finally bear fruit for us?

Is it not time
to free ourselves from the beloved
even as we, trembling, endure the loving?
As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension
so that, released, it travels farther.

For there is nowhere to remain.

- Rainer Maria Rilke -

The Missing

The bells chime
in their silent tones
Heard by those
who know the missing
Echoing the future
of dreams lost
And recalling memories
unbeknown
Slipping from view
the missing return
Through the veil
to the invisible world
Only to reappear
to the few again when
The bells chime
in their silent tones.

Where Three Roads Meet

- When Creon took over the rule of Thebes I sank back into thankful obscurity and retired to keep company at last with the birds. It was a bird, if you like, who told me the end of the story.
-Tell me, please.
- Do you really want to know?
- You know, I feel it is all I want to know.
- It might go against your grain, Dr Freud.
- Almost everything I have learned has gone against my grain, my friend.
- His end was marvellous. Now there's the thing you didn't grasp.
- Where are you off to? Don't go!
- I'm trying to find the corner of your room, Doctor.
- Why?
- Take me to a corner and I'll show you. Are we there?
- We're facing the French window where you enter.
- And the corner?
- It's here to our right. The other corner is all bookshelves.
- Very well, describe it to me please.
-The corner of my room?
- How many lines meet there?
- How many lines? Three.
- Good. Now describe the directions.
- Two meet at right angles on the horizontal plane and the third makes a right-angled vertical.
- Exactly so.
- Well?
- Well what?
- Aren't you going to explain?
- I would have thought it obvious. It was the third road, the vertical. He took it at last.
- Where to?
- Ah, that's not for me to say. We call it the gods; you may, if you like, Dr Freud, call it 'reality'. The sanction of the gods, the sanction of reality - what's in a name? In any case, it's what you come up against when cornered, and that is when you may begin to know what you are made of and who, really, you are.

- Salley Vickers - p.180-182

Gitanjali 41

"Where does thou stand behind them all, my lover, hiding behind the shadows? They push thee and pass thee by on the dusty road, taking thee for naught. I wait here weary hours spreading my offerings for thee, while passers by come and take my flowers, one by one, and my basket is nearly empty.

The morning time is passed, and the noon. In the shade of evening my eyes are drowsy with sleep. Men going home glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit like a beggar maid, drawing my shirt over my face, and when they ask me, what is it I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.

Oh, how, indeed, should I answer them that for thee I wait, and that thou have promised to come. How should I utter for shame that for thee I keep my dowry this poverty. Ah, I hug this pride in the secret of my heart.

I sit upon the grass and gaze upon the sky and dream of the sudden splendour of thy coming - all the lights ablaze, golden pennons flying over thy car, and they at the roadside standing agape, when they see thee come down from thy seat to raise me from the dust, and set at thy side this ragged beggar girl a-tremble with shame and pride, like a creeper in a summer breeze.

But time glides on and still no sound of the wheels of thy chariot. Many a procession passes by with noise and shouts and clamour of glory. It is only thou who wouldst stand in the shadow silent and behind them all? And only I who would wait and weep and wear out my heart in vain longing?"

- Rabindranath Tagore -

The Dalai Lama is like a doctor ...

"Many of the great doctors in history have distinguished themselves and come to inspired diagnoses in part by seeing the connectedness of things, the way a problem in the head may effect the performance of the body, or how what you put in your mouth can alter the acid in the stomach. The body is a single organism in which one push here may have a strong effect there. So it is, too, the Dalai Lama says, with the world - and our very concerns about it all are intertwined, impossible to solve separately. It's no good offering people peace, he suggests, if those same people lack food and water; and it's no good offering them food and water if our forests and rivers are polluted. It's no good, even, to clean up our environment if we're still polluted within. In short the solution to all our problems, economic, environmental, political, spiritual, can only be addressed by going back to fundamentals, the change of attitude that can create a change in everything the attitude inspects. Reforms on the surface make no difference whatsoever."

- Pico Iyer - The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama - p.93