I Love You More …

Posted on April 18, 2015 by Anrael

Boundless Love fulfills
this moment with All Itself
looking out upon all the emanation bodies
inter-dimensionally and says,
“I love you more than your beauty
and more than the ugliness you are convinced exists;
I love you more than all the froth on the surface waves
the content of your consciousness, and the frothiness
even when deep in identification and story, matters not
in This Love … I include even what bothers me most about you
and offer up that I love you more than me and you
while enjoying me and you and our disturbances and joys.

I Love you more than our oppositional disorders,
more than enough to listen and hear you deeply,
and to listen deeply, to listen to how you feel love,
and express my experience truthfully, vulnerably, sincerely —
I Love you more when This Truth is loved
first, foremost and always as who we are
and we stay here until This LOVE is revealed.

I Love you more than death and all the illusions that separate us
I Love you more than my self, I Love You as This Self,
whole, entirely, completely, helplessly, hopelessly
genuinely, truth-fully, honestly, sincerely beyond all bounds
and completely here now as we are.

As This Love, personally expressed I make contact with you unto
connection, communion and union and am fully committed —
trusting even in the perfection of our imperfections
as the Perfection of This Unfolding Love
unto This Love with you, I Love you more than anything
and want for you ONLY This boundless Love
I/This give my all, all that is my life, This My Life to give.

To This Love, This Silence of most profound eloquence
embracing and enfolding each and all,
this ever-moving Stillness that unfolds and engages
I care fully give all myself every day, many times every time
awaiting peacefully in the death knells the arising of the One
Who Only Is:  This Love is what IS Here Now Only.
I remain until This True Love abides flourishing in and among us all!

I as This Love you more than any idea, than any thing at all!
More than all this world can offer, more than all the sublime experiences
balled up into ecstasies unfathomable by human worldly existence;
than all My heavenly nirvanic Life,
I love you more any possibility of being apart from you,
for, in truth, there is none such
so I Am descended to Be Here and Love You
and This Is MY BOUNDLESS JOY!”

Many Hands make Light Work of the One Heart

Many Hands make Light Work of the One Heart

May All Being awaken to, directly know, feel,
experience and live as Such.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Birth, Death, Life and Other Matters of the Heart

Posted on November 1, 2013 by Anrael

There is such loveliness and challenge in being given the tasks of LightHearted Living! LHL, lol! Yet I am also deeply moved by the suffering and the challenges of my fellow LHBeing, those with whom I am honored to meet, as well as in general, among us all. Among the tasks of this companionship ministry is that of expressing as emissary of this fiery love light, requiring embodying what is given to come through for the good of all, being so released that This limitless Presence can show up as it will.  I mention this because in each of our unique unfolding and understanding, the same is true for each of us.  These words would not have come to you if it were not so.


Realization and living the spiritual Life requires everything of us.  We are in a time of tremendous change and transformation and as multidimensional beings of inherent unity, it is very difficult to remain centered let alone balanced, but it is required like never before.  I find myself saying to people to practice the Presence as if your life depended upon it!  As a matter of fact, it does.  Yet this is also about giving that life over to the Presence.  So we have the razor’s edge of determination – profound resolve to Be true on one side which involves complete surrender and letting go, total release on the other which is not resignation or giving up, false acceptance, but a far more radical acceptance of what is/IS.

Part of the journey of this particular emissary has involved deep conscious awareness and connection at all levels of Being, here embodied on earth in an earth walk and all the way through to the profoundly transcendental, the formless seamless sameness of the groundless ground from which we all emerge moment by moment.  For me, life on earth made no sense without direct experience of the Presence.  When I began the journey I had some little idea of what I was getting myself into but the unfolding has been amazing – full of awe, wonder and mystery right along with struggle, strife and great challenge/difficulty – the Great Mystery of which we are a part.  (Go to https://www.facebook.com/LightHearted.Enterprises for recent expression inspired by Matthew Fox on our need for awe.)  It is frequently a matter of translating the relative and conditioned to the transpersonal and unconditioned and returning to the personal expressive aliveness of this moment’s existence, shape and form.  Free of the conditioned relative in good or bad appearance, the Truth stands revealed…


As a galactic citizen on planet earth, having some sense of what is going on intergalactically is actually useful.  Those who have been following my LH expressions know that I play with anchoring what is going on astro-wise: astronomically and astrologically.  This is because of Christian Mystic Corinne Heline’s influence who was given to see the dynamic movement of the Presence through the star gates of solstices and equinoxes.  So our mother earth/Gaia has her place in the Unfolding Perfection, and we as her conscious life do as well.

We here in the Northern Hemisphere are in mid-season of Fall this weekend aka Samhain.  On the inner planes and for us the Southern Hemisphere is mid-spring.  These polar opposites are in dynamic interplay in the unified field of earth’s life.  We in the north can experience the quickening of the newly emerging life force within us like a pregnancy of impending birth, while at the same time we experience the completion of harvest, nourishment as well as the falling away of what is no longer helpful, of use in our going forward into this new life.  In our annual cycle of spiraling movement, we undergo the deep regeneration of our beings with every leaf that falls.  Our questions for fall involve what are we ready to release, to let go of that we may be renewed, regenerated and reborn.  It is highly useful to live in concert with our place on the planet, in accord with the unfolding Presence as Life cycling around us, to be in conscious contact and participation with the natural unfolding.  What is quickening is of the new that is coming to earth from on high, the energies of renewal, regeneration and rebirth are descending into the planetary core, into the depths, and this is so true during our time of the Scorpio Sun.

This weekend we are treated to some very dynamic astrological influences, involving the archetypes of our conscious life: hybrid solar eclipse on Sunday, and an exact square of Pluto and Uranus today.  I’ve included some links for those who enjoy reading such things and discovering how they pertain to your own experience.  I began a passing interest in astrology that began with a very bright friend in high school who wanted to explore astrology and was studying it.  She did my birth chart and blew me away with the accuracy of what she saw, she reported things about me and my life from this diagram of planets, houses, constellations and relationships among them that was startling in its accuracy, that revealed things that I had told no one about, and that also revealed things about my experience.  She was just a beginner, and astrology has evolved greatly in the decades since as have astrologers.  Funny to recognize that many leaders of countries have astrologers among their counselors–have, do and will, among them that strange man called Ronald Reagan!

Here are links if you are interested in reading about this:

This ground-breaking time has great potential for freedom and living more clearly, serenely and purely as we are meant to, as the Presence alive and embodied.  The degree of the hybrid solar eclipse is 12 Scorpio which will influence our direction for the next four years or so, as will this square that has been and will be repeating several more times, but is at its most powerful this weekend.  This is no time to hold back, delay or deny our True Nature!  What lies in the shadow is being brought forth to be shed as the outmoded old model that is and will no longer be in fashion again!  We must emerge from the shadow in order to shine as the Light we are.  More and more of us are involving ourselves in the process consciously, much of humanity is along for the ride, watching systems and their lives continue to deconstruct without the benefit of a deeper recognition nor with the Peace that passeth all understanding, that still center point around which all revolves.  From the vantage point of an earthling, it may seem like a great shadow passes over the sun, that the source of light and life is darkened, and in areas where the eclipse is total, it can seem as though night has come to day.  As real as that may seem from this vantage point, from another, the sun is simply shining as it ever has, come day or night, eclipses, equinoxes, etc.  We are This ever-shining Presence and the time has come to let every other notion fall away no matter how convincingly real they may seem and instead hold to, or as Saint Mother Teresa said, “cleave to” the Truth of This that Only Is, is Alive and Here Now, with no exceptions!  Relax and let This Be.

For more on This and other matters of This LightHeart, tune in to this Sunday’s podcast  “Surrender and Die!  Why not?! Transmutation & Regeneration”
There’s no time like the Present!  (9 Eastern, 7 mountain, 6 pacific) http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/113501
Phone Number: (724) 444-7444 Call ID: 113501 Direct Link in margin on right.

With great love and appreciation for your unfolding as you are, divine human at times lost in the sea of activity of human life and its demands and distractions, I Am ever with you, within you, and live as you when you relax, open and allow Me.  Make this the point of your existence in whatever ways suit you and see what happens!

In the vibrant flowing fiery love light of This LightHearted Being I Am that we are in Truth, meeting with you all ways in the Heart of Truth, ~Anrael

Posted in Contemplation | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Live and Let Die!

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Anrael

Our associative mind works in wondrous ways!  This morning the Paul McCarney song “Live and Let Die” came in to my consciousness as I was considering Good Friday and the amazing Easter Mystery that Jesus walked through.  The encouragement to “kindly let be what is” that is a dynamic part of our LightHearted Living actually allows this very profound paradox to take place: live and let die.  LightHearted Living is very much about becoming increasingly alive, of being attuned to the Dynamic Aliveness of our Holy Being and letting it infuse our systems.

A large part of our Liberation Work is to take what is externalized in our experience, bring it in to our consciousness and examine it to see what we are calling real.  Our dream life can be interpreted like a dream and can be just as elucidating to us as “the royal road to the unconscious” a sleeping dream is.  When we consciously find our way into our unconscious we are no longer unconsciously driven to behave in ways that perpetuate our suffering.  Our perspective is that self knowledge leads to the Self Knowing of Being, and to make conscious brings the light of Awareness to the shadowy underworld of our unconsciousness and with the light we wake up to our inner darkness born of our conditioning.  As we do this we die to our unconscious small self and begin to live closer to, in connection and communion with, and ultimately as our great Self of Uncontainable Love, Great Spirit, Great Mystery.

From Absence emerges full-spectrum Life and Love!

From Absence emerges full spectrum Life of Love

Today is Good Friday.  Last week during our meeting a companion innocently asked, “What is good about Good Friday?”  The nature of Self-inquiry is to dive into such questions and find out — what could possibly be good about the torturous death of a beloved master given to minister to people with such love and compassion as the world has rarely seen?  What is good about such a sovereign powerful being that overcame the illusions and delusions of separation consciousness to heal and provide for everyone including raising the dead?  What is good about suffering crazy humanity that put him to death and let him die?  How can this good be applied to our daily lives?

This Easter Sunday I am given to offer a special podcast audaciously entitled “A Death Defying Divine Fool for Love!”  To really get within ourselves what makes Good Friday good is to face death.  Most wisdom traditions on the planet have initiations that involve dying, facing death.  It’s definitely part of Shamanic pathways, and was the opening of Sri Ramana Maharshi’s Self-realization at age 16.

Change, the life of impermanence as Buddha so exactingly revealed, involves dying. Creation, preservation and destruction are all part of the One Life we live, and are represented by three gods/goddesses in the Hindu religious lexicon.  On our spiritual journey we die to our small selves over and over and over again until it no longer gets up, until we “stop playing with bones in the graveyard” as Papaji put it.  As one who has walked this pathway, I can assure you that letting be leads to letting die, allowing leads to the most profound surrender of our own lives to the One Life of our True Nature.  As we consciously open in This we discover Eternal Life.

This is what we celebrate on Good Friday.  That one man united in Consciousness and mastery lived and let himself die so that he could demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that death is an illusion of the conditioned mind; of our trance state of separation.  Death is given us as a reality so that we can release ourselves from the attachment to form and be given additional opportunity to realize Truth with a fresh start in a new incarnation.  We can do this while we live!  Those who have known me over the decades know that I am on my third ‘official’ incarnation within this lifetime.  I have died to my entire life many times.  So Good Friday provides us the opportunity to walk through the Easter Mystery of death and resurrection leading to ascension right as we are now.  We can live in such a manner as to let die so that Truth can be born and live within us more clearly, truthfully, genuinely.  We can live and let die the old ways of being that create so much suffering for ourselves, our fellow beings–all our relations and the world.  Resolve to Be a death defying divine fool for Love, not by fighting death, but by defying the condemnation of mortal separation consciousness that binds our lives to the graveyard unconsciously resisting death at all costs.  It’s costing us too much!

If we take the metaphor of the Garden of Eden, after having eaten the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge of duality consciousness (i.e., Good & Evil), we were given birth and death.  This may seem like condemnation (and has been taken as such by the Judeo-Christian religions primarily) — but what if it is an opportunity to get free of the knowledge of duality and the suffering it brings?  To get back to the Garden and eat again of the fruits of the Tree of Life?  Have you ever considered that Eternal Life, Holy Being that is All that Is lovingly and compassionately gives Itself the means of recovery and return?  What is it that Jesus as Christ Consciousness — as Unity Consciousness fully embodied demonstrates by letting himself die that could be demonstrated in no other, no better way?  That Life Is what Is, and it is Good!  We are This Life.  We are Good, originally blessed, not irredeemable “original sinners” of shame and blame.

Friday is a day named for the Goddess, depending on which language derivations you use: from Frigg of the Norse to Venus of the Romans.  Interesting that we commemorate Jesus’s ultimate surrender on a day of the divine Feminine Principle.  The arising of the masculine naturally interplays with the allowing vulnerable receptive openness of the feminine.  So perhaps we should say, “Let die and Live!”  As we go through these next three dynamic days we can spend some time in the depths of human consciousness as Jesus did while in the tomb.  We can engage with Unity/Christ Consciousness that is transforming the death hall into a birth hall, the tomb into a womb, the Womb of All Creation.  We can all emerge triumphant over mortal consciousness having rolled away the stone of materiality and demonstrating that Life includes but supersedes death, as does Love, love unconditioned and eternal that is our togetherness that lasts beyond the grave and lives in our hearts no matter the conditions and circumstances of appearance!

We don’t fight what comes.  We live and love beyond all thought and consideration of our selves for One Life, One Being, One Love thereby making the transcendent Immanent demonstrating with our daily living that Only This Life and Love, Truth, Peace, Freedom and Joy actually Is.  We stop eating of duality oppositional self/other fruits as our daily servings of thought and attention operating in fear, judgement, resistance and unconsciousness.  In letting Be we let die.  In letting pass away the old we let the new be born out of the limitless Womb of All Creation for the Good of All!  We fulfill our purpose in being human Being!

When we are conscious we can choose.  When we choose again and again and again day after day we can arrive at the choiceness flow of Divine Life and Love in Action we are.  Then the foreseen New Earth is given birth in, through and as US, the Unity Self we are in Truth.  Only This Is, I This Am, This we are united as One, as No-One, as This that Only Is.  Live fully and let die realizing for ourself our Self abiding within awaiting our return, the knock upon the door which opens unto to US all we are.  Any small step in this direction changes everything for the better.  Let us begin right now, let die the self who says, “I can’t. I don’t know how.”  Let’s not replace it with another “I” who can or thinks it understands, but let be, let Being Be, just for a moment, and see.

Paul McCartney & Wings, \”Live and Let Die\”

Posted in Contemplation | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Smiling Skies

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Anrael

This morning the smiling rainbow skies
air filled with sparkling magic snow dust
the glorious splendor of morning sun…


the unique snow flake
lifted up into the calm open air
the shimmering face of God revealed smiling down
on such a devoted dedicated one smiling up…

 

the snow flake formed in its own design
belongs to the snow field of which it is a part
belongs to This that snows
in an empty clear sky of radiant blue
the earth cloaked in resplendent sparkling white

a crisp clear pure robe bejeweled
with refracting gems…

Earth bedecked and crowned in glory;
stopping just a moment to notice:
it is always so, and all the sons and daughters
all the relations are the crystalline shining

 


Love
showing its true nature for all to see


heaven and earth through these eyes smiling.

 

Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Let Love Be

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Anrael

Out of the thunderous Silence, enfolding you as Such in the light of Love you are, allow Love to assuage your pain & fear, yes the love of those that surround you, but also This that comes from within you. To choose to love despite the risks, no matter what because it is already so, you already Love with self abandon, & it is the Beloved we love in those we love. You are not separate from This Love & it cannot be betrayed. Terrifying to love helplessly, hopelessly when there is an object … In union the object is the subject. When you are the “other” & he is you, & you both are This that Is & loves, all is dissolved in this holy Union. Love requires the surrender of everything that is composed of other.
On this path, we all get to discover what it means to be true to Love that is both beyond the confines of human heart and within it including all the pain fear rage. When the Heart is to be found within it all, how tenderly will we care & offer it to one another?  How graciously allow each to find their way Home to the Heart?  We can resist all we want, love keeps coming until we surrender & give our all. This act of devotion to love we are helpless before does not involve the object other than us, only in that that object has served to evoke the Love that is within us – let it unfold, have its way. Let us all be helplessly selflessly surrendered to this Love! Let Love care for us & all we love. Let Love have It’s way and witness the dawn of a brand new day.

Posted in Contemplation | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Seeing the Promised Land

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Anrael

“Well I don’t know what will happen now.  We’ve got some difficult days ahead.  But it doesn’t matter with me now.  Because I’ve been to the mountaintop.  And I don’t mind.  Like any man, I would like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place.  But I’m not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God’s will.  And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over.  And I’ve seen the promised land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.  And I’m happy tonight.  I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man.  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”  -Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. from his last speech the night before he was assassinated.

All my life I have been deeply moved by the life, work and sacrifice of Dr. King.  I am very happy there is a memorial to his life in Washington DC now.  His work led me to study Gandhi, which led me into a whole lot of spiritual study and investigation this life is all about.  Back in the day, I marched, I sat in, I attempted to live the peace and love and truth he spoke about.

Right in this quote there are several spiritual principles.  As I look again at his speeches, I can see them filled with them, with the revelations that come from a deeply spiritual life of devotion.  In the first sentence he says, “I don’t know…”  I frequently help people into the Sacrament of Not-Knowing, making sacred what is through not knowing, through the open mind, the beginner’s mind as Buddhists put it.  Leaving behind what is known in favor of what the Unknowable can reveal in the moment is the heart of spiritual practices.  To not know what will happen is to be willing for our True Nature to reveal and manifest itself purely, without any input, intervention, direction, or idea from us about what we think we know needs to be.  To be deeply attentive to what is right now without any filtering, obscurations of a mind that only sees what it knows, is how you get to the next few sentences:  “difficult days”  “…doesn’t matter…because I’ve been to the mountaintop…and I don’t mind.”

The experience of no mind is a profound gift of pure Being.  To be given in profound states of direct spiritual experience that is beyond the conceptual to come to the heights of the transcendent is the mountaintop.  From that vista, it is clear that nothing matters but “to do God’s will.”  In the recognition that “He’s allowed me to go up…” brings us to the end of the doer.  We are given to realize, we are given the determination to practice, we are given to read spiritually inspired writings, listen to talks that help us.  Through those who’ve walked the pathway before us, who’ve walked the talk, the Truth keeps marching on in us through us as us.  Nothing about a long life concerned him anymore.  Only being available to God’s will was important.  This is a life of surrender, letting be what is, opening ever deeper to see, to listen, to be moved by the life of Spirit.

In such a life is given the inner sight to perceive the promised land.  In his vision, as in the vision of Jesus the Christ, as in Moses, as in the vision of all saints and seers, sages and mystics the world over, the seeing that “we as a people will get to the promised land” is the recognition of the most profound truth.  It is the realization that the movement of life itself has but one destiny:  the return from whence it came.  However, to get there as a people requires everything of us, the giving up of everything but the one desire.  As Papaji said, “Burn up all your desires in the one desire: to be free.”  Destiny is not a free ride.

“And I’m happy…not worried…not fearing” is a testament to his realization.  Happiness is our natural state, is the state of our Being.  When there is no self, no mind, no doer, only the deep Peace and Freedom of our essential Being, there is only happiness without worry or fear.  Dr. King had already survived one assassination attempt.  Whether he knew another was coming, I don’t know.  He very well may have, just as Gandhi and Jesus did, and even as Moses knew he wasn’t crossing the river Jordan to enter in with the people he led so faithfully.  Each must find their own way across, finally.  His great leadership, his passionate speaking of the spiritual truths he lived can only take followers so far.  His being sacrificed as one so deeply loved, whose vibrant expressions as a vehicle of what is real and true lives on in us today.

In a class on Institutional Racism I took back in the ‘80s getting a Masters degree in Social Work from the University of Denver, a speaker was brought in from the Iliff School of Theology, part of the University of Denver and where I also took classes.  He knew Dr. King, worked with him, marched with him.  He let us hear a little known speech, a tape recording of a speech Dr. King gave in Chicago.  I was moved to tears in such love and truth being expressed.  In our discussion afterward, I asked what had happened to the movement, where was the action?  In the days of Reagan/Bush things were very quiet.  He replied that though it had “seemed to go underground it was very much alive and would be seen in many surprising ways.”  I took his statement on faith at the time.

As much as I knew, I still little knew what it means to have one’s eyes open to see the “glory of the coming of the Lord.”  Every day I am given to see more clearly the endless glory of the eternal coming of the Lord.  Back in ’91 I published a book of poetry, What Lies Beyond.  A poem entitled, “Fettered Ones” ends with the line, “The Promised Land is at hand today”—right Here right Now!  This phrase rings throughout my being all the time.  “Let freedom ring!”  It informs all activities, all I think, say and do.

 “When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

We speed up that day by letting it ring out and sing out through us!  When we dedicate ourselves to living the truth every day, learning from our failures, deeply investigating our experience, being fully present with what is in our experience with compassion, with one another with “dangerous unselfishness” as Dr. King put it.  The first writing in that book is a kind of emancipation proclamation.  It’s called, “I choose…”  It is the resolve of a life of living Truth, being Peace, embracing Love, adoring Freedom.

“We’ve been in the mountain of war. We’ve been in the mountain of violence. We’ve been in the mountain of hatred long enough. It is necessary to move on now, but only by moving out of this mountain can we move to the promised land of justice and brotherhood and the Kingdom of God. It all boils down to the fact that we must never allow ourselves to become satisfied with unattained goals. We must always maintain a kind of divine discontent.”

This freedom ringing within, from the depths of our Consciousness that is Freedom, keeps us in a state of divine restlessness.  We know somehow that life can be something more, and that keeps us moving.  Don’t settle, don’t be resigned to the way it seems to be, don’t be deceived by appearances or the lie of separation and isolation anymore.  We are not free until every one of us is free.  “We are all bound together in a single garment of destiny.” as Dr. King put it.  The bodhisattva vow is one of return to life until every single being is free and brought Home in the Light of Truth.  It is seen that it is already so, and we suffer a kind of “divine discontent” with anything less.  So it is up to each and every one of us, not a single soul can be left out, to let freedom ring throughout our beings, and throughout all human Being, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

 

Posted in On Principle | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fettered Ones

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Anrael

Fettered Ones

Who amongst you would hear
and not turn away from the Truth
when it is inconvenient?

 Remember who you are!

Feel the pain of your present state
of forgetting.

Your spirit is imprisoned
chained to the wall
deep in the dungeon
of fear’s tyranny.
It starves, fettered ones,
languishing in your neglect
while you run about your worldly busyness.
Your little self-important trials and tribulations
mean nothing except as they bring you to the bottom
of your self-rejection.

Harsh words I speak to you, but true,
necessary to break through
your delusion,
to end your soul’s seclusion.

I have come
to proclaim Freedom,
to show the Way
to bring forth a new day.

The Promised Land
is at hand
today.

 
This poem was published in Anrael’s book, What Lies Beyond, 1991, available from LightHearted Publications by donation plus shipping costs.  Please contact Anrael if you are interested in getting a signed copy of the limited first edition.
Posted in Poetry | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Innocent of Pain

Posted on January 12, 2012 by Anrael

A very difficult part of our process is the recognition of how much pain we are in and how much we resist the pain we have or ever getting hurt again.  Our inner contraction away, our not paying attention to when we’re hurt, our lack of recognition of the amount of pain we cause ourselves on a daily basis keeps us in a pain field, or in as Ekhart Tolle puts it, in the “pain body.”

How we tend to ourselves, how we attend our experience has a lot to do with healing the ruptures of our pain, ceasing to cause ourselves pain, and discovering life that can be fully naked vulnerable and open to the experience of pain in a way that transforms pain.  During my years in hospice work, pain of all kinds was the primary focus of our work: physical, emotional, social, relational, psychological, mental and spiritual pain all get addressed, met with compassion, understanding, and treatment.  What does it take to die in peace?  What unmet unaddressed pain of past and present forecast into tomorrow needs finally to be gently met with loving kindness so we can let go, RIP: rest in peace?  How can this help those of us living everyday?

always shining glory

To relax and rest, and even bask in and as our radiant natural perfection is the endpoint of spiritual endeavors.  The ultimate non-doing of pure Being is our resting place our refuge our home and the source of our aliveness, activity and presence.  “Abide as Such” Ramana would say.  We discover that our True Nature, our innermost Being is innocent of pain. We being to understand that all experiences of pain return here and are embraced and absorbed until no memory of them exist at any level of our system.  This allows the inner relaxation in which this innocence is found to be who we are in Truth.

What You Resist

Resistance is painful.  When we allow ourselves to experience our resistance we discover its divisiveness which causes us pain.  We begin to recognize subtleties of the many ways we say “no” to our experiences of all forms, even our saying “yes” is a no to something.  Then we begin to see how “what you resist persists” works.  We hold whatever “it” is to be real and true by saying a persistent no to it which then keeps it going.  To find non-participation and freedom from this dilemma and our habituated reflexive reactions, we have to be subtly consciously present and willing to experience everything.  This is extremely difficult to do if we have been abused, traumatized, hurt, abandoned, rejected, betrayed, exiled.  It takes strength and courage to unravel the ways we are bound up in our pain.

The Wisdom of No Escape

Most of us turn to spirituality as a way to escape pain and suffering.  We want an end to it, and we can have lovely spiritual experiences that are pain free spiritual highs.  Then we get back to our daily life and here it is again.  Before long, that spiritual experience fades and we are sad and disappointed that here again we are suffering.  While beautiful spiritual experiences are helpful, our work is integrating This that is forever innocent of pain into our daily living.  It takes an instant and lifetimes, practice, devotion and determination every day, every moment.  It is the mature aspirant who discovers it’s time to call off the search and nakedly vulnerably be here in the moment, in experience as is and Meet ourselves in the living Heart of Truth, even when it seems utterly impossible.

Our Way to Innocence

Liberation Work, bringing what is ignorant, occluded and in pain to the Light of the pure Heart of Being is our way to innocence.  We need the support of those also in the LightHearted way to remind us to be present, aware and to open in deeper to the soft underbelly.  Our vulnerability is such a gift which allows us to be receptive to our Essence, the healing balm of our Presence, the embrace that receives everything back with open arms.  We discover how to relax in the midst of our instinctual fear-based reactions into allowing rather than resist by fighting, running away or grasping and holding on for dear life.

We find the means to allow us to enter in to our experience.  The skillful means of presencing and inquiry, of being supporting by the True Friend in those who can hold space and help us find the space within to allow the naturalness of our nature to unfold. We notice the warp and woof of experience without judgment, condemnation or agenda to change it.  In allowing it to be what it is, it reveals itself and what is needed.  We simply want to know what is real, whence it comes, what it consists of because we simply want to understand the workings of our system, of our being, to know ourselves in Truth. We recognize that by trying to turn ourselves into something different, into some idea and ideal of how we think we’re, they’re or it’s  supposed to be for whatever reason we do a violence to ourselves, others, our experience–one that adds to our suffering and pain.  To realize that who we are has no difficulty with any experience and to live as such comes from being real, telling the truth, being in our experience purely, nakedly, vulnerably, openly, non-separate.  Here innocence is restored; pain is allowed and met in non-interference non-resistance but letting be, what our system has been longing for forever, formations return to the formless including the formation of pain.   Gangaji says, “When you know how to suffer it isn’t suffering.”

Settle in, hunker down in to the moment and discover, right here and now, what is being experienced.  Simply notice and allow within the direct experience of being simply aware exactly where you are as you are right now, let be and see.

You can share your experience in the comment section.  Contact Anrael for support in direct experience, liberation work, and companionship of the True Friend.

Posted in Practices | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Without Words

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Anrael

“Our liberation work together is meant to develop and cultivate the direct experience of our True Nature in everyday life experience.  When we learn to meet our experience directly, without words, we uncover what is real and essential.”  ~Anrael

“It is not always necessary to think words.  Words often keep me from acting in a fully intuitive way.  Fears, indecision, and frustration feed on words.  Without words, they usually stop.  When I am trying to figure out how to relate to someone, if I will stop thinking words, and listen to the situation, and just be open, I find I act in a more appropriate, more spontaneous, often original, sometimes more courageous way.  Words are good at times for looking back, but they are confining when I need to act in the present.”  ~Hugh Prather

Such a lovely opening occurs when we come to a place in which thinking is optional, when we actually recognize it is not necessary to think or use words to live and function well—that in fact thinking, using words and naming things often interferes incredibly in our living spiritual experience, with our relationships, with our creativity.  (What a funny thing to write about with words in a blog!!!)

Direct Experience

Last evening during a private meeting, moving into and exploring experience, the movement into the direct experience of the moment occurred: no thought, no resistance, no words, pure sensation and awareness together as one.  The experience shifted into “stillness…the absence of anything.”  The formation disappeared and pure Being as the absence of things, concepts, of anything at all was being directly experienced!

To allow our consciousness to directly experience what is in the moment without interference or resistance, without thoughts, words or action to change is what I call presencing.  Presencing, or to presence is non-action involving focalized awareness in the moment.  It gives us the most intimate sense of being in contact with ourselves, touching in deeply.  It gives a sensibility of being genuine, authentic and okay.

In this intimate sense of contact and communion, the formation and structure, the anatomy of the experience becomes clear: sensation, thought, feeling, and reactivity.  Patterns of learned behaviors that are mental, emotional, physical, karmic, inherited, acquired and absorbed from the environment, conditioned, genetically encoded, cellular and remembered generate our suffering and pleasure, our aversion and grasping behaviors.  Layers of conditioning are penetrated through inquiry that arises naturally and spontaneously when we are one in our experience letting be as is.  Inquiry can take the form of wordless wondering and exploration, sensing and feeling into experience.  No worded questions are necessary, though they can help sometimes.  When we learn to remain in the experience penetrating all the way through to the source, we may discover wonders of limitlessness.

Pure Expression


To be the way, truth and life we cultivate a way of being that is in aligned accord with the functioning of our true nature.  The Wings of Freedom:  Presence and Inquiry are the skillful means by which we relax back into the naturalness of our Being, which naturally liberates and thereby is free to function easily through us.  Then we are the pure expression of Truth Alive, the fulfillment of our potential.

So we begin with the simplicity of being right where we are, noticing the details of our experience, including the constant stream of words, and how they define, limit, interfere, cause distress, and we may simply opt to stop all that mental activity that is focused on mental content.  We find that we can let it all just be or fall away while we look deeper than the shallows of thinking.  This allows our attention to open into the direct experience of the moment and our inherent loving intelligence to act, spontaneously and freely, simply and effortlessly, appropriately, originally and even surprisingly.

Try it out!  It’s fun! This is a LightHearted Way of Being and living.

 

Please feel free 😉 to write your wordless experiment in the comment section.  As always, if you would like support in this work, please contact Anrael.

Posted in Practices | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A Question of Aliveness

Posted on January 7, 2012 by Anrael

Why are we here?  What is the purpose of our existing?  What is the meaning of life?  How can these questions support our everyday living?

For the most part, we don’t have these questions as a part of our lives, and yet we are living the answers and don’t know it or realize the consequences.  We live out of the conditioned mind that has accepted and agreed with the answers found by those who’ve come before us.  What if those answers aren’t correct?  What if those answers limit us to the possibilities known by those who’ve just passed them along and don’t know for themselves?

The Wisdom of Not Knowing

A large part of inquiry is not knowing the answer.  The best scientific investigations involve not knowing.  The scientists are discovering for themselves what is real and true, if a hypothesis is correct or not, provable, can be replicated.  When we approach our spiritual liberation work from this perspective, we open the door to greater possibility and already we are more alive, curious, interested, engaged, involved, and open.  We, our own mind, heart, body and soul become the laboratory of our living experiment.  We become more excited, a flame begins to burn within—a living flame of Truth becomes lit with a deep interest in discovering for ourselves what is real and true.

As we begin to question, we will uncover many of the underlying assumptions that are a part of our make up and that actually drive and direct a lot of our activity.  Ideas like, “We are here to: survive, and to do that we have to earn a living;  find love, get married and raise a family; get enlightened and leave the mortal coil behind; live a good and decent life so the afterlife will be better; to be able to have, do and get what is wanted when it is wanted, “ and so forth.  We seldom question these basic ideas and assumptions unless conditions and circumstances bring us to wonder.

Why not wonder now?  Do we believe these are true?  How are they working out for us?  Do they bring a sense of happiness or satisfaction?  Are we here to be happy and satisfied?

Most people don’t allow themselves to radically not know the answers.  Most people are deeply afraid that if they let go of these assumptions and their consequent limitations that give a sense of false security they won’t survive.  As a result, as Thoreau put it, most people “lead lives of quiet desperation.”  The misery in the world is the result.

To discover why we are here, we have to be where we are right here and now, in the not knowing realization of this moment’s—this unique never before never again moment’s experience.  When we really don’t know, when we give away every reason we think we know, the answer can make itself evident in the moment.

For example, we might recognize that we are at work and on the job because we have to be here for x,y,z reasons.  If we sincerely look to see why we think we are there, and genuinely not know that is true, what happens then?

What if our thinking we know something limits all possibility of freshness, of aliveness? We may discover how much resistance we have to being where we are because of what we think we know about it. “I am here visiting my pain-in-the-neck relative because it’s my duty, it makes me a good person and I am earning my wings.”  Really?

When we begin genuinely to wonder why we are where we are, what really causes us to do what we are doing, we can uncover all sorts of content that we don’t really resonate with when we actually feel our way into it.  We can also recognize our body’s tension, usually a chronic state of tension.  The body emulates consciousness inclusive of unconsciously held beliefs and our dissatisfaction with them.

If people get this far, and few do, they frequently don’t know what to do.  They latch onto yet someone else’s belief; find a place to belong where there’s a better set of assumptions offered.  Nothing wrong with that, yet still, sometimes quite literally, buying into what someone else has discovered for themselves.

The Primary Question

What if the primary question of aliveness is an open question?  What if we are to continually fuel and fan the flame of Truth Alive by being in the discovery moment to moment?  What if not knowing is a radically alive way of being?  Might that be fun and exciting? What if even when the task of the moment is dull and boring, if we question in the midst of doing the task, “why am I here?”  “What do I really believe?” “What if it isn’t true?”  “Why in the entire world am I manifesting here in this moment in this place in this activity?”  If we can stay with it and penetrate down through layers of reasons, beliefs, ideas, assumptions to the place where we actually, radically don’t know at all, we might just find out—for this unique moment, anyway.

Part of the key is to stay in the questioning process until all reasonable, known answers are recognized and further questioned—what if that’s not the real reason?  We find many answers that we think are true, some of which we like, some of which we don’t, all good in the process of radical Self-inquiry.

To come authentically to the Heart of radical aliveness, we have to wonder, what if there is no reason?  What if we can NOT really know?  What if it truly is a matter of discovery?  What can I discover in not knowing why, for instance, I answer the phone right now?  What if I even think I know who is calling and why, what if I truly stop knowing that and step into the moment not having a clue, being innocently sagely clueless, fully consciously present, alive, discovering?  Great masters are very like young children in this respect, spontaneous and free in the moment.  Papaji – Innocence of a trusting Child

In any moment, like right now for instance, we can question and discover, be present and wonder, not as a matter of idle curiosity, but really deeply sincerely interested.  What can we discover right here and now reading this?  The answers just might blow you away!  Please take a moment to leave your discovery in the space provided below.

Posted in Practices | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment