Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice's Notes
Below the bustle
of our coming and going,
beneath even
the rich topsoil that feeds us,
lies a heart of rock.
Hot and fluid
at its core
the bedrock firms under us
with the seeming constancy
of granite, appearing
here and there
in soaring cliffs, in open rock,
cut by stream beds
or simply lying, like a floor
at the bottom of a hole
we labor to dig.
Deep rock supports all our land-forms,
underlying them with a slow-moving
ancient stability
on which life
can rise and fall.
The rock appears to us
in the high places of the mountains,
but it also holds the oceans
as if in the cup of a huge ancient hand,
with a steadiness that allows
the pull of the moon
to move the tides, to and fro.
This ancient rock
spanning millions of years
spanning galaxies also
lives a broader life-span
within which our human lives
are a flicker in a broad expanse,
within which stars are born and burn out,
planets cool, life arises and passes,
in the same way
that morning passes here,
bringing afternoon.
The bedrock lets me know my place
in the larger scheme of things.
My human life is a flash
in a broad interplay of life and time,
insignificant when seen separately
yet held inseparably
within the greater life
animating the whole.
The bedrock speaks
in a language without words
that feels familiar,
that beckons, no, welcomes me
back to the sanity
of something quieter and more steady
that I had nearly forgotten.
It is an open invitation
to relax into an expanded perspective
that includes me in something grand,
beyond the breadth of galaxies.
Something vibrantly alive, and close,
Something right here,
in the center of this human life.
© 2008 Alice Gardner
Somehow a point has been passed where now everything going on in this wild world of ours just makes me want to laugh heartily at the extremity of it all.
What else is there to do?
I know that is not a reasonable argument to make for laughter, but seriously, what are our alternatives? Shall we rush out and stabilize the economy? Shall we all send our cars to the junkyard to stop global warming? Are you laughing yet?
We are not talking about nervous laughter here, based on fear of catastrophe. We are talking about the possibility of right-from-the-belly enjoyment of our predicament, our inability to make things "right" and the break-up of all of our pat answers and predicable outcomes.
Are you objecting that perhaps we could make some headway on things such as the loss of the glaciers or the rate of extinctions if we got deadly serious and tried harder? An good argument can be made that we really must take more of the right actions to set things right in the world, if we can just figure out what they are.
It is worth noticing however, that even when we are laughing, we can still do those things that are within our power to accomplish. Can't we? The most arduous tasks are lightened by laughter and playfulness. Enjoyment of our predicament in no way hampers our ability to take appropriate action when we do see what our own contribution can be.
The bottom line: are we all going to die? Yup. There is truly no escaping it. We all end up there sooner or later anyway, so lets take the journey in good spirits and enjoy the ride. What a ride it is!! People just love to go to scary movies or maybe to go to the amusement park and ride the roller coaster. This is just the real-life variety! Enjoy it fully--we are on the ride of our lives!
Sunlight touching treetops,
Birds awakening…
Morning rises after night
With a constancy and grace.
While politics swirl
Conflicts rage, economies teeter,
Hurricanes roar,
Morning dawns over all
Without apology or praise
But with simple welcoming
Of all that is lit
By its presence.
What kind of love
Embraces this wild world
With such a welcome?
What love is this, that
Contains such
Darkness and strife
When the world
Refuses to conform
To our demands for
Outer peace,
And then wraps us
In such wonder
And grace?
Fear, war, starvation,
And so much else
Are included in the
Grace of morning light
On a darkened world.
In the light’s first
Touch of a leaf
There is something that
Embraces all of what we are
And includes us
In the full circle
Of life as it is.
We see that we are
Something whole
And seamless,
And perfect.
The heart of each morning
Offers with outstretched hands,
An expansion, a release
Out off our self-made prisons
Into a world ruled by a love
That excludes nothing,
A love we can trust,
A love at peace
With all things.
Even this, and this, and
Especially and
Whole-heartedly
This.
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by Alice Gardner © 2008
As we look around at the world we live in, conflict appears to be a problem. As soon as there is a preceived shortage of anything there is conflict over ownership, and there is conflict over who is right and who is wrong on any given subject. We can just look at the US political activities of the moment and see all the speech-makers wanting to be able to claim rightness, and have the people who have different opinions be in the wrong. This is a basic human ego insistence, this need to be right which makes others wrong in order to validate itself.
Most of us aren’t actively at war, but conflict enters our lives in subtle ways: in our relationships, our families, with our neighbors, with people holding different beliefs and different political persuasions. We may even be striving for a world without conflict, but our way of achieving our lofty goal may come out as a new conflict with people who aren’t behaving peacefully.
The thought structures that lead to conflict are always characterized by our thinking we are right and another is wrong. We then feel more solidly and definitely identified with our newly-strengthened egos. This is the process by which we generate outward actions to fix our world, or rather to make it conform to our ideas about how it “should” be.
Yet we must pause a moment here, and see if the world is not already perfect just the way it is as a set-up for awakening, including the conflict that it embraces so plentifully.
Could conflict actually have a role to play in our awakening?
Conflict is the outward manifestation of the kind of thinking we have spoken about above. The colliding of things that are different does not naturally create conflict (aka disharmony or hostility) any more than the meeting of the waves with the rocks on a rocky coastline. The waves are not claiming that the rocks are wrong to be so solid, and the rocks don’t criticize the water for its fluidity. They simply meet in a tumultuous splash and subside, creating a transitional environment at their edges that is exciting, compelling and full of life. Tumult always holds the possibility of some injury, but our rocky shores are not scenes of carnage– they teem with life.
The arising of the kind of thinking that begets conflict is a moment where each of us get a glimpse of the starting-point for the troublesome aspects of our conflicted world. By seeing how we cause conflict by the way we think ourselves to be “right” and reinforce this by making make outer enemies who are wrong, we can begin to step free of this pattern of thinking. This is a very individual journey for each of us to make because our egos are all so different. We are each, of course, also free to go back to our old repeating patterns of addressing conflict outwardly, but this direction is more and more clearly offering us the detrimental results which are evident on the world stage.
As we look around at the world we live in, conflict appears to be a problem. As soon as there is a preceived shortage of anything there is conflict over ownership, and there is conflict over who is right and who is wrong on any given subject. We can just look at the US political activities of the moment and see all the speech-makers wanting to be able to claim rightness, and have the people who have different opinions be in the wrong. This is a basic human ego insistence, this need to be right which makes others wrong in order to validate itself.
Most of us aren’t actively at war, but conflict enters our lives in subtle ways: in our relationships, our families, with our neighbors, with people holding different beliefs and different political persuasions. We may even be striving for a world without conflict, but our way of achieving our lofty goal may come out as a new conflict with people who aren’t behaving peacefully.
The thought structures that lead to conflict are always characterized by our thinking we are right and another is wrong. We then feel more solidly and definitely identified with our newly-strengthened egos. This is the process by which we generate outward actions to fix our world, or rather to make it conform to our ideas about how it “should” be.
Yet we must pause a moment here, and see if the world is not already perfect just the way it is as a set-up for awakening, including the conflict that it embraces so plentifully.
Could conflict actually have a role to play in our awakening?
Conflict is the outward manifestation of the kind of thinking we have spoken about above. The colliding of things that are different does not naturally create conflict (aka disharmony or hostility) any more than the meeting of the waves with the rocks on a rocky coastline. The waves are not claiming that the rocks are wrong to be so solid, and the rocks don’t criticize the water for its fluidity. They simply meet in a tumultuous splash and subside, creating a transitional environment at their edges that is exciting, compelling and full of life. Tumult always holds the possibility of some injury, but our rocky shores are not scenes of carnage– they teem with life.
The arising of the kind of thinking that begets conflict is a moment where each of us get a glimpse of the starting-point for the troublesome aspects of our conflicted world. By seeing how we cause conflict by the way we think ourselves to be “right” and reinforce this by making make outer enemies who are wrong, we can begin to step free of this pattern of thinking. This is a very individual journey for each of us to make because our egos are all so different. We are each, of course, also free to go back to our old repeating patterns of addressing conflict outwardly, but this direction is more and more clearly offering us the detrimental results which are evident on the world stage.
What is this moment like if we stop assuming that it needs improving? What if we just stopped trying to make it be different than it already is? This would mean not having an agenda about what it is supposed to be like or NOT supposed to be like. What if we finally let go of thinking we knew how it should be, as opposed to how it already is?
We can notice in any moment that, outside of all the measuring, comparing and efforting behaviors of mind we habitually listen to, there is something else. It is like another world out there beyond mind. Out beyond our mentally mediated version of the world, there is something real and substantial. It is the actual world as it is–a world vibrantly alive with stillness and motion embracing each other–a world doing the one-step dance of just being what it is.
This world is inviting us to dance with it, and we find we know the step. All it takes is not interfering. Not thinking we already know what is in front of us, or what should be happening instead. Not even trying to be more spiritually right. That is just another overlay. We simply accept every thought, feeling or circumstance as perfect, inviting it all to the table, so to speak. It can then show itself to us fully, and as we feel ourselves falling into its blessed embrace, we realize we have been embraced all along.
What is this moment like if we stop assuming that it needs improving? What if we just stopped trying to make it be different than it already is? This would mean not having an agenda about what it is supposed to be like or NOT supposed to be like. What if we finally let go of thinking we knew how it should be, as opposed to how it already is?
We can notice in any moment that, outside of all the measuring, comparing and efforting behaviors of mind we habitually listen to, there is something else. It is like another world out there beyond mind. Out beyond our mentally mediated version of the world, there is something real and substantial. It is the actual world as it is–a world vibrantly alive with stillness and motion embracing each other–a world doing the one-step dance of just being what it is.
This world is inviting us to dance with it, and we find we know the step. All it takes is not interfering. Not thinking we already know what is in front of us, or what should be happening instead. Not even trying to be more spiritually right. That is just another overlay. We simply accept every thought, feeling or circumstance as perfect, inviting it all to the table, so to speak. It can then show itself to us fully, and as we feel ourselves falling into its blessed embrace, we realize we have been embraced all along.
Its amazing all the wonderful videos that are available online nowadays!
For instance: To click this link to check out what is posted on YouTube for Adyashanti–www.youtube.com To get to that page, I just went to YouTube and searched Adya’s name. Try searching for all of your favorite teachers. Or search “Puppetji” for some irreverent laughs over all this non-dual spiritual talk. Try also going to www.viddler.com and video.google.com for more and more. Try a series called “Never Not Here” by Richard Miller. He’s even got Alice Gardner up there. 
Its amazing all the wonderful videos that are available online nowadays!
For instance: To click this link to check out what is posted on YouTube for Adyashanti–www.youtube.com To get to that page, I just went to YouTube and searched Adya’s name. Try searching for all of your favorite teachers. Or search “Puppetji” for some irreverent laughs over all this non-dual spiritual talk. Try also going to www.viddler.com and video.google.com for more and more. Try a series called “Never Not Here” by Richard Miller. He’s even got Alice Gardner up there.
Being where we are. We’ve all heard that “being where we are” is where we need to be. But do you see the joke in that? Here we are, trying to get somewhere again!!
Being here fully gets translated by mind into a being something to work towards. Somewhere new to get to at some point in the future after lots of hard work, discipline and time, lots of time! Are you laughing yet? It’s funny, and it makes us feel crazy, but its really just mind doing what minds do. That’s all. Mind is so good at figuring out how to do things, and its just trying to do this too, but it can’t. As soon as we realize it can’t, we are free to just smile at its efforts and relax. All is well. Mind is doing its thing and it doesn’t matter. No need to pay overmuch attention to it.
Meanwhile Here we Are! Here we are in this moment with whatever is going on inwardly and outwardly. There is nowhere else we could ever have possibly been except as we allow ourselves to listen overmuch to the stream of thinking. Our minds may be saying to us right at this moment that “this can’t be it” because this moment is totally mundane, empty, boring, painful or… (fill in the blank for yourself). Mind can always come up with reasons why this particular moment can’t be what is being referred to, because it can’t find anything special there. Nothing. (Are you laughing yet?)
Meanwhile, smiling and relaxing we fall into a reality that mind doesn’t even notice. Its kind of like falling asleep at night–we have to relax for it to happen.
Our thinking minds have everything boxed and labeled and categorized according to past knowledge, and our own structure of understanding whatever is encountered. And those capabilities are so very useful to us for practical things. But what the logical left-brain thought-stream doesn’t even notice is anything that is outside of its structures for understanding the world–and that very definitely includes Reality with a capital R. Not because thought is wrong or bad, but because it is constrained within self-constructed bounds and can’t see beyond that. It is blind to whatever doesn’t fit its own structures (at least not until those structures are broadened enormously). So for now it tries to shrink everything to make it fit its constructs. But in contemplating what is really going on in life, thought has run into something much bigger than its constructs, something that contains mind and everything else within it. It has come to the edge of its ability to be helpful and will, when its good and ready, relax and allow us to fall into this new territory. To fall awake.
When we run into a fabulous sunset or an unusually beautiful flower, our mind’s processes of naming it, talking about it, and so on, can detract from our seeing and appreciating it fully. It is the same with the present moment. Relaxing into being exactly where we are, we begin to notice what is here (including thinking and a LOT else), and that this has been here all along. Its just like a new door of perception has opened. We now see where we were blind before.
We stand in a new territory beyond the previously held paradigm that our mind provided us, telling us how life worked, who was to blame, and so on. We have reconnected with something familiar, something we never really left. Something that we have, over all the years we thought we were separate, never left for a second.
As we look around we begin to see how it all is working. Now everything that is happening, even including our own seemingly idiotic or unenlightened episodes are perfect setups for continued awakening into a fuller and fuller embrace of being this that we truly are. Slowly we relax our incessant argument with life, and trust our circumstances, even our thoughts and feelings, as being perfect as they are, even as they flow and change. We offer ourselves, including our thinking minds and their amazing capabilities in service to this perfect alive presence we now can see and that is also who we are.