So I spent a decade on livejournal but it appears to be critically endangered species so it makes sense to choose an alternate forum. When I returned from my big six-month backpacking trip, I found my processes were more internally focused and I wasn't getting what I used to out of writing so I simply stopped writing. It's been seven months since I returned form my 'Awesome Asian Adventure' and I am starting to feel the urge to think and dialogue with others in a more deep and coherent way then can happen in our ADHD facebook twitter universe.
I haven't decided what I am going to write about yet.. it may be a hodge podge of politics, health, religion, psychology, and omphalokepsis. In short, not too different from prior years writing. I am hoping to spend more time writing coherent articles then I have in the past. Though I enjoy my thought trail windy curly writing explorations, I feel I can better express myself sometimes by being more pointed, direct, and succinct. These two voices will need to battle it out on this blog so that it represents my interior world as accurately as possible. But why start with all that totally edited refined posting now? hahahaha Of course a blog can't really represent my interior world and if it could, I don't know if I would be inviting anyone over for tea.
I do, however, have a beautiful ivory castle that I created for myself when I was just a child. It has a thousand rooms and its only accessible by a mystical boat. In it are all sorts of wonders and horrors and secret places. But it's not quite the place to have tea with new friends. It's surrounded by mist and I doubt you could find it. :: smiles :: Instead, I am inviting you to step into my new world here. In the crazy world of becoming, I have shifted so much these last two years that I have at times felt at odds with my past and know that I've grown apart from many of my closest and more dear friends. In the crazy world of being, I am simply me..Veleda..the same Veleda that has always existed and always will. Despite being me, my entire universe has shifted these last two years and I expect this pace of change to continue for quite awhile. I look different, my lifestyle is different, my interests have broadened, and just generally I manifest in the world with a different presence.
Sometimes I feel alien to myself. You shoot for the moon and sometimes you land there and realize it looks different than you envisioned when you saw it in the telescope. My life in many ways is much more boring than it was a few years ago. Part of the beauty of having a clear path is you don't have to debate which direction to go all the time. Oh..there are eddies and cross-currents and little side trips galore but I pretty much in any given moment know what I am doing and where my compass is pointing. (This too shall pass I am sure.) I don't have to know the ultimate location, I simply have to check my compass all the time to know that I am walking the right direction. The rest is trust, surrender, and mystery. NOW is the place where Will meets Love, where Intention meets Surrender, where Geburah meets Chesed. It is only in our present that we can manifest True Will.
The Book of the Law states "Pure will unassuaged of purpose delivered from lust of result, is every way perfect." To me "lust of result" implies not being in the present. I find the greastest freedom of movement arises when I am willing to let the chips fall where the will and simply pursue my Great Work in the moment. This lack of attachment allows me to see more clearly and rapidly adjust my course as needed regardless of how fast I am moving. Trusting that as long as I am doing this, though my path may be rocky or smooth, things will ultimately work out. This tension between Intention and Surrender IS where IT is at. My grandma always says, "Trust God, Tether your camel" and grandma is always right. Do what is necessary in the moment to further your Will and leave it at that.
There is another part of me that looks at this writing and says what a crock of bullshit, you are the Queen of long-range plans Veleda. Get off your soapbox! And well she has a point. Four years ago I said - I want to be more artistic, I want to be more political, I want to be more calm, I want to change my career, I want to lose weight, I want to know how to keep my house clean and pay my bills on time....I want ..I want.. I had an idea of who I wanted to be, a glimpse of a future of me that I yearned to manifest in the NOW. I started thinking of all these desires and wondered why I had had so many for so long that were not moving forward. I wanted Enlightenment NOW goddamit..not in another decade. So I was like well, if i was enlightened NOW, its not as if my entire life would magickally poof and everything wouuld be perfect. But what would change if I was already enlightened? How would I move in the world differently? And so I began this plan to 'fake it till I made it', to live the life of an illuminated being until my life and I were fully illumined. I thought if I could just take it day by day and simply try to express my deep self however it currently exists in my head..and remain open for my view of that to change on a dime..I wouldn't go too far off course..
If the truest expression of my being is to go to law school, then each day I move that forward as far as I can AND if one day I wake up and I no longer feel its 'me', well I take a few days and focus on the many other things that do feel like "me" and test it again and if it still doesn't feel right, maybe I focus completely on these other things and return again in a longer time and then if it still isn't right then maybe I don't return to it. What I found was that a lot of things fell away and some things because extra stickty.. but still.. we live in a material world and I am a material girl.. but not quite like the Madonna song. :: wink :: We live on the Earth and in our Bodies and ignoring this fact has caused us much damage as a species. Our universe is boundaried by time and space and we are also bounded by our cognitive processes, genetics, environment, and physical health.
Living the life of an illumined being requires accepting this fundamental fact.
Acceptance of this fact is what seperates adults from children.
This is not to say that we can't push the edges, but until we're light beings there are some physical laws and social requirements we must follow to continue to exist and there are limitations due to these laws.
An old and dear friend of mine Michael Sanborn introduced me to this concept called "Waking Down in Mutuality" back in 2001. I pretty much assimilated it immediately and prefer it as a whole to the concept of 'enlightenment'. Now I never attended a meeting by this group so can't speak to them at all but, conceptually it simply works. The general theory is that the entire rhetoric around enlightenment is completely off-base and promotes hierarchical and disconnected views of spiritual attainment. Instead of waking up what we really need to do is 'wake down' as in recognize that we live in a contextual, inter-dependent, physical, boundaried, and social universe and that whatever system of 'attainment' we choose to follow should do so within this broader understanding. You can go ahead and read up on them if you wish but the general idea is the..there are a lot of good gems in what they do like "Waking Down in Mutuality is democratic, warmly humane, pragmatic, experiential, and "sticky." We are human beings living on planet Earth with other human beings and TONS of other other beings and other life. Whatever solutions we have are going to come through working together in mutuality and that is the first thing we need to wake up/down to. This is the root upon which all things are built from. Thinking of 'enlightenment' in this way removes the bad 'ego' form the picture.
There are lots of limitations that keep us from living life as an illumined being so I had to wrap my head around some of these things to figure out how to get around them. Things like external events, time, resources, predispositions, etc. I think I will take each one in turn and talk about it in a post..
NEXT POST TEASER..
Problem: the world is a harsh mistress and constantly throwing curveballs, heartache, and insanity at ones foot.
Solution: Be a Honey Badger or as Epictectus puts it "Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions"
I haven't decided what I am going to write about yet.. it may be a hodge podge of politics, health, religion, psychology, and omphalokepsis. In short, not too different from prior years writing. I am hoping to spend more time writing coherent articles then I have in the past. Though I enjoy my thought trail windy curly writing explorations, I feel I can better express myself sometimes by being more pointed, direct, and succinct. These two voices will need to battle it out on this blog so that it represents my interior world as accurately as possible. But why start with all that totally edited refined posting now? hahahaha Of course a blog can't really represent my interior world and if it could, I don't know if I would be inviting anyone over for tea.
I do, however, have a beautiful ivory castle that I created for myself when I was just a child. It has a thousand rooms and its only accessible by a mystical boat. In it are all sorts of wonders and horrors and secret places. But it's not quite the place to have tea with new friends. It's surrounded by mist and I doubt you could find it. :: smiles :: Instead, I am inviting you to step into my new world here. In the crazy world of becoming, I have shifted so much these last two years that I have at times felt at odds with my past and know that I've grown apart from many of my closest and more dear friends. In the crazy world of being, I am simply me..Veleda..the same Veleda that has always existed and always will. Despite being me, my entire universe has shifted these last two years and I expect this pace of change to continue for quite awhile. I look different, my lifestyle is different, my interests have broadened, and just generally I manifest in the world with a different presence.
Sometimes I feel alien to myself. You shoot for the moon and sometimes you land there and realize it looks different than you envisioned when you saw it in the telescope. My life in many ways is much more boring than it was a few years ago. Part of the beauty of having a clear path is you don't have to debate which direction to go all the time. Oh..there are eddies and cross-currents and little side trips galore but I pretty much in any given moment know what I am doing and where my compass is pointing. (This too shall pass I am sure.) I don't have to know the ultimate location, I simply have to check my compass all the time to know that I am walking the right direction. The rest is trust, surrender, and mystery. NOW is the place where Will meets Love, where Intention meets Surrender, where Geburah meets Chesed. It is only in our present that we can manifest True Will.
The Book of the Law states "Pure will unassuaged of purpose delivered from lust of result, is every way perfect." To me "lust of result" implies not being in the present. I find the greastest freedom of movement arises when I am willing to let the chips fall where the will and simply pursue my Great Work in the moment. This lack of attachment allows me to see more clearly and rapidly adjust my course as needed regardless of how fast I am moving. Trusting that as long as I am doing this, though my path may be rocky or smooth, things will ultimately work out. This tension between Intention and Surrender IS where IT is at. My grandma always says, "Trust God, Tether your camel" and grandma is always right. Do what is necessary in the moment to further your Will and leave it at that.
There is another part of me that looks at this writing and says what a crock of bullshit, you are the Queen of long-range plans Veleda. Get off your soapbox! And well she has a point. Four years ago I said - I want to be more artistic, I want to be more political, I want to be more calm, I want to change my career, I want to lose weight, I want to know how to keep my house clean and pay my bills on time....I want ..I want.. I had an idea of who I wanted to be, a glimpse of a future of me that I yearned to manifest in the NOW. I started thinking of all these desires and wondered why I had had so many for so long that were not moving forward. I wanted Enlightenment NOW goddamit..not in another decade. So I was like well, if i was enlightened NOW, its not as if my entire life would magickally poof and everything wouuld be perfect. But what would change if I was already enlightened? How would I move in the world differently? And so I began this plan to 'fake it till I made it', to live the life of an illuminated being until my life and I were fully illumined. I thought if I could just take it day by day and simply try to express my deep self however it currently exists in my head..and remain open for my view of that to change on a dime..I wouldn't go too far off course..
If the truest expression of my being is to go to law school, then each day I move that forward as far as I can AND if one day I wake up and I no longer feel its 'me', well I take a few days and focus on the many other things that do feel like "me" and test it again and if it still doesn't feel right, maybe I focus completely on these other things and return again in a longer time and then if it still isn't right then maybe I don't return to it. What I found was that a lot of things fell away and some things because extra stickty.. but still.. we live in a material world and I am a material girl.. but not quite like the Madonna song. :: wink :: We live on the Earth and in our Bodies and ignoring this fact has caused us much damage as a species. Our universe is boundaried by time and space and we are also bounded by our cognitive processes, genetics, environment, and physical health.
Living the life of an illumined being requires accepting this fundamental fact.
Acceptance of this fact is what seperates adults from children.
This is not to say that we can't push the edges, but until we're light beings there are some physical laws and social requirements we must follow to continue to exist and there are limitations due to these laws.
An old and dear friend of mine Michael Sanborn introduced me to this concept called "Waking Down in Mutuality" back in 2001. I pretty much assimilated it immediately and prefer it as a whole to the concept of 'enlightenment'. Now I never attended a meeting by this group so can't speak to them at all but, conceptually it simply works. The general theory is that the entire rhetoric around enlightenment is completely off-base and promotes hierarchical and disconnected views of spiritual attainment. Instead of waking up what we really need to do is 'wake down' as in recognize that we live in a contextual, inter-dependent, physical, boundaried, and social universe and that whatever system of 'attainment' we choose to follow should do so within this broader understanding. You can go ahead and read up on them if you wish but the general idea is the..there are a lot of good gems in what they do like "Waking Down in Mutuality is democratic, warmly humane, pragmatic, experiential, and "sticky." We are human beings living on planet Earth with other human beings and TONS of other other beings and other life. Whatever solutions we have are going to come through working together in mutuality and that is the first thing we need to wake up/down to. This is the root upon which all things are built from. Thinking of 'enlightenment' in this way removes the bad 'ego' form the picture.
There are lots of limitations that keep us from living life as an illumined being so I had to wrap my head around some of these things to figure out how to get around them. Things like external events, time, resources, predispositions, etc. I think I will take each one in turn and talk about it in a post..
NEXT POST TEASER..
Problem: the world is a harsh mistress and constantly throwing curveballs, heartache, and insanity at ones foot.
Solution: Be a Honey Badger or as Epictectus puts it "Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions"
