Excerpt taken from the April 2021 Diving Deep 5 day retreat talking about the dawning recognition of non doership and the implications of this, the place for different spiritual teachings and practices, yet the transcendence of them too, and the bliss of tasting and accepting all textures, all experiences of life.
Life is such and unbelievable gift, how often do you stop and smell the roses? Appreciate the little simple ordinary moments? Without reference to the past or thoughts to the future.
We miss the beauty of the moment so easily. Ordinary life has become so throwaway, so undesirable. Instead marked with the next glamorous instagram shot, the next big ‘experience’, the next enviable goal. Next next next. We miss the sheer joy of this extraordinary, but divinely ordinary moment.
Whether that moment be filled with anger, joy, sadness or bliss it doesn’t matter. Just the fact we are alive, that we bear witness to all of this. Oh the magnificence that (more…)
This is not the bliss of happiness; the fleeting bliss of phenomenal experience, that shows up when nothing is rocking the boat, the bliss that’s dependent on the content of life being wonderful. It’s something deeper, something more fundamental, something ever-present. It’s like an immovable mountain; the very ground you walk on. It’s peaceful beyond the word peaceful. It’s the very fabric of you.
I didn’t notice it much until now; there have been plentiful moments of the kind of happiness bliss that we all know about, both since this realization and throughout my whole life. But this…I’ve had hints of it, I’ve sensed its unceasing presence; it’s completely without words that can describe it. The nearest thing I know to say is to use the word bliss, but it feels far more primordial than that word can grasp.
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After so many years of the word Enlightenment being banded around by spiritual gurus, new age folk and self-help aficionados, I find myself feeling that the word is just seen as another concept that’s predicated on a ton of other concepts about life. It’s an idea that keeps hold of the mind’s interest in working towards the idea of a state of happiness, bliss, no suffering and the ‘perfect life’. On this level it feels like one big ruse, a massive cosmic joke that everyone is aiming towards, but there’s nothing when you get there; in fact there’s no thing and no there to ‘get’!! (more…)