silent aware spirit = love

(from my journal, written yesterday)

love is an annihilation. the reality of actual love, the stark truth of it, is absolutely destroying. it will empty out every last drop of you; it will cast you aside into hellfire for the very embrace of itself. it is merciless, it is pitiless, and it will never answer a question on the subject. not one. it loves too deeply for that illusion. it loves too deeply for you to bear, and it will kill you in the process.

love will take all that you thought you were and laugh, asking for still more. it will use you to its own ends and you will be left chasing your tail in doubt if you question for one moment why.

there will be wounds ripped into you which will never heal and they will be the most beauty you have ever known, the most tenderly you have ever been treated.

love will play tricks because you try to meet it with your mind, and you will be looking love right in the face screaming "where? where?" and silently it will smile. you are loved anyway, despite your ignorance.

there is nothing which is not precious to the truth of love, not one thing outside its eternal gaze. it cannot be hoarded, or practiced for, and will remain forever outside of time and space.

love is in constant, silent contemplation of itself and knows no boundary called "inside" or "outside" for it sees itself absolutely everywhere and nowhere in particular. if you try to localize or locate love it will bruise you with illusions of its absence.

you will be loved so much you will be shown you are no lesser than the most brilliant of sunrises, and that you are no greater than the most horrific of men, or the smallest of fleas.

there is nothing which love will balk at ripping from your hands by which to show you it is closer than your very flesh. it is only by love's sweet grace that you will be swept aside and shown your eyes are not your own.

with every attempt to get to a place called love you ignore the truth, that love is all you are of and in, and still you pray, using love itself as a stepladder to ascend nowhere else but here.

you may know love for a moment, and then not know later, and yet you are loved through it all. there is infinite space for you to forget the simplest things because they cannot be learned. you may try to teach yourself meditations or write yourself reminders, but love is too intimate for that, and is only ever the heartbeat of now, and now, and now...

* * * * *

i wrote this journal entry yesterday, when for a moment it became clear to me that which is most obvious is that which is true. for some time now i've been rationalizing and intellectualizing this whole dismantling, using my mind as some kind of scope tool, trying to boil down the immensity of the love into a coherant concept that the mind would accept. even actively knowing that this truth cannot be known in the mind, and saying that, and living that way, the mind still does its dance and convinces itself that this truth can be known. even if only known in a way that would perhaps "blast" the mind into some submission, it is believed somewhere inside that the truth can be held there. but it can't. not ever.

there is the truth of this love, this divinity/spirit/self/god/buddha whatever you want to call it. for me, for now, it wants to be discovered as love, perhaps because that is what is most holy to me. and not holy in a way that i ever would have imagined, and not in the hallmark sticky/goopy/ego love kind of fashion. but love, as i know it to be, has been the beautiful, fierce grace in my life that has levelled me again and again as she shows her face of truth. love has driven my falseness from my hands again and again, and moved through the spaces of me over and over until there is little left but space. love, for me, is the same as truth. and i am blessed to see that, if only for a moment.

even writing these words, looking over the journal entry from yesterday, shows itself to be false. the love turns into a concept and the mind scrambles to make it fit properly. i see it happening, but still keep typing.... for whom? any reminders i set for myself will eventually have to be kicked down for the prisons they are to become. but for now, reminders... because that which is most obvious has proven itself to be the most interesting trickery between this human experience of mind/heart/existing.

love has shown itself over and over again to be that ongoing, never-not-here reality that fits the qualifiers of truth as i am capable of knowing it to be. it is not a thing, it is an ongoing current, and can only be touched for an instant in the process of living it. it cannot be defined, localized, held, or qualified. it simply IS. and more and more over the years i have known myself to be that.

the mind tries to shut down, for several reasons. the mind tries to deny the self-love aspect of love's infinate gaze at itself. for the love to be experienced as truth, it shows there is no difference between inside and outside. there is no "love for the world" and "love for the self" in different pouches. that brilliant fascination with itself that gets experienced in this bodymind is quickly co-opted by the bodymind and claimed to be egoic, as if the fascination was with some character named angela. it isn't. obviously. my gut/heart and all that is true here knows that. but the story goes on and on, in the mind:

it's not okay to be the truth, to be the love, because it feels too good. and feeling that good is bad. and you're not worth that love because you want it. if you were more pure somehow, you wouldn't get involved in the whole mess. etc etc etc.

the love's fascination with itself is without boundaries, and it sees itself everywhere, in the people, plants, animals, inanimate objects, and yes, in this bodymind. it doesn't have any drawing lines. not one. it is the oneness, it is eternal, and it is only the mind that says otherwise.

i am typing, and right now i don't "feel" blissed out, or particularly loving even. my brain is brimming with squirmy desires to move away from the moment, to go look elsewhere, to find a better buzz. yet if for a moment the grace comes, and the obviousness of the truth is recognized, the love is apparently going on and on. it only seems to know itself in motion. the silent contemplation where the "i" wants to stare at it in awe, in wonder at having access to it, is simply ego-destroying. it can't do so. every movement to want to own or claim this love is a movement to close the apperature, to basically shut the love off from awareness. of course, it acts anyway, despite my intentions. it has been doing so for years, moving me into caring work, compassionate action, and fearless relationship with truth while speaking to other human beings. it does that which "i" am incapable of doing, being selfless.

so for now, it is only a brief recognition, and simple thoughts on the subject. i will pray for the grace to keep seeing that boundary-less space between self and other dissolving. and i will also pray for the grace to see through the thoughts of self that are ugly enough to try to deny this truth in favor of the story of "i'm not good enough".... because that energetic up-movement, and down-movement, which has always been the truth of me, has shown itself again and again to be as much "inner" as "outer" and i sense right now that there is no difference.

to let it be, to simply let it be what it is, is the way love operates. and for that, i am grateful.

"only" by nine inch nails

i'm becoming less defiend as days go by
fading away
well you might say
i'm losing my focus
kinda drifting in the abstract in terms of how i see myself

sometimes i think i can see right through myself
sometimes i think i can see right through myself

less concerned about fitting into the world
your world that is
'cause it doesn't really matter anymore
no it doesn't really matter anymore
none of this really matters anymore

yes i am alone
but then again i always was
as far back as i can tell
i think maybe its because you were never really real
to begin with
i just made you up to hurt myself

i just made you up to hurt myself
i just made you up to hurt myself

and it worked, yes it did

there is no you
there is only me
there is no you
there is only me
there is no fucking you
there is only me
there is no fucking you
there is only me

only
only
only
only

well the tiniest little dot caught my eye
and it turned out to be a scab
and i had this funny feeling
like i just knew its something bad
i just couldn't leave it alone
i kept picking at the scab
it was a doorway trying to seal itself shut
but i climbed through

now i am somewhere i am not supposed to be
and i can see things i know i really shouldnt see
and now i know why, oh now, now i know why
things aren't as pretty
on the inside



(thank you trent reznor, once again, for summing it all up so beautifully....)

what is surrender?

through all this last year there's been a few teachers who have blessed my life by helping me to peer into dark crevices and see that i was hiding. the mind is tricky, it does all sorts of sneaky things, while informing me that it's not, in fact, being sneaky at all, and around the things i've read it seems particularly guilty.

there comes a point where the teachers and teachings are their own kind of prison cells. i find my mind on the lookout for how and where to see the things the teachers talked about - somehow ignoring the obviousness of the whole "finger pointing at the moon" that i really am aware of.

it's insanity, actually, when i watch really closely how the mind works. i can be saying out one corner of my mouth that i really know that no belief is true, and i can grok that deep in my gut, and then the other side of the mouth is trying to ingest as much stuffing as it can to bolster up the very "belief that no beliefs are true"..... it all goes along like the most insane mirror-room in the funhouse i ever could dream up.

surrender isn't a thing i can achieve, and then all becomes well. that may be a lie that the mind tells, it tries to jump on that boat all the time, but if i roll along with the mental idea of surrender, it will quickly take a genuine moment of abandon to the will of the universe and turn it into an experience, and then spend it's days conceptualizing and chasing after that thing called surrender. angela doesn't do surrender, really. surrender is almost like an exhaustion, the grace of trust and just stopping the argument with what is going on.

my mind likes to argue over and over again that "this can't be it" that the way i feel right now, this very moment of life, isn't right somehow, that there's a place out there somewhere called perfection that is going to be achieved somehow. and even working with the kind of teachers and teachings that say the very opposite of that - the mind is So Damn Good at taking those very words and mixing it all into a step-by-step program of what can be *done* to get to the place called *no argument with what is*....

for me, when i hit the days of exhaustion and surrender, the reality that i don't know anything, really, don't know a single thing, it's painful. it makes me cry, not in a wailing bemoaning kind of a sense, but in this really small child woundedness, just simple tears rolling from my eyes and a quiver in the lower lip. it's like a pouting somehow. and yet, at the same time, the effortlessness, the grace that opens up, allows fresh air into this horrid claustrophobic cell.

it's been interesting during the demolition, that the times when i have to face the starkness of not knowing that it has happened in layers. i've had four major events of i don't know so far, and each one has led me into an even deeper kind of i don't know. from the personal stories, to the philosophy, to the social structure, to the quantum level of reality.... it's come over and over again as the mind tries to graps these increasingly complex ideas that it eventually just beats its head against the wall enought that it gets knocked unconscious.

the last event happened on friday, after days and weeks struggling with the sort of 'nature of reality' questions. contemplating existence of myself and the world, what teachers mean when they say emptiness, what they're talking about when they say that they look at a thing (like a table for example) and know the table as themself. i was turned into a gigantic fucking knot trying to figure that shit out. because my gut doesn't seem to have any questions about this stuff - death and existence and all that. it's pretty cool with the experience of life as is. it doesn't say that a table isn't "me" or that it is. it just goes about its business. but the brain wants to push into being a vision where there is an understanding of emptiness, or where it's visually obvious that a table is the same as me.

and i went around and around so thick and fierce and fast that i wound up on friday sobbing in my bed all afternoon under the covers begging for a moment of silence. i would have given myself a lobotomy for just a second of peace. and then i took a shower because i was nearly shaking out of my skin, and under the warm water i just was like, fuck it. i give up. i can't do this anymore.

and during that giving up it became clear to me that there are teachings that have been grasped so tightly to cause that mad seeking. jed mckenna who i think is so amazingly rad, talks about going after the ego like this mad ahab after the whale, and somehow i got caught up in doing what he said, or thinking that was the "method" for finding the truth, that i forgot entirely that he also said "think for yourself and figure out what's true".... like all good teachers, inherant in the discussion of the truth is a paradox because language is dualistic. and the mind will pick and choose according to it's plan to keep itself moving around, and assign meaning wherever it senses it will continue to get fed and thusly stay alive.

i realized i have to abandon all the words that anyone is saying, or has ever said, about any of this, and go be alone and sit with myself and just be. which is why i also have to take a retreat from my friends whom i talk to about this stuff, because i get caught up in what i am saying about any of it and then the ideas grow cement shoes and in the course of one conversation i have "become" something with some perspective and some idea.

and all i know, really, is that i don't know anything. and trying to know stuff overloads my system and fries me. i already have enough energy moving through my body to feel like 10000 volts in a 500 watt system. i can't do it anymore.

and when i see how afraid i am of giving up, or giving in, and how the mind tries to argue that if i don't keep fighting i will never get 'there' i want to just laugh out loud. yeah. there. where? if it's that afraid of me giving up and not chasing around each of it's little silvery idea turds, then let it do whatever it's going to do.

it tries to tell me that every little pinprick of energy i feel in my forehead (of which there are many these days) is going to be the 'one' that blasts open my system and along comes the enlightenment. it tries to tell me that if i can just hold onto one of the jolt-awareness-centering type moments that have been happening since march, then it will all unfurl into awakening. it tries to tell me lots of stuff.

but i'm too tired and i'm going to let it just run around in circles in the corner over there, and do whatever it's going to do. it's obviously taken too many drugs in it's life and is significantly damaged in it's view of things. i love it, and have compassion for it's insanity, but i'm just too goddamn tired to deal with it.

so the fear of not becoming, the fear of the reality of i don't know (seriously - i don't even know if time is happening or if the doorknob exists, i don't know if i'm here or who is typing these words or listening to the buckethead colma album right now.... ) the fear of whatever may come if i give up.... whatever.

if the universe wants me to be a shell shocked wanderer, then fine. i give up. thy will be done.

the gratitude for the simplicity of things permeates my system and i feel full somehow, and oddly joyful. and then i remember i can't believe in that either. it is what it is, and it's no more true than anything else.

but surrender? it happens again now, and now, and now. it is never finished.

what exactly is going on here?

years ago, driving up from new orleans with my mother, it was the middle of the night and i was behind the wheel. we were having a more or less honest dialogue for the first time maybe in our whole lives during that year, and on that particular drive i worked up the courage to ask her why exactly she'd always seemed to dislike me. she said "because you're never satisfied" and went on to explain that nothing had ever been enough with me, nothing had ever made me happy. i'm in a space right now where very few of the stories from my past hold any emotional charge for me, and many of them seem to have been almost wiped from my memory, lingering maybe like ghosts in the corners somewhere. that story still remains pretty focused in my mind, the details are clear as daylight, and it almost makes me shiver because it speaks to something that holds a clarity and a charge like no other: the truth.

the thought that i have never in my life been satisfied is an interesting one. at that time it made me really sad, because i couldn't argue with it. by that point i'd already done some serious work on myself, i thought, and had surrendered the kinds of demented hysteria, violent rage and pain that had pushed me around for most of my life, childhood, teenage years and my early twenties. by that point i'd learned to lean into what hurt me or made me afraid because it could bring about emotional resolution. i'd committed myself to "personal growth" and had a vague idea of a perfected being i could become if i was courageous enough, and dedicated enough. i had traded in outdated behaviors of anger, chaos, constant irritation and lies for kindness,equanimity, composure and honesty. i tried to live well by the standards of taking care of life on earth. i had even gone so far by that point to really disentangle myself from the chains of society by pretty much dropping out. i owned virtually nothing, was capable of finding food and shelter as a homeless traveller, and had spent weeks at a time in the woods. i felt like i'd done a ton of work to deconstruct all these demons that had plagued me in my young life....

and yet...

and yet...

and yet...

i could be sitting quietly in the woods, looking around at beauty, having no responsibility, no demands on my person or time, no job, no debt, no social or relationship drama to deal with... i could be sewing or reading or anything, hanging out with other people who were dedicated to the same take-care-of-life or personal-growth philosophy.... and there was always, still, that dissatisfaction. that creeping, nagging sense of something that was not quite right.

i wondered about it occasionally, because even as i would be experiencing completely blissed out states, dancing in ecstasy, heart exploding in ferverent prayer or gratitude, or living weeks and months at a time in peace, constantly thankful for my life and happy as can be...

it was always there. the inability to complete the lie, to give into it entirely, to lose myself in it.

there was always a sense that something didn't add up. and so all the seemingly "good" things would end. and i'd be back to moments of this crystal clarity that came with the starkness. it wasn't exactly a depression, per se, although there was sadness that the bliss or goodness never seemed to last. it was a kind of a glaringly obvious starkness that held a feeling i couldn't argue with. i simply could not argue with that sense, because it seemed to be mocking all that i thought i was, all that i wanted to become, and it held something that all the emotional or psychological or spiritual states didn't seem to have: the utter obviousness of the truth.

i can only weave this whole thing together in retrospect, and although i didn't know it at the time, the seeking for the more perfected angela was wearing itself down. there is a lot of energy in this body, and a lot of passion and get-out-of-my-fucking-way kind of gusto. if anyone was changing as a person, i certainly was (as anyone who knew me in my teenage years and then later in my twenties can attest. i went from being a terror to be around to being everyone's spiritual friend. whatever that means.)...

i never thought of any of this at the time with the term "truth" or any of that. it was happening, and all i could muster was the clarity to take note.

sometime in 2006 i read a book by jed mckenna called "spiritually incorrect enlightenment" which for the first time in my life introduced me to the idea that maybe i don't exist. that there maybe isn't a self inside anywhere and there is no perfection to be had for that non-existant, only living in the imagination idea of angela.

i was fucking floored. shocked to death. bloodless, stark, cold, cruel, horrified. i wanted to throw the book across the field of the perfect organic farm i was living and working on in california, to beat to death the awesome well-meaning hippie types who were my fellow workers, to drown it in the ocean that was walking distance from where i lived, to hurl it across the entire swath of the 'awake' northern california landscape that i was surrounded by.....

but there it was. that familiar knowing. that gut level thing that was a kind of a knowing that can't be explained or reasoned with because it exists fully outside of the so-called rational mind.

the author was telling the truth. (or as close as words can come when it turns out that no words can contain the truth.)

and i couldn't argue. it was clear to me that the thing he was pointing to with his words was the same thing that had haunted me year after year of my life: i was living a lie. and i knew it. and for the three days and nights i was haunted by this book, i sensed the cost of digging into what all of that would mean in my life. and sensing that cost, i balked.

i returned the book to the library, left the farm, got involved in some personal drama trying to save my ex husband from an addiction, got involved in more drama around my relationship with my parents, got involved in more intensity and drama by going to new orleans to work katrina-related jobs, got involved in more personal growth projects as i returned back to my spiritual college in colorado, got involved in a real identity-forming situation as i committed myself to working to "wake up" the human race from the dream of separation and thusly save the people and the planet from destruction.....

and yet....

and yet...

and yet...

it never left me, the sense that i'd begun to unravel a lifelong sense of dissatisfaction, a lifelong lie, and i'd turned my back on it. i'd seen the price of truth and just run for the hills. i'd finally begun to have a sense of what an answer would look like to this aching, burning, awful lifelong question that i'd always had and not even known words for.... and i'd just burried my head in the sand.

or had i?

last year in the fall i was blessed to run into a friendship with a challenging person who was uninterested in meeting ego to ego, and was self-contained enough to be able to be friends, and yet be unattached to human drama. and every action from this person was an affront to my sense of self. and beautifully, wonderfully, at the same time, jed mckenna's book came across the shelves of the library i was working at and i picked it up again. i ordered his two other books and read them all in short order. and something inside became fatally wounded, and died.

over the next four months i tried to ignore it through various ego posturing, through self destructive behaviors, through lying to myself, through trying to date and meet ego to ego with people.... but something really key was missing and it just didn't work. as much as i tried still to escape, and tried to flare up the belief that there was something inside that could be perfected, that there was somewhere to go to, that there was some thing i could do, that there was a way to escape this dread.... nothing worked, and my personality became deeply unstable. i couldn't concentrate, couldn't do much of anything.

one day i was sitting at my desk, so overwhelmed with the intensity of the feeling that i was literally beating my head against the wall saying "i have to know i have to know i have to know" and shortly after that another collapsing took place, or a knowing, and it fundamentally changed my entire life in a way that i can never ignore again.

what i saw that day in early march was that truth exists. it was clear, unmistakable, and known in a way that cannot be unknown.

finally seeing that truth exists was like coming to life from a dead place, and finally made my entire life make sense. i knew without a doubt that i was/am a lie, and further, it became clear that i don't even really exist in the way i had thought i existed.

anyway. that's where the ability to talk about it ends for me. it's just important that i get into words the sense i am having of this thing always pulling, always driving this life, always leading the path and never letting up for a second. i gave up fighting against the obviousness of it all, and am surrendered to whatever may be - come hell or high water i am going with this because it's the only thing in the whole of 33 years that has made one iota of sense.

there is truth and i will die to be with it.

surrendering angela

the autolysis (self digestion) has been going on for some time now, but there is this compulsion to write it in a venue where it can be shared. because what's going on doesn't make sense even to me without the ability to write it down, step back, and give it a good look over.

there's a lot of empty space where all this "stuff" used to be. stuff i thought i was, stuff i wanted to be, stuff in the form of pains and pleasures, stuff in the form of memories. stuff in the form of angela.

i'm not certain there's a whole lot of point to writing about how it came to be this way, but i'm sure that will compell me at some point.

for now, it's enough to say this:

everything that i thought i was is an illusion. for something to be true, it has to have always been true, and always will be true. anything impermanent, then, is not true. and that's pretty much all we see, do, think, feel and are. what, then, is the truth? if i can't even think about it, if none of the things that i think are true and it's all really a "finger pointing at the moon" then what exactly is the moon?

that's what surrendering angela means. letting go of all the cluching and grasping that stands between this illusion and that which is true.

and it's not as if i have a choice. i never really did. this is rolling, the fire is burning, and there's no going back.

and even when i'm bleeding and the pain is fierce, i wouldn't have it any other way.