Dear Friend,
You know that feeling when you can’t quite get your eyes to focus?
Tired eyes.
I was late to sleep and early to rise, talking with a friend who came over to visit. We sat in the garden under the not quite full moon. His daughter has earned a generous scholarship to a school that she’ll start in September. He showed me the pictures, and a promotional video. You’d wish for every school to be funded with such resources. More than the funding, the holistic ethos.
That’s the surprising thing about some of the fee paying schools I’ve come across, not all of them, but some are very progressive in their pedagogy.
How strange to live at a time where so much wealth is created yet governments underfund care and education. Infrastructure left to crumble. As if quality of life is something one must be deserving of.
The idea has become so ubiquitous and pernicious that many of us have internalised a sense of not deserving, or of not being enough. In this culture, at this time with all of our rushing about, many people are coming to realise that chasing the physical, the material as a means of happiness is incomplete. Put it another way, a purely materialistic world view doesn’t do it anymore. If we search for happiness in things, we feel like we need more stuff. We become fearful that our ability to get more, or keep what we have will run out on us.
It’s not just about the stuff, it’s about the people who feel like they don’t matter, that there’s no place for them where they belong.
Our culture has become fear based.
It’s media blast us with worry, unease, insinuating foreboding and imminent disaster. I don’t even look at news sources, they pop up when I’m online. Sometimes people talk to me about them. The message gets through to be on guard. Even if you are safe right now, sometime that could all change! Pay attention, don’t look away, don’t relax.
How can you relax when so much is at stake?
News features rarely give the viewer enough context to understand the issue, which contributes to the fear and keeps you coming back for more. More eyeballs, more influence, more income.
It’s important deliberately and intentionally to climb up out of the streams of fear and rest on the banks. To be informed yes, but not to be overwhelmed.
To become aware that there is a river of thoughts and words and images, is not about ignoring them.
To become aware is the opposite of ignoring.
Rather to give conscious attention to the river of content in one’s own mind without than falling into the mind, half drowned, gasping for breaths of air.
Better to rest a while on the river bank and notice what is going on inside of you and your reactions to this stream of mental activity.
Noticing opens up a a tiny gap. You notice that you are an entity and the thoughts are something else. They are emerging from an intelligence. You are that intelligence, the witnessing consciousness.
You are in a body, but the body is not you.
You’re waking into your soul identity.
A favourite of mine is to listen to the birds and watch the steam from a mug of tea unfurl. That’s a meditation. There are many other forms of meditation. Don’t imagine you have to put it off until you can be seated and in a quiet place.
It’s great to do that, but however you take a moment for contemplation and reflection is going to be better than none at all.
We need moments of stillness.
The world won’t give them. We have to claim them.
It’s integral to well being to step back and observe the content of our minds.
The peace we are seeking is inside us.
How crazy is that!
It’s been here all along.
We’ve carried it with us.
Through lifetimes.
But we couldn’t see.
Now as we open our inner vision we see.
You could call this inner vision your third eye.
“If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light”
Light and consciousness being interchangeable terms.
You.
The light of the world.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey
I love your writing, Mike, but I could not disagree more strongly about your statement that your body is not you. I think that dualist conception is at the root of the unimaginably vast disconnect ‘western’ humans live with. For me, the way that even our language works, where we are only able to say “my body”, as though there is a ‘me’ that is separate to ‘my body’ is a kind of violence. A kind of separatism that makes space for really terrible, widespread, care-less consequences that are fundamentally about disconnection, imbalance, an unholistic, wholly fabricated, schism. I AM my body. I don’t even want the distance that pronoun creates. I am one, whole, organism. All my parts are in this body. I have a truly astonishing array of features that make me unbelievably sensitive to my environment and to other physical beings, organic and inorganic. I think that the over-privileging of consciousness has caused the othering and separation and suffering of innumerable organisms I consider to be my kin. I feel deeply grounded in my organic reality.