midday reflection (letter)

"You're right, sometimes we need support and compassion, feeling that someone is close, connected, if not through words but with a physical grip, a subtle closeness, but who will want of someone like me, filled with those ideas, philosophy and opinions, i don't see an escape either, so i must continue to learn about my own strength, even if isolated and drifting far from the common expectations, the common life, the common love, which people gather around, the wind is blowing, the rain is falling, it is dark out of my window this afternoon, the glass to my landscape is broken and the plants are torn and unrooted, i must go on, but you're right, sometimes i'd like someone to soothe my loneliness in the most simple and sincere fashion.
If i go far enough maybe i'll go over that, i can't dwell on that thought or i'll waste the momentum of the present, it starts with one step, but somewhat i hope it will be toward that right one, and not leading me astray in a fog of blankness and emotionless void."

Surrender in personal relationships

(Very long extract, Wow, i almost wrote an entire chapter here, eh eh, for me it's very relevant!)

" What about people who want to use me, manipulate me or control me? Am i to surrender to them?

They are cut off from Being, so they unconsciously attempt to get energy and power from you. It is true that only an unconscious person will try to use or manipulate others, but it is equally true that only an unconscious person can be used and manipulated. If you resist or fight unconscious behavior in others, you become unconscious yourself. But surrender doesn't mean that you allow yourself to be used by unconscious people. Not at all. It is perfectly possible to say "no" firmly and clearly to a person or to walk away from a situation and be in a state of complete inner nonresistance at the same time. When you say "no" to a person or a situation, let it come not from reaction but from insight, from a clear realization of what is right or not right for you at that moment. Let it be a nonreactive "no", a high-quality "no", a "no" that is free of all negativity and so creates no further suffering.

 I am in a situation at work that is unpleasant. I have tried to surrender to it, but i find it impossible. A lot of resistance keeps coming up.

If you cannot surrender, take action immediately : Speak up or do something to bring about a change in the situation _ or remove yourself from it. Take responsibility for your life. Do not pollute your beautiful, radiant inner Being nor the Earth with negativity. Do not give unhappiness in any form whatsoever a dwelling place inside you.

If you cannot take action, for example if you are in prison, then you have two choices left : resistance or surrender. Bondage or inner freedom from external conditions. Suffering or inner peace.

 Is non resistance also to be practiced in the external conduct of our lives, such as nonresistance to violence, or is it something that just concerns our inner life?

You only need to be concerned with the inner aspect. That is primary. Of course, that will also transform the conduct of your outer life, your relationships, and so on.

Your relationships will be changed profoundly by surrender. If you can never accept what is, by implication you will not be able to accept anybody the way they are. You will judge, criticize, label, or attempt to change people. Furthermore, if you continuously make the Now into a means to an end in the future, you will also make every person you encounter or relate with into a means to an end. The relationship _ the human being _ is then of secondary importance to you, or of no importance at all. What you can get out of the relationship is primary _ be it material gain, a sense of power, physical pleasure, or some form of ego gratification.

Let me illustrate how surrender can work in relationships. When you become involved in an argument or some conflict situation, perhaps with a partner or someone close to you, start by observing how defensive you become as your own position is attacked, or feel the force of your own aggression as you attack the other person's position. Observe the attachment to your views and opinions. Feel the mental-emotional energy behind your need to be right and make the other person wrong. That's the energy of the egoic mind. You make it conscious by acknowledging it, by feeling it as fully as possible. Then one day, in the middle of an argument, you will suddenly realize that you have a choice, and you may decide to drop your own reaction _ just to see what happens. You surrender. I don't mean dropping the reaction just verbally by saying, "Okay, you are right", whith a look on your face that says, "I am above all this childish unconsciousness." That's just displacing the resistance to another level, with the egoic mind still in charge, claiming superiority. I am speaking of letting go of the entire mental-emotional energy fiedlg inside you that was fighting for power.

The ego is cunning, so you have to be very alert, very present, and totally honest with yourself to see whether you have truly relinquished your identification with a mental position and so freed yourself from your mind. If you suddenly feel very light, clear, and deeply at peace, that is an unmistakable sign that you have truly surrendered. Then observe what happens to the other person's mental position as you no longer energize it through resistance. When identification with mental position is out of the way, true communication begins.

The ego believes that in your resistance lies your strength, whereas in truth resistance cuts you off from Being, the only place of true power. Resistance is weakness and fear masquerading as strenght. What the ego sees as weakness is your Being in its purity, innoncence, and power. What it sees as strength is weakness. So the ego exists in a continuous resistance-mode and plays counterfeit roles to cover up your "weakness", which in truth is your power.

Until there is surrender, unconscious role-playing constitutes a large part of human interaction. In surrender, you no longer need ego defenses and false masks. You become very simple, very real. "That's dangerous", says the ego. "You'll get hurt. you'll become vulnerable." What the ego doeans' know, of course, is that only through the letting go of resistance, through becoming "vulnerable," can you discover your true and essential invulnerability."

The Power of Now

"Remember that your perception of the world is a reflection of your state of consciousness. You aren't separate from it, and there is no objective world out there. Every moment, your consciousness creates the world that you inhabit. One of the greatest insights that has come out of modern physics is that of the unity between the observer and the observed : the person conducting the experiment _ the observing consciousness _ cannot be separated from the observed phenomena, to behave differently. If you believe, on a deep level, in separation and the struggle for survival, then you see that belief reflected all around you and your perceptions are governed by fear. You inhabit a world of death and of bodies fighting, killing, and devouring each other.

Nothing is what it seems to be. The world that you create and see through the egoic mind may seem a very imperfect place, even a vale of tears. But whatever you perceive is only a kind of symbol, like an image in a dream. It is how your consciousness interprets and interacts with the molecular energy dance of the universe. This energy is the raw material of so-called physical reality. You see it in terms of bodies and birth and death, or as a struggle for survival. An infinite number of completely different interpretations, completely different worlds, is possible and, in fact, exists _ all depending on the perceiving consciousness. Every being is a focal point of consciousness, and every such focal point creates its own world, although all those worlds are interconnected. There is a human world, an ant world, a dolphin world, and so on. There are countless beings whose consciousness frequency is so different from yours that you are probably unaware of their existence, as they are of yours. Highly conscious beings who are aware of their connectedness with the Source and with each other would inhabit a world that to you would appear as a heavenly realm _ and yet all worlds are ultimately one."

The Power of Now

The Nature of Compassion

"Having gone beyond the mind-made opposites (good and bad, like and dislike), you become like a deep lake. The outer situation of your life and whatever happens there is the surface of the lake. Sometimes calm, sometimes windy and rough, according to the cycles and seasons. Deep down, however, the lake is always undisturbed. You are the whole lake, not just the surface, and you are in touch with your own depth, which remains absolutely still. You don't resist change by mentally clinging to any situation. Your inner peace does not depend on it. You abide in Being _ unchanging, timeless, deathless _ and you are no longer dependent for fulfillment or happiness on the outer world of constantly fluctuating forms. You can enjoy them, play with them, create new forms, appreciate the beauty of it all. But there will be no need to attach yourself to any of it.

When you become this detached, does it not mean that you also become remote from other human beings?

On the contrary. As long as you are unaware of Being, the reality of other humans will elude you, because you have not found your own. Your mind will like or dislike their form, which is not just their body but includes their mind as well. True relationship becomes possible only when there is an awareness of Being. Coming from Being, you will perceive another person's body and mind as just a screen, as it were, behind which you can feel their true reality, as you feel yours. So, when confronted with someone else's suffering or unconscious behavior, you stay present and in touch with Being and are thus able to look beyond the form and feel the other person's radiant and pure Being through your own. At the level of Being, all suffering is recognized as an illusion. Suffering is due to identification with form. Miracles of healing sometimes occur through this realization, by awakening Being-consciousness in others _ if they are ready."

The Power of Now

The Hunger of the Tiger excerpt, rough translation, (original text down below)

The hind abandonning herself to the bellow in the night of a spring of Chambord ignores the consequences of the satisfaction of her desires, as is the male covering her. The cats fighting for a she-cat in a public square and keeping a thousand Parisians from sleeping ignore that the move of the victor will generate kittens. The flower of the bindweed doesn't know that it will become seed. The bindweed doesn't know why it is blooming.

It seems _ it seems : we can't be sure of anything regarding animal consciousness and we are even more ignorant about vegetable psychism _ it seems mankind is the one amongst living things to make a connection of cause and consequences between the sexual act and childbirth. Some australian tribes, it is said, haven't still got the relation. As for the humans supposedly civilized who know perfectly well that sex is the instrument of reproduction, they are nontheless conditionned in a way that they generally forget the purpose and plainly let themselves drive by the mean, that is by the desire, as is the cat in the square or the stag of Chambord.

("La biche qui s'offre au dix-cors dans la nuit d'un printemps de Chambord ignore les conséquences de la satisfaction de son désir, comme l'ignore le mâle qui la couvre. Les chats qui se battent pour une chatte dans un square et empêchent mille Parisiens de dormir ignorent que le geste du vainqueur se traduira par des chatons. La fleur du liseron ne sait pas qu'elle deviendra graine. Le liseron ne sait pas pourquoi il fleurit."

"Il semble - il semble : nous ne pouvons être sûrs de rien en ce qui concerne la conscience animale et nous sommes encore plus ignorants du psychisme végétal - il semble que l'homme soit le seul parmi les vivants à établir une relation de cause à effet entre l'acte sexuel et l'enfantement. Certaines tribus australiennes n'ont même pas encore, paraît-il, fait le rapprochement. Quant aux hommes dits civilisés qui savent pertinemment que le sexe est l'instrument de la reproduction, ils sont cependant conditionnés de telle façon qu'ils oublient en général le but et se laissent tout bonnement tirer par le moyen, c'est-à-dire par le désir, tout comme le chat du square ou le cerf de Chambord.")

La Faim du Tigre

Using and Relinquishing Negativity

"Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning and destruction of nature and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the  collective human psyche. No other life-form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life-form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it. Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or a stressed oak tree? Have you come across a depressed dolphin, a frog that has a problem with self esteem, a cat that cannot relax, or a bird that carries hatred and resentment? The only animals that may occasionally experience something akin to negativity or show signs of neurotic behavior are those that live in close contact with humans and so link into the human mind and its insanity."

"Somebody says something to you that is rude or designed to hurt. Instead of going into unconscious reaction and negativity, such as attack, defense, or withdrawal, you let it pass right through you. Offer no resistance. It is as if there is nobody there to get hurt anymore. That is forgiveness. In this way, you become invulnerable. You can still tell that person that his or her behavior is unacceptable, if that is what you choose to do. But that person no longer has the power to control your inner state. You are then in your power _ not in someone else's, nor are you run by your mind. Whether it is a car alarm, a rude person, a flood, an earthquake, or the loss of all your possessions, the resistance mechanism is the same."

The Power of Now

Produit de la transformation de la cellule initiale et de l'activité de milliards de cellules usines, l'homme ne peut à aucun moment et d'aucune façon intervenir pour diriger leur travail. Il est leur résultat, non leur maître. Il les maltraite, les empoisonne, les asphyxie, les mutile. Elles font face, tant qu'elles peuvent. Quand la mort survient pour l'individu et pour elles, quand la matière vivante se défait et retourne aux éléments, une de ces cellules, ou deux, ou plusieurs parmi des milliards, s'est détachée de l'individu et a transmis la vie et les ordres. La forme de vie que lui et ses semblables sont chargés d'assurer continue. L'individu a servi à cela. Il a servi à maintenir, pour sa part infime, l'énorme courant qui entraîne, parmi tant d'autres, son espèce dans le temps et l'espace.
Né d'une goutte de vie qui porte des ordres, il doit porter plus loin l'une et les autres et faire, quand vient le moment, se détacher de lui des essaims de cellules messagères dont l'une ou deux ou plusieurs porteront plus loin que lui les ordres par lesquels il a vécu et qui lui survivront.
Déterminé par les constituants, emporté par ce qu'il constitue, impuissant à se diriger, ignorant de sa direction, l'être humain n'a qu'une apparence de vie autonome. Son existence individuelle est une supercherie.

La Faim du Tigre.