Perspective, Perception & Interpretation - Ted Chiang

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous 
grammar.  Every physical event was an utterance that could be
parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other
teleological, both valid, neither one disqualified no matter how
much context was available.

It's like the famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an
elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or
a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on  her chest.  There is
no "correct" interpretation; both are equally valid.

But you can't see them both at the same time.

Ted Chiang
Stories of Your Life and Others

with thanks to Whiskey River

for photo too :)

~

We each have unique stories, perspectives, perceptions,
 and frameworks of interpretation of Reality.
 I celebrate our diversity - our unique waves/expressions on
the Greater Ocean of Being...

MM

 

The Swan and The Frog - Dennis Holtje

Photo by Robert Woeger on Unsplash

There once was a beautiful white swan that came from the great
ocean to the North.  After being in the South for the winter, it
was ready for the return journey home.  So it took off and with
its big wing span and shining white feathers, it soared effortlessly
through the blue sky.  After a long while, and far along the journey,
the swan began to tire and came down to land for a rest.  It landed
right on the edge of a water well and let out a deep sigh.

In the bottom of this well there lived a frog.  The frog said, "Well,
who are you and where do you come from?"

"I am a swan, and my home is on the water of the great northern
ocean," answered the swan.

"Ocean?  How big is this ocean? asked the frog.

"Very big," said Swan.

"Is it this big?" Frog asked, taking two hops backward.

"No, much bigger," said Swan.

So the frog took five huge hops backward, saying,
"Is the ocean this big?"

Swan said, "No, it's much bigger than that."

And so the frog went around the entire well - his whole
reality, as he knew it - and asked the swan, "Now, is the ocean
as big as this?"  And the swan said, "No, it's much bigger,
much bigger!"

Thereupon the frog said, "Well, you're a fool and a liar!"
because he knew there could be nothing bigger than
 his world and his well.

Dennis Holtje
From: Light to Sound

 

 

Quantum Strangeness - Fred LaMotte

Here's another secret of quantum strangeness from the annals
of the quark.  All events, as to their quiddity, are equally
significant.

The daring leap of a tree frog from the spigot of your garden
hose, to her sanctuary in a pot of begonias, is as important as
the birth of a new political party, or an earthquake in Brooklyn.

The universe is not just as you see it, but as the frog sees it.
Your attention magnifies a breath of August breeze into a
hurricane; but for the frog, all human catastrophes are as
weightless clouds in a distant sky.  They pass soundlessly
overhead.

Why do you assume that your chief concern should be mine?
The liberal wants to convince me, the conservative wants to
convert me.  Neither allows me to create myself.  But that is
one task I can do better than anyone else.  Let me follow the
wondrous river of my own interest over all its rocks, through
the rough waters of responsibility and consequence, and I will
learn my lesson much better than you can teach me.

A Greek philosopher said, 'Be kind: everyone you meet is
fighting a great battle.'  A Jewish carpenter said, 'Judge not,
lest ye be judged.'  Here's another piece of advice: if you want
to see radical transformation in humanity, stop trying to change
each other.

Have you ever walked the labyrinth?  One who seems closest
to the goal may suddenly find their way veering far off.  When
two pilgrims pass, they don't know who is nearing the center,
and who is drifting further from it.  Compassion is precisely
this not knowing.  All they can do is bow...

Fred LaMotte
Uradiance

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

 

Invite the Guests In - Rumi & Ostaseski

 This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep through your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Rumi
original title: "The Guest House"
translation by Coleman Barks

~

Suffering is about perception and interpretation.
Our stories about what is happening or did happen
shape our interpretation of it. Invite in what hurts;
sit down with it and get to know it really well.
The only way through suffering is to allow what is
happening.  Turn toward the difficulty to see what
it has to teach you.  You can't make a change until
you first accept the truth of what is.

Frank Ostaseski
from: The Five Invitations

~

Photo: Mystic Meandering

My "Guest" :)

Mind and Consciousness - Rupert Spira

There is no distinction between Essence of Mind
and the expression of mind...

There is no entity called mind in Consciousness...

Mind is the activity of Consciousness.
Thought is just the activity of Mind
in the activity of Consciousness.

Perception appears in Consciousness.
The mind is not the container.
There are thought perceptions in
Consciousness.

Thought, choice, desire, feelings are a
movement of Consciousness.

Consciousness in its naked form is empty
of thought, choice, desire, and feeling.

Rupert Spira
Non-Duality teacher

Excerpts from one of his YouTube video talks

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering
 Clear Cut Glass Crystal
in a stoneware candle holder

"Why We Hate" - Steven Spielberg

There is a very interesting 6 episode series that we recently
watched on The Discovery Channel called
"Why We Hate", explaining the human capacity for hate. The
series titles are: Its Origins, Tribalism, Tools and Tactics,
Extremism, Crimes Against Humanity, and Hope.  Maybe
some of you have seen it as well...  It was produced by
Steven Spielberg and Alex Gibney of The Discovery Channel.

It is a provocative documentation of human's hatred toward
one another.  Episode 6 includes discussions with a neuro-
scientist, Emile Bruneau, that proved to be an eye-opener
for me, and brought some self-awareness.  He related it to
the brain and certain neural pathways, calling it
"biological hate" and how we can, in a sense, retrain the
brain through meditation! [which doesn't require that you
belong to a particular religion].  That despite our conditioning,
our environment, our *learned* prejudices, our isms, our "tribe"
[which would include our "religious" tribes, not just our race
and ethnicity] we can *unlearn* our innate, conditioned
capacity for hate for those we *perceive* to be different from
"us." The Us vs them mentality.

If you are on Comcast/Xfinity you can watch it On Demand.
You can also watch it on Amazon Prime, which requires
membership, although you can evidently pay to watch individual
episodes.  In which case watch episodes 5 & 6 and you'll get
the most important parts.  The first episodes are good, but a
little slow.  On the computer you can go to
Discovery.com/shows/why-we-hate and you can view episodes
there on "DiscoveryGo."  We were able to watch the Trailer
for free...

It's worth the watch!

Here's the link to the Trailer with Steven Spielberg
on "DiscoveryGo"

Conflict - David Skitt

A Commentary on Krishnamurti's POV on the world

Conflict and violence Krishnamurti sees as issues of basic concern...
But in his view history shows there has been a repeated failure
of education, science, politics and organized religion to end them.
What is needed in our time therefore is to own up to that failure,
to make a clean sweep of all these past, defective endeavors,
and to adopt an entirely new approach.  It is hard to imagine taking
a more radical position than this: Put aside everything you have
 learned from others, ever read, and start your own inquiry into
what life is about, what really matters.  Stand on your own two
feet.  Stop being a second-hand human being.

He proposes that this means looking at what is actually
happening in life and in our consciousness - 'what is, not what
should be' - without condemning or justifying, without resisting
or wanting to change it, holding it instead 'like a precious jewel.'
In doing so, he says, we are looking at human consciousness,
not just our own.

A constant source of human confusion, in Krishnamurti's view,
is our rooted tendency to make images of ourselves, others, and
of life and death that are put together by thought based on memory,
on past experiences or hearsay.  Instead of looking afresh at what is
new in the now, being open to the unknown, and unpredictable, we
'translate the present into the past.'  He sees such images are
inevitably conflictual because they are time-bound and therefore
partial and inadequate.  Yet we frequently act as though we are
programmed by them.

Krishnamurti maintains that we fail to make the most of our
mind and our life while subject to latent or manifest anger and fear.
Also, our sense of self is usually experienced as inherently [separate]
from another's, whereas all human beings share far more
psychologically than separates them.  Not to see that is a huge error
of perception, because our sense of shared humanity is lost. This
feeling of psychological [separateness] breeds a fear of isolation
that leads, among other things, to a spurious sense of safety in
numbers, which is then, unfortunately and divisively, carried to
excess in nationalism, political ideology, and religious [fanaticism].
These provide a false cohesion held together by fear that there
are those 'outside' who threaten us and are in some way not as fully
human as we are.

Seeing the problems in our personal life and in the world with a
mind free from the dictates of the past, from faith, belief,
stereotyping, and fantasy, is to see that what goes wrong in the
world outside reflects what goes wrong in one's own mind.  This
is the share of all men, of all humanity, unless we all change,
each one of us, change to something that is not projected by thought.
Where there is insight into that, Krishnamurti says, there is a wholly
different way of living, in which an awakened awareness of what
causes human suffering also brings with it greater sensitivity to the
beauty and immensity of life.

David Skitt

KFT.org

via - No Mind's Land

Good Medicine - Andrew Colliver

Unbelief is good medicine, undoing belief
better:

all beings free to leave their being
and enter silence.

The nameless tree with its forest
of green,
the endless expanse called
sky, beaks and

feathered wings with their urgent
conversations;
all around, the light that sets the vital body
to humming,

and the dark of re-creation:

the world held for us in promise
until it is loosed from
our thinking.

Andrew Colliver

Poetry Chaikhana

Commentary by Ivan M. Granger

The rebel in me likes this poem, especially its opening line...
"Unbelief is good medicine, undoing belief
better:"

I don't take this as a commentary on belief vs. atheism or agnosticism
or any of those artificial dichotomies of thought.  This is a commentary
on thought itself, our perception of reality, our relationship to reality.

All belief, whether good or bad, orthodox or unorthodox, is a window
we set in the mind.  Its frame defines the boundaries of what we
 perceive and what we are blind to; its tinted glass colors what we see
 and how we understand it.  That window of belief often serves the
 important purpose of helping us to focus, training us to see what is not
 commonly recognized. But, at a certain point in our awakening
 process, the very notion of belief becomes a problem.  All belief,
no matter how elevated or pure or accurate, is only a thought
 about reality.  What the soul ultimately craves is direct perception
 of reality - which requires dropping all perceptual filters,
including belief itself.

To enter that state of direct perception ("all beings free to leave their
 being/ and enter silence") requires deep silence.  The distorting
 vibrations of mind must quiet.  Get quiet enough and even the sense of
 ego fades, along with all its demands that it be seen as the center
of existence.  The various tugging and tremors of awareness melt away
 and finally, finally we see things as they are, without labels, without
 artificial separations: "The nameless tree with its forest of green..."

Seeing clearly, we see that everything flows into one another, and it is
 all filled with a living, glistening light -- even within ourselves.  Seeing
 this light, feeling it flow, feeling the heart overflow, we are filled with a
   quiet glee.  The very sense of who and what we really are is
 transformed. We feel alive for the first time... "all around, the light
 that sets the vital  body to humming"

That is when new possibilities emerge, the promises within ourselves,
within our interrelationship with reality are freed to find fulfillment.
For that to happen, we must first move beyond belief and free
 ourselves from the filter of the chattering mind.... "the world
held for us in promise/ until it is loosened from/our thinking."

Simply Seeing - Meister Eckhart

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which
God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye,
one seeing, one knowing and one love...

Meister Eckhart

~

Photo - picture of an Amaryllis bloom radially blurred
forming the eye in the center...

"Everything Is Deeply Okay..."

I awoke this morning to a 2 inch dusting of snow and joy in my heart. I ran outside to quickly snap these photos (the first two have been color inverted digitally). However, I was not joyful because of the snow and crisp winter morning air, but because I fell asleep and awoke finding myself repeating the phrase – “Everything is deeply okay” – and knew it in my bones.  I *felt* it deep in my Heart of Hearts that no matter how life *appears* on the surface, everything *is* deeply okay.  On a much larger level than just our little existence here, it is Cosmically okay, when seen from the Cosmic view of Reality.  How I *know* this, I don’t really know, except that I read it in Jeff Foster’s book – The Deepest Acceptance last year. J LOL… (which I wrote about here.)  Seriously - that’s not really why either, although it planted a seed.  We can’t just read it in a book.  It has to become a *felt experience* with life…  And it is, gradually becoming my *experience* – a way of *seeing* – little by little, day by day – well some days that is – yesterday the view was not so "cosmic." J

Despite the intensities of life and living, and believe me there are many at the moment, there is a lightness of Heart breaking through the fog here, a letting go of the personal drama orientation to life – hopefully - at least for today J  Mostly there is more awareness that it is the mind, my thoughts *about* what is happening, that creates my mental suffering, the *thinking* that there is something “wrong” with the way life is playing itself out here, that life should be different than it is, and that I need to *do* something to make it fit my idea of what it needs to be. Like digitally enhancing a photo. :)  Instead there appears to be a collapse occurring.  Those mental structures, beliefs, and concepts that life must fit my image of what I *believe* it should be are collapsing, to a degree.   And, a realization yesterday that I am still trying to hold onto those beliefs about life that keep me tied to those mental structures and ego constructs that filter my perceptions of the way things really are, and *its* deep “okayness.”    

Shall we Dance :)

~*~

“*You* don’t have to be okay with anything.  It’s not about the me-person being okay.  It’s that everything is *already* embraced by *Life* ItSelf.  It is a cosmic okayness that goes beyond ‘I’m okay’, and ‘I’m not okay.’  We are totally free to respond to life experience in authentic, honest, human ways.  We are free not to like our experiences, and - on a deeper level to experience a total, all-encompassing okayness with the entire situation.  Underneath everything is a cosmic okayness.  It’s not about telling yourself that you’re okay when you are not.  It’s not about pretending to be okay, trying to be spiritual, trying to be peaceful.  You don’t have to be anything other than you are in the moment.  It’s about radical honesty.  It’s about seeing reality as it is, acknowledging it, and discovering that the situation is fully admitted into Life – already.  There is simply Life, in all its mystery, wonder, and timeless simplicity.  And in this recognition the illusion of separation between us and Life falls away, and we are no longer at odds with life as it is.”

Jeff Foster
From: The Deepest Acceptance

~*~

“The treasure of deep Being is buried under the rubble of personality…”

Coleman Barks
The Soul of Rumi

~*~

The first two photos are color inverted.
It makes them look more magical :)

An Expotition...

Pooh Bear and I went on an Expotition in the surrounding neighborhood last Thursday – our version of the 100 Acre Wood.  At my suggestion we went down a side street we had never been down before.  I was sure that there was a path that cut across a “power line right of way” back to our street, as I had seen the other end of the path from our street several times.  We kept walking down a long hill, following the curves in what seemed like a much longer way than the length of our own street just a block away.  We eventually found the path that cut through (yellow dotted line on map below), but it seemed to be a part of someone’s property that had a gate that was closed.  Neither one of us being the risk-taker type, Pooh and I decided to just keep going –  even though we had no idea where it would take us.

It was getting dark. Dogs were barking at us - strangers in this neck of the woods.  And we kept running into dead ends and cul-de-sacs.  We could see where we needed to be, but we couldn’t get there from where we were.  There was no path, no way through.  So we kept going and going and going, like an Expotition to nowhere.  Eventually we sighted a familiar main road.  We walked along the shoulder in rush hour traffic after dark – until we got to a large open field that we knew was just down the street from our house.  Once again I had seen that there was a path from our side of the field – that *appeared* to cut across the field.  But now that we were on the other side of the field we couldn’t find the path…  Okay, so this is becoming a theme here, don’t you think!

By this time I’m running on empty, stepping in gopher holes, and Pooh Bear is way ahead trying to find the way in the dark with only the remnants of light from the sunset.  We came to a deep ravine right in the middle of the field that spanned the entire width of the field.  There was no way across.  Ooops.  Very strange, I could have sworn I saw a path that went all the way the length of the field out to the main street.  I had not seen a deep ravine.  So we followed along the edge at the top of the ravine, hoping to find its end so we could get around it.  But the gaping hole didn’t end, until we got to a parking lot at the edge of the field.  We had to go through the parking lot and re-enter the field on the other side of the ravine where we *finally* found a way that would lead us home, which was not necessarily "the path" that we *thought* would take us there.  Phew.  Now *that* was an expotition.  It was probably about 2 miles, and about an hour’s brisk walk.

Upon reflection I found the whole journey an interesting life metaphor that we kept running into dead ends and cul-de-sacs, unable to get where we needed to go; not really knowing where we were going, unable to find a path that would take us home.  Everyday life reflecting an internal perception of “reality…”

 Just two days before I had awoken with the sense of needing to “leave the spiritual path behind” (also a recurring theme), although it was not clear to me what that meant exactly, and still isn’t, but change is in the air - again. J  It is the sense of “endings,” the sense of giving up the *trying*, the*striving* to find the right way, to stop *pursuing* the path; to just stop - to just *live* and not always try to *get* somewhere.  Pooh Bear has even commented that he felt I was trying too hard to find my way, efforting. And when I asked him why I was not getting the clarity and insight that seem to come to him so easily, he said – “because I’m not *trying*.”  Oooo – wise bear.  They just come to him because he stays open to life, without agenda, without the expectation of finding anything.  But as a consequence of my *trying* so hard to find the right path, the path has become illusive, and almost emotionally torturous to travel.  So I was not totally surprised when our little expotition ended up feeling a lot like my “spiritual path.”

 Recently I mentioned to a fellow blogger that I felt like I have been running on a “spiritual treadmill” going nowhere; still running on the surface of life.  That even after 30 years of being on a “spiritual path” I was still living on the surface of life, aware of a deeper Reality – a vast spacious background Presence in which all of life exists – but still focused mainly on the surface; lamenting that even “spirituality,” like religion, had become just another construct in the matrix. 

So it seems it’s time to get off the treadmill and leave the surface path behind, head deeper Into The Forest and Plumbthe Depths, tasting the sweet honey in the adventure of Being, and experience the current of Being that runs deeply through the internal pathways.

“Why search for anything when the very fabric of experience is
the path,
the unfolding of everyday experience.

Stop trying to awaken,
stop meddling with your experience
long enough to notice what is.

The key is within.”

Rob Matthews
”The Ineffable Mystery of Being”
(scroll down to read full article)

Seeing Red... It's not what you think!

Seeing color was an exercise from The Practice of Contemplative Photography by Andy Karr and Michael Wood.  See their website here.  The idea was to only see color, not to identify the object of the color – as in red *car*, yellow *sign*, blue *house* - but to just see the color – any color – all colors.

~~~

This photo was taken last Fall
outside a restaurant.

 ~~~

~~~

I was out in the car doing errands one day this last week and thought I’d try the exercise.  No camera to tempt me to snap every shot of color I saw…  I just had to be aware…   I began to see red – naturally drawn to it… Interesting…  I just became naturally *aware* of the color red as it passed by me or in front of me, and wondered if this is what the authors meant: The object itself  is not important – don’t need to identify it – only see color…

~~~

~~~

And then – a couple of days later I began to see red all around the house. (We have red trim, red car, red fence, red doors, red curtains – all shades and hues of red. J)  Only this time the camera was readily available and I began snapping like a snappin’ fool.  After all, it was an *assignment* and my mind evidently took it seriously. Intuitive seeing left the room and thinking took over.  I became obsessed with red, on an expedition to find red, planning, and arranging – oh-oh…  I broke one of the rules of contemplative photography – no contrivance – if I understand them right.  According to the authors – contrivance is “how we want things to appear and not how things actually are - directly *seeing* your immediate experience unfabricated and uncontrived.”  I started to specifically *look* for anything red, looking for “good” shots – not just spontaneous “flashes of perception/seeing” as they call it in the book – but purposely *looking.*  And I could tell the difference.  There wasn’t a *natural* relaxed, spontaneous *feeling* of perception that flowed from within.  I wasn’t just being *aware* - but conceptual thought took over the process.  I didn’t get absorbed in the moment of awareness, just noticing, instead, my mind became the controller of the moment. I felt stressed and anxious about “getting the shot.”  I think you can see the difference in the two photos at the end of this post with the previous photos.  

The authors say that “true seeing comes through seeing from your basic nature/Beingness which gets ‘reflected’– producing ‘equivalents’ of what you saw from your basic Being, drawing on a deeper level of intelligence than the usual way of seeing..... through being present to something in an open space (of awareness) that is created by letting go of the currents of mental activity that obscure our natural insight and awareness.”  One could call it the awakened eye, just *seeing* life as you find it, rather than manipulating it…   Am not saying I’m there yet… Just sayin’ what they said…

~~~

contrived

So – obviously - I am learning to *see* without the conceptual overlay, without manipulation, without interpretation, judgment, or contrivance – just seeing what is - from that sense of Aware Beingness – that which is seeing through the mask of me.  Not as easy as I *thought.* J

“In reality only the Ultimate is…
The rest is a matter of name and form.
When you understand that names and shapes
are hollow shells without content,
and what is real is nameless and formless,
just pure energy of the life and light
of Consciousness,
you will be at peace -
immersed in the deep Silence of reality…”

Nisargadatta

Lens/Focus

Yes, the picture to the right is supposed to be blurry. :) Although it was not originally taken for that purpose, but it serves a purpose here.

Last Wednesday I picked up a new pair of eyeglasses. It has been more than a couple of years since I’ve had a new prescription. Now you might already think you *see* where I’m going with this, but read on…

Within an hour of *trying* to adjust, *trying* to see I had a pressure headache, my eyes hurt, and I became physically fatigued. So off came the new glasses and on went the old way of seeing – which interestingly was MUCH clearer. :) There are multiple metaphors here I know… But let’s just focus here a little bit…

The rest of the day my head and eyes hurt and I had trouble focusing. I felt like my brain had been scrambled. Well it is anyway, but it felt like someone had put it in a blender and hit the liquefy button - the thinking function went mush. I had no idea that blurred vision could cause blurred thinking. My poor eyes didn’t know where to focus, and neither did my brain evidently. I was just going to lay down, close my eyes and rest and hope it would pass, but on the way to the couch I got distracted at my desk doing some paper work. And it seemed that in the *focus* my symptoms started to clear up. By actually focusing my eyes on one thing at a time, instead of being over stimulated with trying to take everything in all at once, the eyes evidently refocused themselves and my headache lifted… The act of focusing actually helped. However, as soon as I left the act of simply seeing and went into a wider aperture, allowing in more stimulation, the eyes lost focus again. Hmmm. I know there must be another metaphor here as well… :)

And maybe the simple noticing here is that when I’m feeling bombarded with too much input, I need to come back into the place of present moment awareness and focus. If I try to make too many decisions, or think about all the things I need to do, or have so much information coming in at me at one time, the system gets overloaded, things get out of focus, and I get fatigued with the distortion of it all. Sitting in a quiet, low-lit space and quietly focusing, minimizing the external distractions that blurred my vision, brought back perspective to an overly distorted view of things. This reminded me of my need to spend more time in quiet stillness, something I don’t always remember to do. It is helpful for me to withdraw myself from all the “eye strain” of trying to see too much, and just focus on what I need to see in the moment.

I was able to get an appointment with the eye doctor for a re-check the next morning. She gave me a thorough exam, made adjustments and gave me a new Rx.

During the exam the doctor nicely explained that when you change the lens it focuses the light on a different place in the back of the eye, changing how your eye focuses, and thus how you *see.* The eyes try to get the light to focus back on the old focus point, causing muscle strain in the eye. Interesting. So even physically we try to *resist* seeing something new, or seeing in a new way…

And of course there’s the old familiar metaphor here too. :) It seems the lens we use can create clarity or distortion, because it’s the lens that causes the eye to focus, or not, to bring the light to the point where we are able to *see.* It seems the clarity with which we see life depends on the lens we are seeing *through* - the lens of our perceptions. My perception of the way things are is the lens through which I’m seeing life, which creates distortions of how things really are. My usual lenses are fear, worry, stress and anxiety. But I’m going to need different ‘eyeglasses” to clear those up. I’ll need a monocle for that – the One Eye of present moment awareness – focusing moment by moment from the place of Stillness.

How clear is your focus lately? What lens of perception are you seeing through?

Heart Smiles – MeANderi
www.ASerenitySanctuary.com

Grocery Store Wisdom - Obstacles

Welcome to my third “grocery store wisdom” blog post – where I get to notice Life living Itself! I am actually looking forward to going grocery shopping every week now, as it gives me the opportunity to just be aware, to just notice… And I am discovering that something as mundane as grocery shopping can be quite enlightening!

Today’s noticing seemed to be about obstacles. It’s a theme that I’ve been noticing for a week now.

Almost immediately upon entering the grocery store I noticed obstacles: people blocking isles with their carriages, shelf stockers with their carts, little yellow the “floor is wet” signs in the middle of the isles in the produce section where water covered a portion of the tile floor, a man on a very tall ladder in the middle of one isle in the frozen foods section, and longer lines at the check out stands. I noticed irritation arising as well, and the sudden insight – ah - something needs to be seen here. So I jotted down the word “obstacle” on my grocery list; not as something to buy, but something noticed, like finding clues to a mystery.

As I continued through the store, it seemed like everywhere I turned there was an obstacle requiring me to maneuver a different way, to stop and navigate differently in order to get around the obstacle, which I found annoying, because, after all, the obstacle shouldn’t have been there – or so I *thought.* And that, I discovered, was the source of the irritation – the *thought* that the obstacle shouldn’t have been there, to divert me from *my* path – to get what *I* needed. Sounds arrogant I know… another noticing…. Hmmm. I added “irritation” and “thought” to my grocery list of clues.

It was as if Life was trying to get my attention by having me experience this – these “obstacles” that I interpreted to be “in the way.” It was my *perception* that saw them as obstacles – the perception of the “me” – the mind. But they were just *things* on my “path.” I believe there’s a Zen saying that goes something like, just keep stepping back until you step back into the Looking itself. When I step back from this mind perception I can see that Beingness/Awareness/Presence (however you refer to “It”) doesn’t *perceive* things as “obstacles”, but like a river flows around them, navigates around them. *Nothing* is perceived as an obstacle, or a problem from the standpoint of Pure Seeing. It’s just *seen.* It’s only the mind that interprets and perceives a problem that needs to be dealt with. Aha – like a specialty chef combing the shelves for particular ingredients, the clues just came popping out at me. And so I added “perception of a problem” to my list. By this time my curiosity was really peeked and I was actually looking for clues – spy glass and all! :)

What I also began to see in this clue shopping – ah-ur – grocery shopping, is that life is not always a straight path, but it winds and turns around so-called obstacles giving us a different view of things. By having to go around obstacles it slows us down, makes us *aware*, to *see* rather than being on automatic mode all the time, *expecting* life to go the way we want it to. Instead, I had to slow down, watch where I was going and maneuver *through* the obstacle, or even find another way. And in that seeing was the final clue – “awareness.”

In the awareness of it I noticed how often I let the so-called obstacles in every day life determine how I experience life, allowing the external life circumstances, and my thoughts about them, determine my perception of the way things are, instead of experiencing life from Presence, from Awareness – what I call “the Stillness.”

And so I came away with my “grocery list” of clues to ponder: obstacles, thought, irritation, perception, awareness, Stillness. And from the clues the wisdom emerged: Obstacles are just thought perceptions in the mind that create irritation. They dissolve when seen from Awareness – from just Seeing…

I want to leave you this inspiring quote:

“There is a new way of operating… It is more like navigating a flow. You feel where events are moving, and you feel the right thing to do. It’s like a river that knows which way to turn around a rock… It’s an intuitive and innate sense of knowing. This flow is always available to us, underneath the turmoil of thought and emotions… There is indeed a flow. There is a simple movement of life.” Adyashanti

Heart Smiles – MeANderi
www.ASerenitySanctuary.com