What really satisfies...

The last few days have been peculiar ones for me.  The power of intent and focus has many more uses than figuring out one's taxes, although I am not downplaying the effort one's taxes take, and why the hell haven't they simplified that process anyway?  I feel like spring is breaking through into my soul.  It is a peculiar feeling, like taking a colonic for the soul or something.  A lot of things have gone missing.


This is the peculiar feeling that I have gotten used to over the past three years.  It is a feeling of emptying, and sometimes the effects of the emptying are more far-reaching than I understand on the surface or consciously can wrap my mind around.  The last few days have been a study in abundance for me.  A stock that I owned through a business account went up 500% one day and 100% the next day after that, bringing an incredible gain to my languishing accounts.  Work has been so easy that it doesn't feel like work at all.  The weather has been beautiful, and I can feel the time that I will be able to shed the winter clothes and feel the sun again on my skin.  All of this has come, as things do, mysteriously, through avenues that I hadn't considered or with circumstances that I hadn't consciously been aware of.  All of it is somehow beside the point, next to the strides that have been made in me.  I don't feel somehow that I have made the strides, but it is more that the strides have been made because I simply moved out of the way of whatever is striding.


It is always this way with my spiritual journey.  It is the Law of Unintended Consequences actually working in one's favor instead of against one.  This particular movement actually started about three weeks ago.  I became very still inside, as I began to realize that God knows not of my imperfection here in this dream of a world that we invest with so much importance.  I exist in multiple dimensions and through multiple realities.  This is true psychologically and materially.  Somehow, the silence began to pervade me internally.  My mind became very quiet, and I could feel, in an almost palpable way, the "other" parts of me.  I also began to accept, very deeply, myself.  I began to accept that really there isn't anything to accomplish here (this may seem very odd to those with a Protestant work ethic), that I am loved for simply existing, and that there really is nothing wrong with me after all.  I hope to write more on this subject later... there is so much that I wish to lay out in some sort of coherent fashion here.


This morning, and this is becoming an exercise that I do with increasing frequency throughout the day, I pause.  I ask myself, "What really satisfies me; what really thrills me?"  That feeling of connectedness to my Source, that feeling of inner quietude and sense of directed peace are what thrill me.  They are the satisfying places to live.  It is a place of joy that is all-encompassing, all-pervasive, all-comforting.  Only this place in me, this spot that is somehow centered around my heart and allowed to expand to my entire being, can be called satisfying.  

I watched my mind yesterday as the stock was climbing through the roof.  At first, there was a very familiar twang of the "old" me, the one attached to the outcome.  There was excitement, anticipation, a deep fear of not knowing when to sell or to buy.  I felt, in other words, out-of-whack.  Even in the midst of "something good" happening, the old mind of lack and fear wanted to take over, to spoil the moment of time of happiness over success, to ruin the very thing that it says it wants.  Why is this?  What is this fear mind, and how is it different from the subject material at hand today?  It is unsatisfying.  Everything that the "old" mind does (call it "ego" or whatever since this seems to be the accepted term for it) is rife with all the stories from the past, marketing ploys of our past experience.  On the other hand, there is peace.

It is difficult to explain the feeling of inner peace and flow.  It must be experienced.  It can be recognized or guessed at by reading someone's writings or in hearing of an experience of someone, but it can only be recognized in retrospect as something that one has experienced.  It is impossible to explain to someone how this state is reached, how it works, how it feels.  It is a deep inner acceptance to life, to the moment, to whatever is occurring at the time.  Nothing needs doing, per se, in this state.  Being is enough.  The inner awareness of one's own divinity reigns.  The state of "I am" is the only thing worth knowing or contemplating.  Everything else takes a back seat.

It sounds quiescent, somehow even morbid, like there is nothing going on.  To the "old" mind, this state is ultimately foreign.  It sounds like a forced lack of thought, a certain hypnotized state.  Matter of fact, there are some "spiritual teachers" who actually recommend hypnosis to induce this state.  That is impossible, however, because the state cannot be induced.  It is who one ultimately is.  Who you are can never be discovered by hypnotizing yourself, because you will always be supposing or projecting that which you are.  That which is you simply is.  You cannot create a construct of what you are and then say, "I am that."  It doesn't work that way.  What you are has to be discovered, explored, experienced.


The state of flow that I am talking about is alive.  It is so alive that it seems like you have never lived before.  That feeling that is generated from beyond you simply penetrates you.  That feeling is none other than yourself.  The feeling of aliveness is quiet, silent, but it is not moribund.  It does not hold the death of induced silence, which I have done to myself.  It is not dead.  The silence that one typically thinks of without the experience of flow is a silence without life.  There is one thing in this world that has no thoughts, makes no changes, has no choice, and experiences the state of nothingness that this induced silence produces.  That thing is a corpse.  A corpse has perfect "peace" of mind.  It makes no changes, has no direction, is completely unattached, has no desire, etc.  But... obviously, it is dead, deceased, unalive.  


The inner peace that I speak of is utterly silent, yet so alive that it defies description.  It is joy, pure and simple, without care, without concern, but directed, pointed, sure.  If I only had two words to describe it, it would be calm surety.  Happiness can be manufactured, but it holds within it a certain wariness of the future, of being unhappy at some future date.  Flow and awareness have no future.  One thing is as good as another, and in this, it is choiceless.  Yet, awareness has the aliveness to direct, to place calm intent on the experience it wishes to have.  There is no fear at all of the loss of itself, because it is none other than the base state of being when everything else has lost its flavor.  


This is the state that I am learning how to foster.  It is fostered through keeping still.  It is fostered through listening rather than forcing ones thoughts.  You listen to your real thoughts.  Difficult to distinguish?  A little.  But as the state is experienced more and more, being out of that state actually becomes painful, because the world closes down to a feeling of such limitation that one feels claustrophobic.  I tend to feel a certain petulance with the world when I am out of the flow.  I feel like I have no choices, and I don't think that this is far from the truth.  Real choice can only be had when options are clearly seen, and I cannot "see" when I am out of the flow.  Therefore, my world narrows to one of no real choice.  I may think I am making a decision about something, but that decision is usually in between two equally distasteful choices.  


Yoga, meditation, correct foods (and this doesn't mean vegetarian foods, but correct foods for me), and a certain chasteness of spirit (meaning that I don't get drawn out into thinking that things of this world are important) seem to foster this state of flow.  None of those things are the end all and be all either of the spiritual path.  It is never from externals.  The externals, like yoga and meditation, are merely tools.  They are action-oriented, and therefore, they really have nothing to do with flow.  They just seem to help clear that which is not flow out of my life.  Blah... this is so hard to explain that I wonder why I am bothering.  Don't Do... Be... yeah... as if that tells you anything.  But this is fun to write about.