The Thin Red Line - Melanesian Choirs - Compilation

system of belief

How deceived was I to think that what I feared was in the world, instead of in my mind.

(Selections from a couse in miracles: Accept this Gift)

echo of divine silence

Some planets rolled in those openings on the side of my head.

I haven't heard anything for years. Whenever I see a mouth moving in front of me

I just assume someone is saying something brilliant

and then go on about my day feeling very secure.

~Tukaram (1608-1649)

the wild in me comes out in these desolate places

You and I, we are made up of broken fragments, sharp edges and smooth bends. You say that you have broken something, you say: we are broken now.

On the contrary I am more whole now than I was before.

cognitive alchemy

A new perspective has arrived and made a nest for itself in my mind, this is not about right or wrong, good or bad, black or white or dark and light. This perspective has slowly been taking root and is objective in its release of realizations and nurtures self acceptance and self respect; this is a key lesson for me right now. It is all about me seeing the bigger picture and perceiving every minute detail as a unique experience from which I can learn. Experience is everything and it is a gift.

The salvation aspect here is that when life is encountered through this new perspective than emotional attachments and distress as responses to an experience or feelings of not being in control become none-existent or at any rate less. For example when being confronted with some so called “negative aspect”, instead of the usual (negative) emotional response, the emphasis in my mind is on the experience and the lesson involved.

What this perspective is ultimately teaching me is self-acceptance and self-love and those qualities and affirmations have a tremendous grounding effect. Trust also plays a role in this process, if you can truly accept and believe that everything that is happening to you is exactly what you need than you can breathe a deep sigh of relief and away fall the negative responses and emotions.

Relief causes us to turn back into the downstream flow of life and abundance; it is the so called breakeven point on the emotional scale. Through this ability to witness every situation as a valuable experience I can gain wisdom and get to know myself better which in turn allows me to grow, change and learn but also to enjoy life as it comes with it’s duality and confrontations and transmute the negative into something positive.

Read what Gandhi says about experience here.

Photo: Cuno Van Voorst

Red Tree Times

perception is everything

What you percieve in others you are strengthening in yourself.

(Selections from a couse in miracles: Accept this Gift)

nothing unreal exists

Reality only brings perfect peace. When I am upset, it is always because I have replaced reality with illusions I made up.

(Selections from a couse in miracles: Accept this Gift)

defense illusion

When you feel the need arise to be defensive about anything, you have identified yourself within an illusion.

(Selections from a couse in miracles: Accept this Gift)

pass a tree like ours

Turning around I see your chair is empty, you have been won over by the world, taken by the city. You stand behind me with your arms around me and your head resting on my shoulder, just a ghost now lover.

Where you see them hand in hand; feel your own without mine and when you see them kiss; know that my mouth is here. When you gaze upon the moon; know that I am gazing too and when you pass a tree like ours, think of me; lost, left, loose.

I saw a pretty face today; with a smile like yours, dancing on the side walk to my music. Brought me a coffee she did and a man about your age wearing boots like yours winked at me in the subway, his eyes were friendly, he wanted.

Walking in the park, watching dogs play, I suddenly thought you were at home making tea and waiting for me. The sun was shining so bright I couldn’t even feel the fear or the cold only life rearranging reality, meandering, weaving its beauty around me.

So I smoked a cigarette and strummed my guitar with the same nonchalance as you and when a young couple asked me for directions I said I was from out of town and didn’t know the way, it was not a lie metaphorically speaking.

Part of the process is being upset and reset. Part of the recess is being restless for rest. The blankets are cold, the bed is cold, the night is old but I am starting fresh. I was never one to get sentimental without you, talking of past events, back to myself, older now and wiser somehow.

The nature of Helios is a secret of the god; and a man's first business is to know himself, and seek the source of light in his own soul. We don't eat anything we see, but have to learn what our bodies can turn to good, So with the mind.

~ Lysis quotes Sokrates (The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault)

He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me

A glimpse through an interstice caught,

Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner,

Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching me and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,

A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oaths and smutty jest,

There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

I swear the earth shall surely be complete to him or her who shall be complete, the earth remains jagged and broken only to him or her who remains jagged and broken.

Red Tree Times

inner dialogue

You have to believe that there is more. The future is a mystery, take comfort in that. Even now as you wait and seemingly you have been waiting for a long time, all is as its meant to be. People may come and flaunt their fortune or appear to you better, it is not so, all things are temporary, all things fade away like the sun sets each day. You in your time will prevail and gain only to disarm a fellow human with your success, a rising sun, self respect must remain, this must be what you gain, and a face may glint and shine though the heart within is sour.

I love you more every hour; I love you more every day but even that will fade away, or is love the one thing that remains? At the end it may be my only asset, my only garment, my shrine, the love I have felt for you; this love sublime.

Glad to see my possessions passed on, less is more to me as I grow, to remind me of the futile hoarding, the simple things hold a peace within them, never hurting my pride, never wasting my time. My peers cause me to be restless and sad and come to me restless and sad but why?

Because they have the pretense of life, they are on the stage, in their prime, chasing after those things that cause me to fear for a few seconds and then I smile inside. I am young, I am strong, and I am beautiful. Happy to watch my plants grow, lucky to know all that I know, fortunate to be alive. Disappointment is becoming foreign to me like an unpracticed tongue, like a book I no longer read and so pass on.

Zandvoort Woods

He whom i loved knew my mind; perhaps it was his own

I grasp at this gift as if it were a temporary pleasure to hold, like a bird that waits in a cage after the door has been opened only to fly out in a sudden burst toward freedom, I know that to cling to this lust will turn my treasure into ashes, to leave me empty on the hillside as the storm approaches.

To wait for you is hard to do when it should be easy, I would like to keep this fire burning with a steady flame but I am without fuel now. I am running low on hope, to remain patient and out of sight as to remain honorable and worthy of your love, it is a rough but noble path.

For as many nights as I contemplate our meeting and our parting and our reuniting, there are as many days spent with my eyes wandering, lust kindling for strangers or the anticipation of physical distraction. This I say to you without shame knowing that you may well be in exactly the same predicament.

Somehow I hold you high in my sights, exalted in my thoughts, as if you could never indulge, never lower yourself, always dignified, always untainted, but you are a man as I am. You are flesh and blood and soul as I am.

If I give myself over to destiny, to fate, to the gods, than I can sit here and let go, never in control but then powerless and weak, like a simple leaf caught spiraling in the wind. Yet if I allow love and then grace to command me than what a tide of peace crashes over this shore.

Once again I am that rock, waiting without waste, in comfort as if you were here beside me, as if it were you talking to me softly in the night. As if it were you with that smile of encouragement or that goodbye as I leave.

trails

To the night, music, herald the coming of moonlight rewards. We work in the day, we walk, and we sweat. We die in the light of the sun. They would block the rays and so we sit now and sing on the balcony to the night.

All we have is the setting, sleeping to wake, to rise laughing at this life, moving into dreams, steered by pleasure and crying, living, revolving, resting forever.

That is what the weather means, where we are in this human race, in this so called awakened state. We know what we have been; always together alone. I would like to leave, all of that playing with premonitions and all of that asking permission behind, if I could.

These clouds, o these false clouds.

The Politics Of Silence

By Paul Monette

I said to my friend: ‘Is your sister political?’

And he replied: ‘No, she’s an artist.’

This is not something I can agree to anymore. It is simply not enough to be an artist, unengaged. If you live in political times, if the lightning rod of history quivers with fire on your roof, then all art is political. And all art is that is not consciously so partakes of the messiness of politics, if only to flee it. People still went to the opera in Nazi Germany, people still read books that were pleasant and diverting.

Robin lane Fox, a massively learned historian of religion, says most people believe that the Christian world was a fait accompli, a historical inevitability. But in point of fact, until Constantine converted to Christianity in 313, the western world was a battleground between pagans and Christians. The pagans were an urban, sophisticated class – not unlike us. They had their mysteries, and of course they had their gods, very human gods. So one of the first things the early popes did was systematically destroy the pagan texts, or lock them up in monasteries. Professor Fox was able to reconstruct a semblance of the pagan world by going through ancient cemeteries reading the gravestones.

If you destroy the record, you destroy the truth.

I’ve learned in my adult life that the will to silence the truth is always and everywhere as strong as the truth itself. So it is a necessary fight we will always be in: those of us who struggle to understand our common truths, and those who try to erase them. The first Nazi book burning, I would have you remember, was of a gay and lesbian archive.

Source: Last Watch Of The Night, essays too personal and otherwise

never alone

If God is in all things and everywhere and if this be true than I am always in the company of love, always surrounded by truth and always walking in the light.

new cosmic connections

law of attraction, health and choice of experience

by Dr Eric Pearl

One of the biggest guilt trips that has been making the rounds for quite some time relates to the concept of choice.

Hang out at any New Age bookstore or gathering for long enough and inevitably, as soon as the discussion turns to someone's faultering health, some one else will pipe in, generally with a holier-than-thou tone in their voice, and say, "Well I wonder what they did to bring it on themselves." The others will then nod their heads in a practised, all-knowing fashion. We've all seen this. Now this poor person, whoever they are, already has enough going on without a group of NAGs (New Age Gossipers) attempting to make themselves feel superior at this persons expense. "Bob (or Mary or whoever) should simply choose to get well," the converstaion continues. "Just look at what this is doing to their kids." The spiritual One-upmanship is so thick you could cut it with a crystal wand.

If we were able to make our own choices as easily as we were able to select a shirt or a slice of pizza, I'd certainly choose to be happy, healthy, living in a a loving relationship with a partner who fulfilled my every wish and need, and to be prosperous in the career of my choice. And, while I was at it, I'd choose to be incredibly good looking (what the heck!). I know that a lot of people would choose some of the very same things. I also know that if there was a pill that could give this to us, we'd all be at the doctor's office first thing in the morning, standing in line for the prescription.

So why don't we all manifest these things in our lives to the degree we think we'd like? Because the part of us that does the choosing isn't the part of us that many of us would like to think does the choosing. It's not the conscious part of us that decides upon the blue shirt or the peperoni pizza. It's the part of us that sees the big picture, the overview of our lives. It's the part of us that has the understanding that we're going through our lessons here on Earth and that our experiences are to be played out within certain parameters - those that we most likely agreed on prior to incarnating this time around. Do I know this for a fact? No. Does it make sense? Yes.

So maybe Bob (or Mary) can't just order themselves up an instant helping of "good health." Maybe blaming them for that, or for getting sick in the first place, isn't really doing anyone a service. As more and more of us are able to view things from a larger perspective, there will be less pain inflicted on others by those of us who really want to mean well.

Source: The Reconnection