Am I a Socialist?

    I believe "We are ALL in this together" and, that the government has the responsibility to assure equal oportunity for everyone. However, the hardest part for me is including those people who, when they here me say that, accuse me of being a socialist who hates his country.

Election Fraud

    At this moment in our country, every American needs to ask themselves which is more plausible: a) were there enough lying, corrupt election officials and judges coordinating in several states to steal the election without leaving any evidence (or having Mitch McConnell hear about it)? OR b) is there one lying, corrupt president who will do and say anything to not look like a loser?

God's Watching

What if one day you got the very clear unambiguous message that God wanted to visit you. God says that He/She has been watching you and totally loves what you have been doing with your life. All of your strengths and weaknesses, your successes and failures are perfect. In other words, you can do no wrong and God wants to watch you do exactly what you've always been doing.

How would that feel? Would you live that day differently knowing that God accepts you unconditionally, and just wants to BE with you. Can you believe that God will accept ANYTHING you do, unconditionally?

Well, in essence, that is exactly what has been happening all your life. We are all a manifestation of the Divine. Our consciousness is our window to our Soul. Or another way to put it, it's our Divine Overlap.

Everything in life that we believe to be bad or evil, is generated by people who don't understand this. They feel separate from their Divine and that separation creates fear. Everything evil is created by feelings of separation and fear. God understands us, (Himself) so well that He trusts us, (as a manifestation of Himself) to explore individuality, and, to eventually come to an understanding of non-separation AS individuals. Just the realization that we are NEVER really separate from God changes everything.

Its a very effective exercise to imagine, or remember that God is present every moment of the day and loves us exactly the way we are. See how that changes things.

Reality

When I refer to God, I'm talking about all of Reality. Try to get your head around the concept that God is EVERYTHING! There is no God and... And Reality is creative and intelligent. Just look at Nature on this planet alone to see the vast diversity of life forms, and the way death nurtures life. It is obvious that this creative system has intelligence, purpose and direction.

Reality is also conscious. Man is part of this system, uniquely designed to observe and participate in the whole process. But we also have a mind that is capable of thinking about and evaluating what we experience. We can use our inherent thinking ability to imagine things that are not part of the System, not part of Reality or God. God gave us this power, and He/She did not kick us out of the Garden of Eden for using it. We IMAGINED ourselves out of the Garden. We used all of our senses, combined with imagination, and came to the conclusion that I, in this body, am different and separate from everything else. And oops, by the way, separate from God.

Reuniting with God is no more complicated than remembering that we can't really be separate from Reality. The key is the discovery that the sensations inside our bodies are of the same basic quality as those sensations outside of our bodies. And our true identity is not within the body, but is the expanded awareness of ALL of our experiences.

Take a moment to sit quietly and observe the sensations inside your skin, all of them. If you are patient, they will soon take on the same quality as those outside your body. Your identity will no longer be only with thoughts sensations and memories inside your mind and body. You will expand to identify with ALL your experiences and you will discover what Jesus meant when he said "I and my Father are one."

Focus on the Truth

It doesn't matter how things appear at any given moment. The awareness of the Truth that everything is an expression of The Divine, allows those appearances to begin to change and to heal. When we are caught up in the drama of everyday life, our world becomes an expression of that chaos.

The Divine accepts and loves us unconditionally because we are a manifestation of Itself. That Love gives us absolute freedom to do and think anything we want. For thousands of years we have been in the habit of believing that we are separate from the Divine and thus vulnerable. As expressions of the Divine, we are free to use our freedom to wander off into worry and fear. Then we use our creativity to manifest those fears into our experiences.

When we sit quietly and accept that absolutely everything we are experiencing (every sensation inside and outside of our bodies) is an expression of the Divine, our creativity takes over and shapes our experiences with Love. Without any additional effort on our part, we begin to remember and manifest our natural state of happiness and health.

Our Supply

The essence of "The Law of Attraction" is, you only receive what you want from a position of have. You have to feel abundance in order to attract it. Even the Bible says, and I paraphrase, "To he who has, much shall be given. To he who has not, that too shall be taken away."

Doesn't seem fair does it. How can I pretend I have what I want when I don't? Well I wish that all this time "The Law of Attraction" had been called "The Law of Manifestation", because that is what is really happening. You have the power to manifest everything you need from within your Consciousness. You don't attract it to you from the outside.

Our supply, all the things that we need in life come from within us. They come as a vibrational expression of our Consciousness. That's why appreciation, gratitude, giving, sharing, loving, are so powerful and important to our happiness. They are all expressions of the flow of our energy. We can only be generous when we are sharing ourselves with the world from a place of fulfillment. We give love, compliments, appreciation and yes, even things to the world, and that sets up a flow that continues expressing itself through us. 

When we feel that there is something missing in our lives, we are identifying with a place of emptiness and expect it to be filled by something from outside of us. It is evidence that we do not believe that our happiness comes from an expression of our Consciousness, but from things that must come to us. Then we are operating from a place of emptiness trying to fill that emptiness with things.  We are acting from a place of wanting.

The happiness that things brings us will always only be temporary. The desire is momentarily quieted, but the place inside is still empty. Give and ye shall receive. Want and you will be wanting.

Worry

So if we are always only Divine Consciousness, what’s happening when we are worried or afraid?

Most of the time we identify with ourselves as an individual, separate from other individuals and the surrounding world. When we are afraid or worried we contract even further into our own little world. In this way we limit the amount of Divine Consciousness or Divine Energy that flows through us. It’s like closing down the aperture of a camera lens which allows less light in.

The best way I know of to open your Divine Energy aperture, is to focus your awareness on the sensation in your body associated with your worries or your fears. For most of us these sensations are located in our chest, in our gut, or in a constricted feeling in our throat. So, start by sitting quietly where you won’t be disturbed. Turn your attention to these worrying sensations inside your body. They should be easy to locate because they are usually uncomfortable and sometimes painful. Focus your attention on these feelings without trying to get rid of them. This is important. We want to feel these fears and accept the sensations associated with them without any judgment or attempts to change them at all. “But I don’t accept them, I don’t like them and I want to be rid of them. I want something to be different”. I know, but when you are feeling a worrying sensation and wanting to get rid of it, you are looking from it and identifying with it. When you look at a sensation, not judging but accepting it, you are not identifying with it. This is a new and different activity. Your identity moves back and expands as it looks at your worrying. You have opened your identification and your energy flow. Awareness with acceptance is a very powerful tool that you may not have not been consciously using up to now. Also, for the moment anyway, you are not feeding uncomfortable sensations with disturbing thoughts.

“But this exercise doesn’t solve my problems.” Well, you may be in for a surprise. Once you have expanded your awareness and are no longer identifying with just your own problems and your separate personality, you have opened yourself to your true identity: Divine Consciousness AS individual. Acceptance is a form of Divine Love and it has the power to release resources  that you didn’t know you had.

Unmonitored Creativity

Our awareness, the consciousness of everyone of us, is a spark of Divine Consciousness. We are God manifest as individual beings playing around in a sea of Divine Consciousness. If you look for the source of your consciousness, you won't find it because it has no objective qualities. Our Consciousness is shining out of the unknown, illuminating the known. Consciousness cannot be seen as an object but we are obviously aware of it; self aware.

One part of consciousness (in the thinking area of this Divine-pretending-to-be-an-individual), is our creativity. Our minds are free to think creatively. But we let our creative abilities unintentionally wander into ideas and beliefs that may not be true. For instance we have the choice to create Love, to appreciate our lives and the world around us. Or we have the freedom to think thoughts that make us feel separate from our Divine Source and our fellow humans. Believing this we feel alone and vulnerable. We become afraid and so we fear the world and the people around us.  We forget that we are all made out of the same stuff and that we are all in this together.

Divine Consciousness is totally loving and trusting of itself, so it allows us to do this. This gets us in trouble ONLY because Divine Consciousness has chosen to play this game of forgetting it's true identity. If we realize that we are here to remember who we are and enjoy this incredible experience, then there is really nothing to fear except for our own unmonitored creativity.

So if you hear anyone saying that you should fear or hate any people or groups of people, they are not speaking from truth. They have forgotten who they are, and are speaking from a belief system created from confusion and misunderstanding.

Each one of us has the power to let Truth guide our thoughts to create Love and share it with those around us. This is how we increase the amount of Love in the world which is definitely what it needs right now.

This Election

If you find yourself upset and angry about the election, there is something very important you can do. This recent election is not something terrible that just happened to us, nor is it a harbinger of something terrible that is just beginning to happen. Instead it is a barometer, a gauge of sorts that is telling us where we are as a people, and as a country. This is where we are, right now. And if we want to move from where we are, we must acknowledge and accept where we are. Acceptance is one of the shapes that Love takes. In order to move forward, we must realistically accept where we are and move forward from here, not from where we believed, or hoped we were.

So try not to react to these events with anger. Do not feed this situation with fear, but embrace where we are as a people with Love. Love is Divine. Love is power, and if we now embrace who and where we are and love each other right now, where we are, we will move in the direction of Love.

You will experience fear and anger in others but try not to be swayed by the judgments of others. Do everything you can to embrace life now, as it is, with love and acceptance of all of us as a people; a people who need more Love. Be that Love.

Atheists

There is a wonderful discussion going on on the Internet and news programs between a brilliant religious scholar Reza Aslan and some well known atheists, Bill Maher among them. I won't go into too much of the details of this discussion; you can read the latest on the Salon website. But it has really got me thinking.

Recently Stephen Hawking stated that he had proof that God did not exist, something about there being equal parts matter and dark matter so nothing had to be created. Thus no need for a Creator. I'm not a physicist so I'm sure there are parts to this logic that I don't understand, but it occurs to me that it's much easier to "prove" that something exists than it is to prove that it doesn't exist. If someone says something does not exist, doesn't it seem possible that they perhaps haven't found it yet using the tools and methods that they've been using so far?

The experience of God is not discovered in the mind, in thoughts and logic, so scientists are at a real disadvantage. God can't be talked about or repeated in a way that someone else can see in print or  hear as a listener. God has no objective qualities, at least none that can be distinguished from all the rest of the objective world. God is pure subject, pure experiencing, consciousness itself. The light of awareness shines out of the unknown, the unknowable in fact. So It cannot be named nor described. But God can be experienced and each one of us has that capacity, because we too are experiencers. But it must be explored and discovered by each individual.

Each one of us is aware but we don't "do" awareness, we just "are" aware. Awareness happens effortlessly. Our awareness is a light that shines out of nowhere, out of the unknown. When Jesus said, "I am the light", he was identifying with himself as pure awareness. If we pay attention to being aware and not just what we are aware of, we to can feel peace and love emanating out of that Unknown. Sages and wise men for thousands of years have referred to that as feeling Divine Presence, our true identity. Jesus also said "I and my Father are One". So when we identify with the light of pure awareness and not with the objects of that awareness, we feel our relationship with God.

And that sets us up to be accused of being self-delusional, right? Well, I guess I would rather be free to explore all the possibilities of life's experiences and end up loving it, than fearing exploration because what I mght find can't be trusted.

Asking for Help

One off the things that becomes apparent as we explore the whole realm of Spirit, is that help for us and our problems is always available. It is actually hard wired into the whole system, into who we are. Because we are not separate individuals as we have assumed all our lives, when we ask for help, we are recognizing that part of us that we previously thought was outside of ourselves, but is really the expanded, Divine part that just isn't as visible.

What I do when I feel isolated is close my eyes and simply say "I need help". And then I wait and watch inside and it always happens that the sensation of "something is wrong" or "something is missing" becomes just that: merely a bodily sensation. As I watch that sensation, it gradually changes into a sense of peace, "a peace that passeth understanding".

With that peace comes a knowing that everything is alright.

Ask and it shall be given.

Feeling Separate

All of the crap in the world and inside each one of us as individuals, is a result of not realizing that we are one with Divine Consciousness...God. But why, if all of this is God, did God decide to allow or cause so much pain and suffering? Good question.

I can only imagine (as many before me have imagined) that God being creative energy got bored with being ONE and sitting contentedly in that knowing. So It decided to explore the creative possibilities of the world of TWO, or as the Tao calls it, the beginning of the 10,000 things.

Now to really explore the possibilities of the dualistic realm, good and evil, likes and dislikes, me and not me, God had to forget that It was all of the universe and really believe that it was something separate, individual. We are that forgetting. We believe that we are separate beings totally contained within our bodies and our minds. Our job is to find our way home.

The key to overcoming the suffering of that separation, is to first realize that everything in our experience is our Divine Self doing and exploring exactly what we are meant to be doing at each and every moment. That has the effect of shining the light of truth into our experience and availing ourselves to the unlimited power and resources of who we really are.

Second, don't take your mind and it's thoughts too seriously. The mind specializes in distinguishing between things; between what it likes and doesn't like, chasing those it does and trying to avoid those it doesn't. Begin looking at emotions and bodily sensations as something to be explored and not necessarily acted on. Look at them, love them, but don't struggle to make them go away. Accepting them activates your Divine love light which knows more what to do with them than you do.

The third thing is to persevere. Don't be discouraged if life doesn't instantly and permanently turn into Heaven On Earth. We have generations of mental habits that we slip back into the minute things don't go quite the way we want them to. This takes time but by loving and accepting yourself, you will begin to feel the peace and happiness that is the ground of our true identity coming through. God works in rhythms and seasons. You don't cut down a fruit tree in January because it bears no fruit.

Finally don't be afraid to ask God for help. Because your consciousness is really Divine Consciousness, help is hardwired into who you are. It is saying I believe that I am more than I used to assume that I was, and I am now reaching into THAT part of me for guidance. Then sit quietly and listen.

It might help to see all of the physical world and the world of the mind and senses as the waves on the surface of the ocean. We only see the surface, the disturbance, and don't see or understand what is beneath it. But it is ALL water. We just can't see the source and cause of the waves. It is possible however to feel our waterness, the connection to the source of our concsiousness. When Jesus said "I and my Father are one", he knew what we all can know.

Worrying

Here’s an exercise .

Imagine for a moment your life without worry. Just for a moment, look at everything that you have, everything you are doing, your plans for the next few days, weeks, month, but look at it without the element of worry in it. Don’t worry about money or security or whatever you worry about. Just look at your life at this moment with only the worrying removed.

How does it look? Oh, and by the way, don’t worry about not worrying, you can reintroduce worrying back into your picture in a moment. But for right now, just a few minutes, think about your life as if there was nothing to worry about.

How does it look? How do you feel?

When I do this, I realize how good I have been at creating a very nice life for myself. I get to meditate a lot during the day; we have a nice apartment in a cool neighborhood, in a very cool city. We go for a long walk everyday with the dogs down to the waterfront, sometimes stopping to have a drink overlooking the marina. We eat out a lot because Kim is blogging about Vegan food in Portland. We have plans for traveling to visit family in the next month and more.

Now comes the amazing part. I have been able to manifest all of this very cool life… all the while worrying about it at the same time.

Now I wonder what would happen if I didn’t waste so much time worrying and spent more time creating. How much more productive could I be without worry taking up so much of my time? Worrying doesn’t seem to be particularly destructive or dangerous; it just takes up so much valuable creative time. How much more wonderful stuff would be happening in my life if I didn’t waste ANY time worrying?

Choice

It seems to me that we have only one real choice in life, and that is to either accept or reject what's happening to us at this moment. If we reject it we are functioning primarily in our mind, obsessed with thinking about what is wrong. We are judging this moment to be insufficient in some way. We are angry about something or someone, disappointed, wishing we had more or less of something. Just thinking constantly about how things should be different.

When we are doing this, limiting our experience to only what is running around in our heads, our field of opportunity and influence is also limited.

When we are accepting of this moment however, we are participating much more in Reality and less in our perceptions and judgments of it. When we say I accept this moment, it is an opening of our awareness to what is going on right now, in us and around us. Even if we start from "But I don't like what's happening in my life," you can look at any bodily sensation that may be a result of not liking this moment, and experience it without thinking about it or judging it. Accept all of your feelings. Move from thinking about your life, to feeling it. Accepting bodily sensations and looking right at them is no longer thinking thoughts that are fueling your discomfort. You begin opening yourself and engaging in what is going on inside and outside of you. Experiencing living instead of only thinking about it.

Once we are outside of our judging mind and feeling inside our bodies, we are participating in this moment. Thus we are more open and available to whatever energies are active around and through us. The Present is the only place that anything really happens. It's the only place Reality is. Acceptance is like telling God "I'm not complaining about your beautiful manifestation anymore." That opens us up and allows Love/Acceptance to flow out of us. And God is like a mirror in that everything that comes out of us comes back to us.

Remember, we are always one with Divine Love. Thinking can fool us into believing we are not.

I Think, Therefore I Am

Who we are as a separate individual at any given moment, is a thought. It is a thought about a desire, a fear, a memory. It might be a memory of painful experiences which creates a thought about fearing getting something we don't want or not getting something we do want. But all of our beliefs about who we are as Rick or Sally or Johnny are just the thought (or memory thought) that we are having at this moment. Always at this moment. Nowhere or no when else.

Thoughts are like clouds; they can obscure the blue sky of who we truly and always are, but don't eliminate it. No matter how many thought clouds we have, the sky is always blue.

The more attention we can put into our experience of this moment and let our thoughts float through without identifying or attaching to them, the more this energy of who we always truly are can come though. One of the results of doing this is its effect on our subsequent thoughts. When we watch our experiences of this moment and let our thoughts come and go, one of the thoughts that begins to show up naturally, and I believe, by design is Trust.

We can't know with any certainty what is going on to create this reality that we all experience. So it makes sense that we also can't know what is going to happen in the next year, week or even the next minute. But the more attention we put into the only reality that really exists, this moment, the more we begin to trust the energy of that reality to influence our lives.

Trust cannot be thought or wished into reality, it must be experienced as an element of the energy of this moment. Then trust will be its own reward. But it will also allow the creative energy of this reality, (which brings flowers in the spring and apples to an apparently barren tree) into our experience. That might take the shape of inspiration or just plain relief from worrying.

Trust has a way of snowballing. As inspiration and creativity come, so do the resources we need to fulfill the destiny of the Source of that energy.

Watch for it and find it.

Meditation

God is always present. God is the substance of all of Reality. We are an expression of God as individual beings. Our awareness is God's constant gift to us, and if you watch closely you will realize that you are always conscious. You have no control over being conscious. Even in deep sleep we are conscious but since there are no objects or thoughts, our mind doesn't remember. When Jesus said. "I am the Light", and "I and my Father are one", he was speaking to this. He realized that he was an expression of pure Divine Consciousness.

So if it's already here, why don't we feel it. Some say that God pretends to forget in order to explore life as an individual with 5 senses and free will, and totally free to interpret or misinterpret these experiences. That also includes the freedom to dwell in the past or future. As a result we worry and live in fear. This has brought us to our current state of affairs, believing we are isolated and alone. Who we "think"we are is totally contained within our bodies, and the world is all out there, unknown and potentially hostile.

Meditation is the way to break down this barrier to seeing who we really are, who we already are but don't remember. So if God is the substance of our consciousness, of our very Being, every sensation and perception is Divine. We may have temporarily separated ourselves, at least believing we are separated, but that is an illusion supported by years and generations of thinking that it is true. Misinterpretation of our experiencing is the main problem, so the solution is to examine our actual experience and see what happens.

Start by finding a quiet spot and give yourself permission to not think about anything. All of the details of your busy life can wait for 20 or 30 minutes. Begin with the idea that EVERYTHING that you are experiencing is an expression of God. Even your thoughts are a misinterpretation and can lead to doubts and frustration. "What do I think I'm doing?" "I'm sure I'm not doing it right, nothing is happening." Etc. When these thoughts intrude, and they will, just dismiss them and come back to feelings.

Every sensation that you have is Divine Consciousness so you would not be experiencing anything if God was not living through you at this moment. Consciousness requires no learning or effort, but we do tend to take it for granted. So we want to be intentional with it. Start by examining the sensations inside your body. Pay particular attention to sensations that you usually associate with "me." This will probably be behind your eyes, or in your throat where you talk to yourself and to the world, or sometimes in your chest or gut. As you let your awareness cruise these areas, you will begin to notice that you don't really live IN those sensation but someplace slightly removed. You are actually looking AT the sensations that you used to identify with as "me", and not from them.

This free floating Experiencer is you true identity, the light of awareness that sees everything without judgement our interpretation. Since it's not identifying with any specific sensations, it feels totally calm. Continue to observe with an open receptive attitude. The Divine within you cannot be communicated with with your mind or with words. Only through your own open consciousness can an assurance that is beyond explanation reach you.

Be patient. It takes practice. And remember, you are not learning something new or looking for anything. Instead, you are allowing your true Identity which is always already here.

Healing

For a long time now, I've been getting the feeling that I need to put something out there. I've put it off for a long time because frankly, it scares me. I'm afraid of what people who know me will think. But it has reached the point where not doing it may hurt me more than what other people think. So here goes.

Everyone who knows me, knows me as a spiritual seeker. I've been mining the depths of what it means to be a human individual and what our relationship is to The Divine, to God, Spirit, Source, Consciousness. For the past few years I've been meditating everyday and have come to a very comfortable relationship with...all of the above. I particularly like the term Consciousness because it implies the magical, mysterious relationship to God inherent in our our everyday awareness. More on that later.

What I've been afraid to go public with is that throughout my life I have had some success with Spiritual Healing. By that I mean both healing the spirit and healing the body through Spiritual means. I seem to have reached a fork in the road where I either go public, or risk losing the gift and the opportunity. So as of today I offer help to anyone who feels that they need it, and hasn't found it in their life so far. Asking for help is THE major requirement on your part to receiving it.

 I try to stay away as much as possible from a lot of verbal advice or discussion, because I understand our mind's obsession with ideas. Instead, most of what I will be saying is meant to lead your mind to the limits of it's understanding, to trust; trust what it CANNOT understand. The power of healing comes from our "knowing and feeling" that we are not separate from The Divine. Unfortunately we don't feel that and the fear that comes from feeling disconnected causes suffering. Because we ARE all connected, (ask a physicist about that on the physical/scientific level) when you reach out for help you access a channel between us through which healing energy can pass, even if you don't feel it.

So, if you like, you can email me at rickvburg@gmail.com and we'll talk a little about it, or you can just think about asking for help through me. Reach out in your mind. Understand that it is not Rick the personality which is capable of healing, but my access to healing energy all around us. You are probably feeling alone and isolated and not accessing it on your own. Sit quietly when you can and listen to your body; take inventory of bodily sensations and embrace every feeling as much as you can. Most suffering comes from some form of resistance. If you are in pain, I understand this can be very difficult. Do the best you can understanding that even pain is communication.

God is Love. God is also the Reality or Substance of the whole universe. So Love is the substance of all there is. Acceptance and "embraceing" are a kind of non-judgmental loving, and the more we accept the more we are opening ourselves to Love.

And Love heals.

Gratitude

I was going to write about my exploration of thinking today but that will have to wait. This morning I had a great realization about gratitude and want to share it.

I have always had a bit of a problem with the Law of Attraction and its insistence that all you have to do is "feel" like you already have what you want and that energy will attract what you want. A lot of peoples interest (and mine too) in the Law of Attraction seems to be around money or the lack of it. It has been very difficult to maintain the feeling that I have plenty of money when I don't. And it seems to me that spending money as if I already had enough as part of the "feeling" of already having enough, is a little careless.

At the same time, I have always believed that gratitude and appreciation are very powerful tools for achieving happiness and peace of mind. When I feel down, I often look around and list the thing I'm grateful for.

Now I believe that the Universe wants us to be happy. (By the way I use the terms Universe and God interchangeably but  the Universe has less baggage in preconceived beliefs associated with it.) But just giving us what we desire doesn't guarantee that we will be happy. Take money for example. There are some very rich, very miserable people out there. And we've all heard stories about people who won a huge lottery and are now unhappy and wish they hadn't.

So maybe the Universe understands that in order to be happy, we need to evolve into beings who appreciate life in general with all of it's ups and downs, and not just the fleeting gratitude when we have our desires fulfilled. And maybe if we are grateful for just being alive and for having everything that we DO have, then we might make different choices that lead us towards what we want. I can get behind the Law of Attraction now that I see it as being like two magnets that are drawn and move towards each other rather than me just trying hard enough to "feel" like I already have what I want.

If I feel grateful for Life then I am already happier. I can still desire "stuff" but my happiness is no longer dependent upon that particular desire being fulfilled. And if the Law of Attraction IS true, then my gratitude makes it more likely that I'll get what I desire.

Cool!

Who am I now?

So if what is experiencing these experiences can't be seen, has no objective qualities, who am I? Who or what is experiencing all this? Something is. As I look for the ME that is more than just a sensation in my body, I can't find it. If the feelings that I usually associate with me are merely sensations in my body that "I" can look at, what is this "I"?

I seem to BE the seeing that can't be seen. I am just awareness that is shining on all of these sensations and emotions.

So as this awareness shines on these sensations that used to be me, in my chest, throat, and head, I notice that these feelings are just perceptions and really are of the same quality as the sensation of the chair under me, or the computer resting on my lap, or for that matter the sound of the birds outside, and the taste and smell of my tea. They are all perceptions.

Now that the sensations that I used to identify with as me have been demoted to perceptions without a perceiver, it seems like experiencing is just happening. There is just awareness like a light coming out of nowhere, illuminating everything. I feel connected to everything, a part of everything I experience. When this is happening, the sensation now in my body is one of peace and happiness. When I see another person, the experience is compassion. And when I look around, the experience is beauty.

So how do I make this last?

Oops. Now I'm no longer exploring experience but thinking about another time besides the present. I'm thinking and worrying about how to make this experience last into the future and not exploring. Exploring experience only happens in the "now".

So is thinking what keeps me from peace and happiness?

Experience Explorer

I've come to a conclusion of sorts lately that there is nothing left to figure out. Figuring out stuff like:  Who am I? What is God and what is my relationship to It? Is existence as a separate being truly an illusion and what does THAT mean? etc. These are all mind games that feel good for a while and then need refreshing, daily. I'm tired of all that. So I realize now that what I've become is an Experience Explorer.

There is SOMETHING being experienced here. Who is experiencing it and what it is that is really being experienced isn't clear, but experiencing IS happening. Now "I" appear to be the one "doing" the experiencing, but when I look at the sensations in my body, within the confines of my skin that I usually associate with "me", something strange happens. What I'm really asking is not who am I, but where am I? Where are the sensation that I gather around and collectively refer to as "me"? Well sometimes it's an area right behind my eyes, especially when I'm out in the world. Sometimes it's a feeling in my throat, particularly when I'm talking, but even more so when I'm talking to myself. Sometimes it's in my chest when I'm worried or happy. And sometimes it's a little guy in my thoughts that collects and keeps track of all the memories and stories about me.

Now the strange thing I mentioned is that I can look AT all of these sensations of me, that individually and collectively have always felt like Rick. When I do, they become the OBJECT of experiencing. What's doing the looking when I'm being looked at? In other words, I can look at all the sensations inside my body and they are not me anymore. They are just bodily sensations and emotions being experienced by something else. If I think I detect something doing the looking then its a thing being looked at, not the looker.

Try it. You can't just take my word for it. This is an exploration not an explanation.

What it begins to feel like as I practice this, this looking at the sensations that I used to associate with "me", is that my awareness does not originate inside of my mind or body, but my mind and body are inside of, or a product of Awareness. And yes, at this point I must capitalize Awareness because it becomes something greater than, but a integral part of every experience. This Awareness is always aware. Even in deep sleep when "I'm" totally gone, it responds to a touch or sound.

What is this Seeing that can't be seen?