From the Prelude – "All Reality Begins with this Moment of Experience"

"We sit together in the late day, as the sun is passing.  We are at rest, and there is a shared heartbeat between us.  A shared recognition of consciousness in our eyes.  We have relaxed into what is fundamental to our being: the harmonizing field of the heart, the coherence of the present, the surrender of distraction and self-consciousness.  Absent our self-centered mental worlds, awareness is simply a light that allows this moment's own transparency to energy and form and emptiness; to the sighing of the sunset fields.  And to the undefined reality of You and I awake to each other; which is only the universe's latest recognition and celebration of itself.....

....When awareness returns to itself, rests in its own luminous nature and its home in emptiness, reality is wide open,  Now the passing day turns from the early gloaming, the gentle and still sparkling wash of post sunset pinks and peacocks and gold-lined grays; and the blue hour begins, slowly darkening into purple and black.  But there is nothing fixed, nothing solid, here.  There is awareness. This wash of color and form, these transformations of the air, are the transparent shades of an infinite moment; the darkening woods are a lover of infinite space and depth.  Now there is a screetch, now a rustle.  The single note of a bird -- or the wind chime -- or a distant car.  Or a heartbeat.  Or of love recognizing itself once again.

Reality begins with this moment of awareness.  Where else will it arise?  Will it be the reality of the film or the reality of open sky and deep woods; the reality of the dream images or the reality of empty awareness; the reality that beckons newly and infinitely to us or the reality that is already prescribed?  It begins here, in the moment of shadows, and in the sunrise."

from the chapter "Inexhaustible Non-exclusiveness"

...."The experience continued to grow and open in its revelation, and I continued to communicate to my partner as it was happening......... now, this love was revealed as the emptying out of all relativistic structures -- mind and matter, time and space; revealed as the empty infinite self-originating and self-ecstatic holographic nature of being.  My awareness opened into a reality that cannot be defined by mind or awareness as we ordinarily experience them......

Conventional structures of mind empty to reveal what neither exists nor fails to exist. Which never comes into being and which always is. Which is always an infinite potential, and which is always spontaneously realized.  Which is no thing, but which is each thing.  It is exactly a non-temporal, non-spacial potential of infinite probabilities without "self".  Without self means without an abiding or self existing reality other than a playful potential.  And which is yet a wholeness of being, our infinite mind or infinite love. ....  It is one Mind (or Self) realizing itself at various dimensions of its flowering out from the heart of its own reality.

That flowering includes the flowering of non-dual into dual; the flowering of a timeless and spaceless dimension of inclusive potential into all the possibilities of time and space, personal and impersonal, one and many.  It is hard for our minds not to think temporally or spatially -- that all this happened at some point, or somewhere; as if first there were timelessness, then it manifested as time. But there is no before of after.  This is now the very moment in which all potential inheres as one reality; and no potential – realized or unrealized – is exclusive of any other; as we are also not exclusive of each other.   

This is the ever-present matrix of all realities, flowering out of an interpenetrating reality that is inherently friendly with itself as its own body; at home equally and simultaneously as existence and non-existence, participating in the same totality.  It is like seeing into the heart of a holographic image, into the underlying 'structure' and 'dynamic' of the hologram itself.  It manifests as anything, yet that "anything"  is but a reflection of the reality that contains the whole.  This is thus the ultimate divine intimacy, in which love is simultaneously total and transactional.  That is, love not only exists as love, but loves as love, a Self-manifesting intimacy of 'self' and 'other.'

.....It is, in fact, the full relational field in which we exist together with all things that is the consummate flowering of this non-dual reality.  The awakening to other underlying dimensions (or contexts) of perception are an occasion for integrating the roots of our awareness in the indigenous ground of our own being.  Yet this  perfectly manifests in our interdependent life with others.  It is to imbibe a little more of the underlying spaciousness of phenomena, non-fixed, non-literal, non-self-centered – so that we may more readily open up space where conventional experience might close space down.  And it is to take mature responsibility for the affirmation and renewal of inter-relational life together -- amidst the challenges of finite experience that trigger our conviction of separation and negativity.

The profound glow of this experience faded – much to my surprise – as I reentered  into the hard work of the Intensive; though its openness rebounded after it was over.  However, it was in the months that followed that I realized how authentically something had entered and shifted in my body.  In fact, it was the world that had entered my body, and in some new way I had entered the world.  I experienced increasingly that my body was the body of the world; that somehow I had entered into the evolutionary journey of all life with a kind of bodily compassion; that the non-exclusiveness was an instructive and constructive bodily event."

from the chapter "I and My Father are One"

Love and Awakening

As I leave as a ray of the supreme love and enter into the earth, I feel the powerful possibilities and likelihood of falling asleep in the created realm, even as I know the absolute truth of my God function and the task of its constant reawakening.  Even as God makes this constant "sacrifice," I make that sacrifice.  I am the Source. I am the Process of love's dedication.  I am the Awakening.

Though all of this is true in an eternal moment -- this union of lover and beloved -- we experience this process projected as time; and as drama.  In that drama, love flows ever downward, like water flowing into the tiniest places. In the Christian language, it is the holy spirit that is the aspect of God's loving into the heart of creation, flowing like water to bring the mercy of love and awakening.  In Buddhist language, it is bodhicitta, the awakened heart nature of the universe entering into the heart of all our activity in dedication to our awakening.  In dedication to others.

As bodhicitta/holy spirit awakens in us -- as our own nature awakens in us -- we find ourselves to be the very water of love seeping into all those tight spaces where only water can seep: the tight spaces of grief, fear, pain, hatred, persecution; and of the suffering generated by our ignorant responses in the most mundane circumstances of our lives and our relationships.  We are committed to being awake and available.  That is what it is to be fully embodied in this life.  To recognize who it is that is embodied.  To understand the nature of this embodiment.  To be the body of existence beneath the story of existence.

It does not guarantee an easy path.  It does not make anyone special.  It does not promise to bypass a broken heart.  It does not offer facile salvific predictions about human politics or history.  It does not guarantee the return of our species to harmony with the living organism of earth, which is itself the full embodiment of God's beauty and intelligence.  It does not assure that the determined roadster of our love will make it across the track just ahead of the barreling freight train of our ignorance.

But it offers us the true fruit of each moment.  It offers the salvation of our moment to moment commitment and awakening -- to the conscious reciprocity that allows for genuine acknowledgement of each other; to the emptiness, or humility, that allows for the renewal of human possibility; to our persistence as love despite all evidence to the contrary.  This is the moment to moment salvation that we beautiful human beings have proved capable of now and throughout our history.  It is a-historical.  It is the expression of what we are.

And still the water seeps, and love loves.  And we make the choices that allow us to stand clear in our self nature, and to uphold others in their self nature; continuing like water through all states and stages, till it has sought through to its lowest level, its common denominator.  And that common denominator is love.                      

Drink and You Will See

Like you, I once thought

I was a tiny creature in this vast

creation.  Now, I'd like to

offer you this magnificent display,

the moon and the stars, served

in this ancient clay teapot and steeped

for just the right amount of

time.  Drinking it,

you will see that you are also

the host or hostess of all the created

worlds; the gracious server

of all tea; the mother of the universe

laughing in your womb; the

best of friends.

from the chapter "Reciprocity"

Our vulnerability reminds us that we are never truly independent, but always exist in a field of reciprocity.   Thus reciprocity is a deep spiritual principle. And its understanding also arises in the context of any mature and intact culture that has preserved wise counsel as to how we should function in human community. (Unfortunately, to find examples of reciprocal social models, we must look to some of the indigenous cultures that are vanishing in the wake of our hyper-individualism.) Hence the Nguni Bantu philosophy of ubuntu, and its teaching "umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu" which translates as "a person is a person through other persons;" or "because we are, I am."   Or the Tzutzujil Maya term, kas-limaal, which refers to the mutuality by which we enliven, or light the spark, in each other; and which also translates as a profound mutual indebtedness.

This is not only enlightened social philosophy.  It is true right down to the level of our neurobiology.  As we have said, the neural network that allows us to directly experience our own felt sense of self is activated by our first experience of eye contact and attunement to others.  Stated again, this inner "social" nerve network that grows in response to our relationship to others is also the nerve network that enables us to perceive a direct meaningful sense of our own being.  Thus we are a gift from others.  We "become a person through other persons."

This principle is true not only of our human relations; it is fundamentally true in terms of the interdependent origination of all things, impermanence, and the emptiness of any fixed self -- all as an expression of 'inexhaustible non-exclusiveness.'   This is the divine hologram, the Buddhist dharmadhatu -- or the 'mind of God' -- in which all things embrace and embody each other in an infinite display of reciprocity and nurturance.  That is the field out of which we are born.  And it is a field that, even within the structure of our life in time, enjoins us to the experience of being fully nurtured and of then being able to fully nurture.

The immediate recognition of our true mutuality as human beings is compromised by personal and historical trauma, and by the reifications of our separateness in the form of greed, anger, and ignorance.  And by the mind's acquired categories of physical and social difference, amplified by fears, family conditioning, cultural history, stories, propaganda, and institutional structure; and which is, in turn, ex-ploited by the reactive self-interest of others and the destructive and disembodied algorithms of the demonic online matrix, which amplify our delusive conceits.  This profound social illness, and all of its consequences, is made possible in the moment of our development that we abandon the immediacy and direct experience of our empathy circuits for the virtual constructs of our programmable mental circuitry.  Whereas when we are able to rest in the open field of empathetic relationship, no internal conditioning or external propaganda will turn us from our immediate shared presence with others.  Propaganda has no place to fall.

This open field also characterizes our primordial relationship to the natural world, a luminous field of reciprocity that our human consciousness once participated in.  What was made clear to me in all my experiences was that all creation is woven of one conscious fiber, or reality.  And that fiber is a mutually interpenetrating totality.  When in my last experience I witnessed, and entered into, the creation of worlds, there was no separation between my soul and the world soul; it was one creation in which consciousness was at play, and born of the same love.  Put simply, the earth is luminous truth, and reflects back to us the truth that is also our own being.  Hence it is also a field of mutual presence and respect.  And it speaks in a language of being that suspends the verbal representations of our thinking mind.

The empathy field, and the natural recognition of mutuality and indebtedness that was once true of our indigenous relationship to the earth, has been lost to the progressive self-centered cultural, technological, and mental structures that at first distance us from -- and then manically and depressively compensate for the loss of -- our indigenous connection to the land and to the life of all species; even as we go on destroying.  When we as humans hold to our notion of separation, superiority, or that we alone are truly living or conscious, we confine ourselves to a very small world; and we are dangerous to the network of living beings.

The point is that the dysfunctions, disharmonies, and disasters that we experience or enable – in our personal, social and ecological lives and in the lives of our civilizations – are based on that same obscuration of the reciprocal field of consciousness.  Our separative mode of consciousness is naturally come by, but dysfunctionally entrenched, and often addictively defended.  It has its own limited operational value; but it  sunders the web of human community, and plunders the web of life.  And it cannot restore the intrinsic joy of our true being.

from the chapter "Transparency and Coherence"

We all probably know what coherence feels like; although we may not always notice, or we may not use that word: when we're sitting by a stream and are just listening to its sound; or feel its gentle rush as if it were in our own bones.  For that matter, when we feel our own bones as our own simple structure of place; our center; or the ground beneath us; or the land.  When the breath that enters us is also a breath of the land; a breath of the whole body; a rhythm of place.

The heart also knows coherence; when its own electro-magnetic field is allowed to rest in, and to set, the resonant tone, the sufficiency of the moment; intrinsically translating a higher coherence into the manifest field of experience.  This natural resonance is enabled when our receptive awareness, mediated by the pre-frontal cortex, rests without interference or projection with the way things are; when that resonance arises as a gentle smile, a kind thought, a sense of well being.  The breath deepens, sighs, relaxes.  We could term this the heart-brain-breath axis.  We could name it Presence.  We could even name it conscious loving presence.  Because the interference patterns, the discordancies of perception, generated by the  reptilian-limbic-cortical axis are at peace, there is coherence in both of these axes.   There is coherence with something underlying, unified, and present.

There is then, even when consciousness is not fully awakened, a more relaxed access to the unified field out of which experience arises; a greater coherence and availability in our perception, in our emotional state, and in our functioning.  This is the first intention, we might say, of all "spiritual" practice.  This needn't be a "realized" non-dual consciousness, so to speak.  But when our internal warfare stops, when the mind is relaxed and empty, this is in itself a simple and essential non-duality; a coherence of the 'dual' and 'non-dual' that has nothing to do with definitions or philosophy......

..When the obsession with "self" and with "things" is relaxed, all is present as the openness of space, space shining as "things," not separated into self and other, not separated from by a virtual boundary, but empty and lucent, inhabiting us as we inhabit it.  That is transparency, free of confusion.

(When) we apply ourselves to bringing harmony to our confused mind and emotions; and the energies of body and mind relax their conflicting patterns and begin to listen --as with a common ear of knowing -- to this moment of presence as it is: that is the coherence by which transparency may be received.  Our coherence is the optimum ground, or condition, for experiencing our transparency, just as a still lake, unruffled by the wind, is at once transparent to itself, and perfectly transparent to, and reflective of, the moonlight.

                                             Clearing

sitting in morning fog,

sun rises by itself

mists dissipate by nature

and emptiness shines through

if i weren't sitting here

i might miss it --

                                           i might still believe in fog