Daggers

Daggers chime and shine
In empty stairwells
Where oil lamps glow
The silence of memory
Fills the space
And then the face
White and ghostly
Shimmering in a silver mirror
Looking into my eyes
Like a foggy memory

I cross the river and I cross the stream and then I dream
Of a land by the sand where no human hand has ever been
Where birds fly high in a wide blue sky and the church bells chime
In time like a place in the dream of a face in a scene in a book
By a bubbling brook where a lady in a veil is drawing out ale
And a little boy sits on a swing
A chest full of gold in a story once told
Where an old woman sat cross-legged on a mat dreaming a dream by a stream

And then the dwarf fell into the well and landed in hell
Where the fires burned high into the sky and the broken souls cried and asked the lord Why a face peered from under a beard from a place behind a screen covered in green
Where the spirit was gone and the song it was wrong and the dancing was simply obscene
And I thought of naught from a very high spot looking down from a dream
And I wondered was it I who had seen?

The Laughing Jesus

An excerpt from a brilliant book, 'The Laughing Jesus' by Freke and Gandy, about the true nature of reality.

1. You have a dual nature. You appear to be a person but essentially you are awareness.

2. Lucid living is adopting a both/and perspective in which you are concious of both your apparent nature and your essential nature.

3. As awareness you are a spacious emptiness which contains the world. You are a timeless presence which witnesses the flow of experiences which we call 'time'.

4. Life is like a dream in which one awareness is becoming conscious through infinitely various forms.

5. We are unconciously one and conciously many. Gnosis is becoming conscious that all is essentially one.

6. Awakening to oneness is the experience of big love. Knowing you are one with all you find yourself in love with all.

7. The purpose of life is to love being this moment. When you are driven solely by other desires you miss the point and become engrossed in the life-dream.

8. The foibles which keep you unconcious in the life dream are your qualities which have become distorted because you presume yourself to be an isolated individual.

9. The way to love appearing to be a person is to become concious of your impersonal essential nature as awareness.

10. Lucid living is a state of enlivenment. It is loving being human.

The Present

For most people the unknown is terrifiying. After the past week, I have discovered that sometimes the 'known' is even more so.


When nobody knows you, it is like you are a blank canvas. You don't feel that you have to act a certain way, talk a certain way, be a certain person because nobody knows you. And the most beautiful thing you discover, is that you don't know yourself.

So you can be who you want to be.

When returning, you don't have that pleasure. You have already been typecast. You revert back to the old self. Everything that went between seems like nothing more than a dream, an illusion.

And it is an illusion. But so is this. When we go to the cinema we are aware that we are watching a movie, but for the movie to be effective, we need to get lost in it. We need to believe that it is real. We identify with the protagonist, we have to for the illusion to work, for the movie to become real. But at times we realise we are not in the movie. We are in a darkened theatre, watching.

The protagonist of the movie is the person that we see as 'ourself', our Ego. The person we think we are, the person that we create in our daily lives. But what exists behind that person? If we sit still, shut down the endless chattering in our head, what are we? We are awareness, watching a set of experiences, that we call 'reality'. Awareness is everlasting. Our bodies change, our friends change, our thoughts change, we change. But awareness doesn't. Awareness lasts forever.

When we are asleep, and we dream, we think that the person in the dream is us. We feel fear, we feel happiness, but in the end, we wake up. We are therefore both the person dreaming and the person being dreamed. 'Real' life is exactly the same. We are the person dreaming (our awareness) and the person being dreamed (the 'self)

When we realise that all is illusion, we do not give up on life. Quite the opposite. We make this dream, the best dream it can possibly be. Because it is all there is.

Years ago I dreamt of going to Australia. I dreamt that dream into a reality. Now that it is over, I'm not going to stop. I always dreamt of living in Brighton. Now I am dreaming that dream also into a reality. In a few days I will be living there. Not that happiness exists in travelling, or in living somewhere else. Happiness exists in only place it can. The present. Wherever that may be taking place.

This world is nothing but an illusion. So why don't we make it the best illusion it can possibly be? We exist in the eternal, never-ending present. So why do so few of us rip off the wrapping paper and see what is underneath?

Go on, rip off the paper. I dare you.

Christmas, Territory style.

Christmas is upon us. Darwin is lit up with lights. Decorations hang in the shop windows - And it's thirty five degrees.

Sweating perfusely, looking at the decorations as I pass the shops. Craving for a nice tropical smoothie to cool me down, or the divine feeling of an air-conditioned shopping centre after baking in an outdoor oven. Such is my surreal Christmas experience.

I was sitting in a pub on the main street the other night, watching a tropical storm. The sweat was dripping off my skin and sticking to my clothes and I was treating myself to a nice cold beer. I was sitting across from an advert for a Christmas party in the (aptly named) Monsoon Bar. Beautiful busty babes wearing santa hats and drinking cocktails. The same, but different.

Last night I went to a Christmas party in the local bowls club. It was after dark but it was hot as ever (30+). There were a few elves running about, as well as a lot of santas, and fidel castro ('the only man who can take christmas and give it back again'!). There was also an absolutely vile santa claus, belly hanging out, smoking a joint as he played bowls.

This was Christmas, Territory style.

So dinner was served. A nice big turkey, with roast potatoes and lovely hot vegetables?

No.

Cold ham, salad, prawns, oysters and cold potatoes. Apparently this is typical Antipodean Christmas fare ('it's too hot to eat anything else')

So I sat eating my cold food, drinking a cold bevvie, and watching the tinsel, and sweating like a fat person eating a big mac.

It just wasn't right. Where was that cold that goes deep into your bones? Where was the mulled wine and the open fire? I remember last year doing some shopping in town. It was freezing cold, pretty dark and I was shattered. Going into a pub and sitting beside a big warm fire. Ah, bliss.

The air you are surrounded by in Darwin, is a warm fire. Bliss is getting indoors, peeling off your soaking clothes and lying naked under the air-con.

Still one thing is the same. Lots of Christmas parties with drunken idiots staggering around in Santa hats. That is universal.

And well a Fidel Castro lookalike distributing the secret santa (or christmas cringle as the aussies call it), you can't beat it. And yes, you had to sit on his knees.

I got drunk, played with my 'snap hands' (my christmas cringle present) and talked about all the important things with other drunken randomers as the sweat dripped off my face.

Some things never change eh?

Keeping the Ego, but seeing it for what it is.

After my fear last night that the only way to spiritual enlightenment was to destroy the 'Ego', I have fiddled around with the theory to make it more comfortable in my belief system. And I have come up with the solution, as I see it.

Keep the Ego, but see it for what it is.

When we become 'aware' we are in the moment. We can see our thoughts and emotions for what they are. They are NOT us. All of mankind's problems come from not realising this. When an emotion is strong it can take us over, and it can be difficult to seperate our 'real self' from this emotion, which pretends that it is us.

It isn't though.

I have spent the last few days since my Reiki session in some sort of 'in between' world. A lot of the time I have spent sitting. Just sitting.

Yes, thoughts came and went through my head. But I am not my thoughts.

Keeping this consciousness is hard, as we can be easily snared by the traps of the Ego. But when a negative thought surfaces in our head, it is important to detach from it, and see it for what it is.

Letting go of the Ego (and also perhaps, the opening of my throat chakra) hs also led to conversation being more interesting, more stimulating. When conversing, very few of us actually listen. This is due to the endless chattering of the Ego. Part of us is hearing what the other person says, but the majority is thinking of what we are to say next.

When you let go of the Ego, or see it playing its tricks. You stop the chatter. And you actually listen. The effects have been amazing. People are responding to me in such a positive manner, and the simple reason is that is how I am responding to them.

Of course a life-time of bad habit can not be changed in a day, a week, a month, even a year. Its a learning curve.

But all you need to do is sit down and meditate for ten minutes at the end of the day. Close your eyes, watch your thoughts, but do not attach to them. Remember who you are is different from how your Ego constructs you.

You are the blue sky. Your thoughts and emotions are clouds flying past. Do not attach to them. Do not see them as real. They aren't.

I'd like to finish with a quote from a very inspirational blog that I discovered (http://beyond-within.com/blog)

The ego, represented by the false creator, or Demiurge, is not something to be defeated, destroyed, relinquished, killed or otherwise done away with, but neither are we meant to indulge in or be ruled by its false beliefs about itself. The ego is an aspect of the self, a tool used for having experiences and interacting with the material world — but when we go to war within ourselves, who wins? No, the ego is to be transmuted by the purifying, alchemichal flames of gnosis; to be balanced and shown its true form by Spirit. This catalyzing process is every individual’s apocolypse, which literally means “unveiling”; a trial by fire that brings forth a whole new creation.

Death of the Ego

The way to achieve spiritual enlightenment is to kill the 'Ego'.

The Ego is how we construct the reality of this world.

But the Ego is an illusion that is the root of every human misery. Without the ego there would be no pain, no suffering, no war, no disease.

To reach true enlightenment we must look inward, not outward, and figuratively 'kill' the Ego. To accept that this is all an illusion, and the Ego is a false master. That we spend our lives in a false world, in a false self, tricked by the Ego into thinking that this is it.

To kill the Ego we must spend hours, in 'awareness watching awareness' mode. Where we lie down and watch our true self, watching.

Nothing else.

I meditate and believe that it is important, but this 'Killing of the Ego' scared me.

If we lost all of our 'self' then what is left but an empty shell? What is the point of going outside, making friends, embarking upon relationships, travelling, going to the cinema, reading, going for a walk in nature? After all these are just an illusion created by the Ego to divert us away from our true nature.

The point of this 'awareness watching awareness' is to realise our true essence. The 'Ego' that we think is real is not real. Nothing is real. So why bother? Let's just stay in a room all day in a meditative trance, reach enlightenment and never have to go through the endless cycle of birth, death, rebirth ever again

(The book would say that what is now speaking is my Ego, which has been frightened that it has been discovered, and is trying to stop me from killing it)