Olympic Ramblings

For the past few summers I've been living and working out in Olympic national park. I often sit out on the porch of my cabin, looking out at the old growth forest, and I let my mind run. Sometimes I write these thoughts down, sometimes I let them run free without trying to catch them.

Alan Watts once declared that real religion transforms anxiety into laughter.

In that spirit, I offer to y'all a few of my mystic meanderings from this past summer, an often incendiary spark behind many spontaneous and uncontrolled fits of laughter that I have shared with myself.

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I think a workable definition for spiritual awakening could be the process of sinking in to the difficult to dispute fact that we are always creating our experience;

that there's this feedback loop each of us is continually dancing within, In which every moment is a participatory co-creation.

In which that version of the "I" that is manifesting and revealing itself,

it contains all its past parts, but it is not mandated by them:

This "I" is a fluid dance after all, not to be rigidly defined nor confined to a lifeless box.

This "I", then, must be moving, must be changing, must be transforming,

for that is the hallmark of life, is it not?

If awakening then is that initial spark of insight into the grandiosity of this present moment, Enlightenment then refers to that felt realization, living in this boundary-free space.

It's the symbolic resurrection, fully letting go of all conceptions of self, of who we thought we were - the death of our ego structure if you will - so that in turn we can give birth to that which we are becoming.

And it's in this space of Becoming where we radiate that deep bliss independent of what arises around us.

For

it's only when we become fully empty

that we can ever have enough room to become truly full

So when you think about it,

it's all a bit of a funny paradox

Since the only body

that could ever find enlightenment is a no- body:

it's something thats self-referential but there's no separate self to be referenced.

So that's awakening and that's enlightenment...

and the long windy road connecting the two...

that's Evolution.

Where each step is learning, is experience, is knowledge.

where each being we meet offers a mirror,

a vehicle for our moksha, our liberation...

Where all events, all things...

become a catalyst for a fuller expression within this unique form,

this particular incarnation,

which we wear as a wet suite while surfing along a flash of lightning

appearing and disappearing and reappearing

across the infinite expanse of space and time.

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What if what we call God is that which is left after removing all these layers of conditioning?

If It's the space between us,

the flame of the candle dancing in the breeze,

the pause in between the musical notes?

What if

It's the blue sky behind our clouds, if it's that perpetual motion and our physical body the shell of a rocket ship?

What if It's purpose,

if It's the continually unfolding creation creating itself as It becomes created

in which we are both the vehicle and the expression?

And what if...

we've actually been doing this for an awfully long time?

Could it be m-a-y-b-e our memory is just a bit foggy?

As if we're just characters in a play and we're all really clueless like its our first time on the merry go round.

We go round and round the wheel of deception,

holding onto the identity of our characters for dear life,

glorifying the charade as if we could lie ourselves into deafness.

But...What if

we just woke up and began to fully own the mystery?

If we could inhale and breath in the universe and exhale it as a seed growing out of our hands.

Living without any walls or obstruction.

No anxieties or fear,

no conceptions of good or bad,

no memories nor attachments.

Only Open Fields.

Only Becoming.

Only Experience shape shifting,

playing hide and seek with itself.

If we entertained this possibility seriously,

if every person, if every thing,

was an extension of experience,

of our own experience....

what would change in us?

What could we Become?

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And then, you realize...no matter where you are, or what you do, there's really nothing else to do but dance.