Everyman's WEEKLY Journal # 72
© 2014 Rev. David Seacord
May 4, 2014
"I need your help."
"I need your help." That is all his text said. I accepted it as true, because at 28, he has no reason to not be honest with me. I received the text a couple of hours after it was sent because I'd been working away from the cell phone for a while. I texted back "Call me" and in less than a minute we were talking about it all….
All dramas are 'complicated', yes? Particularly in relationship, which contain so many surprises. He emoted the confusion better than he could put it into language for a while, while I listened and downloaded. Now you may remember (bringing in another thread here) a couple three weeks ago I mentioned at the end of my journal that I was going to start reviewing Radiant Joy Brilliant Love with some close friends via Skype once a week? That has been happening… and since we restarted at the beginning (thus causing me/blessing me) to restudy the early material… which is a fact that became relevant to the conversation he and I were having because, well, it was fresh and potent (and it said it so much better than I probably ever would have). When he paused for a moment for breath, I said, "Let me read something to you"… "OK"… and so I read him Clinton's Chapter 1 words on 'expansive learning' (as distinct from 'defensive learning'). As I read, I could feel the truths of Clinton's words reaching him, giving him a reference point that stabilized the angst of mind-swirl, and slowing the spinning. When I read "It's ok to not know" I could hear his breath change. To make sure he had a fair chance at getting it, I slowly read twice the line "If you guard yourself against disillusionment and disassembly, you eliminate the chance of discovery"… because when I'd reviewed it earlier that day, it had hit me as profoundly profound…like a freight train (again, and more potently than when I read it the first time). Then we carefully went over Clinton's foundational conversation about 'building matrix'…(via our 'practicing')…. about how building our matrix is so core to being able to stay awake, and then, to continue growing ever more conscious.
And in the end, (because he's now working [for money] for a Meher Baba devotee) I told him the most important Meher Baba story I knew… about a trip Baba took halfway around the world on a steamship and by train… from India to Santa Fe, NM. And how all he did when he got there was to walk to the plaza and make eye-contact with an old Native American sitting on a blanket selling pottery. That done, he turned around, walked back to the train, and returned to India. I have always understood that story to be about the need to complete karma lawfully, and in full. As we were talking about he meeting his relationship karma, it felt a good story to share.
All in all, it 'used up' more than an hour of 'our' lives, that conversation, and in the end, his "Thank you" was a true one, and complete, and enough. Lots of things use up a lot more time, but in the end, are probably much less important than the heart time we give to each other.
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What was good for me to get, to see, this week… was that I am certainly nobody special anymore. This is very happy-making for me. Perhaps I will make fewer mistakes this way. That would be good, since as the rules say you gotta clean up ALL your messes somehow, sooner or later, best to stop making so many.
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Another thought-gift that I was able to catch this week was to 'remember your teachers more'. Bingo. I right then started to do it. As I started toreview (I think there is a theme emerging here btw) my memories of my most cherished learning moments…moments given from my connections to different for-real Enlightened Ones, I got seriously grateful. Who would I be today if not for those experiences? I cannot imagine. Actually, I do not need to. I just look at the world around me, which is filled with so many of the barely living. Nowadays, among them I see my real work… that is what my knowing knows. The mission now is to pay it forward. It is also my dharmic growth path. I do not even need to choose whom to… they always choose me (just like you do, choosing to read these words). It is something that can be felt, or even seen… like a fish rising up to meet the bait. Actually, it is just frequency magnetism. I am sure you know what I mean.
In any case, let us get real. Egoically, if I get lazy, yes, I can easily dream I am more enlightened than I am actually being. You too? It IS common territory these days…and it does feel good to 'help', yes? It feels good to offer higher views. It sorta makes us 'somebodies'. There are so many of us that are all hip to this little ego racket nowadays that we are sorta buried in a culture of it, yes? But you know, what is true is that when we met those who were our REAL teachers, we could feel something important was up, and that no posing or ego-BS was allowed. So you and I just got naked, and told the truth, and made some important discoveries. Authenticity… that's the reason we got given the teachers real gifts…
So now the job (seeing that we are all now being used as teachers …. to somebody…) is to keep those gifts (that we received by grace of authenticity) fit, well tuned, ready to go, functional, well practiced, usable… How? My download this week… remember your teachersmore. :-) I.e., keep them close around… don't isolate. Give THEIR voices space in your head. All those other crazy-making voices…take them and their stories and drag them up to your teachers, and let your teachers nail and crucify your crazies away…
Hey, it can be fun! I've been imagining all my teachers in a circle with me… if I have a question, I throw it out and wait for an answer… Who's better to ask? :-)
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The other book I have 'out' where I can see it all the time is "The Impact of Awakening" by Adyashanti. The other day, I felt the download to random open it, and it opened to the dedication… to three of his teachers… the last one being Nisargadatta Maharaj. I hadn't known this before (about Adyashanti), but I felt my already deep affinity for him deepen, as I too have felt the impact of Nisargadatta in my life (when, as I young man of about 28 I wandered (by referral from other 'travelers' into his hands for several days in what was then a Bombay slum, because that was his karma of where to be, and be his awakeness…. And in his hands, I ceased to exist as who I had been before…a story I will share at another time...).
A couple of days later, a downloaded intuition was received to visit Adya's YouTube channel, and I found myself watching the opening of a new upload. Here, the editing had omitted the hosting's formal introduction, but it was obviously significant because Adya begins speaking about his own Native American grandfather, and the visits that he remembered to the grandfather's house as a child. And he remembered that the grandfather would always do a kind of strange dance around him, and sing in Cherokee… and that he and his siblings had just thought then that Grandpa was making 'silly'. Only much later did he come to see that his Grandfather had been offering a traditional Native American blessing for him.
At this point Adya refers back to the edited out introduction, which contextually I understood now was a kind of blessing. He completes his reference by noting that, like his grandfather's ritual, "real blessings (from the sincere heart) have a real impact in our lives…"
Knowing that that was my teaching, I didn't watch more, but I did notice my awareness of my sincerity was expanded. And I saw I have visible other examples in my own life that are plain to see. One notably is Snatum Kaur, whose voice carries such an authentic devotion to 'God' that I was immediately blessed upon hearing it with the knowing that Imust Get Up And Go (to where I could hear more, which was Sat Nam Fest last spring 2013). That's where all my motive to be on these 'sound teams' originated… so that I could have the opportunity to be around her, and other devotee/musicians. And as I have been around, I have listened and hear person after person after person testify that they too first were called by Snatum's voice… carrying to them the blessing of her deep love for God, and the peace that now lives in her heart. In a world of falseness, the most powerful teachings are simple, authentic, and true, and delivered by the most humble… by those who are BEING their message.
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Clinton speaks of 'expansive learning' as being a space where it is allowable for truisms to take their time in finding their connections to each other… like each truism world can exist as a self-referential island-continent vibrating high energy, but independently, perhaps for a very long time. In other words, in expansive learning, there is no pushing the river. There is simply staying present to it. So I can see for me that there now exists this Sikh connection as an island, and another island is my advaita practice, and another is being an artist/musician/writer, and another is my world of family karmas and their completions. And there are many many more…like my interest in law, for instance. All are lawful to my soul because they all require honesty of me. All thus contribute matrix. All empower awareness. All bless me. If I am to tell the truth, what in my life does not ultimately serve my awakening? It's sort of like what Guru Nanak said "Show me the direction where God is not, and I will point my feet there…" (I know that comment is 'out of nowhere', sorry. He was in Mecca on his pilgrimage to the Ka'ba and fell asleep with his feet pointing toward the shrine… and was awakened by a guard about to behead him for the crime. That's when he said those words…and the guard, because his heart was true, became a devotee…).
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Perhaps these words will carry a blessing for you. Every once in a while one of you lets me know I did good. That's appreciated. In the meantime, there is 'chopping wood and carrying water'… i.e., lawful karma to complete. From what I can see, mastery starts being approached when we accept our karma joyfully. I'm exploring that one….
Many blessings,
Namaste & Sat Nam…
David
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Rev. David Seacord
Fine Art Painter / Sufi Cherag
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