NONDUALITY: THE YELLOW BIRD

This not an allegory, analogy, symbolic story, or anything of the sort. There was a yellow bird that was sitting on the back deck railing. I did not notice it, and went out the sliding door and with a husky dog no less. I don’t know if the bird alighted on the railing while I was not looking, but I don’t think so. If it did, that would be even more magical. That it did not become startled by a door, a person, and a large working dog, is weird, was weird. (that someone in this room is watching a show and the moment I wrote that a flock of birds on the screen became startled and took off from a large tree is true and synchronistic). The bird in mysticism could have meant many things. It stayed there for a full few minutes, staring lovingly at me. And I would swear the lovingly part is not a projection. I thought right away that this is something very strange going on- and felt it meant something but I did not know what. It was yellow, and I guess this is a Gold Finch? Or something else. Now it could have been someone’s pet that escaped, or it could have been injured, or kind of a bird with a different brain that made it more relaxed, unafraid. If some people have different brains, or learning differences, why not a bird? Or maybe someone had been feeding it, and it got the wrong house. Yet, - my truest impression was that it was none of these. It seemed like a messenger. But I can’t get caught up in that. I don’t know if it was a totem, a messenger, or what. Is someone going to die, but it is okay? Is someone going to be borne? Is a special event going to happen? Is an auspicious sign? The point is, - though neat things happen, and I do believe they mean something, - I am glad that there is something else- or rather that it all appears in everything. It is let go as soon as it happens, and it opens up the vast, the infinite space, - for more to happen. What shall happen on this grand adventure? In a way, nothing less than everything. The bird slowly got ready to fly off. I could sense it, could see it. There was a certain movement to the feet and body, and a slight, slight repositioning. Then turning 44 degrees or so, it went off to the air and in seconds, as if something out of a fairy tale or a poem, was mixed in to the story of dense and high leaves and branches borne of a mature tree that waited under a pink blue orange white pre-dusk sky.

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NONDUALITY: IS THERE A CAUSE TO AWAKENING?

This is a great question.  To me there is no answer. How could a single cause be pointed out? But I am sure others might differ. Maybe somewhere a guru touched a disciple’s head and voila! - He or she came home. So to me, I don’t think there is a way that someone can do something to become awakened. My view and feeling on it is that the person was never not awakened, but clouded over by culture and idea, and sort of programmed. The program can run out, and then there is what is called awakening, though it is for nobody. It is just existence waking up again to what already is because a veil has been lifted and the ‘dream’ is over. Something like that. So I would say there is no cause. But, that could be wrong. There could be something that does it within everything. I think people should say the truth, which is ‘I don’t know, but here is my impression and experience.’ So I say no but I am open to a cause. For instance, I met Mother Meera, in Toronto Canada, about a year before, the late summer a year before, and received darshan. She is a divine mother I wholly believe in who works in silence. Perhaps that had something to do with it. I do not know. 

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NONDUALITY: A FALLING THAT NEVER SEEMS TO HIT THE GROUND

After the searching lets go, as if a program of some sort ran out, what remains is whatever is going on. The romance of the seeking and the finding, that whole idea, ends. Therefore the singular moment afterwards, without the seeker, continues. Here such a moment has continued for several years. This in itself, when the I as a tool or function within the stillness, amazes me. Nothing in a way has happened. I almost wanted to go back, though this doesn’t seem possible. I never heard or read in the canon of someone wanting to go back. But those books, those teachers, those seminars, darshans and satsangs were all so interesting and magical in their own right. A whole lifestyle was taken away from me when the I stopped one afternoon. And then what? A sort of falling into things, a merging where whatever is seen is what one is. There is not the viewer and the field per se, but just the field. An inability to close the physical eyes for a nap in order to escape, dream, avoid, such like, - another true love that existed prior to this awakening. So the search and the naps, - two things taken away. And what could have been lovelier than books and beloved sleep? Don’t get me wrong, there is sleep, - but it is regular sleep, at night, and now, years later, rarely at any other time. The body became predominant, not the mind, - and it does what it wants when it comes to natural functions like sleep. The eyes will not close if they are not meant to close. And there is this falling, falling, falling. I would have thought that on the contrary there would be an expansive, upward, and widening. The ajna chakra and the crown chakra are upwards. The kundalini usually rises upwards, is experienced that way. Upwards is heaven! But instead it’s like a falling into reality. Into things. A spilling of the eyes and whatever moves out from them, existence I suppose, - back into existence. And I never really landed. The new being, which is the old body but without the superimposition of the seeker, just continues on. There is always the physical existence until it subsides. 

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NONDUALITY: WHITMAN, RUMI, AND THE TWO GIRLS DOING COKE IN THE WASHROOM

I was sitting in a nice enough place with the group of people. The main road was there and outside the window. How the lights reflect off other things and seem to live a life of their own. Life at night. Lights at night. There were plastic parts and metal parts, signs, bus shelters, headlights, long parapets with flowers sitting smartly and the hues seemed to vibrate somehow in and amidst the air. 

In front of it all, inside the window, was a large security person, a security guard. It’s obviously his afterhours job to stand there and show his presence, to deter trouble. I had forgotten that in that particular place, from 9:00 onwards, they hire one security guard. He used to stand at the back as I remember it, - where the eatery let out to a patio and the patio out to a series of parking lots and trees. I guess that is where trouble sometimes tried to erupt or ensue. But it was a coldish night, and nobody was out there, - so they stationed him or he stationed himself at the front.

The table was full of patrons talking, and two women walk in but don’t look around. They are furtive, and something about their body language and quick semi-secretive moments denotes they are up to something. The washroom is in front of our high table. They duck in. One of our women needs to go, so goes in also.

In the meantime I look out the window and the chatter becomes background noise. Whitman and Rumi, I think, are alike and not alike. If Whitman, as he says, wants to take you up to a hill and gently put his arm on your hip in brotherhood and point out to the area, to show you its beauty, its vastness, well then Rumi is not exactly like that. Whereas Whitman would be what regular people would think is beauty, is nature, is extolling God and Nature’s virtues as it were, Rumi is more like a living fire. He would be somehow the hill, the air, the water in the river. Where the bearded Gemini would announce and pronounce the miracle of the land and its people, the other would claim that he is all of it, that the viewer is all of it…

There are people down at the bus stop. It’s faraway but you can see the lights of their phones throwing themselves out to the air. We are far away from mountains, hillsides, poets and sages anyhow. There is a cable centre, a few industrial buildings behind. A guy in a plaid shirt and a woman pass out the door to smoke. His plaid shirt is not for show or comfort like most, - but he is wearing it because he is actually a blue collar person. At twenty five, he has a good edge that he would not identify as such, and it’s one that others don’t have. The woman faces the traffic. She is anonymous. 

The security man is bored. He has seen everything before. He tries to sneak looks of the football game on the big screen but does it so casually as to be seamless. I look at the candle in a small mason jar and fall out to the objects on the table. Stone cold sober, I am drinking coffee. There is a moment of pure being. Everything is everything, - one movement yet still, or erupting from stillness. No, - even the moving, against reason, is still. Our lady comes back and whispers to the other lady. It’s about the girls in the washroom. They were in a stall together and doing things like substances perhaps. They were in there a full fifteen minutes, maybe more. We forget about them, talk on something else, - then they burst out and head to the large bar, disappearing with other patrons.

What would Rumi do on Young Street?, I wonder then, …one of the longest streets in the world…full of things, but with nothing much underneath them…promissory notes unfulfilled. Well, as the light pollution blocks out the stars, we can stare at the other lights. We can laud the Laundromat. Why not? 

The door behind security opens once more. The wind comes in. It’s brisk, autumnal, and agile. Some napkins are thrown about and people scramble to grab them the way people do.

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NONDUALITY: AUTOBIOGRAPHY VERSUS BIOGRAPHY AND WHY IT ALL ENDS UP LOOKING THE SAME AS BEFORE

Before a shift or a falling away of story, one’s autobiography is paramount. It is serious, real, and there is not a moment, an emotion, a thought, or anything else that is not invested in it. People will immediate act and react in accordance not with what is present, but with their own story. You can see this everywhere and know it in yourself. After a shift so-called, or a snapping, or an expansion of awareness of some sort, or whatever term suits, the same person is no longer a person but is everything and nothing at the same time. Yet, in the Source, the Stillness, movement happens and humans apparently exist. So now the person can talk about themselves almost in the third person. Some people do this. Jim can say, When Jim was seventeen he broke his hand during a fall on some gravel when he was cross country running. If you talk like that, you will appear quite strange. So, to ‘go along and get along,’ Jim, during a kind of re-socialization, ends up saying this: When I was seventeen, I broke my hand during a fall on some gravel when I was cross country running. Now the listener will not take a second glance. Now Jim has returned seamlessly to the world. He knows he is not. In fact, he has become the grandest secret of perhaps the universe! He has become the fact that he is nothing less than the universe! But that, in regular society, is deemed ‘crazy talk,’ narcissistic delusion, so on. So there he is, sipping his coffee. How can he tell a mailman or waiter, a passerby or really even acquaintance or friend, what he has found? This is where the most genuine of people, someone who is not a character, a persona, ends up, crazily enough,- acting like an actor,- in order to put others at ease. Yet, at least he or she knows through some Gnostic sense, through something like I AM, that he/she is not the story but that the story is something that appears inside of Source, God. 

 

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