My Five Minute Awakening

[ButterflyWoman]

My practice will now be decidedly subtractive, meaning I see that there is much to cut away rather than accumulate. There is no destination to reach, no greener grass after years of self effort toward some ideal state of being. A "perfect" self would only mire me further in the hall of mirrors. Cancelling hope for a better tomorrow. Sitting down today to realize the whole show is right here, right now, and so close I've been pushing it aside in order to find it.

An analogy I like is that you find you're locked out of your house, so you desperately climb up onto the porch, up onto the roof, into the slightly open attic window, get in, come downstairs, and find that the front door was unlocked all along.

Meditation is not the road to liberation, only a tool in helping me reaffirm that a vertical reality bisects the horizontal time-driven unreality I presently occupy. Desiring any one state only feeds that state's shadow side, enforcing duality, tension, suffering.

Agreed. And very well stated.

No complicating matters. No worrying about whether or not my energy is blitzed, cloudy, low, blah, blah, blah. This is needless.

YES! And stop worrying so much about "positive" and "negative" and so on. You can characterise things that way if you want to, but it's so unnecessary (and the act of judgement of "positive" versus "negative" and "right" versus "wrong" and all that is grounded deeply in duality, anyway, obviously).

Continue to express compassion toward all beings, realizing this is not a holy act, only the safest stone to balance on for now.

*nod* Again, agreed. When I fall too far away from the position of compassion, I generally fall off my perch entirely. *squawk*

Surrender. Grace. Surrender. Grace.

And so it is.

[Frater.Akenu]

Soul, I would say there is some important message cipher hidden for you. Think about what these all events want to tell you, what's the message?

[Korpo]

Hello, Soul.

Interesting to hear I made an appearance or two. Which is funny! What did I look like?

The one with the tanks sounds very coded. The Hogwarts one sounds like the kind of dream I would have once in a while as well.

So, your dog is a herder as well? Mine always tries to coax me towards the kitchen or the front door. Herding dogs can be very patient but persistent that way.

[SoulSail]

Interesting to hear I made an appearance or two. Which is funny! What did I look like?

Erwin Romel.

Just kidding.

Actually you had blonde hair, glasses, looked like some distinguished intellectual type. But we were both in uniform and just going on and on about our tank gear. For some reason I kept getting the hunch that we'd worked on many components mutually in the past and were discussing how those components were doing. Even though we were in tanks, and there were many tanks. The whole scene was totally free of violence. The sun was out, the grass very green, and the whole thing was rather pleasant.

The Hogwarts dream was far more mystical. Your house was a maze of rooms, rooms of rooms, hallways both long, curved and all sorts of up and down. It was full of ancient artifacts, almost like something you'd see in an old Tibetan monastery.

Who knows?


Soul

[SoulSail]

Soul, I would say there is some important message cipher hidden for you. Think about what these all events want to tell you, what's the message?

I agree and admit to looking at the experience from one side perhaps to a fault. That this five minutes was sort of juxtaposed with a mind-state so fully compressed with stress and problems...I can't help but see a deeper point, or "cipher" in the whole narrative. I do not know. I have sensed that very subtle instruction to look closely at the order of events all the way through. Best course seems to leave the story open so my understanding isn't clouded when more comes out.

We'll see.


Soul

[dreaming90]

You had what the Zen masters call "kensho."

I have only a brief prayer for you: "May the next time be permanent."