No days of the week. No appointment later. No plans for dinner. Just a brief moment, in between parking the car and heading into the gym… free-floating in the present, and clueless on all counts except one:

How great it feels to be alive.

I feel the pulsing of my blood. The softness of my heart. The air itself. Ahh, presence! This is how I should feel every moment of the day… if only I felt it.

See, whenever I exit those mental machinations, even for a minute, it’s incredible. It can be the most magical part of my day, but I have to notice it… not just blank out. Once my mind is checked out, it usually stops recording. It automatically goes into old loops, old memories, old plans and regrets. I’m at the car… and suddenly I’m at the check-in counter. What happened to the minutes? Where did they go?

Well, we all need a new apparatus to stay aware when our minds go quiet… a different instrument… one which never misses these blessed opportunities, these rare opportunities to stretch out its wings. There’s a part of us that wants us to notice these occasions, too… and share them with us.

That’s our soul calling: hitherto in exile, living off of the mind’s grid… and ready when you are!

Admit it

You don’t know

What you want.

You never will.

Even if you did

It wouldn’t

Make you happy.

What you

Truly want

Is so enormous

So expansive

Nothing less

Than All There Is

Will suffice.

Oh, weary traveller

If you seek rest

Set your sights on the

Greatest prey

Of all…

On your

Forgotten

Beloved

Infinitude.

Why do you try to align

The outside world, friend?

It will never happen that way

Save your precious energy.

Focus not around,

But above.

Pull your attention inwards

The points of your crown

Reaching upwards.

The outside world has been

Patiently waiting for you

Like a forgotten mirror

To align yourself

So that it can change, too

Not with activity but by

Your peaceful presence

Your expanding love.

Aha!

Yes, you have control

But not how you thought.

Adjust your alignment

Reach upwards

Not outwards

And finally reclaim

Like a magical child

Those amazing powers

You hid away

So long ago

Bringing into alignment

The entire universe

With a most

Beatific

Detonation.

Let the Universe
Do what it wants.
When it speaks through you,
Let it speak.
When it acts through you,
Let it act.
You’re a channel now.
Whatever it
Appears to be
Don’t doubt
For a second
Its perfection,
Even when it appears
To be wrong.

You can’t control it
Or understand it, so
Disconnect your
So-called levers.
No more filters
Or middlemen.

Just allow it to
Work its magic
Without constant
Interference
and you’ll begin
To be shown
Its marvellous
Secrets.

Watching politics these days is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. You see the spin, the blame, the hype, the evasions, the finger-pointing… and you know it will lead to greater conflict, not to resolution. “Don’t they see how they could do this better?,” you think. “They could easily avoid this problem if they just listened to one another.”

So you study, you watch the news, you learn the data, trying to understand who’s right and who’s wrong. You establish an opinion, a beachhead. And that’s how you get caught: it’s the idea of a peaceful resolution that keeps you hooked in an illusion. Because it’s not people who are fighting, it’s a level of consciousness YOU are stuck in.

This low level of consciousness is created and maintained specifically by polarization, by “right” and “wrong” thinking. At this level, nothing gets resolved…. because that is not the purpose of this level of consciousness!

We’re all here to learn something very simple: to resist the temptation to enter into this polarization… especially polarized conversations. You know, the ones that leave us frustrated, anxious and combative, the ones that create enemies instead of friends? Yeah, those. Well, conflict is a great teacher, it turns out. And exhausting. Sooner or later we cannot but see the futility of getting involved… not because we’re afraid of “letting the other side win,” or “appearing to be timid,” but because we see that polarized discussions make us feel awful afterwards. They pull us out of our center, and when we lose that, we lose any chance of finding a resolution.

Perhaps that’s what Albert Einstein was talking about when he said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

And since we all need to learn how to stay in our center, we’re tempted to enter into the arena over and over again… until we get utterly exhausted in combat. That’s the lesson here. Others will try to goad you. They will criticise you for not taking a stance (the one in middle always takes shots from both sides), but one day you find you’re simply too weary to go one more round… and you begin to doubt that, in any case, the problem will ever be resolved “out there”. You suspect that it doesn’t even want to be resolved. Resolution isn’t the teacher… futility is! exhaustion is! And suddenly, you see the world as just a movie, trying to pull you in to it with its endless supply of catastrophe and disaster… and the only solution, like the computer at the end of WarGames learns, is: Not To Play.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t help. Please don’t get me wrong. It means you’ll be a calm onlooker, knowing that this is a test for you and for you alone, a test only you can resolve… by not getting sucked into the belief that it needs you to fix it. The lesson is to pull away from it, mentally and emotionally.

That’s when a magical door appears. There, in between the noise and the tumult, we suddenly have a choice: either to re-enter the chaos, trying to “help” or “be right” or “get involved” or any of the other convincing slogans we hear all around us… or go through the door, alone, deep within ourselves… into a whole new level of consciousness.

From there, you see the problem was never out there. The problem was believing that the outside world needed (or even wanted!) resolving. It’s not that “they” are ignorant… it’s that you are… by getting pulled into this level of consciousness over and over again! Conflict is the teacher, you finally figured out how to “resolve” this “problem” —internally — and because you’re sitting this one out…

You graduate!

I used to think money
Or a protector
Or thick walls
Would keep me safe.
But I was wrong.

Stay with me, says
My inner child
Please.
Don’t run away.
Don’t caretake others.
Don’t wait for others
To take care of you.
Do the inner work.

When the fear
When the anger
When the anguish comes
Stay with it
Stay with ME
Don’t run away
Don’t leave ME
This time
Your scared,
Sacred
Inner
Child.

You don’t have to protect me
Or keep away these
Scary feelings.
That never works.
Just sit with me
Don’t make me feel ashamed
Or abandoned
For feeling them.
Don’t leave me this time.

Look me in the eye
Tell me you’ll stay
Tell me that
My feelings are OK
That it’s safe to feel them
With you by my side.

You’re the only one
Who can make it safe.

When I feel safe
Magically…
You’ll feel safe, too
We’ll feel safe together
That’s all we ever wanted.

It’s how we treat
Our Inner Child
That makes us feel safe.
Nothing else
No external change
Will do it.

I need You
Here
Now
And Always.

Will you stay?

Because it’s outside the mind

Outside of normal

Measurements of success

Spiritual growth is

Hard to detect.

Losing your certitudes

And limitations

You won’t recognize it

As a gain.

Who ever would?

Keep going, friend

Reach for the sun.

Let yourself unfold

Imperceptibly

Inexorably

Naturally.

Welcome the exquisite

Slowness of

Petals opening

Fragrance appearing.

At first, you won’t notice

The garden admirers

You’ve done nothing

But lose your old self.

Yet the world

Rejoices in

How colorful and alive

You’ve become.

Who could imagine

The courage it took

This letting go

This sustained trust

This patient waiting

This humble

Glorious

Unfathomable

Reawakening.

There is a vast field of Infinite Intelligence surrounding us, dear friends, wanting to communicate with us… but its way of transferring knowledge is so different from what we’re accustomed to… we don’t even know how to receive it. It’s waaaay too complicated for our minds to decipher… because it doesn’t talk to us in words, ideas or concepts. It comes as “spiritual downloads.”

These downloads flow into us in huge metadata bursts… quietly, silently, explosively. We don’t see them coming; we only know they’ve arrived because there arises in us a kind of deep knowing. We suddenly comprehend something as if we had studied it for months… yet the download only lasted a minute!

People with near death experiences have been trying to explain this to us for decades. On returning to waking life, they often describe heavenly communication as being much faster and cleaner than earthly communication. A short encounter with a divine being may need years to fully comprehend. Think of a mega download, as opposed to streaming; one burst and it’s in.

Artists regularly report similar downloads. The famous Coleridge poem “Kubla Khan,” for example, was composed in a single night after the poet received the entire tome, word for word, in a waking dream. (Unfortunately Coleridge was interrupted while hurriedly scribbling it down. The poem remains half-finished to this day.)

So here’s the problem: if your mind is active, it will try to understand this intelligence… and in doing so, will block it from arriving. We need to quiet the mind to allow the Universe to do its work… to not block the package. The mind always tries to jump in and interrupt the flow… as it is terrified of these downloads: it only appears as though the mind is trying to help… but in effect, it parryies them away, chopping them into pieces, claiming authorship. It knows that it will be “fired” once you figure out that there’s a faster way to receive information. That’s why it doesn’t tell you about it!

It’s like an old 56K modem trying to distract you from 5G technology!

The heavy work of your growth and healing, therefore, happens in this ultra-fast invisible manner. Understanding may come later, as a kind of bulwark, but it won’t take the lengthy timings of the old system. Our greatest “effort,” really, is to silence our minds, trust that the downloads are coming, invite them (with gratitude)… and open our hearts. This makes our bodies into a sort of satellite dish, ready to receive from the universe at any time, without distractions.

Once we begin to receive these spiritual downloads, we’ll give up the old ways of accumulating knowledge altogether. We’ll also abandon the illusion that the mind was ever helping us: it only imagined that it was responsible for our progress, our ideas, our growing.

See, it was the Infinite Intelligence all this time: the Universe talking with our souls!

(Our minds were just in the way.)

Today, while talking with a photographer friend of mine, she said that historically there have been two explanations for still life photography. The romantic reason is to put a halt to our mortality, giving us the illusion that things (i.e. us!) remain stable over time (which of us hasn’t fallen for that one?). The rational reason is to create an image for study, as we see with botanical and zoological books.

And suddenly I remembered a photography exhibit I saw some thirty years ago, made up of forty or more polaroids by my favorite movie director, Andrei Tarkovskij. Each polaroid stood alone in a frame with Tarkovskij’s hand-written notes added underneath, usually describing the encounter. One featured two Russian farmers standing in a field, made especially memorable thanks to the caption in which the director writes that the couple had never seen a photograph before. After viewing the developed polaroid, they asked him point-blank, “Why would anyone want to stop time?”

In deference to that couple, perhaps there’s a third good reason for still life photography: a spiritual reason. In this frenetic world of constant movement, a still life image can help us slow down our thoughts, our idea of time, even our breathing… and help us focus on non-movement––for a change. It doesn’t slow the world down… but it can slow us down. It helps us appreciate moments of stillness in our own lives, magical moments that otherwise might pass unobserved: a cloud, a reflection, a leaf, a shadow. That would be a good reason, wouldn’t it?… helping us turn our backs on relentless activity, helping us relocate that still, divine point… within.

In other words, “Be still, and know that I am God,” as it says in Psalm 46:10.

So here’s a note of appreciation to all you still life photographers. May that stillness you felt when you clicked the shutter be passed over to the rest of us, one slowed-down viewer at a time. Thank you!