The month of May
Brings opening
From bud to blossom.
Tightly bound,
Each bud stands
Complete, still and perfect
Being a bud.
Yet there is movement too.
Imperceptibly the bud
Rests in the change,
The movement of opening.
Flourishing.
Still and at peace,
Being the epitome
Of life as it is
Simply as a bud.
Yet also it is
Pure motion personified
As slowly it opens
Into a full-flowered
Version of itself.
In the forest,
We find fiddleheads,
Perfect just as they are
At each moment
Of their unfurling.
Yet they slowly unroll,
Becoming the ferns
They somehow already are
In a vision far beyond
The thought of it.
Even the scent
Of springtime
Penetrates
The virtual world
Of thought,
Bringing us
To the real life
Where stillness
And motion meet,
And life comes
To its flowering
In us and around us.
“Although there is a lot of argument about the word evolution regarding the origin of the humanity (evolution versus the other creation stories) we will stand aside from the fray here and look at the subject a bit differently.
“If we consider human evolution in terms other than purely biological (such as in terms of our ability to learn new behaviors in order to survive) it is easy to see the movement of it all around us in our individual experiences. We are developing new thought processes, behaviors, skills and capacities as we go through whatever our lives bring us, both individually and collectively. This is the kind of human evolution that plays an integral part in our daily lives, only it shows up in such small increments that we rarely bring it into focus.
“We are taught in school about ‘natural selection’ and ’survival of the fittest’ in regards to evolution, but giving some focus to the ‘adaptation’ involved is a broader and less biological way to explore the relevance of evolution to our everyday lives. Adaptation is the capability we and other organisms have to adjust ourselves to new conditions when they appear in our environment (in order to be naturally selected or to survive). It is the ability to alter our way of life, our habits and our behaviors when it is necessary to do so for survival or for other things that matter to us. It is about our ability to meet each moment freely and creatively and to let go of old habits of thought or behavior.
“This world situation that we are facing is inviting us to let go of old fear-based thinking habits that have in the past formed our ways of thinking about the world and its problems. Our old ways of thinking have brought us to this point - a point beyond which they are no longer able to help us survive and thrive. Through seeing ourselves and the world from a perspective outside of our old filters and frames, our perceptions are altered and we naturally are freed from old outworn thinking and behaviors that no longer serve us. We are then able to adapt ourselves to the new environment presented by the times we live in, and become creative in our relationship with it.”
First book: “Life Beyond Belief, Everyday Living as Spiritual Practice” available on Amazon, as a kindle book, other ebook, or at your local bookstore by request.
As the old year melts away like an icicle in the sun, the future unfolds moment by moment, simply as whatever is happening next in our ordinary lives. Each moment is a movement from mystery to miracle when we see the world as it really is, without the overlay of our minds telling us that what we are observing is ordinary, irrelevant or uninteresting.
As for myself, I’m not big on partying for New Year’s. I like to take the transitional moment as a time to review, wrap up and clean out from the old year which always entails things like file cleaning and accounting. Then I like to look forward to what the new year may be wanting of me and get a general sense of direction.
This year I was given a Kindle for Christmas which was very fun because I had put a lot of effort into reformatting my book “Life Beyond Belief” into a Kindle edition, but had never even held a Kindle in my hand before. I’m loving my new Kindle and loving the publishing revolution that it and all the other e-book readers will for sure be bringing to us. These e-book reading tools open up the publishing world even further, so that anyone who has something to say that others are interested in can participate in the planetary conversation. Next I’ll be working on making my blog available as a Kindle blog that can be subscribed to on Amazon.
So, to all of you who got Kindles this Christmas along with me: Besides downloading my own book in Kindle format at Amazon, also check out Adya’s latest book, End of Your World here. Adya’s book is a very wonderful guide to what he calls embodiment, which is really what Wide Awake Living is all about: bringing one’s awakening down into the everyday thoughts, actions and interactions that our daily family, community and work lives consist of.
In 2010, the Wide Awake Living website will be seven years old. It all started when a tenant who was also a friend lost her job and couldn’t pay rent so she paid part of it by teaching me how to make a website. I had experienced a major shift in the fall of 02 and was just starting to write about it. The original writing is still up there online, but the site has grown a lot since then and it led to this newsletter.
Lately I’m learning how the internet is a way for all the people who are working with the various aspects of the next evolutionary leap for humankind to connect up and stay connected. It may be that this newsletter and the various things I do on Twitter, Facebook etc can be a support to people who are themselves making this evolutionary leap out of the mind-made self that has hitherto confined us, and into the awesome wonder of what is.
A New Earth
Stand up, wake up!
New possibilities have arrived
For these lives we had thought were our own.
The possible human stands free now
Of its past constraints,
The cage it grew up in, that served it well,
Trembling now with wonder at what it sees.
Old habits of mind fall away like old skin
No longer needed, no longer helpful
Outgrown and abandoned.
A different world, a new earth
Comes into view, fresh and alive
By a change of perception,
A new way of seeing.
We are joined together now
In a new maturity
A new awareness of how it is,
How we are carried on a new wind,
And a new response stirs.
While getting back to writing again after a long pause, something has been coming up that seems to shed a lot of light on my own and other’s stories of awakening. The title above reflects what it is all about, and it is being a rich and fascinating exploration for me that I would like invite you to join in with as you read on.
What I notice in relation to my own awakening is that there are many areas where the actual living of the newly awakened perspective has been as easy and natural as water running downhill. But there have been other areas in daily life where earlier stages of development seem to naturally take over and temporarily hijack me into re-identification with familiar patterns of reaction and discomfort.
I had read that, once realization came, all the reactivity and discomfort would be finished. In an absolute way, that statement is totally true—it is all finished (based on the new identification with my always-already-awake Self). And yet at the same time, there still can be moments of disconnect from that awareness and then there is reactivity. Yes, this reactivity and discomfort are seen in the context of being a part of the grand perfection of everything, and yet that doesn’t mean that they are to be ignored as they are transcended.
The discomfort that arises is functioning as an attention-getting device that is part of a constructive process of gradual personal acclimation to that perfection, in order that it may be more fully lived.
A cognitive framework that allows discomfort and reactivity its place in the perfection of things then becomes important. If our internal thought structures are open enough to allow for anything and everything that shows up to have a legitimate part to play in life, (and we don’t reject some things and disassociate from them) then everything in life becomes a support for awakening.Life can naturally move towards greater and greater capability of the individual person to fully live in daily life that which we have realized ourselves to be.
I am fascinated to be giving the field of human development an overview, and am especially fascinated to see it correlating with the recent developments in both neuroscience and child development. It seems that we humans are at an amazing transition-point in history because we are now able to see and make sense of our own development over the eons in a clear way that has not been cognitively possible before. As we have developed the capabilities of our neo-cortex (pardon my oversimplification here) this has allowed us new perspectives on who we are and changed the world that we see.
Along the way, the increasingly complex ways in which we construct thought-based knowledge have also revealed themselves, as have the mechanics of perception. This obviously pertains to the way that we construct the personal self in its entirety. This self-construction process that has occurred in us as individuals is the bedrock that lies under all the rest of our thinking. It serves as a foundation that allows or doesn’t allow whole spectrums of experiences in any particular life.
These new perspectives also bring in a new possibility—that we may be able to allow life to deconstruct parts of our personality structure that are outgrown and no longer helpful. This means that the real Self is now more able than ever before to maintain a personal identity (a small me) that is operationally functional at a high level, in that it is serving the real Self and allowing the One which is awake to live through the personality more freely.
One of the ways that our personal thought structure can potentially hamper us pertains to the way it integrates ideas about spiritual awakening (by any name). It may even go so far as to firmly disbelieve that such a thing could ever happen in our own life, or it may be more subtle than that. Some of our assumptions and beliefs are closed systems with set interpretations of everything and these kinds of closed systems do not allow for the openness or space in which awakening can occur. The uncomfortable moments in life are faithfully offering us clues to ways in which we may be hampering ourselves, interfering with life’s inherent tendency to develop itself through us.
How our personality structure interprets what happens to us is significant in terms of our ability to actually live the realization that becomes available to us. Whether we have pursued realization through one of the great traditions, been outside them, or whether awakening has seemed to pursue us, the outcome (awakening, enlightenment, gnosis, self-actualization, Christ-consciousness, et al) will, at least in terms of our ability have it available back to our daily lives, be dependent on the structure that we use to interpret, understand, know anything in our lives.
For instance, if we operate through a thought-based personality structure that is totally dominated by the need to be right and have others be wrong , then any experiences of non-egoic awareness will be interpreted and contained by those structures. The outcome would almost inevitably be a difficulty in even seeing anything that lies outside those structures. Through our thought we draw meaning from our experiences, and create the world that we experience by a necessary censorship of our sensory input that guards us against overwhelm.
Similarly, if the conceptual structures that build the individual personality have, throughout that person’s lifetime, ostracized the “bad” parts of who they are, then those parts need to be included somehow within the whole in order for the realization to be fully lived. This disowning of parts of ourselves is a major contribution of psychology to the spiritual seeker’s dilemma. I have recently discovered that new information from the field of psychology describes very well the pattern behind the arising of these disowned parts of my own psyche that I described in the latter parts of my book. Knowing about this cognitively gives me a framework for allowing the reclamation process to proceed with a higher degree of comfort. It lets me relax.
This exploration seems to be about how the structure of any individual’s thought-based personality has a role to play in allowing space for awakening and how it can provide a conducive environment for awakening both before, after and during any realization of who we really are. These thought-based capabilities of the “small me” seem to now be offering themselves to be wielded as a tool in the hand of that newly discovered Self and are coming into alignment with the movement of life itself as it animates the individual person.
We live in a monumental time, and the dying of the old ways of operating need not cloud our perception of what is arising in its place.
Sunlight touching treetops,
Birds awakening…
Morning rises after night
With a constancy and grace.
While politics swirl
Conflicts rage, economies teeter,
Hurricanes roar,
Morning dawns over all
Without apology or praise
But with simple welcoming
Of all that is lit
By its presence.
What kind of love
Embraces this wild world
With such a welcome?
What love is this, that
Contains such
Darkness and strife
When the world
Refuses to conform
To our demands for
Outer peace,
And then wraps us
In such wonder
And grace?
Fear, war, starvation,
And so much else
Are included in the
Grace of morning light
On a darkened world.
In the light’s first
Touch of a leaf
There is something that
Embraces all of what we are
And includes us
In the full circle
Of life as it is.
We see that we are
Something whole
And seamless,
And perfect.
The heart of each morning
Offers with outstretched hands,
An expansion, a release
Out off our self-made prisons
Into a world ruled by a love
That excludes nothing,
A love we can trust,
A love at peace
With all things.
Even this, and this, and
Especially and
Whole-heartedly
This.
Being where we are. We’ve all heard that “being where we are” is where we need to be. But do you see the joke in that? Here we are, trying to get somewhere again!!
Being here fully gets translated by mind into a being something to work towards. Somewhere new to get to at some point in the future after lots of hard work, discipline and time, lots of time! Are you laughing yet? It’s funny, and it makes us feel crazy, but its really just mind doing what minds do. That’s all. Mind is so good at figuring out how to do things, and its just trying to do this too, but it can’t. As soon as we realize it can’t, we are free to just smile at its efforts and relax. All is well. Mind is doing its thing and it doesn’t matter. No need to pay overmuch attention to it.
Meanwhile Here we Are! Here we are in this moment with whatever is going on inwardly and outwardly. There is nowhere else we could ever have possibly been except as we allow ourselves to listen overmuch to the stream of thinking. Our minds may be saying to us right at this moment that “this can’t be it” because this moment is totally mundane, empty, boring, painful or… (fill in the blank for yourself). Mind can always come up with reasons why this particular moment can’t be what is being referred to, because it can’t find anything special there. Nothing. (Are you laughing yet?)
Meanwhile, smiling and relaxing we fall into a reality that mind doesn’t even notice. Its kind of like falling asleep at night–we have to relax for it to happen.
Our thinking minds have everything boxed and labeled and categorized according to past knowledge, and our own structure of understanding whatever is encountered. And those capabilities are so very useful to us for practical things. But what the logical left-brain thought-stream doesn’t even notice is anything that is outside of its structures for understanding the world–and that very definitely includes Reality with a capital R. Not because thought is wrong or bad, but because it is constrained within self-constructed bounds and can’t see beyond that. It is blind to whatever doesn’t fit its own structures (at least not until those structures are broadened enormously). So for now it tries to shrink everything to make it fit its constructs. But in contemplating what is really going on in life, thought has run into something much bigger than its constructs, something that contains mind and everything else within it. It has come to the edge of its ability to be helpful and will, when its good and ready, relax and allow us to fall into this new territory. To fall awake.
When we run into a fabulous sunset or an unusually beautiful flower, our mind’s processes of naming it, talking about it, and so on, can detract from our seeing and appreciating it fully. It is the same with the present moment. Relaxing into being exactly where we are, we begin to notice what is here (including thinking and a LOT else), and that this has been here all along. Its just like a new door of perception has opened. We now see where we were blind before.
We stand in a new territory beyond the previously held paradigm that our mind provided us, telling us how life worked, who was to blame, and so on. We have reconnected with something familiar, something we never really left. Something that we have, over all the years we thought we were separate, never left for a second.
As we look around we begin to see how it all is working. Now everything that is happening, even including our own seemingly idiotic or unenlightened episodes are perfect setups for continued awakening into a fuller and fuller embrace of being this that we truly are. Slowly we relax our incessant argument with life, and trust our circumstances, even our thoughts and feelings, as being perfect as they are, even as they flow and change. We offer ourselves, including our thinking minds and their amazing capabilities in service to this perfect alive presence we now can see and that is also who we are.
Normally it would be a logical conclusion to assume that having a stroke would be a bad thing to have happen in your life. But Jill Bolte Taylor is a brain scientist and when she had her stroke she was able to observe the details of her experinence as she lost and regained her brain function. Hers is a teaching story. Not many of us have felt interested in delving into dry factual brain science. I haven’t. Yet Jill’s story brings it alive because it is what actually happened to a living breathing human being.
Jill experienced the loss of the use of the left hemisphere of her brain due to a blood clot, and then regained it again over the course of an eight year process of brain re-education.
She is able to eloquently describe what life is like when only the right hemisphere of the brain is functional, and the experience appears to be what we spiritual people have been calling enlightenment, nirvana, the kingdom of heaven. The oneness, the being in the present moment, the perfection of all things - all of this is how our right hemisphere experiences life all the time. On the other hand it is the left hemisphere that measures, judges, compares, fears, condemns etc., but it is also, of course, what makes us able to function.
When Jill experienced the loss of contact with left brain input, she was in paradise, but she couldn’t function. Her conclusions after regaining these functions are so clearly validating the importance of the effective working together of both hemispheres, giving ourselves a comprehensible experience of being alive and allowing us to know how to be in the world based on input from both sides.
The sense that my brain makes of this is this: based on input from the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere then is able to let me therefore know how to live, in both large and small ways.
In this view of the brain, what could awakening be except the shift in what we are identifying with - out of the thinking/calculating mind of the left brain, into an identity which encompasses and accesses both hemispheres and allows them both to function harmoniously and compatibly!
It looks from here like the whole “human condition” set of issues (hatred, fear, poverty, etc) is coming from the long-time dominance of the left hemisphere over the right, from not allowing the input from the right to be a part of our awareness. The thinking/communicating mind is so noisy, and the paradisical world of the right brain is so quiet, that an unhealthy dominance has occurred.
It seems clear to me now that we are at the point in our collective experience where we can begin to shift this dominance. Our spiritual interests have brought us to this threshold, but the threshold itself is not a spiritual one. It is a human one. Jill’s story can be heard by anyone, irrespective of religion or spiritual interest or not. This is about what we are. Although she never uses the word, Jill’s story seems to me to be totally about awakening because it gives us the possibility of a new kind of relationship with the busy left hemispheres of our brains that have created the ego structures and the whole experience of separation, difficulty, problems etc. Yet when our left hemisphere is being tempered/influenced by the right it can be a powerful tool in service of that One-Life which we apprehend and connect with through the right.
Knowing how little I know about all this, I’m sure the brain science here is all a huge oversimplification, but I’ve always been a fan of simplicity so don’t really want to apologize for that. Simplicity is one of the attributes of Truth, if you ask me, and so I look for it within complexity.
Aside from ideas
About what suns are,
What turns…
How it all works,
An actual sunrise
Touches the treetops
In golden light.
This is a miracle of refraction
Performed without
Knowing the word
Yet pouring like a clear stream
From the heart of itself
Golden and radiant.
Noticing this,
Seeing what this is,
This sunrise touches–
Brings attention to–
The actuality here,
So often hidden, but always
The seed in the core
Of this human life,
Housed in flesh, yet
Not confined thus,
Remaining radiant and
Golden as sunrise.
Behind all ideas of who
Watches the sun coming
And sprinkles words on paper
Calling them poetry,
The actuality of the morning
Infuses what it touches
With something quite else,
Something wonderous.
This fleshy bundle…
A miracle in itself,
But what it houses!
What it houses!
This actuality finds itself
In each ordinary life, and
In the fading stars, the rising orb,
The birdsong
Amongst the tangled shrubbery–
In every single thing.
Oh, miracle beyond knowing
I am returned again to actuality
By your hand.
I arise with the sun.
An opening into a simplicity
Already here, yet
Just becoming visible.
I am a window to actuality.
Take my words, and
Look through me, if you will
At this world’s morning.
I thought that I would be able to write more often on this trip but it has been an extremely full time. The Chicago experience was amazing. I arrived a day earlier than I needed to, to attend the Oprah Winfrey show about A New Earth, and what happened in that day (besides resting up) was the filming of two hours of conversation with Richard Miller who has already made 24 of these conversations with others for Chicago Public Television. Richard is creating a wonderful archive of conversations with spiritual teacher types of people and they are available to all if you go to video.google.com and search “Never Not Here”. It is a wonderful resource for all and I will put a link to it on my website when I get home.
The Oprah Show the next morning was an amazing experience, but they didn’t ask me to say anything at all. The entire audience consisted of people who were related to the A New Earth webcast in some way. Many of them were people who had written in asking questions. The show itself was 100% on A New Earth, and was already pre-orchestrated with 8 chosen participants Skyping in who had experienced major shifts recently from reading A New Earth. One was a soldier in Baghdad who was currently experiencing incoming rockets and having to periodically hide underground to protect himself from the enemy fire. His mother was in the live audience. So was Elizabeth Lesser and a woman who was a Catholic lay minister. Each person of the 8 Skypers had a particular story about a recent shift and they all fit together beautifully. My favorite was a woman in Ontario who was in late stages of cancer. She was so inspiring the way she talked about how she had been so negative and angry and now she was living in the awareness of how precious and beautiful every remaining moment of her life was. The show will air on Wednesday April 9th in the regular Oprah Winfrey show time-slot in your area.
As soon as the cameras would shut off, Oprah was so personable and talked to us all as if over a cup of tea in her kitchen. She told us a couple of remarkable things in those commercial breaks and afterwards. She traced the whole trajectory of her career with us and ended up making the point that ALL of it seemed to her to be directly leading to and making possible this work that she is doing with Eckhart Tolle. She says it is the most important thing she has done in her life. She also said that she intends to hold off naming any more books to her book club for at least a year in order to keep the focus on A New Earth and see what the year brings. Isn’t she something? I’ve really got to hand it to Oprah. What an amazing woman. What an opportunity she is giving the world.
Now, a few days later, I am writing from Vermont. I am staying with a dear friend in Guilford Vermont and there is still 3 feet of snow on the ground at her house! Vermonters are still waiting for spring, and looking forward to it very much after one of the longest and snowiest winters in a very long time. There are still 20 foot piles of snow here and there on the north sides of big barns and places where the sun doesn’t often reach.
I have already done two evening book events/groups and both have gone wonderfully with about 25 to 30 people attending. The event in Amherst Mass takes the record for length, having started at 7:00 and the last people not leaving till almost midnight. There was also a radio interview on the local station WKVT with local DJ Steve West who did a wonderful job interviewing me about the book, and has given me the recording on a disc, so I will be able to post it on the website at some point in the near future. There is one more event this afternoon in Westminster West (Vermont, north of Brattleboro) and then a lot of visiting around with old friends. This is the area where I have lived for most of my adult life and raised my family. I lived around here right up until moving to California in 2004. On Monday night I will visit the woman who created the beautiful cover that you see on Life Beyond Belief, and on Tuesday I return to see more of my parents who live in a wonderful Senior Community in Exeter New Hampshire called RiverWoods. Because of the Chicago adventure, I arrived to see them at the beginning of this trip just in time to borrow their car and leave again. So Tuesday through Saturday will be the time to be a better guest than that, and to enjoy and be with them until my return to California on the 12th.
On the second web-cast of Oprah Winfrey’s phenomenally large online class with Eckhart Tolle, the stand-out for me was when Eckhart talked about making the present moment the focal point of our lives. Eckhart has a wonderful way of saying inspiring things using such plain language that we can all get it, no matter what our spiritual or religious background might be.We can see into the meaning of his simple words, and connect with the reality that they are pointing to.
We heard in his earlier book “The Power of Now” about the importance of the present moment—about how the past and the future are not real in the same way that this present moment is real—past and future are just ideas that are programmed into our minds.This must have resonated with many of us, because the Power of Now has been on the best seller lists for so long. Now Eckhart has written A New Earth and it has already sold 3.5 million copies, even before Oprah started this class. We must have an abiding interest in this message! And we want to know—after exploring our interest and enjoying these wonderful books, is there a way that we can actually experience this reality that Eckhart is talking about in the midst of the commotion of our busy daily lives?
What would it really mean to change the focal point of our lives to the present moment, and to stay living in the world? If we are willing to really have that happen for us, what would it mean for our lives?The content in each of our lives is different obviously, so the exact details of what would change would be as unique as we each are as people.On the other hand, there are universal patterns about this inner shift that Eckhart is referring to.One of these is expressed so succinctly by the description he uses of having a space develop between our sense of self and our thought processes. This space occurs and expands as we disidentify with our thought processes, and relate to them instead as a wonderful tool that we (an identity outside of them) use. In our lives up to this point, we have been fused with these thoughts that go through our minds, as if our ideas about ourselves are actually equivalent to who we are. When we stay in the present moment and notice that our thoughts are arising and are something quite separate from who we are, then a space is appearing. At first it may seem vague and fleeting, but over time if we keep giving this our attention, the space seems to widen and become permanent and “normal”. We notice our thoughts as if from a slight distance, as only being thoughts and not having anything to do with who we are.We no longer look to our thinking processes to provide us with crucial information about who we are, and so are freed in a wonderful way from reliance on our thoughts, feelings or circumstances conforming to our preferences. They no longer affect us in the same way.
This lack of reference to thinking for clues about our identity, doesn’t leave much possibility for using the past and future as focal points for our daily living. Past and future turn out to not exist outside of our thought processes. We can watch our thoughts creating both. Meanwhile it is all happening in a present moment that seems to be pregnant with possibility and vitality.When we stay with it enough to recognize the incredible beauty of the life force expressing itself around us in a myriad of forms, it can feel quite overwhelmingly and radiantly beautiful, no matter what the content of it is.
If what we are going to do today or how we are going to behave in a particular situation has been a compulsive recreating of the past (making today be much like yesterday and projecting that into tomorrow) we become freed from that.Although such freedom from the past is generally felt to be wonderful, what is sacrificed to get there is the knowing of what will be happening in the future.To the mind, this tends to be a profoundly unacceptable situation because of its need to control life, and mind may be making noisy complaints about that. The noise, however, is occurring on the sidelines of awareness once we are experiencing the space that we have been referring to. It is just mind doing what minds do, making noise and being a tool that is trying unsuccessfully to retain control over its rightful master, you.It no longer is needed for that particular job. You already know who you are.
As we allow the present moment to be the focal point of our lives, we are freed from the domination by our thoughts that has been the normal human condition for thousands of years. We are freed to live our lives without compulsive referencing to ideas about what is possible and the world opens up to us. We use the mind to reference practical things—we don’t want to forget our phone number or forget how to cook dinner. Mind is the most amazing and practical tool when it comes into its rightful place of serving something beyond itself. And when it is not needed, it can rest. What is here in this focal point of the present moment then, is the simple yet vitally alive world that surrounds and includes us. We feel the wind in our hair again. We see the incredible vitality in the world around us—we see God (or call it Life, or Love) peeking at us out of everything. We experience the joy that every birdcall has all along been offering us.The veil of thinking has been lifted off of the world, and life as it is, including our own, can now be experienced.
Experiencing the world in this way is such an overwhelmingly wonderful experience that once it is felt, it forever remains as a motivation for the sometimes time-consuming process of learning to live it in the midst of everyday life. At first it may be that even little disturbances like a harsh word or a traffic jam with jump-start mind into such compelling noise that the experiencing of the present moment may not be possible until that event is long passed.But gradually over time, with steady attention to who we really are, we are able to stay conscious in the little things and only more charged and potent events can throw us. Gradually we come to live our whole lives in this new world. We have changed the focal point of our lives to the present moment, and our world reflects back to us the incredible gift of the Life that we have been given and that we are.
