- This lead me to scan this Blog for such misspellings and, indeed, I found and corrected several.

- One of the misspellings was associated with a post I’d made back in February of 2007 referring to a beautiful post over on Life 2.0 entitled,

‘Let go and let Love’…. why did no-one tell me it’s so simple?

- As I made my correction, I began to reread the ‘Let go and let Love…’ post and was deeply captivated again by it.   So much so, that I want to re-post it here in it’s entirety.  It’s a very beautiful and timely piece and I encourage you, if you like it to visit Life 2.0 and explore for more of the same.

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First up, an explanation of sorts.  There’s been a continued ‘enlightenment’ theme to recent posts.  Maybe it’s because I try not to plan what I write that posts here tend to follow a path of their own, I don’t really know.  All I can say is that I have a load of ideas around entrepreneurship, creativity and life hacks that I’d love to share with you too.  But whilst we’re still on this subject, and just so you have a little perspective as to ‘where I’m coming from’, I’ll tell you about my own journey so far:

I guess we all come to the recognition of Truth in our own way and in our own time,  and that’s good.  My way seems very strange though.  I was one of the so called lucky ones – I had my very own ‘burning bush’ experience.. but what I did with that beggars belief.  I very, very subtly (so that I wouldn’t even notice I was doing it) turned and walked away from it.
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The burning bush
Some years ago, after a lifetime of being determined to find out ‘how things really worked’, and having studying  A Course in Miracles for a year or so, I was out walking my Labrador on the hill behind my home.  After I had gotten tired of throwing sticks for Ben I sat down on a stile to watch the world go by for a while, and the dog curled up under my feet. In the next few minutes I came to see my whole life in a completely new light, totally reframed and everything fitting perfectly together – like adding the last few lines to a ‘join the dots’ picture where suddenly you see what it is all about for the very first time.  I thought I had been building businesses, raising my children, trying to be all the things I wanted to be.  I had no idea that totally unbeknown to me, life had had a completely different agenda.

This ’secret’ agenda had been working through everything I had ever thought, spoken and done, through every so called failure and success and through every traumatic or blissful moment in my life.  I saw so clearly that everything that had happened since the day I popped onto this planet had been orchestrated to bring me to this place where I was now sat and was able to see the perfection and beauty of it all.  It all was suddenly so clear, every single part of my life fitted together faultlessly, with not one piece missing or to spare.  Enlightenment had been going on all the time…. perfectly.

Here’s what I now knew:  After all my efforts to understand, to ‘get it’ and then to walk the path, the path has been walking through me all along.  We had always been the vehicle for enlightenment, we just didn’t see ourselves as doing that, and certainly didn’t see ourselves as being in the driving seat.  There was one beautiful purpose to life and my expression of that had been played perfectly by me all along, and this was true for everyone.  Suddenly all concept of right and wrong and guilt and doubt disappeared completely.  And there was no place for  regrets anymore, only this one vast, all encompassing Love….. and it had only been my desire to find happiness in this life that had blinded me to seeing it was already here.
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Good intentions gone wrong
I knew from that moment on that my life was changed because there could be no forgetting this.  By some form of grace I had glimpsed Reality and all I wanted or needed to do was find a way of helping the rest of the world see the same thing. And that’s where I started to lose the plot again.

The more I tried to explain this, to myself or others, the more distant it seemed to become.  All I wanted do was to help and yet the more I tried, the more this epiphany turned into a distant memory.  What I didn’t see then was that the very act of trying to understand was the act of denial of what I had so clearly seen.  By trying to understand I was separating the one who was trying to understand from that which he was trying to understand.  By attempting to reconcile God and Life and Love and Enlightenment and ‘Who I am’, I was denying that they are all the same thing….. this Oneness that I had been so fortunate to experience.

It’s only when I imagine there is more than one thing, like when I put the little word ‘my’ in front of the word ‘life’, that there arises the concept of an under-stander and an under-stood and then the need to understand.  Oneness can only ever be experiential because it is all inclusive.  Reality can only be known, because there is no-one separate to understand it. It’s only the mind that obfuscates this feeling of Love and connection that we already exists in.  And anything I can imagine to do to come to this realisation, can also only be part of my denial of this feeling of Love that is constantly trying to seep into our conscious awareness.  As Thomas Aquinas one said:

Love takes up where knowledge leaves off.”

Awakening was life’s role not mine.  I had forgotten that our part is only to allow it to happen.
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Wising up
So little by little I’ve come to accept there is nothing I can do to awaken because life itself is the process of awakening.  It’s a process of accepting what already is and that requires no doing and no effort, just a surrender to what is already here in this moment.  Life delights to set us free, to make us happy.. and everything we need to fulfill that purpose comes to us, perfectly.  When we really accept that we don’t know how to wake up then a miracle happens.  Instead of not-knowing being the problem, not-knowing becomes the answer – our whole way, because ‘not-knowing’ is the clean and empty slate on which Love will write a different story through our lives.  It is in the invitation and the opening to grace.

I suppose we could paraphrase the whole process of life down to this one thing:  A process of letting go of our resistance (in a multitude of ways) to the Love that Is.  This is all that is really going on here.  And so we come home to Truth, to the knowing of our true Self, simply by allowing it to happen – by allowing ourselves to become non-resistant to everything.

At the end of the day the choice is this:- we can either be true to Truth of our own experience or true to the latest idea of what is still needed.  This is seen so clearly in the way the great religions keep us in chains by lowering expectations and by promising freedom some time in the ‘future’.  And so we end up settling for being Christians instead of Christs and Buddhists instead of Buddhas.  Didn’t Jesus once say, “Greater things than these things shall ye do”.  Adyanshanti says it well in this essay entitled  ‘You are the Buddha’.

This is what the Buddha did.  He didn’t say, “I’ll try.”  He didn’t say, “I hope I’ll find the Truth.”  He didn’t say, “I’ll do my best.”  He didn’t say, “If not in this lifetime, then maybe next lifetime.”  He came to the point where he didn’t look for anyone else to tell him the Truth or show him the Truth.  He came to the point where he took it all on himself.  He sat alone under the Bodhi Tree and vowed never to give up until the Truth be realized.

The power of this very simple, yet unshakable intention and absolute stand to be liberated in this lifetime propelled him to awaken to the simple fact that he and all beings are liberated—that all beings are freedom itself.  Pure awakeness.

The Buddha was no different from you.  No different. …..

Adyanshanti also says “What we serve we cannot lose”.  True enough, but even this idea of ’serving Truth’, at least for a  bear-of-little-brain like me, is too much.  I have seen that we already do this and I have seen that in spite of appearances, everything we have ever done has served Truth.  We were just mistaken, and thought there was something else going on here.  And so when I attempt to serve Truth there is this very human tendency that arises in me to judge how I am doing, and then I lose my way again – lose sight of the fact that we already do this perfectly – that we are already awake and perfectly creative, and just don’t see it yet.
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Homeward bound
So for me at least, I need to finally let go of trying to live it, of trying to serve it, and simply  allow It to live and serve through me – become nonresistant (’surrender’ if you like) to this Love that we call life that already flows through us.

There’s a huge freedom in this tiny change of intent because now there is no cause for stress or concern.  When we replaces all the reasons ‘why’ we do things (especially all those spiritual or do-goody reasons) for this single ‘why’ of allowing Truth/Love/Life/Joy/*your own term here* to express itself through me, then there are no worries any more.  Life makes no mistakes….. ‘mistakes’, ‘problems’ – that’s all mind stuff.  Success in this is always certain, but now we come to  know it is so.

So perhaps I finally am ‘getting it’:  Just surrender to life…..let life flow through me un-resisted…. and see what happens.  ‘Listen and allow’…. as my friend  Jodee Bock tells me to do.

What a release not to have to do or understand anything anymore …. just enjoy the ride.  No worries, no cares, it’s not up to me now… not my problem.  And what problems could there be once their cause, my resistance, has gone.  Trusting instead, that when we are just being who we Are, in harmony with Universe, everything just works out fine.

Love Is…. what more could we do than simply let it be?

To let go and let Love……Why did no-one tell me it’s this simple?

Or perhaps they did and I just wasn’t ready to hear.
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Life as celebration
So what to do, now that I know that anything I try to do to bring about enlightenment blinds me to the recognition that it’s already here?

How about just doing whatever it that makes us happy and trust life to take care of all the rest?  Hard as it is to shatter the egos belief in unworthiness and sacrifice and struggle, it’s only in the path of our happiness that we find what we have come here to learn.  Life has only one agenda: -  that we be happy, now.

And what better way to strengthen this realisation than to see it everywhere, take joy in everything that comes our way and share it freely?  It’s this what we came for.

So to me, our greatest role models and teachers are not the obvious ones.  Not the ones that lecture or hold retreats, but those who know how to squeeze the juice out of life and then invite you to dine with them.

Evelyn at  Crossroad Dispatches and Tittin at  Backtracking Slowly Forward spring immediately to mind.  Click over there and you’ll find a pot-pourri of art, raw life and insight……. and you’ll perhaps also discover what  George Bernard Shaw meant when he said,  “The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.” (we can forgive him the gender bias of those times).  But like any good feast, the best times to go there are when you are little hungry and when you have a little more time than you need… so you can savour and enjoy all the different flavours.

- To the original post on Life 2.0: 

- Point well taken.

- This post is for the purpose of putting up some digital photos I want to share with various folks here and there.   A few weeks ago, I went up to Golden Bay to visit with my friends, Robert and Cynthia and their two beautiful little girls.   Here’s are a few photos from my time with them:

Bob, Cynthia and the girls

Cruise Ship at Pohara

Sampsons at Pohara

Bob and I at Pohara

When I was with Robert and Cynthia, we attended the fair being held in Takaka and at the fair, there was a great collection of old time cars that folks had restored.   Some of my Starbucks buddies in Monroe Washington are into things like this so I thought I’d put these photos up here for them to see:

I’ve just finished reading The Schopenhauer Cure by Irvin D. Yalom – a brilliant book which I highly recommend.  Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as you might expect from the book’s title weaves its way deeply throughout the novel’s plot.

Bit one bit of Schopenhauer’s thought that I noted with particular interest is illustrated in the following quotes:

It has often been noted that three major revolutions in thought have threatened the idea of human centrality.  First, Copernicus demonstrated that Earth was not the center about which all celestial bodies revolved. next, Darwin showed us that were not central in the chain of life but like other creatures, had evolved from other life-forms.  Third, Freud demonstrated that we are not masters in our own house — that much of our behavior is governed by forces outside of our consciousness.  there is no doubt that Freud’s unacknowledged co-revolutionary was Arthur Schopenhauer, who, long before Freud’s birth, had posited that we are governed by deep biological forces and then delude ourselves into thinking that we consciously choose our activities.

and

…Schopenhauer two centuries ago understood the underlying reality; the sheer awesome power of the sex drive.  It’s the most fundamental force within us — the will to love, to reproduce — and it can’t be stilled.

Schopenhauer may have been the first to name and describe I call the Biological Imperatives.

Of course, it wasn’t until much more recently, with the advent of Evolutionary Psychology, that we can begin to connect his observations into the greater cloth of hard science vis-a-vis what E. O. Wilson called Consilience in his book of the same name.

“Why is that wrong?” asked Assaji.

“Because these things are dreams that lull you,” said Buddha.

“What would we see if we weren’t dreaming?”

“Death.”

“The five monks felt a chill pass over them.  It seemed pointless to deny what their brother said but hopeless to accept it.   Buddha said, “You are all afraid of death, as I was, so you make up any story that will ease your fears, and after a while you believe the story, even though it came from your own mind.”   Without waiting for a reply, he reached down and picked up a handful of dust.  ”The answer to life and death is simple.  It rests in the palm of my hand.  Watch.”

He threw the dust into the air, it remained suspended like a murky cloud for a second before the breeze carried it away.

“Consider what you just saw, ” said Buddha.   “The dust holds its shape for a fleeting moment when I throw it into the air, as the body holds its shape for this brief lifetime.  When the wind makes it disappear, where does the dust go?  It returns to its source, the earth.   In the future that same dust allows grass to grow, and it enters into a deer that eats the grass.   The animal dies and turns to dust.   Now imagine that the dust comes to you and asks, ‘Who am I?’  What will you tell it?   Dust is alive in a plant but dead as it lies in the road under our feet.   It moves in an animal but it is still when buried in the depths of the earth.   Dust encompasses life and death at the same time.  So if you answer ‘Who am I’ with anything but a complete answer, you have made a mistake.

I have come back to tell you that you can be whole, but only if you see yourself that way.  There is no holy life.  There is no war between good and evil.   There is no sin and no redemption.   None of these things matter to the real you.   But they all matter hugely to the false you, the one who believes in the separate self.   You have tried to take your separate self, with all its loneliness and anxiety and pride, to the door of enlightenment.  But it will never go through, because it is a ghost.

- from Buddha by Deepak Chopra

I feel very blessed.  I’ve dodged one of life’s great bullets and get a chance to go on with an open future.

Thanks to all of you who have followed this health saga of mine and who have expressed their concerns and compassions.   It has all been much appreciated.

To quickly recap.

My wife had divorce proceedings served on me on July 2nd.

Exactly two weeks later on July 16th, my Urologist gave me the results from a Prostate Biopsy and I found out I had Prostate Cancer.

After a crash self-education course on my options, I elected to have my Prostate removed since all indications were that we’d caught it early and it was still fully contained within the Prostate gland.

On August 11th, I underwent a robotic ‘da Vinci’ Prostatectomy at Swedish Hospital here in Seattle.

On August 19th, I went into my surgeon’s office to have my catheter removed and to get the Pathologist’s report on my Prostate.  The report confirmed that the tumor was indeed, fully contained within the Prostate.  My surgeon told me that this result meant that I had about a 95% chance of being Prostate cancer free.

It is now September 20th.   I’ve recovered well from the physical surgery.  I still have minor issues with incontinence but these are said to improve for most folks over time.   Impotence is also an issue but recovery from that side effect generally takes six weeks to three months and I’m only about five weeks post surgery now.

The truth is, for me personally, neither of these factors weighs very heavily on me compared to dodging the cancer bullet.

I go in this coming Wednesday to see my surgeon for what I believe will be my last post operative visit.   He’ll draw blood and run a PSA test and that’s when we’ll get some indication if I do, indeed, fall into the 95% cancer-free group or if I’m one of the unlucky 5% folks in whom the cancer cells escaped from the Prostate into the body before the Prostate was removed.   My PSA level should measure as zero, if all the Prostate cells are gone from my body.

On the divorce front, things are still proceeding.   Here in Washington State in the U.S., all divorces have to undergo a 90 day cooling off period so the folks involved can see, after their emotions have subsided a bit, if divorce is what they still really want.

Oddly, in our case, I was strongly opposed to the divorce when my wife first had the papers served on me.   But, now that most of the 90 days have elapsed, I’ve decided that I do want to proceed with the divorce and she’s begun to express some doubts.

There’s also the issue of how we will split up our assets. It is complicated since we own a business and five pieces of real estate.   Originally, we told the court that we would provide the court a document detailing how we wanted to split our assets by mutual agreement.

But, thus far, this mutual agreement hasn’t been forth coming.

An, in the mean time, I am still departing for New Zealand in late November on what will very likely be a permanent move.   I’m packing boxes of my personal books and possessions and I’ve arranged for these and my motorcycle to be shipped by sea.

So, there’s been a lot going on here and it has distracted me greatly from Blogging.  But, things will settle and I will likely resume.

I’m still following the news most days via my trusty RSS reader which I’ve set to trawl through 50 to 100 different websites and Blogs.

I’m still deeply convinced that the world is coming to a time of inexorable changes and they are not going to be pretty.

I may still post an occasional piece here if something intense arises.  But, until my personal life sorts itself a out a bit, I’d be surprised if I will post a lot.

Stay well my friends, stay flexible in your thinking and always consider your options – you always have some!

Sometime later, Indra, one of our seven rescue cats, jumped up on my desk as he often does.  But this time he was foaming and drooling at the mouth in great gobs.

I jumped up, ran to the kitchen to grab a paper towel and then I saw the remaining one pill there on the counter top.  Click! – it all came together and I knew why he was like that.

Damn! Damn! Damn!

I grabbed Indra up and took him to the nearest bathroom so I could keep him corralled and yelled for my wife to come and help.   She went into the bathroom and as she did, she reminded me that we have an Animal Poison Hotline magnetic sticker thingy on the refrigerator.   It’s something that’s been there for several years.

I ran to the kitchen and grabbed the phone and, yes, there was the little magnet that said “Animal Poison Hotline” right there where she said it was.   I called them in a semi-panic.

A nice voice answered and said who they were and then asked me to press “1″, if this was about an animal poisoning event.   Then it asked me if this was a new event (press “1″) or a previous event (press “2″).

Once I’d pressed “1″ and then “1″ again, the voice said that since they received no state or federal money for delivering their services, that there would be a $60 consultation fee and that I should have my VISA or Master Card ready.   I looked at the phone with sheer incredulity.   I realized I had just gotten tangled up with the Animal Poison Hotline equivalent of ambulance chasers.

I hung up and dialed our local vet while my wife was shouting to “Hurry up” from the bathroom.   I hadn’t called them first because it was 5:30 PM and I thought they were closed.   But, thank God, when the phone rang, someone answered and a vet was on the line in a few seconds saying to bring Indra in right away.  Turns out they were open until 6:30 PM.

To make a long story short, Indra turned out to be OK.   We later found the missing pill and he’d chewed it some but only made one small puncture in it before the vile taste must have made him spit it out.   But, at the time, we didn’t know that and thought he’d swallowed 200mg of Celebrex.   So, what could have been several days of efforts to save him (and maybe lose him) and several thousands of dollars ended up being a two local trips to the vet and about $300.

But, I am still deeply rankled at the “Animal Poison Hotline” people and their credit card demands.  In fairness, when I looked closely at the magnetic sticker later, it did say, in small print, that there would be a ‘per incident’ fee.

But I’m imagining the motivations of the folks who printed the magnetic stickers up and distributed them.   They were seeking a profit and one great way to do that is to match a service with a need.   And this one’s a beauty.

When someone calls up and their beloved pet has potentially been poisoned, they are not going to quibble over $60 and a credit card number when minutes may mean life or death.   But, what a nasty time to jack them up.

Thinking about all of this, I remembered that years ago I had been deeply pissed off when I read an expose in the Orange County Register about how the local fund raising drives for the local police and firemen actually worked.

The police and firemen didn’t actually have the time or the expertise to man the phones, so they’d hire an outside company to do their fund raising.   These folks would call you up and say, “This is the Orange County Fireman’s Association – how are you this evening?“   And then they’d start in on you for donations for various things to help the firemen.

It was a sweet deal for everyone except the donor.   The fireman’s Association got some money out of the deal and they didn’t have to pay the fund raising folks a penny because their contract let them take 80% of the proceeds off the top for their services.  And the firemen were happy because 20% of something is way more than 100% of nothing.  And it was totally free for them.

But, the donor’s, who were giving out of the goodness of their hearts, didn’t know that 80% of their gifts were going into the pockets of the fund raisers and their lavish life styles.

I’m wondering if something similar isn’t going on here.     Wouldn’t people scream if uncle Bob was down on the floor with a possible poisoning and they called a human poison hotline and got held up for a credit card fee before they could proceed?

Stinky stinky stuff.

Are you wondering who these folks are so you can steer clear of them?

They are:

North Shore Animal League

and

PROSCAR International Animal Poison Center

Believe me when I tell you that you’d be far better off to put the number of your local vet up on your fridge RIGHT NOW.   And then call your vet and ask them for the phone number and location of the local 24 hour emergency vet in case you have an after hours emergency.   And then put that number up there as well.

It seems as topical today to me as the day I wrote it.

You might show it to the young men in your family, all full of testosterone and patriotism, who want to go and have a great adventure and fight the good fight.

(MONROE, WA) — The Sky Valley Chronicle has discovered a man in Monroe who’s been operating a cathouse for years just minutes from the Monroe Police Department.

He offers no apologies, refuses to hide the facts of what goes on in the house and stands firm in his belief that what he is doing falls within community standards of decency.

Uh, no it is not that type of cathouse. (We’d love to say “gotcha!” at this point but we’re far too sophisticated for that).

The type of cathouse run by Dennis Gallagher is for regular house cats and is designed to provide them a safe, enriching and liberating lifestyle.

More…

I’ll post more when I know more.