What Calls on What Is

"What if what if's only confuses what we are?"
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

BY ANTHONY ROSS

Life at last was carried inward for the world to see, and breathe.  A mirror is what we all see.  A surrender.  A note on a piano: the tone jagged yet intrinsic in beauty.   What else could there be? 

Matter clings to memory.  In this concession, confusion arises. Swirled in between rocks of idealism or rejection and pressed upon is the image of inadequate iridescence.  Take the fire.  A fire rises and falls, shifts and turns and breaks away from its source.  What fire could behold its original source?  A spark, launched to be risen. Surrender, this spark amidst the great forces of the world, pushed by the air and taken by the wind.  Frozen by the wind.  Sparks disappear to the eye.  New sparks are born.  And fires go out.  All the time, shifting and changing.  Nothing lasts.

Don't doubt yourself young man.  You are a whispering of the eagles.  You are a speaking of the wind, of the land, of the trees. Anyone who approaches you will hear this calling, among other things.  They will be good to you, as you are to them.  Even if they are not, you will be of unchanging nature, for change is the nature. The nature is change, and anyone who befuddles and belittles existence in to terms of good or bad and conclusions on these principles will be sore-footed.

The environment is a consistency with man.  The two are not separate.  One does not see another out there and then set foot upon it like a door mat.  The setting is taken upon moment by moment, message by message and change by change.  Life is inconsistent in its consistency, or else it would not have consistency.  There must be stops and starts.  There must be sparks and then no sparks.  The idea of one being there for another is just that, an idea.  There is the whole.  There is not the linear.  What language and systems of thought apply to is the understanding of the linear construction of what appears to our understanding.  Such understanding is limited and such interpretations of understandings are limited.  They are not useless.  They are bound by definition.  Such things are very helpful to being a messenger of the world.  A sign poster of the world.  We can also make sign posts out of these sign posts, messages out of the messages.

Again and again we have fallen away from reality.  It takes a falling aback into it to be free.  How does on do that?  How does one fall into the ineffable?  A reality so untouched, unlabeled, un-bewildered by experimental interpretation, does not fall away.  It is just that we cannot meet it.  Yet, how do we meet it?  Is meeting it through an idea?  Is meeting it an idea we can have?  Meeting what?  Meeting what is.  'What is' is met upon knowing that it is not met.  We meet the unknowing upon knowing we don't know.  It is upon seeing the completeness of our incomplete description.  A valid one, but an invalid one for an entirety of change.  To describe the change in which has no contained form is a challenge that cannot be complete.  To complete it would be to achieve the impossible.

Our minds are just a stream in the ocean of life.  One stream can contain countless information.  It can break into new streams and change new streams into its own.  That is our sign post.  A most valuable one, yet the ocean is undivided in its wholeness.  Its complexities unfathomable and beyond thought.  Our own thought of its ocean-ness is less than.  We may never know if we've achieved this seeing of the ocean at all.  The 'if' is our achievement. It is our interpretation of possibility.  Possibility only comes from our defining of what is impossible.  Where can what we are, really, be the only thing?  Is it necessary to free oneself from the 'iffing' to see the natural Self?  What if what if's only confuses what we are? 

We are too simple to understand with a simple mind.  We are too natural to understand in organized thought, yet the understanding of our natural state is one that does not need words.  It is a full view of reality, unimpressed by anything and without direction of other than itself.  What is that?  Where does that live?  That life is all things.  All things is that life.  There is no thing that is not.  All things are.  All is, as is.  Are you with it?  What is with this?  What is this?  What is.

Noticed Motives

"We mustn't need to switch our motives before moving on."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

BY ANTHONY ROSS

What motives are there for entering into any endeavor?  Whether spiritual, practical, scientific, artistic, or any other label you could put upon an act of inquiry, the general motives are similar.  One can have a motive for achieving greatness in some aspect of that which he's acting upon.  What level of proficiency can I do this task with?  Another may be the simple playful observation of the task as it happens.  Often times this latter motive would provide the proficiency of the first.  This exploration broadens horizons and opens the field of what the motive might be.  Its motive is left undecided until further exploration.  The more opposite motive to exploring this would be the attitude of, "let's get this over with."

What might a person accomplish with the last motive?  They would walk from the end of the beach to the other end, if this was their task, without noticing a thing.  They may get there in proper time, or in sufficient timing if their goal of proficiency was to walk the path as fast as possible. Yet, the walk itself would be something of little value to them.  The motive, unintentional as it may be, was to get past the walk and basically ignore it completely. Therefore, no understanding of the path they walked will ever be retained, as the motive was to move on to what mattered more, namely, not the task at hand.  Here, the task at hand is not of concern, but the motive behind it.

A person with a conclusion as to what the point in mind is would likely miss the point.  With the two other motives mentioned before, understanding and attention must accompany them.  As said in the book, Mastery, which talks about the path, trials and exploration of mastering anything, the one who hurries will fall behind.  The most driven, work-a-holics burn themselves out.  This is because with that direction observation falls second to achievement.  Without detached observation, we likely will be blind to both our faults and our successes.  To add to that, we'd likely dismiss those as being something they're not.  Trying to one-up ourselves with each effort is like seeing the end of the beach without the walking that takes place from start to finish.  Even when walked, with one eye at the end, what appreciation of the process would be acquired?  At least we see the end of the beach before moving on to the next task, with this motive, and don't miss the entire thing.

The motive of play is a motive of noticing.  It's where we are not simply passing by, but dancing with the happening that's in play.  The energy embodied in this kind of act is attention.  It is also fully encompassing, filled up by itself.  The walk doesn't need to be done for the purpose to be achieved.  The path of Mastery is one of containment as a whole, with the process resulting in the result within it's happening.  The sense of this, how we are to play, is subtle.  It is a way of being that emanates liveliness of the moment.  If we could always play games, our lives would feel this kind of motive and every act would be an inspiration to continue on moving in a fun, ever-new dance.

That being said, this does not mean that our tasks will be always sufficiently in play.  To aim to achieve this is carrying the motivation that we ought to proficiently play.  It's thinking that we HAVE to play, which causes a double-bind.  The motives we carry will often change.  This is most definitely because our motive for our motives is something we are still playing with.  We can play with the motives we have now, whatever they may be.  We mustn't need to switch our motives before moving on.  That would be avoiding the task at hand, which is the walk we're on.  This would compartmentalize our way of seeing too much and we would essentially be missing the point.  The point is subtle and profound.  Noticing where you are is a game to live.  Its motive?  Well, look.

The Answer at Hand and Foot

"Without the end of your life in mind, you came in quite naturally."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

BY ANTHONY ROSS

How do we live?  What is a life?  Such simple questions are the mirrors to an infinite number of complexities and variations.  Is it possible to say everything about this in a blog post?  Am I pompous enough to know the answer, while I'm alive and in living life, let alone to write it in less than ten paragraphs?  The answer is yes, because the answer is forthcoming.

The answer is already at hand!  Nobody can answer that, and so we've got it.  There is no discussion needed, though there always seems to be discussion from angst and conceptualization of what it is about and how we can make it better, or how it is worse. Imagine a baby, being born.  However many months later, it's walking on two feet.  The parents say, "Well done child.  You execute your walking with promise.  Keep practicing, and one day you can get paid for walking so well.  Then, when you are making money at your walking, your life will be well.  Yet, you can always make more.  Just keep at it, and you'll really get somewhere.  Walk more and you'll get there faster."

This is agreeably ridiculous.  Yet, how often our questions arise of, "What am I doing with my life?  Am I doing the right things?  Am I heading in the right direction?"  You were born without direction.  Without the end of your life in mind, you came in quite naturally.  Then the thoughts come in to try to get to the top of life before the end comes.  It's a linear thought process that was adopted with the influence of all those other directions, pushing and pulling. It's not about going from stage to stage to stage in a linear manner, but a sparkling dance of jazz music jamming with itself, as Alan Watts might put it.

A baby awakens into a flux and flow of life.  They come to understanding the variations and complexities around them, but over time grind these subtle nuances of perception into a very obtuse and narrow mindset of what direction they are taking things and what direction they think they should take them, usually based on what others conclude about their life.  Their digging and clear responding of what is is effectively wiped out and only comes back in the certain moments of clarity that anyone gets, no matter how confused, with good fortune.  These moments are the ones that we should be after, but they are also the moments that are the subtlest, and thus the understanding of how to 'reach,' or better said, 'read' them is unfamiliar, though not unattainable through the right viewing.

The right viewing really is the best moment itself, never mind the circumstances.  All circumstances are responded to the way that they 'should' be, when they are seen correctly.  What is seeing correctly?  It is seeing without the fragmented self.  Seeing without the ideas of, 'many months later, this will be helpful to me,' or, 'because I'm doing this, my problem will be solved.' Wanting to fix 'this thing' doesn't fix it.  Both of those are ideas that bring us away from the answer at hand.  Life is, and any complexity that it has is only a sparkling piece of the on going music.  Any conclusions we have on it are from the past and usually based in a mirror that is throwing a lot of unnecessary complexities into the present, because our viewing is skewed.

What is the question?  The question is 'What is the question?'  Is it so hard to act with what the seeing is, to have perception match response? What would we do if everyone treated their life with attention and care?  The next step would be to do what is needed to be done, without an idea of it.  What is that?  Don't ask.  Attend.  Yet, nobody needs to say it.  It has to be, and such an answer will be.  In attention, there may still be the questions of difficult verbal response, such as, "What is a living?"  This question's answer might not even be there, in words, but it will be perceived.  The following is a poem re-discovered in my notes that relates to this.

I keep thinking, "What's in the words?"

And so I never look, but I can see.

Looking is a notion in itself.

I can see.

There is nothing blocking it.

All is as it is.

This is the experience that is required to be in this moment.  This is the perfect experience to experience in the way I am experiencing it.  The experiencing of it is expanding into many more experiences and explanations within it.  The only rule for this function is seeing.

A baby doesn't need an explanation for it.  They're sitting with it; the stuff of it.  Such is the intention I see behind Rilke's words:

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language.  Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them.  And the point is to live everything.  Live the questions now.  Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will                           gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."