Posts Tagged ‘My Journey’

A Dream Points the Way

Enlightenment Part 12

Tony Crisp

In my dream I was in a prison cell with two other men. We ate, slept and defecated in the cell. I was standing at the bars of the cell, and had the impression of having been in the prison for years. I was shouting and cursing the people who had put me in the prison, full of hate and self-pity. I had done this day after day while in the prison. Suddenly I realised that my years of shouting had availed nothing. The only person who was upset by it was myself. I was the victim of my own anger and turmoil. So I dropped the attitudes behind the anger and shouting and was free of them. Years went by, and one by one I dropped other habits of emotion and thought with which I had trapped and tortured myself. I realised I could be totally free within myself. One morning I woke and sat up on the mattress on the floor that was my bed. The last ghost of inner entrapment fell away. A fountain of joy opened in my body, pouring upwards through me. So intense was it I cried out. The cellmates called a warden. They stood looking at me as I experienced a radiance so strong I felt as if I must be shining. I was aware my joy poured into them, although they thought I was mad. Nothing would ever be the same again.

Commentary

We are all prisoners of our emotions, of our thoughts, and of our sense impressions. Mostly we live in these as if they are reality. This is a form of confusion, but also of imprisonment. The bars of this prison are often invisible to the person they enslave. Or else the person calls them ‘Me’. We say, ‘That is how I feel. I don’t like this. I am afraid. I am in love.’ Or else we depend entirely upon events and others to stimulate pleasure or pain in us.

The identification between the thoughts, the emotions, and the sense of self is so immense, that no life outside this imprisoning identification is even suspected. Yet here is the source of most human misery.

Drop the identification, as the dream suggests, and immediately a degree of liberation arises. Drop the multitude of other identifications and gradually the bliss of liberation opens.

Link Back to Chapter Headings – Link to Chapter 13

Soft Toy

As a child our toys can be extremely important. A soft toy might be the only non-threatening relationship we have, and so depict security, love, and the ability to control instead of be controlled. It could therefore represent the ability to create, with the aid of an external object, an internal source of love and assurance. As an adult it might suggest a desire for a non-threatening emotional or sexual relationship. It can also be a means of venting anger or pain. See: Doll; Toy.

You Are It

I feel so satisfied,
Having finished the work
That only slowly
Revealed to me how much
I wanted it done –
Things seen out of
The corner of one’s eye.
And now I am sitting on the floor
In front of my wood fire –
Timber I cut and chopped myself –
Looking out of a window.
Brilliant blue sky,
With an edge of heavy dark clouds.
And as I look,
That feeling pervades me again.
It has put green shoots
Above the dug soil
Of my awareness.
I barely know it yet,
But I sense what is growing.
It is the knowing that everything
Is here in this moment.
The past is here,
Ancient, hoary, and as
New and fresh as each breath.
Yes, the rise and fall
Of this beautiful beast breathing.
Breathing as it ever has,
Through all the lives
Of the mothers and fathers,
The kinsmen and kinswomen,
Who gave this life it now is.
And this now, knowing itself,
As the latest dancing moment
Of all those moments we call
The past – as if to dismiss them.
Yet here I am still carrying
That slippery ooze in my balls
For love of it,
And love of all
That my dance sprang from.
Here I am with everything
I danced upon the way.
And yes, everything
Is with me too.
I’m not sure why
I could never see it before.
So I ask you
Are you breathing too?
And can you feel it?
That you don’t exist
Without the air?
That you are the air!
And don’t you drink,
And don’t you eat also?
Doesn’t that light something in you?
Recognition maybe?
Woven you are,
Of everything around you.
The gravity –
Where would your house, car,
Chair, body, be without it?
The fire, the sun,
The mazing beginning of it all
Where would you to be without that?
You wouldn’t
Would you?
There would be no sun or rocks or
Ought else to be with us.
And don’t you want to sing with me?
Seeing how every moment,
Every ordinary thing
You do, is completely,
Utterly, absolutely,
Unendingly, fully,
An expression of it ALL!
You can’t scratch yourself
Without it being holy.
It couldn’t happen
Without everything taking part.
So please laugh with me,
And cry.
Tell me you know.
Know that here –
This moment –
All that has been,
All that can be –
Is with you.

Angel Soul

More than a man and less than a God,
A fool by any name,
I traipse the dim lit streets of life
Discovering my shame.
I have the soul of an angel,
With the great wings of the air,
But my heart and bowel,
They still run foul
Of the manliness hid there.

I’ve every good intention,
To take the world by storm,
But my every good intention,
Turns out to be forlorn.
My foolishness turns in my lips,
To jewels of pregnant wit.
While in my efforts to be wise,
I make an ass of it.

Where Am I

I asked the web of hugeness,
Of which I am a woven part,
To help me understand
What I face this day.
And in the silence
I heard the hugeness say,
Listen — what do you hear?
You hear the beating of your heart,
And in your ears
The flux of your own blood.

Now look —
What do you see?
You see your shadow
Ahead of you
On the track you walk.
And looking back
You see the path you came by
Winding to the past,
Full of memories and deeds.

I listened and heard.
I looked and saw,
Just as the hugeness told me.
But what of the future,
I asked.
And the answer was;
If you turn your gaze
In that direction
You see the uncreated.

And yes, there in front,
The swirling possibilities
Of all my dreams,
Emerging forms of
My longings and my hopes.
Before me were the patterns
Of my passions taking shape,
And my working days
Moulding the road ahead.

So in this moment now,
With prayerful craft,
I form the subtle threads
Of passions and of thoughts
Into the weave
Of what will come to be.

What is a woman – What is a Man

It was the dead fish in a dream that led me to these feelings.
I was reminded of all the sperm that comes away from a man during a lifetime.
Then image after image of women flashed through my mind.
Pictures of women in black brassieres and black corset straps.
Women with fags in their mouth with unfeeling hard faces.
Women having a period.
As I watched I saw they were all images pushed at me by our culture, by advertising and films.
They were images I had been handed of women.
It’s so fucking unreal. It’s so unreal.
It’s just a whole big picture people have made of what a woman is, and what sex is.
So unreal. A huge picture people have painted about this thing.
It’s so terrible. It’s just not like that.
Life, sex, isn’t like that – as awful or as beautiful.
We keep going off and getting stuck like a bloody old record.
These images and feeling dead inside like the fish in the dream are all a part of it; part of being dead.
All this bloody muck on top of you from our culture about tits and brassieres, and pictures of women with their legs open, as if that is womanhood.
That’s not womanhood. It’s a part of a woman’s equipment, but a woman is something so different.
Womanhood is a lovely thing. Why picture it as all those things?
It’s not just a fairytale thing either.
A woman is a real animal who feels something personal behind all her body equipment.
There’s a real human being, with fears, hopes, love, weakness, strength, and we give our youngsters this bloody stupid image – of men too – and it’s all part of the deadness.
Such a huge thing this dead fish.
It is an image of the sickness of sexuality in our society.
As a nation we don’t want to admit it as sickness.
We accept the strip shows, pawnshops, prostitution, rampant homosexual activity, as parts of our permissive or accepting society.
It’s suave to accept.
But we accept because we don’t want to take a look at ourselves as individuals, individuals who make up this culture we live in.
We would rather blame it on to somebody else – it’s them – the youth – the coloureds, the dorpouts.
Well it is, isn’t it?
We still have the ghost of the middle class, or upper class ideal of the English culture and family life of loving devotion and romance haunting us.
We’ve got a crippling image of what is right to do, but what a terrible price individuals have to pay – prostitution, pornography, strip clubs.
We torture ourselves by trying to live morals and a way of life, rules of relationship in marriage and family, that is flagrantly sick.
We try to conform to a society that has a deep sickness.
Because of this I thought I was sick.
I have been murdering myself trying to cure my own beautiful wildness.

The Vigil

This is the darkness of night,
I stand in vigil and vigilant.
It is my chosen task to be the one
Who through this time of shadows
Remains awake and dwells
For this season amongst
The corridors of memories and thoughts,
Watching over those whose lives
I celebrate and desire to be.
And in me rises the light that
Keeps at bay the creatures
That might otherwise haunt these hours.
It is the primal light of Life,
The drive to be, the
Innate power to exist.
And as I am the sentinel
Of the darkness,
The eyes of my sleeping kin,
I know I must remain alert
And keep alive awareness
That I am the urge to be.
I know too that dawn,
The light that changes all
So magically with its easy touch,
Will come despite the
Seeming endless watch I keep.
And in that new day
We can live another life.

The Tree

I am a tree,
With my roots
Deep into the earth.
Feeding from all that has lived
In the past of my family.
I feed from the lives of others,
Who have left, sinking into the earth,
The leaves of their creations
And their endeavours.
Up from the deep darkness
Of the unknown
I draw my sustenance.

So many bodies have been formed,
So many words engraved,
So much love and war,
Buildings shaped and crumbled,
For me to draw on in my sap.
These are the rich soil,
The rich souls,
For my boughs and leaves
To draw on in their forming.

And on my leaves
The sunshine
Of the unformed,
The as yet to be.
I draw it in to mingle
With what already lived –
And died.
And in that mingling
I can sense fruition.

Innate in me,
As in every tree,
The blossoming and seed –
The passion and the flowering.
And this I give to you,
As all those beings at my roots,
So gave to me –
Their leaves,
Their seeds,
My life.

Photo From Toyota zero emissions advert

The Song

Did you hear it?

What, the song thrush here,
And in the tree the blue tit?

Yes, but did you hear the dog bark?

I heard a dog howling
Last night in the dark.

Was it joined with sounds of cricket on the green?

Only now you mention it,
The crack of ball on bat,
I hear but haven’t seen.

Was there a piano accompanying all those too?

I didn’t catch the music’s voice,
Not as well as you.

You didn’t hear the harmony,
The voices all as one,
The orchestra of all those sounds
With single voice of none?
I heard it here this afternoon,
One voice sang through them all,
Collecting all the sounds of life,
Into one vibrant call.

The Hand

See my hand is opened
Look at what it held
Some night dreams
And some day dreams
That for a while impelled.

See my hand is opened
All it held is gone
People, desires, and longings,
Leaving me alone.

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