Personal history seems largely irrelevant. A childhood mixture of privilege in a family of artists, sexual abuse and boarding schools may or may not have led to intense psychic experiences and profound depression, alienation and that feeling of being an outsider looking in, separate from life. The vastness, the emptiness reduced the simplest things to fatuous meaninglessness. Some mornings even breathing seemed pointless.

Then came being in love, and, curiously, "near-death" experiences, all that tunnel and light stuff, but during love-making!

Then, out of the blue, aged 21, cosmic unity hit me like a truck at a Ravi Shankar concert. All that is, is One, one Truth, no self, one eternal Being  whose nature is love......

Sounds so good, but there was no support context, no guru on hand to say "tat twam asi", or even "yes". The love shimmered for a few weeks, and the awareness became an experience remembered, then regretted, then pursued, through sex, drugs, and rock n' roll. Well, it was the sixties. So even the memory was pretty much lost. Depression returned, even psychosis, paranoia, and hallo psychiatrists! Then Rammurti Mishra, Tibetan Buddhism, TM and a gradual return to some light. Marriage, three yearsTM teaching, children (miraculous), parenting (bliss), and the return of the Longing.

Three actual experiences of being near death, (two car crashes and severe illness)....but no visions!

India, the Ganga, KaliMa, Mother Meera, Gangaji, Ammachi, divorce, dark fire, new love, and bingo, through the affirmation of a connection to Andy Rymer, seeking ended with an awakening death into no-self on July 2nd, 2002.

Everything changed, but nothing is different. If you're here, you'll know this. Now whatever arises arises, bliss and shit, and the world seems to carry this body wonderfully well without too much thought, effort or hassle. Things seem to fall into place of their own accord. The ego is not lost, but it has lost its hooks. There is often pain, but there's no suffering. Sometimes the vastness is flat, sometimes the emptiness is vast, sometimes bliss bubbles in every atom. The most miraculous thing of all is the mere fact of the ordinary  mundane realities, in all their Divine splendour, just being Being. Funny, eh?

 All those years spent gazing at the back of my eyelids just to find that what I was looking for was doing the looking. Ironic. And they say the Divine has no sense of humour!

This is the Donkey Dharma. Follow the carrot till you drop the following. It's pinned to your own tail anyway. As a good friend once told me, "If you don't know where you're going, go by the road you don't know."

I am just a wave,
and you are a bigger wave?
But when the wind drops?

Fear is unreal, isn't it? So why does my stomach churn on a cliff-edge. If I had no fear I would go rock-climbing. Somehow nothing else terrifies me like that. Maybe it's to do with some final surrendering, for instance, the thought of driving from Kathmandu to Lhasa thrills me, but  the thought of being driven over that road is nightmarish. And that's a dream waiting to be fulfilled.

Seeking for a “way”

buries the ever-present

in clouds of effort

I just received this article through the Tibet Support Network, but this time it's not about what China's doing to Tibet.....it's about Darfur. Spread the word and take action. You could write to Stephen Spielberg.

The 'Genocide Olympics' (Op-ed by Mia Farrow, Wall Street Journal)

"One World, One Dream" is China's slogan for its 2008 Olympics. But
there is one nightmare that China shouldn't be allowed to sweep under
the rug. That nightmare is Darfur, where more than 400,000 people have
been killed and more than two-and-a-half million driven from flaming
villages by the Chinese-backed government of Sudan.
http://online.wsj.com/article_print/SB117505109799351409.html

That so many corporate sponsors want the world to look away from that
atrocity during the games is bad enough. But equally disappointing is
the decision of artists like director Steven Spielberg -- who quietly
visited China this month as he prepares to help stage the Olympic
ceremonies -- to sanitize Beijing's image. Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994
founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the
holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur's genocide?

China is pouring billions of dollars into Sudan. Beijing purchases an
overwhelming majority of Sudan's annual oil exports and state-owned
China National Petroleum Corp. -- an official partner of the upcoming
Olympic Games -- owns the largest shares in each of Sudan's two major
oil consortia. The Sudanese government uses as much as 80% of proceeds
from those sales to fund its brutal Janjaweed proxy militia and purchase
their instruments of destruction: bombers, assault helicopters, armored
vehicles and small arms, most of them of Chinese manufacture. Airstrips
constructed and operated by the Chinese have been used to launch bombing
campaigns on villages. And China has used its veto power on the U.N.
Security Council to repeatedly obstruct efforts by the U.S. and the U.K.
to introduce peacekeepers to curtail the slaughter.

As one of the few players whose support is indispensable to Sudan, China
has the power to, at the very least, insist that Khartoum accept a
robust international peacekeeping force to protect defenseless civilians
in Darfur. Beijing is uniquely positioned to put a stop to the
slaughter, yet they have so far been unabashed in their refusal to do
so.

But there is now one thing that China may hold more dear than their
unfettered access to Sudanese oil: their successful staging of the 2008
Summer Olympics. That desire may provide a lone point of leverage with a
country that has otherwise been impervious to all criticism.

Whether that opportunity goes unexploited lies in the hands of the
high-profile supporters of these Olympic Games. Corporate sponsors like
Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, General Electric and McDonalds, and key
collaborators like Mr. Spielberg, should be put on notice. For there is
another slogan afoot, one that is fast becoming viral amongst advocacy
groups; rather than "One World, One Dream," people are beginning to
speak of the coming "Genocide Olympics."

Does Mr. Spielberg really want to go down in history as the Leni
Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games? Do the various television sponsors
around the world want to share in that shame? Because they will. Unless,
of course, all of them add their singularly well-positioned voices to
the growing calls for Chinese action to end the slaughter in Darfur.

Imagine if such calls were to succeed in pushing the Chinese government
to use its leverage over Sudan to protect civilians in Darfur. The 2008
Beijing Olympics really could become an occasion for pride and
celebration, a truly international honoring of the authentic spirit of
"one world" and "one dream."