Goldsmith

God must become an activity in our consciousness.
-- Joel S. Goldsmith

Married to...

Buttercup Festival.

Body, Gogh

"What is the use of a beautiful body, animals have it too... perhaps even more than men... but... the soul, as it lives in the people, that's what animals never have. Is not life given us to become richer in spirit?" - Vincent van Gogh


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I'm watching "Vincent: The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh", a film with some of Gogh's letters read by John Hurt. It's excellent.

Vincent is seen as the archetypical "tortured artist", with some justification. But I think it is much more important that his art came from Love of Life, and like he said himself, from Serenity. He never felt sorry for himself, he took the hardships of life as simply the price one paid to reach Higher. And he saw the Light, Love, and Joy behind it all, and that is what he painted.

Art and awakening

I just had a realization: art, like humor, can facilitate awakening. Well, I knew that, but what I realized is that like humor, but unlike most other methods, it can make awakening into a process which has more pleasure than pain.

Resting as awareness

Opinions

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
-- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Fear and smallness

I have come to realize that all my trouble with living has come from fear and smallness within me. -- Angela L. Wozniak

Ego dissolving

Hokey sh*t, here's another huge thing from the same book:

The ego having been fully dissolved is not the same as awakening.

Many wake up, permanently or not, before the ego is dissolved, and the awakening accelerates the process explosively. But the ego may still be there, in fact it can even be a very strong ego, and fight the dissolving process tooth and nail.

This fits my experience so much, and it seems to be one of the few things missing from The Disappearance Of The Universe. In that book the end of the ego seems to be totally identified with Awakening, and it does not make sense to me, because so many people who are clearly awakened also clearly have ego.

What Adya says may explain what happened to me: it might be that I had not just a brief awakening in 1986, but a permanent one (I'm not at all sure, though), but it was obscured by a fantastically strong ego, which has been painfully being dismantled every since, accompanied not the least by crippling fear. It can still be difficult at times, but I'm pretty sure I'm close to the end of fear. I hope very close! :-)

Glimpsing Reality

Once again, Adyashanti has said something I needed to hear (in the book End Of Your World). This one also confirms long-time suspicions of mine.
He talked about how some people have mini-awakenings which are not permanent. They can be longer or shorter. And how it might even be so short as just "a snap of the fingers".
But that even that... Reality is so powerful that just such a glimpse can powerfully change somebody's life.
And start the ego falling apart for real.

Which is exactly what happened to me in 1986. I had a micro-second glimpse of something, and then fear kicked back so hard that it took me two decades to dig back to where I could start getting an overview of what had happened.
One of the effects, apart from the beginning of mystical experiences and the ego dismantling, was that I got in touch with a powerful Inspiration for my art.

I'd figured it out, but it's good to hear that it's a known phenomenon, this brief glimpse of Reality (Source).