All posts tagged: the Self

picking your heart’s lock

April 20, 2013
by Michael
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Course Ideas / Poetry

here’s the thing about That- (your heart’s lock). the Love inside You is the same Love that was inside Houdini. (do you see?) and fear… is a clumsy lock maker. his locks are rusty, ineffectual, and overdone hunks of metal, as functional and sophisticated as a cabal of mouse traps. sensing his own ineluctable incompetence, he applies them in copious quantities, disguising nothing at all as a vast and interwoven steel conspiracy. eschew this shammery. (those clodding forgeries […]

I’m Trying To Tell You Something…

April 11, 2013
by Michael
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Poetry

Last night the Beloved and I changed the Rules of Engagement: I agreed to stand quietly and listen. She agreed to do do the rest. She blindfolded me. She rolled me up in a sail that came with its own ocean. She hung me upside down from the ceiling- (you know, like a carcass)- and pulled the plug. The door latched behind her as She left the room. Click. My concepts took their cue and spilled […]

Is Acceptance a Perpetuation of Suffering?

April 3, 2013
by Michael
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Christ / Course Ideas

If you are on a spiritual path- a path to awakening, a path to acceptance of the Christ within you and within everyone else and within all that is, eventually you will have a high noon showdown with the following paradox.  To be awake is to know that the ever-changing expressions of Love that collectively are Creation do not simply ‘happen to’ us.  They are not foisted upon us by a wrathful Creator.  Nor are […]

Chasing the Wind

March 22, 2013
by Michael
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Christ / Creative

The village in which I have lived my whole life is nestled along the coast.  It is full of sun and figs and light breezes.  Beyond our little harbor there is a great sea that stretches to the horizon and extends beyond the borders of the known world.  No one has ever found the End.  As children we used to go up on the roofs of our parent’s houses on calm spring days with baskets […]

Arguing Your Case

March 11, 2013
by Michael
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Creative

In order to escape your prison, you will have to argue your case.  No one can argue it for you. I’ve got a hearing coming up- Docket 249 in the Court of Self Appeals- and I’m getting antsy.  I can tell you it’s no cake walk.  I’m prowling around this cage like a tiger fresh off the jungle, drowning myself in images of freedom that induce feelings of freedom, that induce tears one instant, and […]

Desert Wandering. Desert Discoveries.

March 8, 2013
by Michael
comments 13
Christ / Creative

There is a desert inside of me where I wander, like a hermit, my vocabulary reduced to variations in the salinity of my tears and one Name that I give to everything.  I found myself there again last night, sheltered against the wind by a robe of old rags, walking alone amidst an endless quilt of rolling dunes beneath the stars.  I know I am not the Originator of this place, even though it is […]

The Teachings of Rubik’s Cube

March 3, 2013
by Michael
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Christ

Once when I was a boy I asked my father for a Rubik’s Cube.  My wish was granted, and when I arrived home I took it out of the package and played around for a little while making small, easily recovered changes, frequently restoring the original hexi-color symmetry.  I didn’t want to lose my way back to the original, “correct” state, so I made four or five moves to “scramble” the puzzle, then put it […]

Choosing to Exist

February 26, 2013
by Michael
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Course Ideas / Creative

I think we should begin with a bit of Rumi.  This is like stretching out briefly before we tear ass across a back yard still slick with a morning dew.  It’s a best practice, and it just might prevent us from ripping ligaments or pulling hamstrings in the recklessness that follows.  It’s a safe beginning. Sort of. “We tremble, thinking we’re about to dissolve into non-existence, but non-existence fears even more that it might be […]

The Conundrums of a Conflicted Mind

February 23, 2013
by Michael
comments 2
Christ

Who is studying the Course?  And to what end?  Who hears the words?  Who is stirred to hope for a new life?  Who recognizes Love and surrenders, turning round then to confront their darkness?  Who finds it too complicated or difficult? Who knows? My little, egoic self is a Seeker.  The starting point for this little one is the deeply held belief that my unique and particular historically-derived collection of personal experiences is all that […]

Setting Yourself Aside

February 16, 2013
by Michael
comments 3
Creative

Strange.  Strangely familiar, I mean, this coming back.  It’s a lurching free-fall and a hot cup of tea all at once.  At first I don’t recall ever enrolling in this University of Unceasing Joys, but then my feelings and memories, even my very identity and my deepest sense of Self, snap back into their real shape, like that shape memory polymer when you heat it back up. I’m taking one of two required semesters of […]