Oneness Introduction

Oneness Introduction
If there is one word that describes the predominant characteristic at the center of all
problems and pathologies it is disunity—of self; of relationships; of social organization
and community; and of the body politic to mention a few, as reflected in the rise of
mental illness, relationships that have gone sour; the plethora of crimes and political
corruption plaguing our communities, nation and the world. And yet there is no
epistemological foundation evident in the trajectory of humankind’s pursuit of truth as
our understanding of reality expands that suggests anything other than as we gain a
clearer apprehension of oneness, in like manner and to the same degree resolution of
those maladies becomes apparent.
In his book THE ONENESS, Daren Demeule has captured the “Rosetta Stone”, the
heuristic capabilities of which can alter the destructive direction disunity has led us in,
and set our sights and actions on a path that both informs and at the same time heals as
we trod the trajectory of development in the individual, in relationships between and
among individuals, in society in all of its functions and social expressions. It is both a
spiritual journey as well as a scientific one he beckons us to, all led, guided, and informed
by the basic proposition that at the center of this process is the discovery of the oneness
of all that is. To capture the essence of this message one must strive to see with a new
eye, hear with a new ear, understand with a new mind and love with a new heart.
Dr. Donald T. Streets, Ed.D.

Intro is being written...

My beautiful friend and Brother, Dr. Donald Streets has agreed to write an Introduction to my book, I so look forward to this. His soul is gentle and kind and he truly loves to propel people along thier paths. I pray that when I 
am in my seventies that I have half of his love and attention to those
still working through their adventures.

The Book is Complete!

The BOOK is complete...

This Morning at about 4am I finished the manuscript to:

"Oneness, A Practical Conversation of Peaceful Surrender"

You can preview it on this Blog at : http://www.darendemeule.blogspot.com



Or At the Official Myspace profile: http://www.myspace.com/darendemeule

Preface

This website is an introduction to my upcoming book "The Oneness... A Conversation of Peaceful Surrender" The content in this site is a preview of what will be in this soon to be released work. This is a conversation of Oneness; it is not an essay or an authoritative text. I am very pleased to share these viewpoints with you. I am grateful to those who have been placed in my path, who have supported me in my adventure and for teaching me so much.

Oneness is not a new concept, nor is it original. It is as ancient as the eternal can be. Everything has emanated from One. And will return. If you can change your perspective to see that all things make up a Oneness, you will be supremely objective; eliminating individuality, persona, and separateness to reveal to real nature of you, the universe. Oneness is God. It is the entire sum total of the eternal infinite universe. You are Oneness. Your essence, the Oneness that you truly are, hears and knows these truths. Only your ego; it's confusion and desires stand between you and conscious Oneness. The eternal infinite universe is One "organism". Oneness is the notion that I am to the Universe as the moon is to the galaxy; a significant, but a mere tiny fraction of a whole. The earth, air, fire and water and I are the same energy, expressed in different form. Everything perceived and in-perceivable is a mere component of the Oneness. There is One god. It is Oneness. He/she is Oneness.

§ We Are One §

"We are learning, through physics and other sciences, that we are all connected in more ways than just being made of the same stuff as stars. We learned of the Big Bang that described a singularity that exploded into energy and matter that then formed into all things. We have speculated on the Gaia hypothesis, that the Earth is a single organism of which we are part. We have expanded these ideas to include the entire universe as a whole, connected thing. But these are not new ideas - they are just "truths" we are learning to accept. In the Upanishad, a Hindu scripture written over 3,000 years ago, we read this: "In the beginning there was existence, One only, without a second. He, the One, thought to himself: Let me be many, let me grow forth. Thus out of himself he projected the universe; and having projected out of himself the universe, he entered into every being. All that is has itself in him alone. Of all things he is the subtle essence. He is the truth. He is the self. And that... THAT ART THOU!" - excerpt from ediblebrain.com

Forward

During the thirty-nine years I have inhabited this body, I have lived mostly completely unconsciously. Almost completely reliant on a self created fiction to navigate through my seeming tumultuous life. I had only fantasy at most times because I would not accept my reality. When I was young my imagined self coped with the hardships and the contradiction to truth I had encountered. Through this writing I will convey what I have come to know through this journey.

At an early age my mother and I were mostly on our own. She had suffered from mental illness and was hospitalized many times. I was left with relatives sometimes and also with temporary foster care. I was left to live a very free, unsupervised adventure. There was lots of fun. There was also lots of fear and confusion. I was angry with the ambulance drivers, and police that often forcibly hauled my mother away in tears and screaming. I was confused by my mothers confusion. I was angry because she was so unstable. We often moved, she was always running. We lived in several different cities, usually we would move once per year. I did not set down ay roots nor did I bond with any of my playmates for long terms. It seemed like anything could happen at any time. At age nine my mother had met a man who owned a grain farm, co-incidentally, very near the farm she grew up on. They met in Calgary several hundred miles away from the farms they were raised on.

After a short period of time we all moved to the small city a short distance from these farms. Until this this time I had almost always lived in a larger city. A year later or so we moved out to my mother’s boyfriend’s farm. I was aghast. There was no electricity, no telephone, and no indoor plumbing. We heated our home with wood (it was way up north and cold in the winter) and we used an outhouse. There was no television. Now I think romantically of how I learned to live , but then it was a huge shock to me. We settled there on that farm for the next six years, my mother seemed to have a break from the instability, both mentally and financially. I was at the same school for that time too. I had by that time become quite unruly, behaviour wise. I was very conflicted and had a difficult time accepting the status quo even at that young age. I did not understand why my teachers would tell me what they said was the way of the world and it was obvious even to a nine year old boy that the world was mad.

I was often very isolated and begun to live in my head. It started as play, and then as my life and isolation became unbearable it was full fledged escapist fantasy. I developed a few friendships mostly with older children or adults. I wanted so bad to be anything that I wasn’t. To be anywhere, but where I was. I began to drink when I was 14 and there I found an escape a break from the painful fiction I felt trapped in. From there my life went down hill fast. I used drugs, became involved in theft to finance my alcohol and drugs. I was arrested by fifteen and was in and out of prison for the next nine years. I spent a total of six years actually in custody. Many days were dark there. I was a complete whirlwind. I made attempts (feigned) on my life. I fought with other inmates and was threatened by guards. During the short breaks between my incarcerations I was earnest in changing my life, however I was always apt to repeat what I was doing as long as I was trapped in my limited thought existence. I finally in 1991 stopped getting in trouble with the law. I was still in deep suffering and creating a lot of damage in the lives of the people I had relationships to.

This next period became my “mental illness” phase of life. I broke free from the confines of the common reality completely. Ironically this is what I work to do today. Yet then I was still angry, confused and using my old ways to achieve the results I was after. This “illness” was at times mystical and exhilarating. I was hospitalized many times over the next few years. Once as many as four times in one month. I wound up in 1994 in a skid-row hotel room, renting by the week. Drinking, living in complete chaos, I was fed up and was tired of trying to change and failing. One fall night I was half drunk, alone (really alone) and I swallowed a bottle of my psychiatric medication. I did not really want to die. I just wanted the suffering to end. I stumbled a few blocks to the hospital and told the staff there what I had done. They asked me to drink a thick slurry of ground charcoal as it would soak up the pills in my stomach. I wasn’t able to swallow it, so security held me down as they forced a tube into my nose and down into my stomach so the charcoal could be injected. I was in and out of consciousness. The next time I was aware I was back in my hotel room. I came to understand later that I had been released that night from the hospital. I was just in front of the emergency, outside starring up into sky, when some drinking companion came by and recognised me. He told me later that he had found me and took me back to my room. Even the hospital was unwilling to continue with my game. I had no place left. I seemed completely wrecked.

Shortly after that I moved in with a friend who had tried to help me before. I had some sort of shift. I began to work on myself. I stopped using alcohol and drugs. I began to be accountable and to change very slowly. I accepted help from others and started to truly open my mind. I became willing to change, I didn’t know at first how I would do it, but change I did. I did have a lot of help and support from some very caring people. I was very scattered and volatile for a long time afterward. I was hospitalized for a psychotic break a year after that last pill incident and I had been drug and alcohol free for that whole year. I then had a very long depression that lasted for about two years. I slowly grew out of it and ever deepened my attention to the real reality. The point of this historical remembrance and sharing it with you is to give you a context of my life drama and what I had created as my story of suffering. It is the past and does not really exist. All that exists is here and now.

I give these words and thoughts to stir your attention to that which has always been you. The Oneness.

Chapter 1 What is the Oneness?

A Parable

Jonah was thirty years old when his transport reached its destination. He had been travelling for 180 Earth years. His trip had taken what would have measured on earth about eight months. When a ship surpasses the speed of light by so much, eight times, time seems to cease to exist. The transport held only one human passenger, it was primarily a cargo ship for the newest of the human outreach posts. Jonah was a lone pilot, more like a monitor, whereas the ship is quite capable of piloting itself. He had enjoyed the extended solitude, there isn’t much opportunity for that in the network. Humans, 450 years ago had developed a cyber-space like network where all humans minds became connected in a giant internet sort of annex world. Of course it was completely wireless and had great range. The only true respite from it was in deep space. His eyes were wide as he flashed into the planetary system that contained Chantara.

Chantara’s planetary size is a about double when compared to Earth. It is very similar in the environment of plants and animals except they seem a little stouter from what seems to be an evolutionary adaptation from the stronger gravitational pull. There were no humanoid equivalents that had been detected on that planet. Jonah had been there twice before. There were no Earth residents yet living on this outpost, as it was still being outfitted. Jonah would drop off the sixty-thousand tonnes of payload off, to the mechanized beings that were assembling the initial housing, and manufacturing plants. By the time the first load of settlers, 200,0000, men, women, and children arrived there would be a completely self sustaining city there for them to move into. In the past 250 years humans had successfully relocated close to nine billion people on other planets. Chantara was just another in that growth of settlements.

Humans had expected for hundreds of years to encounter a life form as advanced as them, or more so, but had not. It seemed inevitable. As far as they could tell the universe was infinite and eternal. The odds were completely against humans being alone as “intelligent” life forms. Jonah had given up looking for them on his long trips, finding them was kind of his one of his original motivations of doing the kind of work he was. Actually Jonah had become quite disgusted of late, with how he saw his kind selfishly devouring the habitable universe like some virus or plague. He had done a lot of thinking about how he might be able to stay out in this new outpost and have no one else follow. He had thought of it on his last trip, this time it was a real urge.

After he was mostly done his checklist of items to do during the unloading procedure, Jonah couldn’t keep himself to task. He was entirely distracted by this urge…or notion. He stopped what he was doing and went to the central communications station. He had decided to send a message back in the empty ship claiming that something had corroded or devoured their previous work. He stated that he was erring on the side of caution by staying on Chantara. “There may be a contagion present that I cannot risk exposing the populace to,” he spoke valiantly into the holo-recorder. He sent the empty ship back.

The settlement was almost complete. Everything he needed to live for another 500 years was here. He had all the new medical equipment and androids available. All the food producing equipment to support half a million people were in place. Entertainment, holo-rooms and anything a human could desire. Just no real human interactions. Life was quite merry for quite sometime. Jonah had created a small community of virtual friends in the holo-reality. There wasn’t much that he couldn’t do. He spent about forty years like that. His body aged about six months.

Then one day completely out of left field he was struck with what seemed like a horrible instant eye infection. It was not an infection. Infection had been obliterated for hundreds of years anyways. Somebody or something had put something in him that was modifying his genetics. His sensory tooling was being adjusted for him. His eyes, ears, nose, taste, and ears were all being genetically overhauled. He became incapacitated for the better part of a week. The medical protocol program within the settlement had sent androids to retrieve him and brought him to the medi-room. He was tended to there for the next week. His eyes had, grown, and become mostly dark. His ears had fallen off and he had just small flaps, like gills there. His nose shrank enormously and he was left with only a small slit of a mouth. His cranial case had increased in size, by a third.

When he had become completely conscious, Jonah arose from his bed. He saw and felt and heard things that were not there before. He could perceive the molecular flow of particles and atoms in the true fluid state flowing in and out of their “solid” forms. He saw and heard other beings that existed in the “new” dimension he was now privy to with his sensory changes. He instinctively knew they were always there…he was now equipped to see them. He was not afraid, he knew he was one of them.


A Teaching

For all of mankind’s existence humans have attempted to understand, please and develop rituals and rites to better appease their gods. From primitive spiritual tradition, to giant dogmatic religious organizations, all have almost forgotten the true nature of “God”, and how we fit into “God”. Many religions have become huge power structures with immense political and social influence. These organizations are filled with egocentric clergy and followers; thus the institutions are bound to be filled with egocentric tendencies. They are often some of the most disruptive and destructive groups of the world. They are also playing one of the key roles in developing the collective madness. Many humans are in a time in history, where being spoon fed their realities is no longer acceptable. These transitional human beings require truth. The irony of many religions is that their claimed intent is to reveal truth, and they often are instrumental in concealing it. What is introduced in this book is not another dogma… it is merely a conversation of what is. As you read the following, let the words, thoughts and ideas awaken the essence in you. You already know the truth. You may not, at this time, make any real sense of it… that’s ok. You may not be ready. Those who are not ready may throw the book off to the side saying “what a bunch of crap” Its ok. Some of you are not ready to let go of the illusion you have built. Some may be upset by how I speak, within this book. You may not care for how it may seem judgmental. I am speaking not to your mind or to your ego; I am speaking to the true godly nature that is in all of you. To the whole being that you already are; that nature, or truth in you will receive this and awaken. It is Oneness. You are Oneness.

The Oneness is the infinite whole, that comprises all space, matter, anti-matter, and all dimensions. I am the one. You are the One. The cat in the litter box is the One. The litter is the One. The stars are, the Christ is, the Buddha and the tree he sat beneath are the One. The Oneness includes every movement, energy, life form, stone, molecule, light wave, sound, feeling, memory; every unnamed and undiscovered form as well. The One is truly in itself with out form. The One had no beginning and has no end. The One has always been and will always be. The One is. The One is everything and nothing.

An exercise to meditate on the Truth of Oneness is to imagine a time lapsed observation of the events since the last Big Bang until now. Consider the enormity of the event, of all that is visible in our presently detectable universe, all emerging in infinite explosiveness from a point with almost infinite mass, and only the size of a tiny fraction of the head of a pin. To see that event as a intermediary source of all that we experience in this present moment. The oceans, fish, plants, wind, fire, stars, planets, and space all emanated from that place 13.7 billon years ago(+/- 200 million years). Imagine the energy and matter rushing though space; novas, gasses and such forming into stars, galaxies, and solar systems. Speed through to the formation of the Earth and it’s several stages of development as it cools to a violent volcanic barren rock and visualise the formation of oceans. Picture life emerging from the “primordial sludge”; evolving algae to plant and to animal. Understand how one ingests the other infusing the energy and matter of the prey into the body of the predator. See how the plants grow and are created from the minerals in the soil and the energy of the sun combined with water. The plant is a new form created from the material and energy of “others”. There is a fluid transformation in the cycle of birth and death. Smile as you recognise that dust of stars, the light of the Universe, is you one in the same. All energy and matter is indestructible it only changes form and position. The same Oneness has shifted, morphed and interchanged since - forever and it always will. You are the same One as the stone and the air. You are the tree. You are your brother and enemy. You are the Sun and the Moon. You are everything. Devine. You are divine. You are the One! We all are. The humans are just six billion expressions of the One.

There is only One. Individuality and separateness exists only in the perception of a human. This is the root of ego. The misconception that a human is isolated from the Oneness is what is forgotten in the process of growing up in the collective madness that pervades the current civilization. When a human is first born there is only completeness… Oneness. Until fear is experienced, until the need for acceptance is created, until suffering becomes the subtext of paradigm the human baby is at One with the Oneness. When a human looks at anything as if he and it are not of the same collective he is denying the truth of Oneness. This denial creates an inner conflict that is experienced both consciously and unconsciously. This is where “individual expressions” (individual humans) contribute to the collective madness. This madness will lose its grip on the population when enough “individual expressions” realize the truth of the Oneness and surrender to it.

The Oneness is God. Not limited to the God of mythical beardedness pointing down at man and the world from His cloudy loft, but the entire Oneness, the eternal Oneness of which you belong by default. God is said to be all or nothing…you are included in all. Jesus knew the Truth. He walked the Earth and endeavoured to share that Truth. He had surrendered to the Oneness. He called it the Father, and he was His Son. He spoke and taught of a trinity within the One. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of the Oneness. The Spirit is sent to fill those who receive Christ and the Truth.

Siddartha Buddha when he was a wealthy prince experienced a inner conflict that caused him to shed his title and wealth to pursue enlightenment. Enlightenment is only the realisation of the Truth. He studied with the Brahmans and was left still unrealized . He finally came to meditate beneath a bodhi tree until he was able to realize his true Buddha nature, which always was within him and accept the Truth of the Oneness. He needed only to remove the misconception he had gathered through out life that acted as a veil between he and true awareness.

Christ and Buddha were only two of the many realized teachers. They are widely known and immensely followed. They were clear strong voices of the One. Though most of our world claim to be disciples or followers of one of the great and Devine teachers most have not truly let go of the “collective madness”. The teachings and the names have even been incorporated in to the mass delusion which is responsible for war, starvation and Eco-destruction. Popular religious Icons are only a few of those who are in the Truth. Many more realized humans have lived and live now, they are growing in numbers. As the percentage of realized Ones grows the grip the collective madness will lessen; when all become Conscious to the Oneness.

The Oneness is always present. It is unavoidable. It is beyond words concepts and forms. The only way to live aware of your true nature is to Be. To surrender into the present. One cannot be in Oneness and fearful at the same time. Love and fear are not really opposites, fear is the response to the lack of Truth. Oneness is even more than love. Love is the recognition of Oneness seeing Oneness. You experience Love when you look at a stranger and see God, the One, yourself, the whole. When you feel connected to the stars that is love. When you hear the collective One voice in the lyrics of a song, that is Love. When you forget yourself in the union of a great conversation You are loving. When you are in true acceptance and totally in the present moment you cannot help but respond with Love.

Some experience fleeting moments of Oneness and never gain peace ongoing. It is what keeps them from total insanity. It is sadder to be caught in between bliss and suffering than to be totally insane. Suffering is only denial of the Truth. That you are the One. That God is always in you.

Chapter 3 Time and Oneness

A Parable

“Oh, no,” David thought to himself as he entered the coffee shop. He was experiencing one of his more recently frequent de je vu feelings. For him these events were not quaint and pleasant. These feelings were uneasy omens of ill fate for him. For some reason he had learned to associate his experiences of de je vu with things going wrong for him, or that the path he had somehow glimpsed before was all going awry. He did not really realize that his mind was often, or almost always convinced that he destined to an awful fate of some kind.

David made his way to the coffee bar. He asked for the coffee that he had each and every day. He had come there for years. The people that worked there all recognised him, some of them wondered why David had never been friendly or at least become a bit familiar with them. He was a distant guy. He seemed more caught in his thoughts and almost not at all involved with the world about him. Pre-occupied; he wasn’t overly rude. He just didn’t seem to notice people or at least they didn’t seem to matter to him. David was single, at least at the time. He was a good looking talented young man, perhaps twenty-seven. He had no problem getting girlfriends, it was another matter of being truly intimate with anyone.

David sat at the coffee bar, he sipped his coffee. The usually fleeting feeling of de je vu that had begun earlier would be gone in a few seconds; a passing annoyance. Today this one was hanging on strong and getting more uncomfortable for him. He tried to shake it. Picking up a news paper he attempted to distract himself. Reading did not work. He even checked the date o the paper to ensure himself that it wasn’t the edition from that day before that he had already read. It seemed as though he was actually living out a dream he may have had. It was becoming completely spooky to him. He grabbed up his coffee and walked out the door of the shop.

After walking a short distance in the brightly lit afternoon he came to a small city park. David walked to the middle of the greenery and plunked himself onto a bench. He was becoming obsessed with what terrible turn his life was taking in his “altered” state of mind. Soon, two or three minutes later a small East Indian man came and sat beside him. David was further annoyed. He felt he couldn’t escape anything. He was just about to leave when the little man said, “I am thinking that this a tremendously beautiful day. How about you?”

“Ya, I suppose it is nice out,” David mumbled as to not be completely rude.

“I don’t mean to look into your business, however you are looking troubled and that is not good,” the old Indian man smiled sweetly at him.

“I am fine,” David answered, somewhat puzzled by why he just didn’t get up and leave. Something just kept him there. Normally he would have just stood up and left.

“Ok, tell me are you believing in God? I think that you do. I am.”

“Well, I, ummm, well, I think that there is something more than what we see here, but what is really going on I don’t know,” David sputtered out and then fell silent. He realized that his de je vu had subsided. Internally he was a little relieved. He could not understand why he just remained there sitting beside this smiling little old man. They sat for several minutes, perhaps fifteen or so. “Have you ever had the feeling that you had been reliving an experience, like de je vu?” David could barely believe that he had blurted out that question.

“I have.” the old man replied and fell back into silence. After a few more minutes passed he started to speak again, “You see, God, he knows no time. God is infinite and eternal. I am an old man. The Earth has passed around the Sun almost seventy-nine times since I was being born. God does not age…so to him there is no consequence of time. He is not being able to conceive it. For God there just one forever moment and he is in the experience of it all, all the time. My body will stop, one day, being able to breathe and grow and beat my heart. But I am not just that collection of bones and skin. There is eternity in me as well. God is in me, and you. Your human thinking has clouded your real knowing of who and what you are being. This I know. Sometimes as though from out of a sleep, your real self, groggily sees things as they really are. Through the eyes of God. You get time confused with how your sleeping self has made it. There is no time, really. Only it is something we have made up to finding our way through the misconceived partial truth that we try to understand. Time is like a spot on a map. Only those who are lost need maps. Never is God lost. One day you will see… never have you been either.”

David was awestruck. Everything that the old man said seemed to make sense. He had paid attention to him like he had to no other. He smiled and watched some children run by chasing and playing with their dog. When he looked back to where the old man had been sitting to ask him another question, he was stunned to see him not there. He disappeared, at least the old man had seemed to, in David’s mind. He glanced at his watch, again he was baffled. He distinctly remembered leaving the house, a ten minute drive to the coffee shop, only a half hour previous to what his watch read then.


A Teaching

Everything changes. Everything dies. A man will return to the earth and stars from which he came. A tree may seem to live forever, perhaps five hundred years, however it will return to the soil and the atmosphere as well. Eventually a stone will erode away to become another form. It is through this relativity that we measure time. It is not the rising and the setting of the sun. The notion of day and night is only relative to the perspective of location. It is always day and always night somewhere in the world. If you were to be able to float in space half way between the sun and the earth you would perceive no time, unless you fabricated it by using a time piece. Your body would still age as it programmed by your DNA to change in that way.

The Oneness knows no time. It is eternal. It has always been and always will be. Time is only present in relativity to form. Humans live in a perception of linear time. We measure the passing of time by days, and years. Days and years are directly relative to the movement of the Earth in relation to the Sun. If you lived on a spaceship between the galaxies, with no sunrises, no orbits around a Sun, and no seasons would we see time the same way? Time is purely relative to form. The Oneness is beyond form. It cannot age. The One is not subject to time it is truly in an eternal moment. It is always in the Now. Humans experience their lives often in their minds disjointed from the One. The past is powerful in the minds of most and as is also concern of the future. These preoccupations hinder people from entirely being present in the now. Now is the only time that exists. The past is only around in records and memories. The past was Now but is no longer. The past does not exist now. The future will never be here. When you arrive at tomorrow it will be now. It is not important to understand that which will never arrive. You cannot affect the non-existent ever. You can only affect now. It is the only place you can act or be. The one is always in the present.
To live in Oneness is only possible when you are in sync completely. In the Now.

Some humans are caught in a “time warp” of past and future. Hooked helplessly into where they are going and what that might bring them. Many are haunted by the past. In a mode of regret or resentment. You may have sat in worry about what may or may not happen, creating a whole new “false reality”. The biggest difficulty of that imagined state is you will probably act as though your fiction is true, if you are in the grip of ego and rooted in the great delusion. Worry and regret cannot happen when you are truly in the present moment and consciously aware of your Truth. That you are complete in the whole; in the One.

Here is an example of that mind consuming a state of conscious presence and connection. At about the age of 23 I had a job in a lumber yard. At that point in my life I was very troubled and confused. I was unsure of who I was and almost always felt inferior. I had worked at this job for a few months and had received a promotion from yard hand to putting together pre-cut cedar shed packages. I would take raw lumber and build packages ready for customers to take home and assemble into garden sheds. I remember how I would spend hours alone and during that solitude in my work area and I would start to think about my boss and co-workers and what they might think of me. I would wonder how I measured in their eyes. Some times I would have imagined conversations and conflicts with them in my head. I would create a fiction that they were not even privy to, however I would pay the price. My self hatred would grow, my opinions of them would become skewed. My actions and interactions were affected and influenced by my busy imagination. I was trapped in illusion. I was so unhappy in my fictional reality that I always seemed to be driven to keep creating it in hopes of making sense of my world. Busily trying to determine what in my future would give me peace. In the mad world.

The noise and confusion of a busy mind constantly out of sync with the Now causes pain, suffering and sadness to the degree often that a person will seek refuge in drugs, alcohol, and all kinds of escapist behaviour. Some humans will be so desperate to quiet their mind that the will take extraordinary risk, ingesting toxins, engaging in dangerous activities and self inducing altered mental states (such as depression for example) in order to cope with the conflict in the clatter of a misaligned time frame in the mind. Some will even end their lives as a final escape from their self made erroneous reality. The presence in what is Now, real, and relevant instantly relieves you from that fiction and allows you to live in collaboration with the Oneness. Stepping out of suffering and into the One really takes no time, it only requires real surrender. The surrender of the false self is to abandon the delusion and join with Oneness.

Chapter 9 If There is No Story, No Past and No Future, What Will You Do?

A Parable

During the winter Bev had always had a tough time of things. It rained almost non-stop from October until March. She found it very gloomy and being holed up in her apartment was what she was most prone to do. She lived in a beautiful city, Vancouver, yet for that season it seemed impossible for her to see the true nature of the city. She had been living on her own for about six years, she had moved from a small town where she lived with her parents and her younger brother, Jason. She missed them greatly, yet she always seemed to put off calling or writing. She had a couple of girlfriends she had seldom stayed in touch with since university,

Things had seemed much brighter for her when she moved from home to the city those six years past. She was excited to have a new life and become an accomplished fashion designer. The possibilities seemed endless and she had become anxious to embrace a enormous adventure. She did quite well at school at first. A few years in she had been swept in to the college social scene and had begun to party a bit too much, and finally had her heart and expectations broken by a bright, young, and handsome theatre student. Bev was being convinced by her unhappy outcomes that she was not going to see much success in her life. She ended up dropping out of school a couple of terms before she was completed. She got a job selling clothes from a retail store in a downtown mall. She kept mostly to herself.

During that rainy winter she went to work and went home straight after. She spent much of her time at work isolated from her workmates. She had started to think that some of them were conspiring against her and that she was somehow not really worthy of being there to begin with. She would spend time folding sweaters having imaginary debates with her boss. She would spend almost all of her time in a created reality that was never really there. The others actually quite liked Bev, they found her quiet and shy and endearing. She seemed to them a little hurt or wounded, but very sweet none the less. She was aching to be something more than she was experiencing. She often dreamed of what her life might be like if she had a good man to love her. An average guy, maybe who made a good living, who treated her reasonably seemed like it might make her life make more sense. She also thought it would be nice to be discovered as a great fashion talent and to realize fame and fortune. She would be happy and whole then, she often thought.
During that winter she spent more and more time living in her mind, projecting in to an imagined future. At times she would find warm happy feelings for short periods of time, those feelings were short lived when she inevitable realized that she was not living her fictional life. She was convinced that she would feel purposeful when she arrived at the picture of her ideal life she had created in her mind. Bev paid a lot of attention to what she didn’t have and how that was the result of her pain. She daydreamed constantly.

One evening Bev was walking from her workplace downtown to the Sky-train station, to head home. She felt a tug on her sleeve. “Excuse me young lady, can you help me across the street?” a gentle looking very tiny old lady asked.

Bev temporarily snapped out of her preoccupied frame of mind, “Umm, ok. Here.” She reached out her arm so the little lady could take her arm.

As Bev assisted her slowly across the street, the old lady looked up sweetly and asked her, “Will you please help me into that little restaurant just over there?” Bev was secretly a little annoyed. She was already daydreaming of planting herself firmly in front of her television, where she could tune out… escape her pain. She was dreading every second she was in and unable to divert her own attention.

As the old lady took her seat in the restaurant assisted by Bev, she looked up and back straight into her eyes, “Sit down dear, you have lots of time. Join me for a nice dinner. Its my treat.”

“Well I don’t really have time. I , uhhh, would like to, but I have…” Bev stammered a bit puzzled by this lady’s odd way. She seemed to know something Bev didn’t.

“You have an eternity, dear,” cutting Bev off in mid sentence. “ You just don’t see it that way. It should be me, a ninety-seven year old woman who should be worried about time. Come on, sweetie, indulge an old woman. I guarantee that you wont be disappointed. If you like I will pay you the equivalent of what your job pays you for your time.”

“Well, I don’t know. Well ok, maybe for a little while,” Bev surrendered a little.

They sat together for a long time in that fancy little Italian restaurant. They ate and chatted like they were old friends, or like a grandmother and granddaughter. Time flew, and Bev laughed like she hadn’t in some many years. The old lady was very delighted in the company she had chosen. The waiters and the neighbouring diners were infected by the odd couple’s bliss and joy.

Bev rose some four hours or so after they began their visit, and excused herself to the restroom. The old lady stopped her briefly. “Dear, what is your last name?”

“It’s Benning, I’ll be right back,” Bev replied.

As Bev left the lady pulled an notebook and a envelope from her hand bag. She wrote a short note and placed two crisp one-hundred dollar bills in the fold of the note. She hurriedly stuffed them both into the envelope and laid it across the table in front of Bev’s seat on the table. When Bev returned she saw the envelope and started to protest, “I know you offered to pay me to have dinner with you, but really it is not necessary. I cannot accept it. The dinner and the company has been fantastic, I cannot remember when I have had such a nice time.”

“Dear, please accept this. I don’t have anyone to spoil or leave anything to, so I am so happy to give you a little something. May I ask your birthday?” the old lady put her pen to her little notebook. “I have a little hobby of sending birthday cards to my friends. It makes an old lady happy to send out a few cards from time to time. What is your address?”

Bev obliged the her new friend and thought to herself about how sweet this lady had been. She gathered her things and got ready to leave. “Do you need help home?”

“No that’s fine, dear. I have someone coming to pick me up in a bit, you run along. Thanks so much for the company. God bless you dear.”

Bev turned as she walked out the door to wave at the lady who had taken her so much by surprise. She smiled a true, sincerely joyous smile. She noticed too, when she got outside the rain had disappeared, it was like a warm spring evening out.

Bev opened the envelope a half a block away. She couldn’t wait to see what was inside. She saw the money right away. She was delighted at first, until she noticed the note. It said, “Dear Bev, Thanks for the delightful company. I am enclosing two one-hundred dollar bills. Please give one each to the first two people you think could use it the most. You will feel great when you do. Then tomorrow at 3:30 pm please call Allan at 604-555-2198...he has something for you. I hope you like it. I am pretty sure you will. Lots of love, Bernadette.” She was a little mystified, but willing to see what this was all about. She right away handed one of the hundreds to a homeless guy pushing a cart full of his strange worldly possessions. He was a little aghast, pleasantly though. Bev darted off before he could say anything. She looked intently to find the next recipient, as she was nervous if she didn’t give it right away, she might keep it. She found a girl much like herself in age and appearance, staring in the window of a shoe store at a nice pair of black boots. She stuffed the bill in her hand and ran away.

“What a blast!” she thought. "I could get used to this."

Bev slept in the next day, as she was prone to do on her day off. She woke up around noon. She made herself some coffee, folded up her bed back into the couch in her little studio apartment. She flipped on the TV for some company and some noise. She had completely forgotten, so far, about her odd encounter with Bernadette the night before. At about three she remembered she was supposed to call Allan at three thirty. She became intently curious. The next half hour seemed to be an eternity. She called at exactly three thirty. “Hi, is Allan there?” she meekly asked. “A lady named Bernadette asked me to call him today at this time.”

“Ah… Hello Bev. Is this Bev Benning?” the male voice asked.

“Yes, yes it is. Do you know why she asked me to call you?”

“I do, Bernadette asked me to come to her house at about seven pm last night. You see I am her attorney. She asked me to rearrange her will last night and make you sole heir to her estate. She had no children. She said you were the person best suited in her group of friends to receive it. She has left you seven and half million in liquid assets, a very nice home in the British Properties and a very nice Italian restaurant. I guess old Bernadette knew she was close, she passed this morning, in her sleep, at about three… three-thirty am. I am sorry for your loss, but can you come to my office tomorrow to start the paper work?”


A Teaching

If you eliminate living in your past and stop projecting your false self into the future, will there be anything to do? If you stop plotting an imagined contrived fiction of a future reality, what will you think about? What will your life be for? If you don’t carry the story of your past, what are you made of? Where do you come from? You come from the source, the Oneness. When you abandon the past and the future you can be here now. To some that is against everything they believe in and all that they have been trained to do. It seems insane to let go like that. It is the True sanity. To live in the purest present moment is to be available for your real life. There you can really hear your fellows, smell the forest, and pay clear attention to that sacred place. It is the only real time. Now.

See how when your anticipated future is threatened by another human aspect (your wife, child, or co-worker), when that person acts outside of the invisible demand you have placed on them to help you enact how you want your “movie” to go. When your son tells you, “I don’t want to play hockey.” If you had a whole professional hockey career planned out for him, and you were attached to that playing out in the future, you might react very strongly. You may become quite resentful or miserable. You actually have thousands of such thoughts everyday. Constantly measuring the success of your false self. It is constant mind noise. Every time you look at another human aspect, you assess, threat or asset. Your ego works to fit them into your story. It can be so rapid, so subliminal, so erratic that you cannot even recognise it. Suffering emanates from this constant chaotic ramble of thought.

When driving down the road you may drive past someone who reminds you of a relative who you have an unresolved resentment or sadness around them. That can launch you into a whole internal re-enactment of that experience. The internal re-enactment…the “play-back of your life movie” is not real. It is your imagination. You do, however, feel as though it is real; your actions are connected to a fiction based on memory. That memory is fluid and subject to change, re-writing (for the convenience of your ego). You can then can then carry the mind pattern and emotions that are reacting to the fiction, and use them with the people or situations of your present. You could transpose this revived anxiety onto another driver or pedestrian. Someone may do something very innocent and or have nothing to do with you, and you can take that pain or anger and misinterpret actions or words. Instant road-rage. I am sure that most people who act out against others are caught in their internal turmoil and drag others into their out of sync, imagined fiction.

So what is in the present, if not your history or your imagined potential? Everything! First of all freedom, and the bliss that is a result of that. The opportunity to recognise Truth. To hear and see God in all that is around you in your present moment. A reality that is open enough to allow you to truly experience the beauty in your relationships. The true connection to you friend or child. A holistic support of those that are in pain or suffering. A peace that allows you to truly not need, not demand, or have expectation of anything. True peace. When you have none of these, you automatically act in compassion. Your true nature can be expressed only in the present. It is the only place to be. It is Oneness. If you are not in the now, you may miss your whole real life. This is the only real tragedy.

The Power of Now , a blessed book by Eckhart Tolle is an excellent expression of enlightened living. I wholeheartedly recommend it, as well as Ram Dass’ Here Now . I owe a great deal to the these teachers, these fellows, brothers who helped me find the Truth within me. I am grateful for their shared words and ideas, I acknowledge that they are holy men, wholly men (ha); that they dwell within me, the Oneness and I in them.