Sample passage from my Gritty Real-World Spiritual Fiction Adventure book to be finished this year!

A passage from Chapter 3 of my second book, to be finished this year called, 

"This is it."

Enjoy!

3

"777, huh," he said aloud to himself as he walked up to the bus stop, "the bus should be the quickest way to the docks." He got on and quickly sat in the first open seat he saw, the vehicle was fairly crowded, and he didn't venture for eye contact among the sea of empty faces. "Only 5 stops, not too bad," Shanyn thought. He found the closest open window to look out of and gazed towards it. As his gaze began to glaze over, he felt himself zone out.

             Suddenly his attention narrowed to a sharp vortex as he heard the voice. It was coming from behind him in the next row, her, the weird old lady from the previous evening. But what really peaked his attention as they continued conversing behind him, was what they were saying. He felt like he was in the twilight zone, she was talking about being in this oneness, like she referred to with Shanyn just the night before. He listened, it seemed interesting to him.

              "It permeates all things everywhere," she spoke enthusiastically, kind of odd for those around her, noticeable by their expressions, as they glared at her judgmentally. As if completely unaware of her ignorant onlookers, she spoke with quiet confidence, "There is no place that it is not, for you see, it is everything, but even though it is everything, it is also nothing."

            "Lady, I don't know where you escaped from, but I hope they find you soon," the sharp attack, viciously ignorant, flew from the mouth of the overly-self-assured-wanna-be-gangster seated across from her. Shanyn wondered what she would say as he tried to figure out what she was saying to begin with.

            "They can find me any where; all they have to do is open their eyes, just like you, my young friend. Anything you search for is right here in front of you. Are you sure you can't see it?" she questioned the thug with such solemn patience, totally void of frustration, or anger. Her voice still filled with a joy that Shanyn just didn't get. It was so alien to him; he just sat there, intently listening.

             "All I can see lady, is that you are full of shit," with that he jumped up, stared her down for a moment, as if to intimidate the harmless elderly woman, then quickly threw his shoulders forward to try to make her flinch. She didn't even blink, her eyes transfixed on him with perfect understanding. Complete and total peace emanated from the mysterious mistress as she acknowledged her confronter. The young black teenager stood up straight, confused at what was occurring right before his very eyes. The people on the bus all looked on now, yet with an odd sense of detachment, as if they were watching television. Shanyn kept vigilant, knowing he would try to step in if the boy became physical.

              Then the young gangster-in-training reacted in a most peculiar way. His maliciously intent stare slowly faded. His face went placid and he seemed genuinely at peace for a moment. It was almost as if she had spread whatever it was she was immersed in with him, because it was apparently working. He smiled at her in a way that suggested sincere gratitude, as if she had released all of his inner pain or something. As always, in typical New York tradition, no one around them noticed a thing. Everyone except Shanyn didn't, anyway. He wondered if she just perpetually perused the city, freeing random souls with open-ended ideas and bliss inducing stares.

              The boy sat down and gave the grandmotherly person his full, undivided attention. She softly cleared her throat and began, "The best part of this Oneness is that it will never run out, being everything and all. It is pure peace to know there is no end and that everything you think you know is an illusion; just endless cycles, form to form from form to form from form to form, etc. etcetera, ad infinitum. If we can close our mind enough, the conscious "cluttered" collection of thoughts we call a mind, then it will all be revealed in one eternal peace to this piece of our relativized reality so just be it now, there is nothing else to know..."

          Shanyn felt the words echo through his quieted mind, feeling at ease and vulnerable towards her. It frightened yet intrigued him as he sat there listening to the illumined rant as she went on and on. He swore he could feel the peace just emanate from her in waves of pulsing energy. He looked up when the bus stopped again, as if he had just stepped back into reality. "Shit, it figures," he torted to himself as he noticed that the bus was already one stop past where he wanted to be. With that realization, he snapped back to full consciousness and leaped towards the bus doors. "At least it's only four blocks, it could have been far worse."\

As he looked down the road he could see the docks in the distance.  He glanced down at his watch and saw that it was 1:17.  Quickening his pace over a couple steps he wondered what the place would look like.  Was it a shady, dark place, cold and damp?  Or is it a clean and warm set up almost seeming too nice to be a warehouse?  He visualized the two scenarios as he came up to the last block now.  He could see it clearly now, the large 777, high up on the corner of the building.   High walls made the sevens look almost menacing on the side of the warehouse.  The place’s height created a shadowed area to the left of the doors.

            He walked up the steps quickly, two at a time and reached to open the door.  It was locked.  He knocked, and it echoed faintly in the distance.  The smells of rotting fish and putrid sea air lit up his nostrils in a deep breath.  “Nothing like the East River,” he thought as he waited patiently.  The darkness of the alley created an odd effect for Shanyn as he glanced up to see blue skies and fluffy white clouds meandering overhead gently through the air.

“Kreeeeeeeee! Boom!” the door assaulted his ears as it slowly opened.  “Who are you?” spouted an abrupt, raspy deep voice as a man emerged from the shadowy interior.  The distinct voice revealed him as the man from the telephone.  An almost monstrous mountain of a person, he stood just under the top of the doorway and peered down at Shanyn with eyes that seemed weathered beyond their years. 

“I called about the job,” Shanyn said with a smile on his face, trying to hide the serious uneasiness the man’s daunting figure posed to his smaller stature.  “I’m here to speak to the supervisor; I think I spoke to you on the phone.  The name’s Shanyn,” and he reached out his hand to try to break the tension he sensed was growing.

The man looked at his hand coldly, then said, “Follow me.”  With that he pushed the doors open further, turned around and went back down the steps he had just come up.  As he ventured after him through the doorway the room opened up like a cathedral.  The warehouse walls just rose up and up to the smaller rectangular windows near the roof.  Sunlight poured through the windows projecting down onto what looked like a small area of offices with the more formal, dirty, smelly, warehouse out in the distance.  The clanking his escort made as he walked down the metal steps was the only sound audible beyond the industrial sized fans droning on far overhead.  An odd aroma of gasoline coupled with what can only be described as plastic melting made his stomach turn over and cringe, leaving him slightly light headed as he descended into the place.

Expect more snippets over the course of the year, I am 150 pages into the book, so we are almost to completion!

Just be.

My first book:  The Art of Falling

https://www.amazon.com/Art-Falling-Rev-Brien-Egan/dp/1515405591/

My websites:

beoneherenow.webs.com

campnow.webs.com

ilvermornysummercamp.webs.com

jedicamp.webs.com

My YouTube channel:

            https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClxve29mvUghOIwrQrWb-Ew

Falling away... to perfection.

Falling away from yourself you might find the hardest thing to release is your attachment to the release itself...


This letting go must be deliberate but must also be done with hubris.  We are all one and interconnected in this divine merging of spirit with form, with the all and nothing.  Falling away from the maya, or illusion, we merge with the oneness. Pure balance is in the center, chaos bringing a matrix of order perfect and flowing through each instant we release the previous moment in a constant renewal of experience...

The question asked then is, if we are constantly renewed and ever changing in the physical, how or why then do we retain our illnesses or our vices or our pain? Why can't we just choose a different alternative? Why can't we just be in a state of perpetual bliss and health?

What attachments to difficulty have we cultivated? Do you need to suffer to fully enjoy the joys of your experience?  Is the glow that much brighter with the contrast of misery? We choose this condition of duality so that we can fully embrace its interplay in our being as well. We must work to celebrate the beingness of joy

Which reality or state of consciousness do you accept as your perception? Can you acknowledge and embrace the pains so that the true power of wellness and echo through your soul?  


Your condition is a choice at every level of your being, no matter how horrific, so how can we find the message and lesson and hidden truths amidst the mire of the murky depths of depression and a fractured life? How can we dig ourselves out of this hole of pain and ignorance?

Can we even bring ourselves to recognize a choice to let go of our strife no matter though we may not have even caused it in the first place? If we can release the notion of separation with our consciousness and our physical being, a powerful shift can occur.


We can take control of our perception once we accept that we are in charge of it. 

Remember:

No one can make you angry without your permission. 


No one can make you happy without your permission. 



No one can make you sad without your permission.




We are in charge of our reality, so let's own it and grow to our true potential!


My new book, The Art of Falling, gives you tools and methods to release those painful parts of ourselves, so we can truly fall away from ourselves. This falling away brings to light all of the potential and all of those things we had buried beneath the trauma and pain from our lives.

It gives you the power to renew!


Click the link below to learn more about and/or purchase the book:


https://www.createspace.com/6150280?ref=1147694&utm_id=6026



A light for your path...

Just be.

Rebirth... part 1

Renaissance means rebirth... 

A rebirth is a revival of the beginning, a bringing back of that time before, of that being when  we were in that child-like state, where all things were possible. It makes me think of the allegory of the movie, "the Neverending Story."

The tale's big underlying theme is about regaining or in the main character's position, retaining that child-like innocence. Saving the child-like empress in the ivory tower of pure unbridled spirit in each of us from the terror that is the nothing. This nothing being the loss of imagination or open ended awareness. It represents the complacency and loss of our ability to be aware and awake to the possibilities of the infinite.  

The nothing creeps into so many of our lives early on and robs us of our innate wonder of our pure connection to the divine and to the potential to be anything. It keeps us from pondering our personal dimensionality and if we are truly a 3 dimensional being living in a four dimensional universe or are we more than that?

So has "The Nothing" conquered your life presently?  Here are some easy signs: (but don't worry, it's not too late!)

1.You are complacent with where you are in your life.  Complacent here doesn't mean happy, it means content enough not to change things you know you could, and it kind of means you have given up on your potential, things are good enough.

2. Does television or the internet occupy most of your time, distracting you from what is really happening in your life? 

3. Do you avoid difficult situations often because you are afraid of change or what might happen so you endure misery?

4. Do you often feel bored and listless where things just don't have that same luster or excitement?

5. Do you feel stuck in your path, but can't think of a new way to solve it?

Just as we feel like things can't be changed and that we are powerless, so it is.  Think of the famous Ford quote, "whether you think you can or you can't, you're right."  if we accept our fates to be tied to complacency and mediocrity then that is all we can be.  If this is all you accept as being your reality, then your cutting yourself off at your own knees. 

The box you have created from your beliefs is the one you can't get out of...

Our limits are those which we have learned to accept.  It reminds me of the old gorilla from the film Instinct, which is based off the wonderful novel, "Ishmael,"where they offer the gorilla his freedom and he doesn't bother to go.  He has accepted his fate, he has been broken. "The nothing" has consumed his wild, untamed soul.  So it is with us. 

This experience of being consumed by our cages leaves us in a listless droll state of fearful perception.  Some of us are able to retain some of our power and potential, but unfortunately those are among the very few.  Many people let it reconstruct their psyche in such a way that they lose that feeling of joy and even the simpler form of happiness. 

Leonardo DaVinci, who, oddly synchronous enough, is considered the first and most prominent person associated with the renaissance time period, was a major advocate for maintaining the child-like empress in our lives.  He reveled in his child-like wonder.  He fought against his loss of innocence with creativity and innovation as his guides.  One of my most favorite quotes by him is where he describes using the imagination to find pictures in the cracks and imperfections of a wall.  He kept himself sharp intellectually by exercising the most important mental muscle we have and that is our imagination.  To draw in another epically famous mind, this time from the 20th century, 

Albert Einstein emphasized the fact that the imagination is more important than knowledge.  He understood that the freedom of the mind to wander and explore was something we needed to grow so that even further innovations and advancements in our society and thereby consciousness are able to come to fruition.

So how do we rediscover our old core being, our essence we showed up on Earth with?  How can we defeat our "Nothings?"

Having our own renaissance may not be as hard as it sounds.  All it takes is reflection and some reteaching so we can unlearn the programming we have been force fed by societal structures.  Call back into your mind that time of your innocence if you still can,those feelings of gentle building excitement where things are boundless. 

If this proves too difficult try this, stare at a spot that looks broken and cluttered or find a spot in the sky on a cloudy day.  Now just gently look at this spot and just for a moment try to connect what is there into something.  Make it into an object you are familiar with in your mind. Can that cloud look like a bee if you turn your head, or can those cracks or splotch of paint on the wall or in the sidewalk look like the body of a dragon? 

Take a brief moment here or there throughout your day to reconnect with your own wonderment and see where it takes you! 

We are as young or as old or as open or closed off as we accept.  Don't be afraid of the mystery of the unknown you enjoyed as a child.  Conquer your nothing, climb on Falcor and become the something you truly know you are!!!  

Light for your path...

Being...

What is this catch phrase in our society? 

Can we really be in the now?  

What does it mean to just be? 

 "To be, or not to be, that is the question." -Shakespeare, Hamlet

So I have to ask myself, did Shakespeare understand this in the way that we now can view it?  Perhaps to a degree when he thought about it in context with Hamlet's dilemma in the epic play.  It was important for Hamlet to embody his full self and take control over his destiny, so in that sense, be the person he was meant to.  To be in the full expression of yourself is indeed a major undertaking and most definitely a life goal if ever there could be one.  How does one even know what their "fullest" or "highest" expression could be? 

How do we know if we have self actualized?

Looking at our being-ness in this light we can examine Maslow's study of the hierarchy of needs and his analysis of peak experiences marking this point of self actualization.  He described a peak experience as being in a state of bliss, almost effortless joy and success as things happen for you because you are totally aware and awakened to all aspects of oneself.  It is being in that child-like state of wonder and open perception where things flow and happen because you are putting forth the fullness of yourself. 

So...  Where does one go to find such a place anyway? 

And how can we make it so we never leave there once we find it? 

Maslow did say that a person can be on multiple levels of his hierarchy of being simultaneously, which makes sense and also validates the idea that we can experience these euphoric states of oneness and then the next moment be back in the hum-drum banter of life. With so many avenues of experience and dimensions to our interconnection with this world it goes without saying that we can be on multiple levels a the same time.

David Hawkins' work, Power vs. Force, is filled with explanations of the varying levels of experience we are exposed to and how it is never just black and white.  His ranking of awareness he complied through his research breaks up the states of being and what emotional patterns we express the more or less we are conscious or aware.

A popular Buddhist saying goes something like, " Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."  This just illustrating that even with all of the amazing energy and power one may exude when in that state of all-being, there is still the part of us that chooses to come back to help others out of Plato's cave, or to come back into the cave to pay our bills.  It also acknowledges that we can still revert back away from our enlightened state even when we are at our greatest growth and expression of our energy...

Let's take a journey then and see how we can get ourselves there in an easy, stress-free way...

Noticing our place in the universe is a start, for it gives us our first three dimensions of experience,length, width, and depth. The difficulty lies in finding our awareness of the illusive fourth dimension we all know is a part of our reality.  This dimension I am referring to is time.  We all sense time as it is a driving force in our lives, calling us to action or requiring that we wait. 

Can we access it from a fifth dimensional perspective?

The best way to reword this question more simply would be to ask, "Can I step outside the traditional way we look at the world in order to affect change to all parts of myself in order to free my experience from this dimensional prison we lock ourselves in?"  Well that didn't quite get any more simple did it?  I hope that description helped clarify it a little though at least.  It is a pretty intricately deep idea though which requires that we suspend our understanding of the universe and our entire perception of reality.  So let's try to see what it feels like and maybe we'll revisit this concept again soon in another post in more depth.

P.D. Ouspensky, Russian philosopher/mystic and student of G.I. Gurdjieff, defined this feeling with a thought experiment he describes in his book Tertium Organum.  In the book he invites us to visualize what it would be like to be in and to fully perceive that 4th dimensional state.

He has the reader close their eyes and see themselves in a room and to picture a cube floating in the middle of the room.  Now the trick of it is to close your eyes and be there and then to see the cube floating in the air from all sides simultaneously.

This perspective he is trying to get the participant to be a part of is that ubiquitous feeling of being everywhere at once, of being in the moment by being the moment. 

The simple act of noticing and being in a quiet stillness is an easy way we can be in our now without having to become time.  In previous posts I have detailed the practice of noticing as well as a visualization to perceive our stillness away from the clouds of our thoughts from our ego mind.

Stepping away from the controls of our perception periodically other than when asleep can help you to regain that quiet stillness and will help you to be in your true state of being...

A light for your path...



Timeless awareness

To create healing now we must be in this presence to embody our past in order to move through it...

This awareness of now is the key to release, the key to peace and moving away from a life lived in the past or for the future.  So what does that truly mean, being in the now, living for today, or staying fully present? 

Being present isn't just about being aware of where you are physically, although that is a factor. A main secret to it's mastery is in the embodiment of being in the now emotionally as well.  So what does that mean?  It means being beyond the emotions, knowing that they are but passing states caused by events in the past or future oncoming events we are focusing on.  The release of this pent up storage of feeling puts you beyond hurt or worry, to a place where it is easy to see that everything will work out in the right and perfect way.  We will see things as Thom Yorke from Radiohead put it with, "everything in its right place."

So just as I have been bringing back in over and over in these posts, a major part of emotional presence lies in embracing or acknowledging these feelings or emotions so that they can be let go of.  This isn't just referring to the negative feelings either, for good must be released as well.  When we let go of them we do not enter into some emotionless state though, if that is where your thoughts were taking you.  No, rather the opposite takes place really.  We go into a hyper-emotive state where we can more objectively see others emotions clearly as well as understand our own motivations for our feelings as well. 

It's like stepping back and pulling the wool off of our emotional eyes so that we can understand all the "Whys" to our emotive experiences.  

It gives us a clear picture of who we are without all of our emotional baggage that everyone gets buried under whether through suppression or from over expression.  Remember, suppression of emotions doesn't make them go away, they only fester and well up.

So let me give you a shovel so you can start to dig yourself out of this emotional grave...

An easy mental exercise to help you identify these aberrant emotions we are working to be beyond lies in seeing the emotions as detached from your highest self.  So how do we check in with this true self, with our "silent witness," as Deepak Chopra would call it?

Taking about ten minutes each day on your own to do this visualization will help to become more aware of yourself and your emotional states so that you can work to transcend.

Now follow along and visualize this to yourself, picture it in your mind, as you read along with me. First take a deep, full breath in, all the way down to your belly and let it out slowly now, and spend a few moments just focusing on your breath as it comes in and out slowly and calmly.  Now picture the sky up above you with the bright sun high up overhead.  Feel the warmth of the sun on your face as you continue to take deep full centering breaths calming and relaxing you now as you bask in the light of the sun.  Just be still in this moment.  Now as you are quiet and still notice as thoughts about your day, worries about deadlines or any of life's difficulties just spill out into your stillness, almost as though you are holding back a levee of thoughts and its slowly seeping out.  Now see in your mind these repetitive thoughts, some negative, some not, these thoughts you have about who you are and what you are, how you feel and what you think of your surroundings.  You know those thoughts that play like a tape recording throughout your day.  Watch now as the thoughts transform in your mind into clouds as they fill up the sky and block the warmth from the sun.  So now picture yourself safely rising up into the sky through those clouds of busy and negatively patterned thoughts. 

Realize that as you are coming out of the cloud cover up back into the brilliance and warmth of the sun that you are moving beyond these limiting thoughts back to the you that is eternal.  You are transcending to the witness, that infinite part of you that is not attached to any emotions or preconceived notions of what the world is like. It is being in that childlike innocence.  This is where you are now.  See the clouds below you now as they drift past and feel the powerful connection from the warmth of the sun revitalizing your true self.  Know that you are beyond your emotions.  Now slowly bring yourself back into this space, the room you are in feeling comfortable and relaxed in your body, knowing in a deep place that you are better for this, and it is so.

Being beyond is its own state of perception, apart from our normal waking consciousness for the simple yet deeply significant fact that we become self aware and fully conscious in a metaphysically open state.  

In other words, there is nothing binding us to our ego.  This is the hyper-conscious state that athletes describe when they are having their best performance or game and are in the flow state where everything seems effortless.

Keep practicing with the visualization and comment below on how it is helping you move to the timelessness of now.

Light for your path

Mirroring our truths out in all directions

What are we but mirrors...

If it is indeed true what science as well as the quantum gurus of our time have come to recognize and indemnify, then we are indeed mirrors of the reality around us under the assertion of the idea that this is definitely a holographic universe. 

A hologram is a three dimensional projection coming from a specially designed plate with light being sent through it.  The essence of this is that the holographic plate is a mirror of the whole in both directions from the micro to the macro extending out in fractal patterns. This is saying that in every piece of this echo of reality therein contains all aspects of itself.

So how does this fit into our mirror?

Our perception is looking out at this mirror of infinity only to see itself, so then the bigger question is, "How then do we not all see ourselves as this infinite, beautiful, magnificent perfection?"

This calls into the idea that our mirrors we are shining out to reflect back are dirty and blemished by our experiences and thoughts and views on the world.  This causes us to see just that, a world sullied and damaged by our own perceptions.  The clarity of the whole is marred by our picture of it.  Our perception, as the buddha said, is our reality.  So our reality is, in effect, as though we are looking through a shattered splintered mirror of ourselves.  What we are seeing is this vision of who we perceive ourselves to be as we project that system of judgments on someone else, someone outside of ourselves.

So everyone we see and interact with is never seen as they are truly, they are merely seen as we are and judged accordingly. 

We are our worst critic whether we admit it or not.  Take a second to recall your past session of self talk.  Were you encouraging yourself or berating yourself for doing something that made you upset or experience difficulty?  Now think back to the last time you said something positive to yourself, not just pride for an accomplishment, but expressing gratitude for efforts or just a happy sense of well-being about who you are as a person.  Most of us really have to search for such a moment if we can indeed find one at all.

So how do we shine up our mirror so it can show all that there is?

An often difficult first step to this goal lies in cleaning out our inner potty mouths.  We almost have to think of it like washing our mental mouths out with soap.  The negative thought we have form our negative words and this spiral extends outward as it affects each person we interact with and so on and so forth.  These words repeated enough form our actions which is what people base our character and personality on. 

It is not that we are what we have said or done, it is that our actions reflect out to the world our true nature.

So let's clean up those dirty mental mouths...

An easy but arduous task to accomplishing this soaping of our mind is a simple method called noticing.  Noticing involves just that, noticing or focusing on our internal monologue as it is happening by creating a conscious effort to pay attention to it.  Building this awareness of your own mental process will help you to free your thought patterns of the same negative degrading thoughts. 

The trick to making it work and not getting drawn into the thought patterns themselves involves two aspects, intention and detachment. 

For it to be effective one must strive to see it in an objective or detached way, to just see the thoughts as things and nothing more.  The intentional aspect of it comes before, when you decide on how you will do it.  Creating an intention to do it sets your ego mind up to be ready to be observed.  Once you have this intention in place being able to separate yourself from your mental chatter and your tape of thoughts you play over and over again will be just that much easier.

Realize that you are not your thoughts, and that you are not your feelings attached to them.

You are but the observer in this reality, just looking at the moving pictures as they dance by as shadow's in Plato's "Allegory of the Cave."  Step back from the chains in the cave and realize they are but illusions to soil your mirror.

Realize that the mirror points out of the top of the cave, to the stars shining so brilliantly in the sky.

Let's go for a walk now, out of our caves...


Light for your path...


Just be.

http://www.deviantart.com/art/Plato-s-Allegory-of-the-Cave-357719728

by Tara Shaffer