DonInChelsea


May 26th 2006

copyright© don oddy

~ love and truth ~

“Don’t give sorrow, don’t take sorrow! The qualities that stop me giving sorrow are mercy, love and honesty. If someone has these, they will never even think of giving sorrow. I need to be merciful not to give sorrow and I need to be strong in order not to take sorrow. In fact, the moment we stop taking sorrow, our days of happiness have begun. These are our eyes, ears and lips – it is up to us whether to take sorrow or not.” Dadi Janki

I revise these sayings and words from the gifted, always said to us, or you. You do this and you will be fine, you do that and expect that to happen. Lots of people telling you and I. When someone is telling you something, often their words are said as a teacher tells a pupil, the relationship can be quite dishonest, for there is no one higher than us or lower than us. We have no masters, and we have no servants in our spiritual development. And mostly if we feel there is a master and pupil or hierarchy to our living, we are unfulfilled.

Its early morning and the birds in London have been singing away most the night, they don’t know when to sleep as its always light here in the town, their singing is pleasant and quite peaceful as the town sleeps and no noise or thrum echoes through the streets, just the hush of millions mostly slumbering away.

I saw Da Vinci code yesterday, it was a film full of parts, which failed to connect. I am glad I had read the book to fill in the blanks. The acting was really underplayed, which means not really acted at all well and it seemed the whole thing was thrown together and much had been left out in the edit. A film like this needs more to it and the actors with their lines, they seemed starved of content as much as we were with explanation. What a load of the usual, a mess sadly, with great potential and really a flop.

With much in the bill paying department done and general housekeeping out of the way my thoughts turned to worldly matters and how we as humans live our lives. As per usual I look for inspiration, other peoples take on our way of life and with DaVinci out felt the two studies might help me make some sense beyond my own.

We can seek inspiration from external sources and we can listen with intent. Inspiration however is an inside job. When we think it and intellectualise our understanding, we often turn off our feelings, we put our gut reaction to one side in order to make sense what is going on.

Gut reactions as they are called, our feeling intuition is hard to suppress thank goodness. Our gut instinct keeps us from harm more often than not, and we forget it at our peril day to day.

We like, as humans to get inspired and to find meaning in what we do. We like to enjoy our daily endeavour even when it’s a job, it is worth doing well. That adage is true for endeavour does most often lead to manual labour or thinking labour and feeling good in completing a job, a task or some thing we really get a kick out of, a hobby or pastime.

And sometimes we put effort into our endeavour hoping we will feel good later, for the endeavour does not provide for happiness as we do it. And that can be because we don’t like it or we just don’t feel good in ourselves. When I get that feeling of doing things because I know they need doing and don’t derive anything from the task, I get warning signs about me and my mood.

As someone who has clinical depression, my reactions to this world are not always good, in fact they can be quite deadening. Reactions, moods and feelings can just disappear and I am left with great holes in my world. I know what and why I enjoyed certain things, feelings and people, company and communication, yet there is none. And that is where depression bites hard. When there is nothing in expression and nothing in receiving and any endeavour. These are the days, weeks and often months when the endeavour is most difficult, for there is nothing to motivate me, except the knowledge this too will pass. I will not go deeper, where my deep is beyond desolate here, sufficed to say that deep is so barren, all is lost to time and patience.

Reads like there is nothing going on when in this deeper state, not a bit, for my head is processing all I perceive with alacrity so alarming sometimes I feel like a computer, seeing all and knowing too much. When in this mind set, there is nothing to stop me seeing the world as is, warts and all. And because I spent most of this life observing and assisting others in their endeavours, I see them so clearly, it is almost too much. Without the judgment to switch off, I can perceive their innermost workings and motivations, what they don’t see in their conscious manipulations of life. An open secret to the gifted this way, it can drive a person scatty, and be very distracting. It is no superior gift, it is what we all do in our gut feelings about life, where we take on face value and choose our next move, It is mere a developed connectedness to what is going on, a capacity we all have and don’t always use.

It comes in handy with this notion of open and honest appraisal of life, not giving sorrow and not taking sorrow. It is the ability to switch off that perception and keep ones own counsel as others work out their problems their way and for me to do the same.

We are not less sorrowful because of it. For we cannot turn our emotions on and off like an electric light or even in more basic terms, lighting and snuffing out a candle. W can suppress and move on, we can leave the process to our dreams and sleep and we can leave in our sub conscious all manner of nasty or even happy feelings we cannot use at the time when they are experienced most closely to the cause or the event which sparks these reactions.

Some call this delayed reactions, delayed gratification and delayed sorrows. Yet they are happening. Our world inside our heads, places of deepest secrets and passions on fire, so many lost to time in their potential expression, as some or most are considered inappropriate in this modern world.

Love and honesty, honesty and love. We can love another and in our mercy we don’t always tell them everything. For in doing so we may feel we undermine them or us. And we don’t tell them our reaction to their doings simply because we might also fear the reactions of too much love our way or worse loss of their love in our honesty.

We get fearful. And worse when we encounter the notions of mercy, we get careless with the feelings of others, for in mercy we judge not to be as open in our honesty, to spare feelings all round. Nothing is spared ultimately in the compromise of truth, for we take away freedoms of thought and action, and actually perpetuate what has become a dishonest endeavour and connection with another.

We can encounter much bullshit and horse crap. We can move around our feelings and feel in more control by our dishonest endeavours. We have lost integrity somewhere when we don’t share truth as truth is, and we lost our position of equality the moment our conscious minds turned to omissions for the sake of mercy.

Love, honesty, mercy, truth and all these fine tools of feeling and expression are best used with a practical application day by day, so we get good with them. Not using them with prejudice or leaving them to one side when it suits us and them. We are so full of self, that we lose our position of endeavour towards our spiritual when we mediate our feelings and express less of what we are and know.

Truth is, truth is never hurtful, events and honesty lead us to awareness and reflection of reality. Reality is never a one way street to peace and harmony, peace and harmony come out of conflict and understanding how things really are and never half measures.

Peace, harmony and happiness are not steady states, there are not sought as an end, the come along as we endeavour to be real in our real world, with light and dark, enlightenment and endarkenment.

We need to experience both as life goes on and in its right size, today size and not stored for overwhelming size at some future point of breakdown where crisis leads to calamity. Be real and speak our truth, then we all get nearer to the truth of it, a joint and mutual understanding of now.

Truth is not mine alone, it is ours and shared. You show me yours, because I will endeavour always to share mine, in this ever present, present…

~
Copyright © Don Oddy



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