August 13, 2011 “Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends”

It may seem that I haven’t posted in a while but the show continues never the less.

The biggest challenge was remembering the password. Why now? One thing that I know for certain is that I don’t have a clue about anything. Yes, that is correct. I just relate an experience that I seem to be having. Is it true? How can it be?

I had an e-mail exchange with an old friend, Lisa Natoli of Gorgeous for God, the other day. (I would include a link to her site but I forgot how and I have come to the realization that forgotten knowledge is a good thing. So if you need a link then check out the links on old posts. I suggest that you do.) I mentioned to her of an invite that I had gotten to a silent retreat and my thought that, “Being around a bunch of people TRYING to be silent is louder that a heavy metal concert.” She agreed. So I got really exited thinking that I may know something. Well, I don’t but there is nothing wrong with feeling exited.

That exchange brought up the whole idea of the “retreat” thing. A while back someone mentioned retreat in an e-mail and I typed, “The only retreating that I have ever done is from the truth of who I really am.” I read it and I thought, “Now that is really cool.” It happens all of the time. I may be speaking to someone or writing to someone and something just comes out. It is like an involuntary burp of words. I have told people that it feels as though I am planting seeds of understanding. Like Johnny Appleseed but I know that these little snippets are meant for me. They are from my Self, for my Self to be ingested, pondered, meditated on, whatever you want to call it. So that is what I do. I say from my Self, to my Self because that is all there is. You can call them different things but that doesn’t change the reality of it, if you can see that.

So what did I do with this snippet, “The only retreating that I have ever done is from the truth of who I really am?”

Something that I have discovered is that the world I seem to travel around in and even the thing that seems to travel around in it is always the exact opposite of the truth. Really! It is like a mirror image of the truth. I raise my right arm and the world raises its left arm. The things I have come to believe about the world and about myself are exactly opposite of the truth. So, look again. You have to see it to believe it if you are willing to just look and examine from a place of pure ignorance.

Retreating is a withdrawal from or an escaping from something that we believe we don’t like to something that we do like or feel that we want. We go to other places to look for something that we feel that we can’t have or attain where we happen to be now. So say we are looking for peace. Low and behold in this calm ocean setting we find it. No shit! And we think it is amazing. When we return “home” it goes away and we can’t wait to get back to that retreat place to find it again.

Now I don’t know about you but I read a Course in Miracles and on every page I am told that I am Peace. I am unwavering, eternal Peace. I mean like, right now, always was, always will be can’t possibly anything else. I am also told that I have mistakenly believed that I could be something other than that. So when I go to that retreat thing I am actually bringing what I am, Peace, with me and pretending to find it there. Then I pretend to lose it on the return flight. It’s like putting on a pair of pants and finding a ten dollar bill in the left front pocket and feeling like I have something that I didn’t have before. Yes.

So we spend most of our time retreating from the peace that we really are. Why don’t we call getting away to a beautiful oceanic area to experience the peace that we always are, “Stop retreating?”

That, like everything else, is a mystery and to revel in it, swim in it, be immersed by it, be transfixed with the incredible wonder of that mystery and only that mystery is heaven. Care to join me? I’ve got news for you…………………..

Why not just be that Peace that you are wherever and whenever? Seriously!