Even the birds know it. I am just here to learn.

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Many of my recent conversations with close friends have circled around sustenance, the uncertainties the current economy presents, the ‘rising cost of eggs [https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1qfgtd9/egg_update_they_are_now_at_about_the_lowest/]’, the incredibly tough job market and just general tensions in a more unpredictable world— not like anything was ever predictable. In the corporate environment, these conversations have become more scary. I currently work in IT and I have watched wave after wave of layoffs and the tensions that are created in different technology spaces. It feels so surreal to be able to feel in the air the thickness of uncertainty. And so, in reflecting on this while writing live on my garden bench, I watch as birds land on the feeders right beside me. They take a few bites, look around, then fly off again. None of them seems interested in building a warehouse of seed for emotional reassurance. None of them seem to linger with the haunted energy of “what if there is not enough tomorrow?” Part of me finds this almost unreasonable. If I were a bird, I would stay at the feeder until I physically could not eat anymore. I would gather extra seeds, create contingency plans and then build tiny bird spreadsheets of all the locations with the best seeds. I will probably sell a course on “How to be a seed millionaire”. But what I’m seeing is quite different. They seem untouched by the psychological weight of future scarcity as they arrive lightly and leave lightly. I am so inspired by what nature presents. But before I go on, I am extremely careful not to romanticize nature. I love to spell out the brutality that is the reality of nature. The same birds I am watching now, quick at the feeder and unhurried in the trees, are also hunted. Some go hungry. Some that I see may not survive the next winter. Some would have their nests ripped out. And the truth is, nature has no shred of sentimentalism in it. See, I won’t be using birds as proof that life is always materially comfortable and that nature naturally provides. That is simply not true if you pay close enough attention to life. However, might I attempt to shift us into a posture that reveals what wild birds could show us about another side of life. We could hold that posture and superimpose it on our reality goggles of perception. First, I want to lay out this one posture. Birds wake into uncertainty every single day. They don’t store narratives about tomorrow(well, as far as we know). In fact, if we would call it singing, they sing before they would secure the outcome of the day. They participate in the world wihtout the burden of carrying the world psychologically. “Allegedly!” In observance, using the wild bird as a reference point, there seems to be a difference between how they respond to uncertainty versus how we become internally consumed by uncertainty. No wonder the biblical framing ascribed to Jesus points towards contentment with today as opposed to the trying to figure out tomorrow. Even in that framing, the point was less “nothing bad happens to birds” and more “life is held by something larger than out anxious control.” And that ‘something’ is my Incredible Fascination. I want to add that being provided for may not be devoid of difficulty. Maybe we could look at it instead, as a participation in a living process. The birds search for food, they build nests, they migrate when needed, none of it passive. And yet they do not appear to psychologically collapsed about the burdens of tomorrow, morosed by the empty bird feeder at 9842 Gelbert Blvd. This is what draws me to the old reflection about the birds of the air. Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet ... Birds don’t live easy lives but they seem free from the kind of mental burden many of us carry every waking hour. You know that constant anticipation of future lack. My gosh! I know of it! In reflection, it’s easy to see how birds illustrate a trust that doesn’t have guarantees as part of the package. If anything there’s an asterisk that points to the fine print. Perhaps because they don’t sit down to think about ROI while analyzing all of the risks they need to take. They seem to move around without relying on a complete map. There seems to be an enoughness in the present moment, while instinctively participating in what is already available. This also includes flying away at the slight sign of harm. See, my fellow explorer, there is clearly an intelligence that moves through it. That intelligence is not like a cosmic vending machine that proponents of ‘the law of attraction’ tout. Instead, it’s more like an ongoing relationship with reality itself. Provision does not lift participation from our hands. It lifts the loneliness from our shoulders. Oh, am I not so grateful for the provision from the great Fascinator. Tha I would be gifted a mirror the last week. That I would be bought food from Green Papaya, that I would be handed a source of living, however little. The giving that I am giving, the receiving that I receive— all of it in service to the participation in that living process. And so I sit. Another bird lands. Another bird leaves. The feeder lowers a little. The day keeps unfolding whether or not I authorize it. There is a kind of company in that. In noticing that life is already moving, already feeding, already singing, long before I lift a finger of effort. Whatever this Fascination is, it does not ask me to stop participating. It asks me to stop participating as one who is separate from all that is. Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are [https://a.co/d/03uHbYI], is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com [https://seyekuyinu.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

I Run Into You, Unashamed

I have a lot of trouble! Oh, where do I begin? Let me start with the basic living-in-america problem— some form of debt or the other. Is it the debt reminders that greet me through the emails I sometimes archive in contempt? Is it the gentle burden of belonging to a family. You know, the beautiful, unbearable weight of being fully a part of people whose blood I share and whose love I was born into? Or is it my body with its sometimes surprising betrayals, the creaks and complaints, its not-so-polite little reminders that it is not forever? Who knows what I’d wake up to tomorrow morning? Oh, and I shred into pieces when I see what’s happening in the world. The news! Have you seen it lately? Don’t even bother if you haven’t. My friend, Lena Shaqareq [https://substack.com/profile/106153130-lena-shaqareq] calls me yesterday, and we talked for fourteen minutes, and two seconds about what we heard over the weekend, what is likely coming. By the end we both just exhaled long and hard, sifting through the pile for some good news. For one, it was not going to rain yesterday! That’s good news! I shake. I’m sometimes shaken. Nobody talks about the gift of being shaken. Well, maybe because it’s honest work. In the shaking, there’s a part in the psyche that’s refusing to go numb, an indication that a thorn is still alive and awake enough to be disturbed. You see, I have met people so armored, so sealed, they no longer shake. I am not sure that is peace. I think that is just a different kind of trouble. When I talk about peace, I’m not referring to that one. Sometimes, from the thundering and the drench caused by the storms of life, there’s just a clear recognition of all that’s pouring into the room. I sit with the shaking. I let it be what it is. The house and car notes, the medical bills, the tiredness from my inability to sleep because of the heartburn that show up because I had dinner 3 minutes after 7pm. Or the conversations over the phone, full of grief — all of which are real life situations. And then, Milo curls up near my feet and stares at me as if to say: you’re doing that human thing again. Yes, Milo. Yes I am. That recognition. That clear recognition…I’ve now known it to be presence. And I use that word loosely, like a coat two sizes too big that I keep stumbling into. And it’s not because I went looking for it with clean hands and a devotional strategy. But precisely when I am most undone. When the anxiety wraps around my chest like the first time I wore a tie and assumed ties should be super tight on the neck. When the weight of responsibilities, what I’ve lost, what I can’t fix, sits heavy in the room, that’s when I notice it. Gosh, how could anyone ever describe this? NOw, this presnece is in no way an escape plan. It is something far subtler underneath it the way the ocean floor is undisturbed while the surface does all its dramatic weather-ing. I was raised in a faith tradition that gave this presence a name, a gender, a throne. I still love those images. They are not wrong. They are just smaller than what they’re pointing at. The Christian tradition pointed to the view but everyone worshipped the window. I’ve pressed my face against enough windows to know. And then, oh my gosh, I saw the view! Meister Eckhart, kept saying things that got him in trouble. He would say that the ground of the soul and the ground of God are one ground. Not two things touching. One thing. Rumi would echo the same thing. Teachers like Nisargadatta would emphasize the pointer— I am, and let that be the entire teaching. But that easily flies over our heads. These folks, it turns out, were all pointing at the same embarrassing simplicity: that what we are looking for is the thing doing the looking. And still, what looks, looks at what we call ‘trouble’. I found out rather late, that the contemplative path is not a lifestyle upgrade. It is not stress management with incense. It does not remove the trouble. What it does (and I say this with the hesitation of someone who has been surprised by it) is reveal that the trouble does not touch what we fundamentally are. Not by avoiding the said trouble. Ah! If we could ever avoid it. By going so deeply into it that we fall through the floor into something that cannot be shaken. Oh, baJezus! Is that what the Christian scripture was referring to when quoting of Jesus it said, “…In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” This is what I mean when I say I run into you. Unashamed. Not at the end of a long purification. Not once I’ve sorted out the finances and repaired the relationships and gotten my cortisol levels that inflates my belly under control. Right here. With the mess still on the table. With the shaking still in my chest. Unashamed, because shame assumes there is a proper version of one’s self that should show up first. There just isn’t. There is just this, exactly this, running headlong into the arms of something that was never keeping score. But oh, when I run into the arms of the Lover — and here the tears come, they bleed from my eyes like a confession — I know the pain will not vanish. I am not promised a painless life. I can only choose not to suffer. I am not promised resolution or neat endings or only good news. The world will still be the world. The interactions, unfavorable economic conditions etc will still need to be tackled. The body will still have opinions. But everything returns to the source. Everything. Even the trouble. Even the shaking. It all folds back into the same silence it came from. The Tao Te Ching 16 would say, “All creatures in the universe return to the point where they began. Returning to the source is tranquility because we submit to heaven’s mandate. Returning to heaven’s mandate is called being constant. Knowing the constant is called enlightenment”. And the Lover — I should tell you about the Lover. It is not a He, though I acknowledge a He in devotional lithurgical orations(geez is that even correct english). Not a She, though I have wept to She. Not an It like its this cold, clinical thing. Not a concept, not a theology, not the conclusion of a good argument. It is the very thing this vapor of me dissolves into. Yes, I used It again, damn it! Maybe because It cannot be fully qualified, cannot be contained in a pronoun or a doctrine or even a poem. And I say that knowing I just tried to write one. Or maybe I need to just shut up. Maybe the most honest thing I can offer you in this writing— my dear Co-Explorer, is this silence! This one. The silence on the other side of all these words is not empty. It is full. And it doesn’t wait for us to get it together to open. So we can run. Unashamed. Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are [https://a.co/d/03uHbYI], is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com [https://seyekuyinu.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

25. mai 202610 min

Content, Context, Container of Consciousness

There are moments that move me out of center. A phrase said in passing, a tone, a memory that catches me sideways, and suddenly I'm no longer here. I'm somewhere inside the reaction. (Remember the one I wrote about my coworker? [https://seyekuyinu.substack.com/p/there-is-no-spoon-there-is-no-spoon?utm_source=publication-search]) For most of my life I assumed those reactions were simply mine. I assumed they were “my thoughts”. Yes, we tend to claim them as our own. I assumed my feelings were my feelings. The bare fact of being me. But sit long enough with any of them and a different realization starts to surface. If you’ve not done this before. All you have to do is sit long enough in silence and you’d notice this fascinating thing. You begin to notice that the reaction is not one thing. It has layers. And underneath the layers, quieter than any of them, something is holding the whole arrangement. Three of those layers are worth naming in a framing I’d call: content, context, and container. In this exploration of who we are — who we truly really are, even these triggers are a part of the journey. A very interesting tool of conceptualization to use for this investigation is to pull out from the linearity in which we engage with experience, pulling it into the three layers: content, context and container. And here’s how: Content Most of us originally think we are trapped by what we think. To be honest, we believe that our thoughts are our own thoughts. We believe that we can shape them, change them, mold them, stop them. Despite our constant failure with these projects of control, we still stay adamant about our belief that we can. We have not investigated closely enough how thoughts create the coloring of meaning. That coloring is what is responsible for two people to see the same thing but experience them differently. Let’s call this layer the content layer. It is where thoughts play. It is where our emotional states lay. It is in fact where the experience of experiencing lives. Can you verify it? Then it’s there. Can you witness thoughts? Yes. It’s content. Can you witness sensations? That’s content. Context How about the context layer? It is the lens in which the content of experience is filtered. Imagine if two people heard the sentence, “you need to change.” For one person, it lands as encouragement. Maybe for the other person, it lands as rejection. Why? Because the content is identical.The context is different. The first person may have grown up around mentors who challenged them with love. Their context interprets change as growth, possibility, or movement. The second person may have grown up around criticism and conditional approval. Their context interprets change as “you are not enough.” Same words. Different world. That invisible interpretive field is context. Or let’s put it in a contemplative frame. Imagine if you witnessed a thought that said, “I am alone.” The content itself is that thought. The context can be an interpretation of abandonment, of freedom, of peace or even failure. Well, maybe even solitude. Or see even silence as an example. Silence in a monastery feels sacred but in an argument it feels threatening. Meanwhile silence at the ocean feels expansive. The silence was still silence. But the context is different. Got it? Container Now the container. Let me put it this way. If you could imagine for a second that you’re at the theater watching a movie. The content is the movie itself. All the explosions(if you’re like me stressing myself out with action packed movies), the dialogue, the sappy romance…all of it is the content. The context then will be the genre and interpretation of it. If you believe it is a comedy you would probably laugh when some crude jokes are made. Same words that may move you differently in a different context. Now, the container becomes the screen. I have a little sketch here to illustrate what I’m trying to communicate. Because our association with experience is trained on the senses and perception, we tend to find only solidity in it, denying the reality of the other layers. In particular, the entire container in which and WHAT WE ARE. My dear explorer, first of all, don’t you just see that this is just absolutely weird. I mean all of THIS. It is so unexplainable, mysterious and generally humbling to think that anything exists. No, I’m not talking about just the heady sense of awe. Not turning it into another spiritual idea. I mean stopping long enough to recognize the sheer impossibility of experience itself. Look around you for a second. A sound appears in consciousness. A memory appears and then disappears. Examine the sensation of your hands. That tingle tingle hushy tingle feeling that YOU are not generating. Or the image of these words and how you can understand the symbols that is the letters. Or the feeling of being a person reading an essay right now. Where is all of this appearing? Not metaphorically. Truly! Where is it appearing in? What is this space in which experience is unfolding? And stranger still, what is it that knows experience is happening? We move so quickly through life that we rarely pause long enough to encounter the raw fact of being here at all. Yet beneath our every thought, beneath our interpretations of anything whatsoever, beneath every identity, there is this open and inexplicable field in which the entire drama of existence unfolds. The ancients called it spirit. Some call it awareness. Some call it consciousness. Others remain silent because language collapses when you realize it’s not even an object. All objects arise in it. And honestly, silence might be the most accurate response. You cannot step outside awareness to examine awareness the same way an eye cannot fully turn around and see itself directly. Yet somehow, unmistakably, it is THIS. RIGHT HERE. Before every thought. During every emotional outburst. After every emotional drama. After every experience. Quietly present. Holding the entire universe of life. Do you see it? Is that not what eternal life is? A Small Experiment Set the essay down for a moment. You don’t need to close your eyes. Notice one thing that is here right now. A sound. The pressure of your body against the chair. A thought passing through. Whatever shows up first. That is content. Now notice how you are meeting it. Is there a leaning toward, or away? A faint judgment, a flavor of welcome or resistance? You don’t have to change it. Just see that the meeting has a quality. That is context. Now, the harder part. The sound is happening. The leaning is happening. Both are appearing somewhere. Not in your head, exactly. Not in the room, exactly. Somewhere more intimate than either. Don’t try to find it. Just notice that something is already aware, without effort, without your having to arrange it. Rest there for one breath. That is the container. Contemplative Currents is a free (bi-weekly) newsletter that aims to shed light into our daily experiences as opportunities for contemplation of this glorious Mystery. If you’d like to support my work, please consider subscribing and/or sharing this free Substack. If you’re looking to monetarily support, buying my book, This Glorious Dance: Thoughts & Contemplations About Who We Are [https://a.co/d/03uHbYI], is enough. I’m grateful for your support in whatever capacity. Thanks for reading Contemplative Currents! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit seyekuyinu.substack.com [https://seyekuyinu.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

22. mai 202610 min

Even the birds know it. I am just here to learn.

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