When I Started Loving Myself – Charlie Chaplin

“When I started loving myself” apparently by Charlie Chaplin written on his 70th birthday on April 16, 1959:

When I started loving myself

I’ve understood that I’m always and at any given opportunity

in the right place at the right time.

And I’ve understood that all that happens is right –

from then on I could be calm.

Today I know: It’s called TRUST.

When I started to love myself I understood how much it can offend somebody

When I try to force my desires on this person,

even though I knew the time was not right and the person was not ready for it,

and even though this person was me.

Today I know: It’s called “RESPECT”.

When I started loving myself

I could recognize that emotional pain and grief

are just warnings for me to not live against my own truth.

Today I know: It’s called AUTHENTICALLY BEING.

When I started loving myself

I have stopped longing for another life

and could see that everything around me was a request to grow.

Today I know: It’s called MATURITY.

When I started loving myself

I’ve stopped depriving myself of my free time

and I’ve stopped sketching further magnificent projects for the future.

Today I only do what’s fun and joy for me,

what I love and what makes my heart laugh,

in my own way and in my tempo.

Today I know: it’s called HONESTY.

When I started loving myself

I’ve escaped from all what wasn’t healthy for me,

from dishes, people, things, situations

and from everyhting pulling me down and away from myself.

In the beginning I called it the “healthy egoism”,

but today I know: it’s called SELF-LOVE.

When I started loving myself

I’ve stopped wanting to be always right

thus I’ve been less wrong.

Today I’ve recognized: it’s called HUMBLENESS.

When I started loving myself

I’ve refused to live further in the past

and to worry about my future.

Now I live only at this moment where EVERYTHING takes place,

like this I live every day and I call it CONSCIOUSNESS.

When I started loving myself

I recognized, that my thinking

can make me miserable and sick.

When I though requested for my heart forces,

my mind got an important partner.

I call this connection today HEART WISDOM.

We do not need to fear further discussions,

conflicts and problems with ourselves and others

since even stars sometimes bang on each other

and create new worlds.

Today I know: THIS IS THIS LIFE!

I originally saw this at Mountain Who am I? but with some inconsistent formatting, then a further search revelaed a copy at Esteem News in 3 separate posts. The two are very very different, enough so to make me wonder if it is from Chaplin. I’ve compiled it and pulled it together here. Anyone know the definitive version, anyone know if this is really by Chaplin?

After the Soaring the Sinking

More and more I am working (in the metaphysical sense) with friends who are battling to function in the world.  The demands of form drive them crazy.  Managing beauracracy, earning a living, looking after their bodies.  The biggest of these challenges seems to be dealing with money and earning a living.

In the process of spiritual awakening often an energetic shift  happens where our gears get somehow stripped – that is that portion of us, the cog which seemed to fit into the world and make things turn is no longer there.  We can no longer operate from the same ego and survival drives we had before and indeed do not want to.  But it leaves us strangely disconnected from the rest of humanity all scurrying around doing. When your self-worth or sense of purpose no longer depends on money or impressing the opposite sex or fame, recognition or security or impressing ones parents or not ending up like them – what is left?    After my awakening I spent a week living in the park before crashing with some of my friends in a squat & then close to a year after that wandering around barefoot doing what little it took to keep my body alive but hardly participating.

Sound familiar? 

It was my blessing to get stabbed twice and thus be brought back from this blissed yet also somehow unreal realm fully into this world with all its delight and tears. Intense prolonged pain was a fast shortcut back in but is not appropriate for most. There are gentler ways to get back in but first you need the motivation as why to engage again.

How about playing the game for its own sake? For the sheer joy of being in a body and being surrounded by the 10 000 fascinating things?  How about delighting in the fact that material existence gives us sex and chocloate brownies? How about figuring out something to do with our time here that is loving, creative, fun and juicy? GUYS jacking back in is important, spirit without matter is expressionless – the maya is also the leela. 

My friends who are sensing a dissatisfaction with being cut off, who do want to again play the game often end up engaging with me around the re-entry.  Seldom do they come right out and actually ask though, because as in the pre-awakened state we never know there is another level until we reach the false summit and see more clearly the next stage of the journey.

I swear to god maybe I am clumsy and new at it – but this work is like breaking in horses.  My friends ask for my help in the world beacuse they can sense I am operational again yet from true Will rather than from ego (mostly – I do keep finding the odd shard here or there) but then when I try and help they buck and bite, kick and scream.  Like having got out of the matirx there is no way they are even contemplating jacking back in.

Jack kornfield wrote a great book called “After the Ecstacy the Laundry: How the heart grows wise on the spiritual path”. 

For almost everyone who practices, cycles of awakening and openness are followed by periods of fear and contraction. Times of profound peace and newfound love are often overtaken by periods of loss, by closing up, fear, or the discovery of betrayal, only to be followed again by equanimity or joy. In mysterious ways the heart reveals itself to be like a flower that opens and closes. This is our nature.The only surprising thing is how unexpected this truth can be. It is as if deep down we all hope that some experience, some great realization, enough years of dedicated practice, might finally lift us beyond the touch of life, beyond the mundane struggles of the world. We cling to some hope that in spiritual life we can rise above the wounds of our human pain, never to have to suffer them again. We expect some experience to last. But permanence is not true freedom, not the sure heart’s release.

Every wise voyager learns that we cannot hold on to the last port of call, no matter how beautiful. To do so would be like holding our breath, creating a prison from our past. As one Zen master puts it:

“Enlightenment is only the beginning, is only a step of the journey. You can’t cling to that as a new identity or you’re in immediate trouble. You have to get back down into the messy business of life, to engage with life for years afterward. Only then can you integrate what you have learned. Only then can you learn perfect trust.”

So come on down and get back in its lovely here.

The Different Energy Flows – Zorba/Buddha RedFlame/BlueFlame Horizontal/Vertical

“My concept of the new man is that he will be Zorba the Greek and he will also be Gautam the Buddha: the new man will be Zorba the Buddha. He will be sensuous and spiritual, physical, utterly physical, in the body, in the senses, enjoying the body and all that the body makes possible, and still a great consciousness, a great witnessing will be there. He will be Christ and Epicurus together.” Osho

There are two primary modes of energetic expansion – for simplicity and becasue that’s how I experience them I’ll call them ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’.

Vertical

This is the development of awareness.  Recognising your own and other’s patterns.  Process work, knowledge of self and others. There is a sense of sharpness and clarity about it. Although it is not seeing, this kind of energy opening is closest to the sense of sight.

As you start to develop this faculty one gets on top of the emotions and recognises them for arisings in the bodymind.  A non-attachment begins to develop and often changes in language take place – “I am sad” becomes “There is some sadness today”.

For me it feels centered in the Ajna or brow Chakra.

A flowering of vertical mode is what is commonly thought of when we call someone “spiritual”

Horizontal

This is the development of the capacity to move energy through the body, to sense into things and respond intuitively.  There is a warmth and feeling of aliveness about it. This kind of opening is closest to the sense of touch and movement.

As this faculty gets more developed there is a sense of flow and of being able to strongly affect the energy of others, heightened senses, increased pleasure. When this further develops it becomes an ability to go with the flow and there is a deep acceptance of what is.

For me it feels centered in the Svadhistana or belly chakra.

When there is an opening and expansion of the horizontal we often view people as artistic.

Practices

Practices which emphasise the vertical are meditation, enquiry such as Maharshi’s “Who am I?”, and deep process work through tools such as the enneagram.

Practices which emphasise the horizontal are creative and expressive ritual, dance, ecstatic prayer, sacred sex 

Practices which use both modes – Yoga, Magick, Singing, Active Meditations, Tantra, Dzogchen

Overemphasis

Risks of an overemphasis of the vertical are dryness, a lack of juice, excessive analysis. Spiritual practitioners with a strong vertical and an underdeveloped horizontal mode get stuck with insufficient energy to power through conditioning and other internal blocks.

Risks of an overemphasis on the horizontal mode are an excess of undirected energy and this leading to all the dangers we associate with artistic temperament, mental instability, addiction, excesses of emotion.  Artists with an underdeveloped vertical often do not acheive much the undirected energy spills into drama and indulgence instead of being channeled into creativity.

Masters

Masters who emphasise the vertical mode – The Buddha, Zen Masters, Ramana Maharshi, Al-Maas

Masters who emphasise the horizontal mode – Rumi, Ramakrishna, Amma

Masters who have emphasised both modes – Osho, Gurdjieff, Adi Da, David Deida

Unity

I don’t think the initial journey toward unity can be attained through timid steps in both directions and an attempt to stay in balance.  That way lies a static underdevelopment in both spheres.  Each should be explored wholeheartedly and yet there needs to be a recognition that when diminishing returns are being obtained in one sphere, it is time to push the pendulum back the other way and start shifting modes.

Me

In my own growth I have found a definite sense of swinging between these practices and at times in my life I have primarily explored one or the other.  I think of my time in business and then my time living in a park and a squat.

A few years back when I was strongly rooted (stuck.) in the horizontal I had the good fortune to meet an amazing woman who was very dedicated to vertical expression (primarily in the form of process work rather than meditation so I did not recognise it).  We proceeded to push each other very hard – it was mostly agony because of sharp shards of remaining ego we still both had (despite prior shatterings) and which we were configured to recognise and demand abandonment of in the other.

This kind of intimate partner work though intense proved to be a fast, high energy track. 

Right now the expressions have both reached a certain level where there is enough momentum that development is proceeding similtaneously 

Narcissus and Goldmund

In the book of this name Herman Hesse examines something similar to the two modes I speak of here through the  characters Narcissus and Goldmund.

“The thinker tries to determine and to represent the nature of the world through logic. He knows that reason and its tool, logic, are incomplete–the way an intelligent artist knows full well that his brushes or chisels will never be able to express perfectly the radiant nature of an angel or a saint. Still they both try, the thinker as well as the artist, each in his own way.” Narcissus

“Perhaps there were husbands and heads of families who did not lose their sensuality by being faithful. Perhaps there were people who, though settled, did not have hearts dried up by lack of freedom and lack of risk. Perhaps. He had never met one.” Goldmund

“Dear friend, how little you know me still!  Perhaps I did ruin a future monk in you, but in exchange I cleared the path inside you for a destiny that will not be ordinary.  Even if you burned down our rather handsome cloister tomorrow, or preached a mad doctrine of error to the world, I would not for an instant regret that I helped you on the road toward it.” Narcissus

The Twitter Sardine Run & Global Consciousness

Its fascinating to see the gold rush mentality surface around Twitter and observe the reactions to it. It has become really apparent that Twitter is the next big thing and its amazing to watch the frenzy people go into as they energetically sense this new source of mana arising & rush to stake their piece of it.  It is so reminiscent of human behaviour during the rising of other such phenomena like the discovery of gold or during a sardine run. 

 

Joshua M. Epstein and Robert L. Axtell, researchers at the Brooking’s Institution created a  computer simulation to study social structures and group behaviors. Their program, named Sugarscape, simulates the behavior of artificial people (agents) located on a landscape of a generalized resource (sugar). Agents are born onto the Sugarscape with a vision, a metabolism, a speed, and other genetic attributes. Their movement is governed by a simple local rule: “look around as far as you can; find the spot with the most sugar; go there and eat the sugar.” Every time an agent moves, it burns sugar at an amount equal to its metabolic rate. Agents die if and when they burn up all their sugar. A remarkable range of social phenomena emerge.

It is amazing to see the actions of the agents as new mountains of sugar are created and they rush to colonise and farm them. Twitter is like seeing an Everest of sugar arise in Sugarscape. Initially many did not sense quite how big this particular sugar hill was going to be (I didn’t  despite signing up to Twitter in ’07 I only really started to use it in January ’09. And I am generally fairly early with the net –  usenet from ’92, running Linux in ’01,  blogging in ’04).  But now its becoming clear – its a mountain of googlesque proportions…and so the rush begins.

I love watching the ripples in the collective noosphere as these new sources arise. With the Internet these upwellings of energy have become global phenomena, and they are arriving with increasing rapidity.  We really are undergoing a massive shift in consciousness and surprisingly (at least to me) it is manifesting quite physically via the Internet.

It makes me wonder about certain spiritually very switched on friends who are not online, or not to any large extent – I can’t help feeling that despite their cultivated awareness, intuition and general expandedness they are missing out…are somehow stuck in an evolutionary Galapagos and being cut off from the net and what is happening here are in no way keeping pace and expanding to their full potential. 

This is why we spend so much time online and with tools like Twitter.  We are attaching ourselves to this heavy teat of psychic mana greedily sucking the juice down expanding our own awareness and simultaneously co-creating this vast global intelligence. Damn but I wish McLuhan was still around – I would love to see his take on it. We have some very able & insightful commentators namely Clay Shirkey, Tim O’Reilly and Kevin Kelley (aside: what is it with these Celtic thinkers – there’s Joyce, Leary & McKenna too! Note-to-self, write essay examining Celtic magical/mythic consciousness and the Internet) but they a bit too technical and not quite esoteric(expanded) enough for my taste – and thus I must write.  

Mostly to scratch my own itch as it seems I have an audience of about 3 who are actually interested in the same bizarre mixture of art, esoterica and technology as I am.

6 Anti-Job Rants

My first ever linkbaited, numerical list blog posting. I feel so deliciously slutty.

6 Paul Graham from incubator Y-Combinator on why humans are not meant to have bosses

Paul Graham looks at what large organizations do to people an makes and analogy with the animals he saw in the wild in Kenya.

Favourite bit:

Having seen that happen so many times is one of the things that convinces me that working for oneself, or at least for a small group, is the natural way for programmers to live. Founders arriving at Y Combinator often have the downtrodden air of refugees. Three months later they’re transformed: they have so much more confidence that they seem as if they’ve grown several inches taller. [4] Strange as this sounds, they seem both more worried and happier at the same time. Which is exactly how I’d describe the way lions seem in the wild.

5 Not an Employee

A website dedicated to not being an employee

Favourite Bit: 

The Sticker they made “Expeditus A Dominus”

4 Steve Pavlina Outlines 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job

A fabulous riff on why jobs are not actually more secure than self-employment/having a business & why the joys of slavery quickly pale.

Favourite Bit:

“When you want to increase your income, do you have to sit up and beg your master for more money?  Does it feel good to be thrown some extra Scooby Snacks now and then?”

3 Your Life as Pornography by Ran Prieur

A totally totally brilliant spoof/story by Ran Prieur of the Joys(!) of employment and what motivates us to do it.

Favourite Bit

He thought of the woman, her hot irresistible waiting body. “Uh, please Master, I beg you to let me be your slave…”
“Slave? We have no slaves! These are enlightened times.”
He sighed with relief. Perhaps the ordeal would not be so bad.
“Then what shall I be, Master?”
“You shall be my team member!”
“Do what to your member?”
“Beg! Beg me for it!”
“Please, great Master, let me team your member.”
“Abase yourself! Convince me you are qualified!”
“Sir, I feel I am uniquely qualified to apply this position on your member. I am experienced in several very similar member positions, with other teams…”

2 Henry David Thoreau: Life Without Principal

Thoreau was, like Whitman, Kerouac and Kesey, that uniquely American flavour of sage.  In Walden he wrote one of the great books about dropping out. This essay is a look at a more natural kind of life – one where we are guided by an inner compass rather than being prodded and pulled by outside events.

 

 

Favourite bits:

To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated….

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business….

Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom.

1 Tyler Durden: Fight Club

Need I say any more?

Favourite bit:

You are not your fuckin Khakis.

The above are why my (equal!) partners and I at Fizzy do not hire people and we make an effort to work with partners who do not hire people either. Personal sovereignty baby… second only to love on the priority list.

One Life – Many Faceted

Twitter is a fantastic tool – a meme accelerator par excellence. The interesting thing for me about it is it has become impossible to keep my worlds separate. I am an Internet entrepreneur, a teacher, a spiritual explorer, a tantrika, a filmmaker… – these selves all manifest on Twitter. One second I will be tweeting about building mailing lists and the next I will be sharing tantra tips or meditation techniques. Yet none of my followers seem particularity perturbed – no virtual stones have been thrown.

I think many of us have kept these parts of our lives discreet – not wanting people we work with to know about our personal lives, not wanting the people we pray with to know what we do for a living. The gaps I bridge can seem wide and the circles I travel in are diverse, yet nowadays people seem remarkably non-judgemental, the harshest judgements and fears often come from ourselves.

And so I find myself letting go of these fears and giving myself permission to be whole, to be truly who I am in every scenario.  Of course it is not necessarily appropriate to launch into sharing tantric practises when teaching a class on Internet Marketing (I hear my business  partners breathing sighs of relief) but neither will I shirk should a moment come when I reveal a bit more of my other facets.

Its a time of integration folks.  Osho tells a story:

A king went into his garden and found wilted and dying trees, shrubs and flowers. The oak said it was dying because it could not be tall like the pine. Turning to the pine, he found it drooping because it was unable to bear grapes like the vine. And the vine was dying because it could not blossom like the rose. He found Heart’s-ease blooming and as fresh as ever. Upon inquiry, he received this reply: 

“I took it for granted that when you planted me you wanted Heart’s-ease. If you had desired an oak, a vine or a rose, you would have planted them. So I thought that since you put me here, I should do the best I can to be what you want. I can be nothing but what I am, and I am trying to be that to the best of my ability.” 

You are here because this existence needs you as you are. Otherwise somebody else would have been here!–existence would not have helped you to be here, would not have created you. You are fulfilling something very essential, something very fundamental, as you are. If God wanted a Buddha he could have produced as many Buddhas as he wanted. He produced only one Buddha–that was enough, and he was satisfied to his heart’s desire, utterly satisfied. Since then he has not produced another Buddha or another Christ.  

He has created you instead. Just think of the respect that the universe has given to you! You have been chosen, not Buddha, not Christ, not Krishna. You will be needed more, that’s why. You fit more now. Their work is done, they contributed their fragrance to existence. Now you have to contribute your fragrance. 

This story is not just about being satisfied with being ourselves but also about being fully ourselves. Glorying in our height, our grapes, our flowers, our simplicity.  As we stop worrying how we are perceived so can we shed these layers and stand in our gifts and so realise the magnificence that is our birthright.  The more permission we give ourselves the more permission we give others to do the same.

Golden Rule Meditation

I came up with/was transmitted this meditation technique about 3 weeks ago. I’ve been doing every morning since then, it has been amazing. 3 days ago we inserted the “with ease” bit which has been a welcome addition