Other Online Presences ~

I am also on My Space at www.myspace.com if you want to find me there at www.myspace.com/devai and on Gaia at devai.gaia.com ~ Happy on-line communicating. I love this world we are living in right now. All of this connection in communication is such a miracle, and I am simply amazed by how much easier it keeps getting to connect with each other in our world until one day, we really feel the truth of we are all as one! All for one and one for all...

Thanks, Devai

This is so old, well ~ I found my guest house in Malibu, and have been living in it for about a year, and it rocks!

So, thanks for all of the responses everyone.

Looking for Guest Cottage to Rent in Los Angeles/Westside/Santa Monica/Venice/Silverlake/Topanga/Malibu

HELLO

For the past several months, I have been living in this big beautiful one bedroom apartment overlooking the ocean, and it was a dream, but it is time to move on once again to yet another dream. I am looking for a nice one bedroom guest cottage, anyone know of one I can rent? I have to be into my new place by May 1st. If you know of one I could rent, please email me at devaipearce@yahoo.com.

THANKS,

Devai

Quotes from Buddha to Lucille Ball

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world."
Buddha




"Being truthful, when you know it will cost you, is the true test of honesty."
Dave Weinbaum



"Difficulties are meant to rouse, not discourage. The human spirit is to grow strong by conflict."
William Ellery Channing



"Whether you think that you can, or that you can't, you are usually right"
Henry Ford



"The easiest person to deceive is one's own self."
Edward Bulwer-Lytton



"Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves."
Carl Jung



"Never let your head hang down. Never give up and sit down and grieve. Find another way. And don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines."
Leroy "Satchel' Paige



"You should not live one way in private, another in public."
Publilius Syrus



"Those who are at war with others are not at peace with themselves."
William Hazlitt



"People are never so near playing the fool as when they think themselves wise."
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu



"An invasion of armies can be resisted. But not an idea whose time has come."
Victor Hugo


What this power is I cannot say; all I know is that it exists and it becomes available only when a man is in that state of mind in which he knows exactly what he wants and is fully determined not to quit until he finds it."
Alexander Graham Bell



"The self is not something that one finds, it is something that one creates."
Thomas Szasz

And, an interesting math quote, plus one more short one, by Lucille Ball.



"The foundation of mathematics is numbers. If anyone asked me what makes me truly happy, I would say: numbers. Snow and ice and numbers. And do you know why? Because the number system is like human. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers a sense of longing, and do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something. And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce rational numbers. And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers. It's a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers. It doesn't stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with imaginary square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system. The first number system in which it 's possible to explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice. It's like a vast open landscape. The horizons. You head toward them and they keep receding." (Smilla's Sense of Snow, 121-122)
Peter Høeg


"I don't know anything about luck. I've never banked on it, and I'm afraid of people who do. Luck to me is something else: hard work and realizing what is opportunity and what isn't."
Lucille Ball

Come to Our Actors Meet and Greet Meeting this Sunday!

HELLO EVERYBODY:

As many of you already know, a friend and I have started a small acting group, where we get together and do relaxation, articulation, and cold reading exercises. As well, we do improvizations, and people can bring in prepared scenes and monologues that they want to do. This is helpful, because other people can often offer suggestions that may help your monologue or scene look better, because the blindspots you may have get revealed. This is a place for honest feedback that is done in a kind and encouraging way.

It is also an actor's support group-- a place where we can all share ideas and concerns, no matter what level we are at, or how experienced we are or are not.

I want to make the focus of the group this Sunday, a meeting group, where people can all get togehter and say HELLO, and I want to make it a forum for all of the participants to tell me what kind of group they would like to see, so that the group benefits us all. Because although I co-facilitate the group it is not my group, it is OUR group-- because without YOU, we would cease to have a group!

Synergy Cafe and Lounge has been kind enough to offer us this meeting space from 4:30 - 7:00 PM on Sunday the 17th. Please meet us there.

Thanks so much and please come and be a part of something new and fun! I would be honored to have you participate, if you think the group would in any way benefit you-- as I believe it would. If you have a lot of experience or none, it does not matter-- what matters is a willingness to have fun and be considerate to others in the group, many of whom are showing us their best work, and/or their projects in progress.

Group: Synergy Actors Support and Workout Group
Place: Synergy Cafe and Lounge www.synergycafelounge.com/
4455 Overland Ave., Culver City, CA
Date: December 17th - Sunday
Time: 4:30 to 7:00 PM
Location within the cafe: back room with stage

A New Spin on the Bottisatva Vow

Dear Goddess,

You are righteously tender, hauntingly reassuring, orgiastically sacred feeling that is even now running through all of our soft, warm animal bodies:

I pray that you provide all the original sinners our there with a license to bend and even break all rules, laws, and traditions that keep them apart from the things they love.

Show them how to purge the wishy-washy wishes that distract them from their daring, dramatic, and divine desires.

And teach them that they can have anything they want if they only ask for it in an unselfish way.

And now dear God of Gods, God Beyond all Gods, Girlfriend of God, Teacher of God, Goddess who invented God, I bring this prayer to a close, trusting that in these mysterious moments you have begun to change everyone out there in the exact way they've needed to change in order to become the gorgeous geniuses they were born to be. Amen. A Women.

Excerpt from Rob Brezny's fun coffee table book Pronoia, How the Whole World is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings

For more on Rob Brezny, here is his site:

www.freewillastrology.com/

His book is on sale at Cafe Gratitude in San Francisco, for all of you San Franciscan Friends reading this...

Mind Quotes and Bill Harris

Mind Quotes

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is
the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is
a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe,
is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
-- Albert Einstein

The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and
mystery. There is always more mystery.
-- Anais Nin

Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love
everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you
perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you
will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love.
-- Fyodor Dostoyevsky

That is happiness; to be dissolved into something completely great.
-- Willa Cather

---oOo--- ---oOo--- ---oOo--- ---oOo--- ---oOo--- ---oOo---

How to Be Enlightened
By Bill Harris

In the last several articles, I've been describing the difference between what
I'm calling "the world of the mind" (a reality you create with your mind, and
what most people take to be THE reality) and a more fundamental reality beyond
that created by the mind.

I have characterized this "other" reality as being the background, with the
reality created by the mind being the foreground. I've also described it as
being what is termed "non-dual" reality, as contrasted with the reality based on
duality, the chopping up of the whole into separate things and events.

I've made the point that any division into separate things and events is
arbitrary and that all such divisions are conceptual rather than real. As such,
the world of the mind is a clever illusion.

There are a couple of levels, then, to what I've been talking about. First,
there is the world of the mind. In that world, the challenge is to harness the
mind in such a way that you learn how to create what you want, rather than just
letting your mind run on automatic, creating whatever it's been set up to create
by your past experiences.

The first of my online courses, The Internal Map of Reality Expander(R), is all
about how to do this. If you master that material, you'll get to the point where
you have incredible control over your mind and how it creates what happens in
your life. Your mind is already creating your life, but if you're like 99% of
people, the whole thing is happening automatically, without your conscious
intention.

It is possible, however, to direct this process--what yogis call the development
of siddhis, or powers. And once you can control your mind you do have tremendous
power. For instance, you can create whatever internal state you want, when you
want it. You can be motivated when you want to be motivated. You can go into
problem-solving mode when you want to solve problems. You'll be able to become
relaxed when you want to relax, energized when you want to be energized, and so
on.

And, by controlling your internal state you'll be able to control your behavior.
What's more, this control allows you to attract, and be attracted to, the exact
people and situations that will facilitate the creation of what you've focused
your mind on.

As I've said many times, the secret to this first level, the level of the mind,
is what you focus on, and the whole Internal Map of Reality Expander was about
the details of all the ways you focus your mind and how to take charge of the
creative process generated by what you focus on.

The second level is one where you remove your focus from the mind and what it
creates. For those of you who are eager to be enlightened, let me just let you
in on the secret of how that's done. All you have to do is take your attention
off of the creations of the mind, off of the world created by the mind. (Yes, I
know that this isn't easy to do.)

When you do this, however, you perceive a different reality--the reality spoken
of by those who are enlightened. As long as your attention is on what the mind
creates, however, you miss this other reality.

Now it's not really accurate to call it "another reality," because it's actually
THE reality. It's the mind-created reality that is illusory, ephemeral, flimsy,
and constantly changing. What we think of as "reality" in fact exists only in
your mind. We're just so used to it, and there is such strong social convention
confirming for us that this is the only reality, that we buy into the idea that
it is THE reality.

Desire creates the world

In the East they have a saying: "Desire creates the world," or "Desire creates
the universe." What they mean is that your desires cause you to focus on the
creations of the mind, and as long as this is where you direct your attention,
you stay in that reality, and the no-mind or non-dual world, the world seen by
the enlightened, is hidden.

In Eastern meditation schools they would say that each seeker has what are
called samskars, "unburned seeds of desire." These seeds of desire pull your
attention back to the world created by the mind--the world of suffering and
change. When you say to yourself, "Wow. I want to be enlightened, " and you start
off to meditate or do some other spiritual practice so as to become enlightened,
these samskars continually pull you off-track and keep you from seeing and
experiencing the Oneness experienced by those who are enlightened.

For instance, you want to make money, so your attention goes to money. You want
to be respected, so your attention goes to being respected. You want the love of
other people, so your attention goes to that. You want pleasures, such as food,
sex, excitement, and so on. Or, on the other side of the ledger, you want to
avoid pain, or something else. These desires grab your attention, and that keeps
you in the world where all these things are created. It's as if your attention
was so riveted to the movie you were watching that you totally forgot about the
world outside that created by the movie.

Only when these seeds of desire have been burned away, they would say, will you
be able to take your focus off of the world of the mind, off of what I have
called the foreground, and allow you to pay attention to the background, the
non-dual world beyond the mind.

Another analogy used in the East is that of a mirror. The mirror of your
awareness, it is said, will reflect reality (non-dual reality, that is).
Unfortunately, if your mirror is covered with dust, you won't be able to see
this reflection. The dust represents all the desires (and aversions, the other
side of the desire coin) created by your mind. To see reality directly, you must
wipe the dust from the mirror--in other words, you must stop focusing your
attention on the creations of the mind. This is what they mean when they say
"Desire creates the universe."

The creations of the mind aren't real, you'll remember, because they are
representations of reality, conceptualizations of reality, a map of reality.
Non-dual reality contains no conceptualizations, no maps, no representations. It
is, instead, the thing itself. If non-dual reality is the meal, the world of the
mind is the menu.

The desire to get rid of desires

There is an intermediate position, however, between these two worlds.

You'll remember that I told you last month about Buddha's Four Noble Truths.
When Buddha, as the story goes, sat under the Bodhi Tree and had his awakening,
he went to teach the Four Noble Truths to the other ascetics in the Deer Park
near Beneres, in India.

These ascetics were super-serious seekers. Their method was to withdraw from the
world of the mind in every way they could. They did everything they could to not
engage the mind and its desires, thinking that this would allow them to see the
real world behind it. They ate very little, they did not seek pleasure or try to
avoid pain, they did everything they could to stop or quiet the mind. They tried
to take their mind off their desires and keep their mind one-pointed on whatever
their object of meditation was, whether it was their breath, a mantra, an image
of God, or whatever they were focusing on when they meditated.

The problem with this approach was that it rarely worked. Part of the problem
was that pushing away desires was just as much a desire as having the desires in
the first place. The entire existence of these ascetics was about desiring to
get rid of desire.

Buddha was, in part, trying to say that there was another way to be free of
suffering, and that you didn't have to be an ascetic to do it. Pushing away the
mind and its creations and desires wasn't the answer, because pushing away the
world of the mind was really just the flip side of seeking it.

This brings me back to what I've been advocating, which is being in the world of
the mind, but realizing that it's just something you're creating. I've used the
metaphor of a movie or a play numerous times, because this third approach is a
lot like the posture you adopt when you watch a movie, where you become absorbed
in the story, feel the feelings, and identify with the actors as if the whole
thing was real--while at the same time, in the back of your mind, you know it's
just a movie.

That isn't Brad Pitt up there

You know that Brad Pitt isn't really there, that what looks like Brad Pitt is
just light images reflecting off a screen. How those images move and what they
seem to do is determined by the film, the light source, and a number of other
things.

In the same way, the world of the mind is a function of the way your mind
processes what comes in through your senses (which, if you've read what I've
written about your Internal Map of Reality, could happen in an infinite number
of ways). What's more, your senses, as we discussed last month, only perceive a
tiny amount of what's really there. Because of the sensory equipment we have,
and the way our Internal Map of Reality has been constructed, we create our own
particular kind of movie, but it's not the ultimate reality any more than Brad
Pitt is actually there in the movie theater with you.

As you become consciously aware of how your mind creates the reality you're
experiencing and, as a result, see what your mind does that causes this
self-created reality to seem to be THE reality, you begin to see the relativity
of it all. You begin to realize that it's the relationship between what's really
there and what happens in your mind that makes whatever happens, or seems to
happen, unfold in the way it does.

Imagine someone so immersed in a movie that they really think the movie is real.
This is the way most people are with the "reality" created by their mind. But if
you can change your perspective to one in which you say to yourself, "Ah, it's a
movie, my mind's creating this, and I can watch it and enjoy it, but it isn't
real," then everything changes.

Such a person plays along with the world of the mind, but knows there's more.
They're aware of the foreground AND the background. Now you might be wondering
why anyone would care about any of this, and if there's any practical
application to all of this.

Here's why you should care: as long as you're caught in the idea that the world
of the mind is THE reality, as long as you're caught up in the world in which
things come into being and pass away--where you sometimes don't get what you
want, and where you sometimes get what you don't want--you suffer. You're
subject to the Four Noble Truths--or at least the first two. But once you're
experientially aware of the background, the nothingness out of which everything
comes, you can relax. Then, the movie of your life becomes fun--or whatever you
want it to be.

I've gone a long way around to get to my point, which is that there is a price
to pay to live this way, and it involves being willing to see the world of the
mind in a different way. You don't have to totally withdraw your attention from
the world of the mind, but you do have to take a new perspective. You have to
look at the movie screen and remind yourself that that isn't Brad Pitt--it's a
projector and light and a screen creating an image that looks like Russell
Crowe.

In fact, all evolution, all growth, is a process of learning to see things from
an expanding and increasing number of perspectives, instead of the one you're
currently immersed in.

Focusing on what you want versus witnessing

Let me take a short detour here and answer a concern that often comes up when
people try to integrate living in the world of the mind and trying to reach the
non-dual world beyond the mind. In the world of the mind, the key to everything
is what you focus on, and since your mind will create whatever you focus on, I
encourage people to focus on what they want.

On the other hand, I also encourage people to adopt what I call the witness
posture, to step back and watch themselves with awareness, and with no agenda
other than to watch. Sometimes people become confused between the two. This
usually happens when someone is feeling bad or experiencing an outcome they
don't want, and is looking for a remedy. Many people have interpreted focusing
on what you want and witnessing as being two different remedies for those times
when life goes sideways, and then they wonder which one to use.

I'm going to go into the topic of witnessing in great detail in a later article,
but I'll just say for now that these two topics are not mutually exclusive. The
question isn't one of focusing versus witnessing. However, this is a great
example of what I've just been discussing: the idea of operating in the world
created by the mind, but at the same time knowing that you, through your mind,
are making the whole thing up.

Since so many people are struggling with bad feelings and outcomes they don't
want, let's review for a moment why you might be feeling bad, and why you might
be getting an outcome you don't want. Actually, this is an easy question to
answer, because there's really only one way to feel bad or to have some part of
life not work, and that is to focus on what you don't want.

When you do that, you get a kind of "two for the price of one" deal. First, you
get what you don't want, since when you focus your mind on something, your mind
does everything it can to create it or attract it to you, and your mind is very
good at creating whatever you focus on. Second, as a bonus, when you focus on
what you don't want, you instantly feel bad. In fact, there is no way you can
feel bad except to focus on what you don't want. So changing your focus to what
you do want is definitely a remedy for feeling bad or for experiencing outcomes
you don't want, because you can't get what you don't want without focusing on
it, and you can't feel bad without focusing on what you don't want.

Witnessing, however, is on a different level. When you're witnessing, you're in
that space I've been talking about where your mind isn't any more real than the
moving light on the movie screen. If you step right out of the world of the mind
and just watch, you don't really care what happens, in the same way that what
happens in a movie doesn't really matter (as long as it's entertaining, of
course). So what if a moving image dies, or breaks up with his girlfriend, or is
captured by pirates?

So, on a more ultimate level, witnessing is just stepping out of the whole drama
and looking at it from outside, with no agenda for wanting it to be any certain
way, because from that perspective it doesn't matter.

The witness is who you are

The other point I want to make is that witnessing isn't really something you do,
which is the perspective many of you have taken. The witness is who you are. In
the world of the mind, we experience doers and their deeds--or at least it looks
that way. In the world of the witness, there is no doer, any more than there is
a doer in a movie.

In a movie, there's really no one there. It looks like a doer, but what looks
like a doer is just changing shapes of light projected onto a screen. In the
world of the witness, it's all one, and the only doer is the universe as a
whole.

So when I talk about witnessing, it does seem as if I'm talking about a
technique, something you do, but it's really just a shift in your attention away
from being taken in by the creations of the mind. It's seeing the movie as a
movie instead of as reality, it's noticing the background instead of the
foreground, it's just watching the mind do its thing, but without any agenda for
wanting it to be a certain way. It's the ultimate "Let Whatever Happens Be Okay"
perspective, because from that perspective everything IS okay.

So when you feel bad, or you're getting an outcome you don't want, the solution,
on the level of the mind, is to change your focus to what you want. On the level
of Reality, it's just shifting your perspective to that of the witness. Once you
do that, the feelings and the outcomes have no more impact than do those in a
movie you're watching. At that point, you may see other people who think the
movie is real, and you may have compassion for them in that they're suffering
because they're asleep to the fact that the world of the mind isn't real, but
you don't have to suffer with them.

When you adopt the witness posture, many times whatever was going "wrong"
straightens itself out, because you can't keep doing something that isn't
resourceful and do it consciously. When you adopt the witness perspective, any
unresourceful ways of thinking or acting become obvious, and when this happens
you lose the motivation to keep doing them. In this sense, witnessing could be
seen as a method of ending bad feelings and bad outcomes.

It should be clear, however, that you can focus on what you want, and be the
witness. The two aren't mutually exclusive. You should do both, all the time,
though this takes some practice to achieve.

What do I do about my ego?

Another question comes up a lot when I suggest being in the world of the mind
while at the same time knowing that the real world is the world of non-duality:
what about the ego? What do I do about my darned ego?

Many people have the idea that in enlightenment the ego disappears, and that if
you're on a spiritual path you want to get rid of the ego. First, let's get
clear about what the ego actually is. The ego is your concept of yourself. Your
ego is your Internal Map of Reality I have written so much about.

Your ego is the activity of your mind as it creates concepts and chops the world
into separate things and separate events. The ego is your mind, filtering what
comes in through your senses, making internal representations of what is left
over after the filtering process, using tens of thousands of varieties of
submodalites to make these internal representations, making unlimited numbers of
distinctions between these supposedly separate things and separate events, and
then stringing these internal representations into strategies. These in turn
create the internal states and the external behaviors and results you
experience.

So this ego, this map of reality, is your concept of yourself and how you fit in
to the rest of the universe. Now stop for a moment and think about concepts and
what they can and cannot do. Take the number three, for instance. The number
three is a very useful concept. But can it do anything? No, it can't. And, you
can't put it in your pocket, or hand a pile of it to someone else.

Take another concept, that of the equator. The equator is a very handy concept,
but it can't do anything. You also can't wrap up a package with it, or tie your
dog to a tree with it. Concepts are maps, and maps can't do anything. They
represent something, but they aren't the thing they represent. As I've said
before, you can't swim in the blue oceans on a map, and you can't camp on the
little triangles that represent mountains. Thinking that a map is what it
represents is like climbing up the street sign to get to the street, or eating
the menu instead of the meal.

"So what?" you say. "What does this mean to me in real life?" Well, here are a
couple of things it means. First, everyone in the spiritual growth community
seems to want to get rid of the ego. But I've just demonstrated that there's
nothing to get rid of. That would be like getting rid of the equator, or the
border between the United States and Canada! What good would it do to get rid of
an imaginary line?

So you can all relax about the problem of the ego, because it's a bogus problem.
There's nothing to get rid of. This would be like getting rid of Brad Pitt--the
Brad Pitt on the movie screen. It makes no sense, because he's not really there.

The map is not the territory

The only thing to do, then, is to stop confusing the ego as being who you are,
to stop thinking that your idea of who you are is who you are--to stop confusing
the map for the territory. And this is just a shift in perception. You can
continue to have an idea of who you are, but you need to be aware of the fact
that it is just that--an idea. Useful, but not who you really are. When you do
this, you are free to play in the world of the mind, where the ego seems to be
real, while at the same time knowing, behind it all, that you really are the
entire going on of it all.

Second, you can't get rid of the ego because who would do it? The "you" you
think you are, the you that would get rid of the ego is the ego, and how can
something that's just a concept get rid of itself?

This confusion of the ego with the real self is why some of you are so tied up
in knots over a lot of what I've been sharing with you. You think there's
something you need to do to get to somewhere other than where you are now, and
that there's something that needs to be changed. But the truth is that what you
think needs changing is like the equator, and how would you change the equator?
You can't, because other than being a concept, the equator doesn't exist.

So if you are trying to change yourself spiritually in this way, you're like a
dog chasing its tail, or someone trying to pull themselves up by their own
bootstraps. What you want to do is realize that the ego, your Internal Map of
Reality, and the separate self you think you are, is just a concept, an idea.
Once you see it for what it is, everything changes. This is why they call
enlightenment self-realization.

I know this is baffling to many of you. If it's any consolation, it's been
baffling to seekers for several millennia. At the same time, making the shift in
perception is actually very easy. For now, I'll just leave you with the big clue
that you can't kill the ego with the ego, because the ego doesn't really exist.
It's just a concept, and as such cannot do anything. You can, however, see the
ego for what it is. This is no different from seeing a movie for what it really
is, and you do that, don't you?

It's important, as you read these articles, to actually do something with the
information. This information can change your life, but only if you put it into
practice. This means beginning to notice the difference between concepts and
what they represent. It means noticing how you divide the whole into bits and
pieces, considering how arbitrary these divisions are, and how they exist
mentally but not in reality. It means noticing what you are focusing on, and
noticing how your results change as you change your focus. It's noticing the
background instead of unconsciously placing all your attention on the
foreground.

If you will play around with these ideas and principles, and notice how they
work inside to create your reality, a whole new world will open up to you. And,
if you want to go more deeply into these ideas, and their practical application,
please take my Life Principles Integration Process(R) online courses. You can
listen to a free preview lesson at www.centerpo inte.com/ life/preview.

Please don't miss next month's issue of Mind Chatter, where I'll discuss the
concept of threshold, and let you in on the real cause of all dysfunctional
emotions and behaviors.

Be Well.

Looking for Nice Apartment!

Hi Everyone,
I am looking to move again into my own place. Please let me know if you know of a nice, reasonably priced apartment that is soon to be available either in Silver Lake, Santa Monica, or Venice. I would prefer a one bedroom because I need to move my living room and bedroom furniture into some place where it all fits. Please let me know if someone you know of is moving out of a great place, or lives in a great place. I have had roommates for a year, and am really looking forward to creating my own space of peace and quiet in a quiet building. Thanks everyone for reading this! Let me know, if you know of something wonderful! THANKS!