Peace of Mind

Did any of you see the series called Tribe on BBC2 a while back. The series that gave Bruce Perry the chance to try out some exotic natural narcotics. My favourite from the series was the Mongolian one where Perry lived for a month with a nomad family, 'helping' them relocate to winter pastures. At one point Perry asks the father and head of the family, a magnificent, handsome man in his late twenties or early thirties, what the most important thing in his life was. He answered without hesitation, "My peace of mind and my work". When his wife, the mother of his children, was asked a similar question she said, "The family". Both of them explained that if they lived in the city their life would be easier but not as free. Their lack of material attachments, whilst making their day to day existence more precarious, gave them more peace of mind and settled their soul. In a sense, peace of mind and none attachment amount to the same thing. The Tibetans say that your problems are as big as your possessions. When my son Max was born in 1992, my teacher's advice was, "Love him with all your heart but don't get attached". Peace of mind only comes when you have ruthlessly thrown off everything sucking at your energy. Dr Chi once said, "If you stick to someone, they stick to you too." Attachment works the same way, it is always two-way. So how does one not get attached? How do you not allow things to stick to you? Attachment and sticking both imply that some steady state has been reached, that there is some stability (continuity) to the sticking interface: two items joined together at some point. If your energy is vorticular then this will never happen, everything in your environment will be in a process of being consumed by you, either taken in, or expelled. There is no such thing as steady state or stability and so there is no attachment or sticking, not for more than an instant anyway. In the vorticular world reality is non-continuous. It is a plethora of instants - instantaneous explosions - from all times and places. In such a world there is no past, present and future because the timeline is as fractured as every other aspect.

Try this exercise. Sticking.
Two people together. Both standing, one in front of the other. One (the sticker) is relaxed and limp. The other (the stickee) slips the back of her left hand under the right hand of the sticker and lifts it up. The sticker's arm should remain as limp as possible so that the stickee feels the dead-weight of the sticker's arm as the hand is lifted. The stickee then moves around the room taking the sticker with her. The idea is to maintain contact through the hands at all times. OK, pretty boring eh? Now if the sticker starts to bring some life and spirit into their hand then the touch will lighten. Keep on bringing more and more life and spirit into the situation and you will both feel that the area of contact wants to shift and roll, to breathe. The spirit should gently insinuate through the contact into the other person. There should come a point in this increasing intensity between you when the physical contact becomes an irrelevance. Both of you should be swarming all over and through the other. The only way to survive the others consuming intensity is your own consuming intensity. You will see that this world of spirit is not a stable world. It requires almost instant resolution (in a self-defence situation this would be the defeat or death of one of the parties). However, if both of you cooperate and work to the same end then that vibrating and dangerous world can be touched safely. This is Heartwork. You come away unharmed but changed forever. With practice all your interactions are heartfelt and heart-driven and every moment is a transforming one. As I said before, the wonder of life is that there is always a miracle wanting to happen.