Category: Leon’s Ideas

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Staying Centered

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Staying Centered

Staying centered?  The question I have this day is how do I stay centered in a world that is constantly pulling me off center. Well for me first off, the world isn’t doing anything, it is my perception of the worlds conditions. So the real question is “why do I want to blame something else, rather than look inside?”, Staying centered?

Staying centered is not really my job, my job(if I would call it that) is to not buy into my thoughts. I’m always centered, I only get distracted and believe I’m not. I have found that my default position is JOY. When I’m not actively trying to be upset about something/anything my resting position is at peace. In an automobile we have to put the transmission in gear if we want the car to move, but in neutral the car is free to roll.

When my life is in neutral I am at peace and in joy. Not happiness, from my experience something has to happen for happiness to occur. Interesting the similarities, “happening”, “happy”, (Happ)ening, (Happ)y. Coincidence…I think not.  Staying centered

I find that my life is “experience”, “description”. First I experience something and then I describe it, most of the time in a nanosecond. I see something, IE…experience it, then almost immediate in my thoughts I describe it. Example, I see an amazing sunset or sunrise, in my chest or center I feel the wonder, in less than a breath though, in my mind I describe it. Words like beautiful, red, brilliant, purple, breathtaking, all different types of descriptors with definitions that mean something to me.

This I believe would fall into what we call “normal” and not think a 2nd thought about it.

Staying centered

Here’s a challenge though, can I, you, we have an experience without describing it. Am I able to take in the wonder of anything without describing it and truthfully when I describe something I am judging it. This is the secret of not being pulled into gear so to speak.

That voice in our head is a phantom so to speak, it’s way out of our control. Ever heard someone say whatever you do, don’t think of a blue monkey. If you’re like most within seconds some form of a blue monkey with cross the mental marquee.  Staying centered

 

The mind is the absolute greatest of all allies, and yet the worst of all masters. It is possible to break away from it’s incessant thinking but it seems for most, it is impossible to make it stop. To break free we first have to be able to distinguish the difference from thought and feel. Experiences we feel, descriptions we think and therein lies our help.

A great philosopher named Yoda once said that “we must unlearn what we have learned”.  If we’re to be Staying centered, this is important.

Staying centered

 

My personal mentor told me years ago that I knew too much. We would see a bird or a flowering plant and I would spout off the name of it. He would often ask me to refrain such activity so he could just experience the beauty without the information. The beauty existed long before someone decided to name it, that is the place to be if you have an interest in being centered and by centered I just mean be…

So how do I know the difference? Words are my first clue, thinking involves words. Words that I was taught along with their definitions. Feelings have no words, we feel something and then we describe the feeling. Ouch that’s hot and it burned me, we had the feeling first, but then we had been taught what that feeling was and how we were supposed to behave accordingly. Our natural reaction is to pull away, but then we’ve been taught what to call it and to ascertain to what degree were we burned. Here’s where the ally part comes in.

Our mind as an ally can let us know what actions if any need to follow this experience. If we are in balance this can be tremendously helpful, yet if our mind is running the show, we’ll be over run with the what if’s. What if it’s 3rd degree burns, or what if it gets infected. What if, if, if?  Peace amidst chaos, meaning freedom from the thinking mind.  A problem cannot be solved on the same level of consciousness that the problem was created…Meaning; I cannot fix my mind with my mind so don’t even try.  However, that being said there is the possibility of being free from the mind and living centered.

For the majority of my life I was definitely out of balance and I would vacillate between OMG! And Fuck it!

 

Only when I was able to recognize the incessant chatter in my mind was I able to cross from resignation to acceptance. Resignation left me with ‘it’s this way for ever’ and acceptance brought me to ‘it’s this way now’ and if only for me,

I find freedom there.
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Tomorrow never comes

tomorrow never comes

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Tomorrow Never Comes

Tomorrow Never Comes, nothing ever happened in the past and nothing will ever happen in the future, .    When you were born…it was now.

  You weren’t born then, the doctor didn’t write down on you medical record that you were born back then…it was now.  When I die it will be now, it won’t be then either.  it is always now and now is all there ever is.  It is always now, everything happens now. Our trouble it seems is that we try to live life in a linear fashion, with a past and a future. the body seems to live in a linear timeline, birth, life, death.  This sounds logical and real, yet, it is always now in those moments as well.  The difficulty arises when we’ll either relive a memory (good or bad) or spend mind fuel imagining something that might happen (also good or bad). We completely miss the present, the NOW and since that is all there ever is, we miss life.

In moments sublime we are totally present and in those moments often we make a memory, we have an experience that we lock onto. In our minds this becomes an anchor, a point of reference. We then begin to measure our life in relation to that moment. Have you ever heard someone say “well back in my day, we did it differently”. This is an example of a mental anchor, we then build and base our lives off of these points in time.

In the beginning of a life we are given instruction and history.

We are told of our families past, accomplishments, failures, health, wealth, education… This unknowingly becomes our programming, a form of predestination. We are born into our place of life. Tomorrow Never Comes, yet knowing where I come from stands a very strong chance of determining where I am heading. Often times we accept this as a blessing or a curse. Blue-blood and entitlement, Ivy league, pomp and prestige. Poverty, need, also entitlement, drugs and crime.

We are told of the family alcoholic and our propensity towards that life. We are given medical history and how cancer or diabetes run in our veins. All of this is given us without our permission or understanding that this is building our destination.

We then set out with our life map and either go where we’re told or make a proclamation, “I won’t go there”. Never understanding that here, right now is all we ever are and Tomorrow Never Comes

The idea of tomorrow is the father of anxiety,

it is where dread lives or anticipation waits. It’s not real, tomorrow never comes. We’ve all heard that and yet, we wait. We hope for tomorrow or we dread it. Hope always sounded like a good thing to me, like a positive outlook on life…I hope you have a wonderful day, I hope you start feeling better, I hope(insert whatever).

All this really says is that NOW is unsatisfactory and I hope it will get better or in dread, I hope it doesn’t get any worse. Once again we are not present, so in reality we are not alive. We are drifting in a place that doesn’t exist, the future or the past.

Take a breath, feel it go into your lungs, then when you reach satiation and no more air will come in, pause; feel the air in your chest and then release, let the air escape, feel your chest fall. When you have let all the air out, pause and realize that in this moment you are dead. If another breath doesn’t come relatively soon your physical life will end.

It is in this moment that you have the opportunity to understand NOW. Everything that draws breath will come to the place where the last breath is breathed out and there is not another one coming. We take that next breath unknowingly and very expectantly and yet there will be a last one. That last breath also happens now, it won’t be next year, next month or next week. It is NOW and it is done.

In my life meditation was how I first found NOW,

I had no idea that I wasn’t present. My mind refused to meditate, I would sit in quiet and yet I was always somewhere else. Thinking of what needed to be done or what I had done and possibly regretted. Never being able to quiet my mind. I was told of the “lizard brain” and how it was always active. I would spend time “trying” not to pay attention, still my mind would not stop. One day in meditation I realized that…

Tomorrow Never Comes

I wasn’t thinking, of course the moment I realized that I was thinking, but right before that I was present, I was NOW. I then understood that mind time is not NOW, it is thinking. NOW is different and cannot be worded, meaning words won’t work here, you can only feel it, you cannot say it.

Have you ever tried to tell someone what something tastes like. Using word like sweet, salty, spicy we do our best to describe what something tastes like. Yet if I never eat it I will never actually know what it tastes like, until then I only know what you think it tastes like. Here’s an interesting observation though, you can tell the tastes, even the recipe and if I don’t eventually eat…I will starve to death. This is how the NOW is, I can tell you all about it, yet if you don’t experience it, eat it, you will starve.

The first thing we do in life is inhale, we come out of the womb and take a breath. This starts the cycle of life for us, and the last thing we’ll do is exhale, and this completes the cycle of life. Everything in between is the dance of the breath, we basically are a column of air, in, out, in, out. This is life in it’s rawest form, anything beyond that is a plus. Until I became totally present I was unaware of the breath, not knowing that Tomorrow Never Comes.  Sure I knew I would get out of breath if I ran too fast. I knew it hurt like hell if I got the breath knocked out of me. Yet I never really was aware of the continuous round of breath.

I watched a person die one time and as they exhaled the last breath I literally watched them leave, the breath came out and all of a sudden I realized this person was dead, not there, the body was just a carcass. As I became aware that this was not the person who was there only moments before, I also became aware that this was never the person I believed it was, and in that moment it hit me…Tomorrow Never Comes.

In scripture it says that God breathed life into Adam,

so maybe all we are is the breath. So the NOW is this breath, this breath is all we have and it is all we ever have. Anything outside of that isn’t real, it’s either a vague very biased memory, or a fantasy we tell ourselves about the future just assuming we’ll still be breathing when that comes. The truth is just this…Tomorrow Never Comes

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Struggle

You cannot destroy purple

Struggle

It is by the struggle that you draw close to me. This is what my wife woke up with this morning, a dream of sorts, and a very important part of this experience was that it came to her in 1st person, “draw close to me” We talked for hours over this experience and what it meant to both of us.

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Afterwards we looked into the definition and the origin of the word “Struggle”. Surprisingly if comes from an old Norse word “strugr” of arrogance, pride, spitefulness and ill-will.

It has been my experience that struggle is definitely different than suffer. Struggle seems to be a part of life, yet suffering is definitely a choice. So many different examples of this have shown up in my life experiences. Christ on the cross asked the question “Elohim why have you forsaken me” to me he was struggling there, but then he says “It is finished” and he surrendered and was reborn.

I know personally I never grow if I am not in some sort of discomfort, and it definitely seems that the universe has very little interest in me being comfortable.

River rock is generally very smooth, no sharp or jagged edges, yet it did not start this way. Years of being rolled and beat against other rocks, knock the sharp edges off and a sweet smoothness is revealed. Once the edges are removed the rocks settle in nicely against each other and there they lay peacefully until a major event transpires.

So what exactly do I struggle with? Physical discomfort for sure, emotional unrest, financial difficulties, these are just a few. So how do these things draw me closer to my divinity? I am fighting against things that are, my pride and arrogance are in full bloom here, the fact that they don’t go the way I’d like has no bearing here, these things just are and acceptance is the key. So maybe the struggle will show me the truth of my own powerlessness.

We have ceased fighting anyone or anything is a practice I follow most of the time. These things show me how self reliance has failed me, they reveal to me that I can’t, god can, and I have the opportunity to let god. The truth for me is that god is not waiting for my permission, more so god is waiting for me to release and watch the miracle. In my teens there were big posters we all hung on our walls, some were black light style and some were catchy slogans, not unlike meme’s today.

One of my favorites was a big rope with a knot tied in the end with a small kitten hanging on by one paw. The slogan said when you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. I lived most of my life that way and I must say, it didn’t work very well. Nowadays I live my life by the thought, when you reach the end of your rope…”Turn loose and fall into the loving arms of god”.

Perception plays a very large part in it as well. I wrote a song one time about perception. Some of the lyrics went like this:

“I was in the checkout line at a grocery store when it started to rain. The guy at the register started to complain because he had just washed his car, he was noticeably disturbed. The next person in line was a woman who was very, very grateful, she had planted flowers in a garden that morning and felt like this would be wonderfully beneficial to them. The young girl who was running the register said that the rain reminded her of sitting on the porch with her grandfather who had since passed away. It appeared to be a sweet/bittersweet experience. As for me I just like the rain.

To resist struggle in my mind would be the cause of suffering, and the acceptance that struggle is just part of, I left that, that way on purpose. Just part of.

The Borg from Star Trek said that resistance was futile, you will be assimilated, and in my life I would say that this is true for me. My mind loves to tell me what is good and bad, right or wrong, pretty or ugly and yet these are just things that I have been taught. Moral is a word used around the world and yet that word is definitely dependent on the teaching the person has received. An upper class Bostonian family would use that word differently that a poverty stricken southern Alabama family might.

I am not a person of Jewish heritage, however I have been told that the reason there were so many laws laid out for them in scripture was so they could see that no-one could keep the law. Self reliance would and always will fail, this pointing us back to our god(whatever that may be for you) for help or just for someone to share our fear with. Many prayers go up when we are in the midst of a crisis or collapse.

So struggle does draw us closer to god, it gives us the frailty to need god, to need help, to need… It is in this need that we find strength, it takes amazing strength to trust an invisible being, an idea, a spirit, whatever your power is.

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Levon’s Ideas

Levon ideas

Levon’s Ideas

Good morning friends I want to share some of Levon’s Ideas,

My name is Levon and I have some ideas about life and a way to live it.  These ideas come from my experiences and while they are my experiences, just like my shower, they won’ do you a lot of good.  That being said, if they make you curious, then my effort has been worth it.

 

I found my way into looking at life differently by getting to a place where life didn’t work anymore and when I got there something had to change.  I needed to look at different ways to live. Thus came Levon’s Ideas

My first thing was my spirituality, I had  concrete ideas of who god was and where I fit in HIS plan.  This was not working well for me.  I followed the outline I had been given, but god wasn’t behaving the way I felt like he should according to Levon’s Ideas .  Being exposed to all kinds of different beliefs of god, my ideas began to expand.

 

One day though I heard a thought in my head, cause that’s where I hear thoughts…The thought was, “You’ve fucked up this life, but now you gonna fuck up your after life”.  When this happened I finally realized that the only reason I believed the way I did was fear, I was afraid of god.  Levon’s Ideas soon followed

 

I had some people who I watched and they did not seem to be afraid of their god, in fact they seemed to have a sweet relationship with a power that they didn’t even always call “god”.  Once I realized I was scared of my god I was finally able to let go of it and open my eyes and heart to the possibility of a new power, a new god idea.

 

So, here I go with the ability to let god grow, and man did it.  It grew exponentially and to this day still does.  The more it grew the closer to me it got.  No longer some Santa Claus in the sky, this power literally moved inside of me.  Instead of up I looked inside and I finally found a friend, my true self, in fact my truest self.  Once this happened, then life beliefs I had started to change and fade away.

 

It wasn’t that I was learning something new, it was I was letting go of what I had been taught and the original was coming back to the surface.  What I had been looking for, I had been looking with.  What an amazing experience this was.

 

So, these ideas I have had are what I would like to discuss here in this blog and on another blog I have called “The Brown Letter and Dirty Paper Blog” I’ll make this a link over to it as well.  I do not know who or what will see or read this, but it is my desire to share things that changed my path forever.  Join me if you’d like and please comment if you have ideas or questions.

 

Thanks so much….Levon