Category: Questions

Happy Ending Massage

Does massage leave you with a happy ending?

I was at Supreme Foot Massage in Walnut Creek, California the other day for a 60 minute foot massage combined with a 30 minute back massage – $45 weekday special.

Supreme Foot Massage is kind of a hole-in-the-wall place, but you can’t beat the price for an hour or so of supreme relaxation. And the staff is friendly.

I was mentioning my supreme massage to a guy moving to Walnut Creek and he immediately came back with – did it have a happy ending? A happy ending massage is a phrase I had never heard of until July of this year. You’d think with over 50 years of living and hundreds of massages from around the country, I wouldn’t be so ignorant or naive.

What I really liked about the exchange, was how the guy’s mind totally lost interest when I replied – no, it’s just a great place for a great foot massage. Observing his mind’s dismissal (emptying, leaving the scene) was really something. One second there was content there, the next instant that content had evaporated because of a total lack of interest.

I guess, if I had had the happy ending he was familiar with, we could have exchanged more words. My feet were happy, in that moment, it seemed like divine benevolence to me.

What leaves you with a happy ending?

Links of Interest

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Items of Interest

October 31
Quintessence – Quintessential Dimension
A.H. Almaas’ summer retreat on Quintessence explored the subtleties of “the world of appearance,” the non-dual perspective and co-emergent reality (being/non-being).

A lot of attention was given to non-doing – relaxing the attention to simple awareness and presence.

Here is the title list of the 16 sessions:
1. Inner Sanctum
2. Treasure Trove
3. Living Wonder
4. Bowing Royalty
5. Private Quarters
6. The Timeless Now
7. Spacious Mansion
8. Ocean Without Shores
9. Crystal Mirror
10. Kernel of the Kernel
11. Transcendent Science
12. Royal Courtyard
13. Bejeweled Palace
14. Divine Sport
15. The Missing Bridegroom
16. Quintessential Delight
What thoughts do these titles raise for you?

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September 5
Being Fake – Fake Being

When you’re being fake, you’re faking being.

The ego does this all the time – it’s what it does. The ego-self cannot be real or do real. We can genuinely be our ego identity, but from that identity, we cannot be genuinely real.

In the normal course of events, people are being fake all the time, though they take this fakeness to be who they are. Being fake means pretending to be something we aren’t.

This is the exact state of affairs when it comes to ego identity, but the rub is – we actually believe we are this identity. We don’t realize the fakeness.

Being fake at the ego identity level means we are taking ourselves to be a historical self, a body, a mind, a set of images. It’s not that these things did not happen or are not real in a relative way – it’s a case of mistaken identity.

What we truly are is much deeper than this and this awareness has been lost to our immediate consciousness, so we live fake lives trying to get real – or not.

If we are trying to get real, to be genuine – it’ a conundrum – how can fake become real?

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August 13
True Knowledge – Knowledge of the True

What is True Knowledge?

If you use Google ranking to help you understand what’s what – true knowledge is a pioneer in a new class of Internet search technology…

Well, that’s not the type of true knowledge we’re talking about here. The problem with topics like true knowledge is everyone has their beliefs, ideas and thoughts about it. These are mostly subjective, based on limited or ordinary knowledge, and little or no connection to the realm of objective reality.

Well, I’ve put my foot in it now! Objective Reality – another concept that everyone has ideas and beliefs about!

I guess the simplest way out of this conundrum of true knowledge is that it is possible to know what is true – whether that knowing is in the relative world of knowledge or in the objective world of reality.

Objective reality would be what you perceive when the ego/subjective I is transparent to reality as IT IS – nothing filtered through the past – no reification.

True Knowledge can be perceived, known and felt. It can guide our lives and reveal the path to optimal living and being. The first step seems to be the same as many first steps on many journeys – from knowing into not-knowing.

Not Knowing is fertile ground for knowledge.

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August 2
Loss of Self vs. Self is Lost

Loss of Self – What does it mean? What is lost? Is the experience similar to being lost?

Buddhism and other non-dual teachings say there is no self to lose. Others say the self is an ontolgical reality that has various levels or degrees of manifestation including those bound and confined within the world of object relations and conceptualization.

Many are seeking the True Self. Do they want to lose the False Self and find some notion of a new and improved self? I think this sense of wanting to find or be a true self is an inherent dynamic within the soul for authenticity, to be what one really is.

It’s the concept of that “one,” the individual consciousness, that is in question here. The biggest misunderstanding, as I see it, is conceptualizing or reifying the notion of a true self according to one’s current belief structure.

The challenge of “spiritual experience” is that it is mostly co-opted by the ego mind. Experience gets categorized and filed according to the past, the familiar and the comfortable.

Loss of Self at the ego level is mostly terrifying as the mind interprets this as actual death or going insane or some other existential disaster.

In fact, the experience of loss of self is liberating if one is able to relax into the experience. This involves letting go of the compulsion of staying one step ahead of one’s experience.

Free-falling into experience as it unfolds without the immediate need to control or understand is challenging. What seems to help facilitate the process is a sense of loving curiosity that is more centered in the heart than the head.

Looking at the world today, I can only see loss of a few zillion selfs as a positive thing. Indeed, the world might improve overnight if we forget the past and let the self go.

Does loss of self mean loss of identity, loss of control, loss if the individual? What are your thoughts – experiences?

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June 8
Universal Mind – Mind for Everyone

I wrote about universal consciousness a while back and that got me thinking about universal mind. What’s the difference between universal mind and universal consciousness?

Universal mind is sometimes referred to as God’s mind or the mind of God.

Consciousness is not necessarily self-reflective though it contains the potential self-knowing.

The url UniversalMind links to a web application site. I find this hilarious! Is the Internet moving toward being the universal mind?

Perhaps this quote from A.H. Almaas puts it in perspcetive:

We call it the Universal Mind because when we go beyond it, we see it as mind. But it is not mind as created by me personally. It’s the mind that actually exists as the totality of the Universe. Some people call it God’s mind. So from the level of the nonconceptual, the physical universe and Essence and all that exists are mind. They are concepts, like ideas or forms that are filled out with something. What they are filled out by is the nonconceptual, the original consciousness.

And here is what Ralph Waldo Emerson says:

Who shall define to me an Individual? I behold with awe & delight many illustrations of the One Universal Mind. I see my being embedded in it.

Quoting Mark Epstein:

What does universal mind mean? The problem with the concept of a transcendental reality is that it sets up a duality in which we are always other. This leads to a feeling of inferiority and a tendency to disparage one aspect or another of our experience. Buddhists prefer the idea of “no mind” to that of a universal one.

When you contemplate universal mind – what/who is contemplating?

May 25