Check this out: This is great. Everything he writes is almost always great.

It's interesting how letting go is actually, in some ways, letting something take hold of me, have its way with me.

Letting go is not banishing or throwing away. It's not necessarily saying
goodbye to something. It may be simply allowing it to fulfill its purpose within me.

So how does that actually work?

I sit down to meditate. One of my goals is to stop thinking about elephants.
And sure enough a huge elephant pops up in my consciousness. At first he
just stands there quietly. So I block him out. He appears behind me and raises his trunk and bellows.

If I demand that he go away all that will really happen is that he will do his
various dances to torment me.

But if I say, okay Elephant, here you are, do your thing, whatever you have to do, he will do his dance, use up his energy and I will be thinking about
flamingoes.

Or, and this is a major flash, he may have something important to say that I
need to hear. There are lessons to be learned in letting go too. What I am
letting go of is my resistance.

When I am threatened by an idea I may try to reject it. My fear builds a wall. When I let go, I let go of the wall. I let go of the stick I am beating it with. I let go of the anger that is trying to scare it away.

I accept the idea in the sense that I allow it to travel freely in my
consciousness. But I don't defend it either. It's on its own, has to survive all by itself.

Fighting it or defending it gives it energy and staying power.

So I'm letting go of my own struggles, not the idea. The idea finishes itself off, wears itself out, dissipates, and I am left cleansed or enlightened.

Emanations
Copyright © 2005  by John MacEnulty
5/24/05, St. Louis, MO

Emanations is now a BLOG at http://emanations.blog-city.com/

Current read: Silent Bob speaks by Kevin Smith. I love Kevin Smith. Good guy. smart. Witty. Funny as all hell.

And still reading the diaries of Brian Eno. This is a bible for me right now.

Love the flower without the need to pick it. The experience of the flower is 

everything. The true experience of anything is everything.

Love in the moment is not a fleeting thing. Doing things one day at a time is 

not a lack of planning. In fact it is just the opposite. Being in the now 

connects us much more deeply than any plan for capture or ownership ever could.

The paradox is that letting go allows total ownership, but in another whole 

sense.

When you love freely you experience it fully. When you love in the moment you 

take away the power of the past or the future to ruin the moment. What is 

revealed then is so beautiful that it will attract itself again and again. 

Measures against insecurity don't necessarily lead to more security. 

Sometimes they just lead to more measures.

But love manifested brings us full awareness of ourselves and our ability to 

love, our trust in love. Then love will always be coming into our 

consciousness, into our lives in a beautiful way.

Who or what we love is not really the point. When we love we trust ourselves 

and the universe. That can never be betrayed.

Eman8tions

Copyright © 2003  by John MacEnulty

5/22/2003, St. Louis, MO

Current Spin: primal scream, xtrmntr 

Tonight we went to see and hear Caetano Veloso sing at the Jackie Gleason theatre. After the concert we got to meet him. this was a huge event for me personally. I was awestruck. I gave him an autographed copy of Rise and Shine and showed him his name in the liner notes. Showed him how we covered a famous Brasilian song on the album. We spoke very briefly. Laughed some. It was a good feeling. He is much smaller in person than on stage. Older, greyer. Very soft and soft spoken. This was a dream of mine. This year I have had the opportunity to go see Pavarotti, Placido Domingo, Boccelli, U2, and Caetano in concert. This has been a very good year.

Listen to the man sing.

The following is from an email by a man named John MaCenulty. It is good. Very good.

There are times when societal actions are extremely clearly wrong, outrages

that reach into us deeply. We feel a sense of hopelessness and despair that

things may be falling apart. A sense of wrong and dread pervades.

And there are times when things come to a focus and really are threatening.

It is not an illusion that will pass in the blink of a magical eye. Some

things are deep and structural, inherent in the way of things. They have been

going on for a long time.

Negative energies flare and wane. We are watching a flaring.

The history of humanity is the story of these risings and fallings. Ever has

it been so.

Yet within the structure of pain and suffering has been an awesome spiritual

beauty that has never been defeated by the awful things that have passed

through us. Hope seems to, indeed, spring eternal.

Beethoven and Mozart wrote in times of war. Enduring beauty was created.

Now I pray again, deeply, for peace, fairness, justice, love in my world,

this beautiful, betrayed, discouraging world.

It is through the very act of prayer that I am fulfilled, not in the

answering of my prayer, in the very act.

When I seek the divine I create the divine. I activate that energy in my

consciousness and it comes into me.

The sadness without prayer is overwhelming.

I focus on the stillness and it comes over me, into me. There is always my

very nature, beautiful beyond all failings, a light within me that will not

darken.

I rise and fall too.

New web site address:

http://Emanations.net/

Copyright © 2002  by John MacEnulty

11/22/2002, St. Louis, MO