#3884 -
Thursday, May 6, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights -
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights
Yes, this issue has a lot. A book review, CD music links, even a
book excerpt.
Greg and Alice will richly repay your time spent. Best to go
listen to his songs,
words cannot do them justice. -Gloria
The Now
Exspirientuality - The Way of Unity: Conversations with Dog -
Book 1
by Greg Allen Morgoglione
What happens when a singer, songwriter, musician really and truly
"gets" what life is all about? To begin with, it puts
him on a somewhat different career path than the road to seeking
stardom. He starts playing his guitar for the old and sick in
nursing homes, and then singing to the young children who are
going for treatment of severe afflictions. And then, perhaps
surprisingly, Greg writes lyrically of how they are "the
band of angels comin' for to carry me home" while giving
much of the credit for his insights to his dog. And he's not
kidding! OK, there is a playful sense of humor at work in
Conversations with Dog, but essentially the Canine Messiah's
wisdom is not some clever joke. Alice can smell phony a mile off
and will have none of it.
The songs came before the book, and introduced Alice, the Canine
Messiah, and her wisdom to the world. Alice believes "you
can teach humans new tricks". She says, "It's as though
you'd been asked how things might go in Your Vision of
Heaven...Show Me, you know. And Now, Gregory, you find yourself
Here, waking up with your Fellow Beings, waking up with me."
The lyrics are a distilled essence of Alice's vision, and the
music itself is folk-rockish. People who heard "It's Time
That Time Was Overthrown" wanted to hear more from and about
Alice, which prompted writing the book. I want to mention here
that you can listen and catch the flavor for yourself at the
music link. These profound and inspiring tunes are a good way to
take Alice on the road with you. Did I mention Greg rides
motorcycles?
Now, this book is way, way more than another journey to some
future enlightenment. That whole trip is dismissed in the
Preface. "Sometimes it seems as though This Here Now is a
problem for Utopia-talking spiritual seekers. [...] Let me find
another book that laments This Here Now, and yet another with
steps to a Dream of That There Then, where no one has to Be Like
Them." No, all that talk is just more fuel for getting
through the illusion of Time. "Time will not get you to
where you have long dreamed of Being. Time is where you have long
dreamed of Being." If the real story begins with Unity and
ends in Unity, then hey, what else can this seemingly in-between
time be but Unity? "Our stories have convinced many of us
that This Here Now is an exception to Unity." When really,
it is like this, "The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the
Earth, but men do not see it," as Jesus put it.
If we convince ourselves that we don't see Unity, then we aren't
likely to express Unity, nor likely to act as if we see it. Alice
simply says, "Look Again." Because quite simply it all
begins with seeing Unity, not thinking about it or trying to
believe in it. It's not that complicated, because what you see is
what you get to experience. If this book were a movie, right here
is where the spoiler alert would need to appear. "It reveals
The One Exercise-an immediately accessible real-time meditation
to practice on the streets of your life as a way to
enlightenment-Now!" Can the Canine Messiah show you how to
see Unity? I believe so, I truly do.
The world is all a stage, and thus each of us is a showman,
staging the show
of our LifeTime, our show of how it might go. And a showman, as
Alice
points out, is a shaman, a dreamer of healing dreams, one who
sees beyond
and brings healing visions back to share, to act out with healing
intent.
[use the Catalogue link for Time O.T. CD, mp3 only $5.]
Greg Allen Songs previous albums
Book Excerpt:
The Now
Exspirientuality and
Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center
On the fourth Friday
in September 2007, I ran face-first into the overwhelmingly
enlightening realization of The Now Exspirientuality. It had been
four weeks to the day since I had been introduced to The One
Exercise and chosen to engage it. Kluge Children’s
Rehabilitation Center had been instrumental on both Fridays.
Community Venue shows, in my mind, are performances. I have the
sense that most “real” musicians, and most folks in
fact, categorize them otherwise, but I do not. I have never been
comfortable with the idea that I am somehow special because I
“play for Them.” Feeling sorry for Them is not why I
started playing at a nursing home in 1995. I started playing
there because I am a musician and I was asked to begin playing
there. It’s an audience thing…
So I’ve always rejected the “special me” idea.
Most certainly I am participating in something special, but I
have never felt like I was the special thing in the mix. It has
always seemed a naïve idea to me. And yet, there was this
recurring thing…
On the fourth Friday in August 2007, I’d had an
“emotional” moment when some parents wheeled their
child over to enjoy the music. It was clear that he was enjoying
the music, and there I was, unable to continue singing. The
thought ran through my head that “these are the moments that
I do SongSharing for, and here I cannot handle it. How
lame.”
“Gosh, Alice,” I had said when I got back to the van.
She waits outside KCRC, van parked in the cool morning shade.
“It happened again – the emotional thing. What is
that?” I explained what had transpired.
This is the result of a basic idea that you have, Gregory –
the idea that Others should not have to Be as you think this
young man is Being. You continue to hold on to the noble but
misguided idea that in a perfect world no Others will have to Be
like This.
This idea of Poor Others is born of your choice to See the World
Divided, to adopt Divisive Vision that sees Self and Other,
Duality, Multiplicity. However, as we have lately been
discussing, most all of your cultural stories begin with Unity
and claim to be headed back to Unity. This begs the
question…
“What could This Here Now possibly be, besides Unity?”
Playing at the game of Duality, the game of Multiplicity. The ten
thousand things.
The useful point for you is that the emotion you are experiencing
and unable to channel into the performance is emotion you do not
understand, that’s all. This is safe to say, yes?
“Yes. Most definitely. That’s a good way to say it,
that I want to be able to channel this energy into the moment,
not have it detract from it. And I definitely don’t
understand it.”
You simply need to Look Again, Gregory, through the lens of
Unifying Vision.
She went on to explain The One Exercise and I went on to engage
it. It was an interesting four weeks, and the fresh Now
perspective of The One Exercise grew quickly on me. On the fourth
Friday in September, again at KCRC, a similar scenario began to
unfold when some parents entered the lobby and heard music. They
turned their son’s wheelchair and he lit up, and they headed
my way. I relaxed further into Unifying Vision and the song I was
playing. I allowed my eyesight to blur into the middle distance
beyond the young man, allowing him into the soft, open musical
space, allowing the aspects of Unified Experience to be as they
be, and in a moment our eyes came together and…
In a flash I was beside myself, outside of myself, outside of my
presence, something… I was still very much Here, playing my
guitar and singing, and quite comfortable in that aspect; and I
was simultaneously Here, observing, watching the KCRC scene
unfold as though I was watching a play from a box seat above the
stage. My cosmic partner and host was a profound presence of
which I was highly aware, but not in any formal sense, and I know
for certain that it was the young man from the wheelchair. There
were Fellow Beings observing with us as well, but I do not know
who. I know it was comfortable. I know it was all good.
We watched the musical moment unfolding in a sort of crystal orb,
like a fragile, oblong, hollow glass ornament. At one point I had
the image of those early glass orb ideas of the Universe. The
space all around was filled with countless crystal orbs, each a
scene; a sparkling crystal Universe dancing with ItSelf like the
snow in a well-shaken globe…
And it became very clear to me that there is nothing wrong with
this young man, nothing at all. It became very clear that there
is nothing wrong with anyone in a Community Venue audience.
I’d known it all along, but never like This. The
overwhelming inescapability of pure equality was humbling.
As I eased back into a more familiar association with my physical
form I felt electrified, and I’m certain I hovered above the
seat of my chair on some sort of force field for the remainder of
the performance. I wasn’t certain what had just happened,
and I looked at the young man in his wheelchair. He wasn’t
letting on anything, but he was digging the music. His whole body
was smiling.
