The writings that follow are by Monica Lind Hathaway.

It is with love that we have selected the writings for you to enjoy and perhaps feel the brilliant and bitingly beautiful words that remind us of the infinite dance we are all doing.

Harmon Hathaway and Brenda Webster-Hathaway

CLARITY

When engaging in the practice of mindfulness many of us tend to confuse clear intention by placing a dichotomic value on the intention, such as:  “Intending to be a ‘good’ mindfulness practitioner.”

This ‘good’ brings with it the instability of emotions and actually casts a shadow over clear (or bare) intention.  The shadow is belief in a permanent self (or practitioner) who is going to become better and better at the practice.  It’s the old habitual encouragement of:  “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”  The actual practice is clouded by emotional ambition if one puts a ‘good’ or a ‘better’ with the intention.

Intending to be aware of knowing a long breath in, a long breath out; a short breath in, a short breath out, is bare attention, where if one is intending to be a good boy or girl (or student) being aware of knowing a long breath in, a long breath out, a short breath in, a short breath out, the intention has subtly changed to being good at the practice and receiving accolades or merits for doing it rather than just being in the now movement, such as:  “Intending to being aware of the breath entering and leaving the bodily process.”  This intention is clear in that it introduces no self who is expecting reward or punishment for the time given to the mindfulness practice.  Clear intention (naked) is all that is required — no promises of goodness or threats of badness to throw a cloud over the moment.  The dichotomic seesaw only gives rise to unstable emotions.

Clear intention (naked) is all that is required.

GIVE UP

Letting go — out of the ashes of the moment a fresh moment is born.

DEAR JOHN

This is to let you know I read your script three times, as required; I found it to be just not quite my cup of tea and decline the generous offer from you of a private audition.  I do not covet any of the roles in the cast of your epic you have titled “Revelations.”

                                                            Sincerely yours

P.S. My cat friends, Beauty, Melody, Magic, Daisy, Beamer, Bear and Calico thought it to be quite old hat and also decline.

PROJECTIONS

Belief nurses authoritative conflict, the field of doubt, the logic of argument based on whether this is true or whether that is true.  (In so doing, doubt becomes useless.)

Truth in the extreme sense of black or white is an invention of mankind and can be used in a social power sense to condition the mind, the energy, by throwing it into conflict with itself.  Beliefs build up and block the senses to the center of being (all that exists in the middle).  Belief is seen as hope, doubt is seen as fear.  If you don’t believe what I believe, I become afraid of you:  you are doubting my function, so to speak, and mocking my structure.

This is the ego’s view and it is unstable and liable to violent swings of emotional conclusions and conversions.

BELIEF – DOUBT

Hopes and fears
Births and deaths
Yesterday and tomorrow
Then and now

Words (concepts) collect power when used in an ego slogan sense.  This has happened again and again in the present history of mankind.  Hypnotic chants that can lead people to enacting violence on themselves and others while claiming to be doing the most good for the most people.

Creating a God out there from mirage like sense data grasped by memory and projected onto the field of the senses in the present moment is the promotion of ignorance and it could be said to be ignorance itself.  Greed, hate and delusion, anger, lust, the piling up of grievances, merits and demerits to propitiate one side or another is to mistake fools’ gold for the real gold.

There is a moment that occurs when one notices the heaviness of the collection one is carrying around and the desire to let go of it, to lighten up arises.  One is battle weary.  To believe or not believe seems no longer to be the point and the weapons of battle and the uniforms of battle are seen to have no self in them.  In letting go, one cares for what is present in the moment and no longer relies on past and future dreams.  In caring for what there is to care for in the moment, one is doing the best of what you or anyone else can do.

The beginning and the end exist in the moment.  There is no place else to know the one mind.

DEFINITION

Projections – statistically speaking in past and future terms as to what has happened and what is in store.  Population count, tax status, birth count, death count, cause of birth, cause of death, chances for success, chances for failure, plans for succeeding in the future in order to avoid past failures, etc. etc. etc.  This is a “heavy burden.”

Note – letting go, projections become transparent.  There is no self in them.  The beginning and the end exist in the moment. There is no other place when knowledge of the one mind can be realized.

YOUNG EYES

Patient, kind, loving,
Generous, meditative,
Concentrated true view.
Viewing everything without accepting or rejecting
Every moment is the first and last
The ancient young one
Gone beyond wisdom

ON IMAGES

All images have an opposing one:  the image one desires to be like and the image one avoids being like.  When you suddenly realize you’ve fallen into the undesirable image, on sudden impulse, you leap into the desired image.  It’s a thought force, the rise and fall of the mental body.  In the undesirable image (or thought), you feel like a loser.  In the image of desire, you feel like a winner.  It’s the bouncing game of the mind — up and down, rise and fall.  It’s all bounded on your perception of the world:  grounded and flat and boring (depressive) or exciting and bouncy and high.  It takes up all your attention and you wonder why you are so tired all the time.

NO ESCAPE

We believe that bad happens because we haven’t been good.  The infantile adolescent is attempting to free itself from the shackles of parentage that have said this is so, it seems.

What is the difference in freeing oneself and setting someone else free?  God is all hung up watching over us.  Who watches over God?

Have you ever been lonely?  Have you ever been blue?  Trouble in mind, I’m blue, but I won’t be blue always.

If there is nothing to escape from or to, no escape is the choiceless choice.

The teeth are a requisite to speech.  (Very important to be able to chew the words — tongue is not all).

Being afraid of making a mistake
Is the mistake itself.
You become distracted into
Hoping you will do it right.

Buy the future form the clever opinion of the past.  (Commodities)

PARADOX

The truth is so obvious that if you missed it, you must have been looking the other way.

A TRAIN OF THOUGHT

Train leaving for New York City on track #4
Train leaving for Montreal on track #2
Train leaving for Chicago on track #8
Train leaving for nowhere on track #0.

THIS INSTANT

We sometimes get caught up in the moralistic tendencies that call for revenge or retribution or atonement which only tend to bring about mechanical repetition of creating the same old story.  We may look at the others and think:  “Last time you were on top, now it’s my turn to be on top.  You were in power yesterday, now it’s my turn to be in power.”  Perhaps we could look at, rather than seek, retribution or revenge or atonement for past history; we could just let it go and allow the self who claims it to go with it.

It seems that retribution, atonement and revenge, are the tasteless food that keep us clinging to the karmic (psychological or moral) wheel of existence.  We mechanically seek to taste that which is tasteless and wonder why we cannot assuage our hunger.  We can imagine it tastes good or we can imagine it tastes bad.  We have heard “revenge is sweet” or “atonement is the food of the saints.”  Both are one taste:  mental formations that rise and fall in the restlessness of the mind.  Seeking or avoiding atonement or revenge just adds fuel to the tank that feeds the mechanisms that turn the wheel.  This rising and falling of thought form is the manifestation of the restless mind.  We usually cling to the question:  “Should I be going with this thought or should I be leaving with this thought?”  Actually when we give up the problem of whether to come or go, stay or leave, be or not be, etc. the problem is resolved in itself.

Meditation is the tool we use to give up struggling with the restlessness and allow the momentum of the wheel to slow down.  In doing so, we are able to experience the gaps in which we can rest in the open space.  The gaps provide the opportunity of letting go.

Rising and falling, appearing and disappearing, are mental formations of structured, conditioned mind.  Only in the rising and falling is there manifestation.  This rising could be seen as birth and the falling as death (or passing away).  These types of thought energies are built on atomic constructions, or perhaps even clearer would be to say they are genetic history or relative truths that arise from our “this life” identifications of creed, color, tribe, nation, language and planet and all the educational relative truths that our conditioning out of these harbor.  If we clearly see that these genetic relative, atomic constructions are merely showing us the past, present and future longings of a “this life” narrow personality (narrow in the sense we identify with being human in a relative sense), we could perhaps cease to struggle with the rising and falling of these thought forms and their ambitious plans and pay attention to the gaps (the open space of pure thought energy without atomic constructions).

In paying attention to the gaps, the bardo, we come across our first touch with full human consciousness, unadulterated by the ambitious struggles of the racial, religious, political energies of divided human life.  In doing so, the bonds to our self–suffering ceases, liberation is instantaneous as the panoramic view of the great space allows our awareness to encompass the universal truth of all being.  The practice of mindfulness, meditation in action, is the tool for anyone who wishes the open liberation of all beings.

SPECIFIC

The poets of the past have compared us to grains of sand, dew drops and specks of dust.

Comparison is a poor tool:  it lacks accuracy.  True poetry lies in seeing and saying exactly what we are:  humans.

The human race speaks through me.  I am that.

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