THE MASTERY
OF YOUR ATTENTION WILL COME
WHEN YOU WILL START SEEING the truth..
*note* interesting post from William Samuel quote"William Samuel grew up in Mountain Brook, Alabama – a small village to which he returned as an adult after fighting in WWII and living in the Orient. "The Universe is my home, but I choose to walk the fields and quiet hills of Alabama."
Born in 1924, he was commissioned a Lieutenant at age 18 and fought in WWII:
I was ... a captain of infantry in two long wars. I lived with Chinese infantry troops in the field for nearly three years – subsisting with them, nearly starving with them. The few American soldiers in China had very little support from the United States during World War II. We were at the end of the world's longest supply line, and anything that reached us from home had been flown over Japanese occupied countries, over the great Himalayan Mountains into Kunming, thence to be trucked and packed in by animals to us, wherever we might be.
I didn't live very well during those years. My last year in China, as the great war came to an end, I joined Chinese troops who were actively engaged against the Japanese and fought in the battles that recaptured Ishan, Liuchow and Kwelin.
During that fighting, Bill came under the tutelage of his Chinese interpreter, a Mr. Shieh, who was a Taoist master:
Let me write a Glimpse or two from those days. First, harking back to China, Mr. Shieh and I, with five American teammates, were being pursued by a Japanese combat patrol. We were "retrograding," bringing up the rear of our little patrol, trying to get back to the safety of friendly lines. We were close to being captured. In those days, neither the Japanese nor Chinese "gave quarter." That is we took no prisoners. I knew that if I were taken by the pursuing Japanese, it meant certain death. On the other hand, Mr. Shieh might successfully pass himself off as a Chinese peasant. Oh, I cannot write this story! At this minute it is enough to remember Mr. Shieh seeing and pointing out the beauty of those purple blooms on the distant mountain we had yet to climb. I marveled at a man who could see beauty under such oppressive circumstances. I marvel more that he helped me learn to do it.
After the war, I think he lived in the Orient for several years, possibly studying under Shieh, although my information is sketchy. A few years later, he found himself back in a war zone again:
In Korea ... I commanded King Company, 279th Infantry Regiment. Things were much harder for me in Korea's combat than in the long, strange war in China. Being older didn't help me in Korea, nor did I have wise old Mr. Shieh at Korea's great Sandbag Castle or at Vulture's Roost on the 38th Parallel.
It is interesting that I've never written about those days, even though I've told of the learning events to seekers who have come to visit here in Alabama. I especially relished telling such tales to the metaphysical "absolutists" or to the young zealot idealists who arrived expecting only gentle words of peace from a Godly teacher. Since stories of strife, warfare and suffering are the last thing those people expect to hear from a "metaphysician," that's often what they got.
Show me a revelation and I'll show you a traumatic event from which that Light emerged....
It was during one of the battles in Korea when Bill Samuel had such a revelation:
During the Korean War, an artillery round burst among my men on the left flank. Several bodies were hurled about and I ran to see the extent of the damage and whether the platoon leader was still effective. Sick to my stomach at the sight, I sat down among three of the bodies sprawled along the slope. I became aware of a visual "Presence" hovering beside them. A misty, blue-white light of sorts. A different kind of light, primal, persuasive and powerful. I could not explain what I saw then, nor can I now, but with the sight, and because of the sight, I was absolutely certain within myself I was being shown evidence of the deathlessness of Life – the survival of the Child, the Soul of men. I felt a marvelous sense of relief, almost gratitude, concerning those men and everything happening that day. Within a few minutes of that incident, my regiment, and my part of the line in particular, was hit by an enormous wave of shell fire and oncoming Chinese troops. Hell erupted in a manner that no one can sufficiently describe or picture for another. One simply must experience something like that to fully understand....
Bill Samuel- That particular hellfire and damnation in Korea lasted four nights and three days, without sleep for my troops and me. I have never forgotten the different time frame and the enwrapping inner peace nor how I was held and supported during that time – or non-time.
More significant, that Peace has not forsaken me since those days, at least not when I was mindful of It nor when the chips were down and I called for It. How do I call for It? I bring forth the Child of Me....
The final tone in this Overtone: The day I moved King Company onto line in Korea, I was given the Order of Battle of the "enemy" opposing me just across the valley on the next mountain. Facing my regiment, and me in particular, was the Chinese 60th Army, the same troops I had lived with and trained for two years in China. We met again, eight years later, in a terrible and senseless slaughter.
In the apparent world, our friends and enemies are the same – and, sometimes, needlessly, insanely, we try to destroy one another, thence to find that Life is eternal. Like Arjuna, in awful combat, I was instructed in certain of the Mysteries and learned the sense of senselessness. Memorial Day 1985
And that Arjuna-like soldier (whose demeanor may have been similar to that described by the opening lines of Richard Rose's autobiographical blank verse "Three Books of the Absolute": Out of the valley of the river came a wanderer. Peace was in his eye and his soul was wrapped in Nirvana) became a gentle teacher of tranquillity and awareness.
In the second half of the 1950s Bill became a well-known healer in Christian Science circles. But by the early 1960s he was removed from their practitioner listing since his views no longer dovetailed with Christian Science teaching. And in 1964 he published Two Plus Two Equals Reality, where he challenges the reader with fundamental questions: "Who am I; who are you? Why are we here? What is the purpose of life? Who or what is God? What is absolute reality?" He began that booklet with the following advice:
With honest and straightforward simplicity, I am here to tell you that you can never be free of personal trials and tribulations until you make your own discovery of Reality, God. You will never find more than the most temporal, ephemeral happiness until you make a personal discovery of God, Isness – until you get off your soft sofa and actually make your own determination of Reality, of Truth, of Fact. You will never permanently rid yourself of the grind and grate in the pit of the stomach nor find yourself free of that feeling of impending doom until you make your own, individual determination of exactly what God is to you!
... If you have tried everything else and are still periodically miserable, if you still contend with one problem after another, if you still have not yet solved the problem of fear and increasing pressure, and if you are really ready to stop suffering, it is time to do yourself a favor. Start now, this minute, to begin your own determination of what God, Reality, Truth is. One can never be happy nor self-satisfied until he does. One can never be free of trials and tribulations until he does. One can have no permanent sense of health or wealth until he does. No one will ever be free of personal fear or insecurity until he makes a determination for himself of just what God is to him.
One of his students wrote that Bill's awakening occurred in the 1960s and was triggered by seeing his reflection in the water of a pond near his home and realizing that "who and what he is was the witness of that reflection and of the image called Bill." I assume that this realization provided the conviction that spurred his writing of the above booklet. (As an aside, the details of his awakening sound greatly similar to the fictional depiction of the protagonist's awakening in Douglas Harding's Spectre in the Lake published in 1996, the year of Bill's death. His student told me that Bill was familiar with Harding's teaching, but I don't know if there was any contact between them.) "
Anyway..I'll post some of his wisdom below ..kisses to me and him,and to you,dear reader...we are all one,indeed..
-added by danny-
...............The Child Within Us Lives! by William Samuel
ILLUSTRATION OF THE INCUBATOR
What do we know about Light? Virtually nothing. About God? Still less.
Let me make a parallel illustration that suggests why Everyman knows so little and may one day learn so much. Instead of people, imagine chickens. Instead of the world, imagine a great incubator with the light turned on perpetually and with us chicks scratching around looking for (or not looking for) comfort, first, and the meaning of life, a distant second.
Let's pretend that an incubator hour is more like a decade, and that for nearly eleven thousand millions years we chickens have been speculating about the nature of Reality, wondering which version is right. During our long search, the thinking chickens among us have concluded that our well-being has something to do with light. (It might be interesting to note here that the scientist chicken and the religious chicken have apparently opposing ideas. The scientist speaks about the light he can measure; the religionist about the Light of God that can't be measured.)
Well now, how do we stand in the great incubator today? What do we chickens really know about Light/light? There is a precise parallel here. What did we know of childhood when we were children? What does a fish know of water or a bird of air? What do those who have been in the light without realizing it know about the light?
Over the chicken-millennia, thousands of religions have come and gone. Four primary philosophies remain today, one for each corner of the incubator. In the corners are great organizations with grand gurus representing different points of view such as Eastern, Western, Jewish, Catholic and, now that science has found metaphysics in its quantum mechanics, we need to add another corner to the pyramid. Each view insists its way is the best way; some say, the only way. The chicks in the south are diametrically opposed to those across the way. The Eastern view is opposite the Western view. One can imagine how these differences arose by recalling the Illustration of the Pyramid. (See The Glass Pyramid.) We remember how those along the north wall see Polaris in a different overhead quadrant than do those near the south wall, and must necessarily describe its relationship to the pyramid differently. The four corners have a common root, but that is about all. Ah, but science has the world's attention. Religious metaphysics hasn't kept up in that respect.
Organizations, using this authority or that, have encouraged us to judge the other views as less enlightened than our own. It is difficult to believe that one claiming enlightenment would call another view heathen because that view sees the North Star at a different angle, but of course, many do. The struggle between science and religion seems unending, science presently dominating.
In search of the true message, some chickens like me have gone to every corner of the incubator and to half the religions-only to become more confused. The subjective East doesn't jibe with the objective West, and neither really knows what the other is talking about, but each seems certain of what the other is not talking about. For that matter, the traveling chick learns that virtually no one who calls himself "metaphysical" knows what metaphysics is.
Most of us chickens have no concept about the light that warms us, much less about the Light standing behind that light. We know what we've been told in our own little corner of the incubator-by our parents, our leaders and their holy books, our schools and organizations. Like the chickens, most of us think primarily of our comfort, self-satisfaction and ongoing titillation-which carefully includes the way we make a living. It is said that less than ten percent of the Western world is religious, though one doesn't have to be religious to have a concern for and interest in Truth. Still fewer concern themselves with subjective thoughts such as these, so we wonder what marvel brought the holy books into being or impels anyone to write these things to so small an audience. Yet through the years there have been correct words to guide us to the Light within.
As for the disputes about what the light of the incubator is (or what the Light beyond the light is), the grand gurus learned long ago that it is infinitely better, for their own sakes, to let the chickens debate the meanings of the words in the holy books rather than delve into the nature of Light/light. Leave theology to the theologians, they say. Debate invites schism and schism is hurtful to the organization and its power. Reader, what DO metaphysics, theology and philosophy reveal about Light? Light is, after all, one of the things so close to us we don't notice it or really know what it is. The Light of Life can't be seen with mortal eyes. It can't be touched. What do people really know about the Light of Life? Like the chickens in the incubator, almost nothing. Only that It IS-and because It is, we are. One can get a powerful argument from philosophers and metaphysicians that even this much isn't certain.
Yet, there is an event that will surely bring every chicken to know about light immediately! When a great storm one day pulls the incubator's plug for a moment and everything goes dark, THEN every chicken in the place will know what light IS from experiencing what it is NOT. In the twinkling of an eye, the apparent ABSENCE of light-and the panic of that absence-will bring everyone to a full consciousness of light. Even those drinking beer, flapping the levers on pinball machines and watching their latest videos will know-from the least of them to the greatest-that light is an integral part of their well-being. And those who are meditating or pinching their noses in prayer, imploring Light to be more Light, will become acquainted with It also.
The Light of Life is just as close to us as the light in the incubator is close to the chickens. We were born into the appearance of time and space with/as It, and we have grown up with It whether we are aware of the fact or not. Light is here, unheralded and unnoticed, living us, supporting and warming us-the very spark of Being Itself. The Child of us IS that Light, here and now.
Strangely, for each of us individually and all of us collectively, life must be threatened and common disaster loom before we are willing to be earnest. The religions of the world have so cut and dried the believer's approach to theology, cosmology, cosmogony, debate and discussion (from fear of schism and disloyalty), that one doesn't learn until the end of his personal affairs that the grand gurus in the corners are no longer spokesmen for anything resembling the Original Message; that these servants of the "living Word" have-in the name of the printed word-dismissed the Living Child within themselves. The Biblical Apocalypse says these churches will have served their purposes in the final days of time. Perhaps so. When we see the bickering and warfare that passes for religion, metaphysics and "love"-Christians torching other Christians in the name of Christ-one only wonders when the destruction will be over.
There are unnoticed Lights in the world-religious and otherwise -individuals working diligently, able in marvelous ways to walk the precarious pathways bcyond religion and metaphysics-no longer beguiled by the organized bewilderers. There are those who have climbed the barbed walls of orthodoxy and found the Child of themselves again. Those who have found the Child are able to tell us how to find the same Child within ourselves. They tell of the Self within, how to find Its Equation for living, how to receive It and how to give It. We seek these people out and listen to them.
The light in the world incubator has begun to flicker and flutter. I am reminded of the Carpenter who said the day would come when there are two are in the field, one taken up and one left behind. Two on a bed, one lives and one dies. Five in a household-three against two and two against three. Perhaps I have been shown some of these things because I know such days will come in the world's "time" if only when the individual faces his own transition. There will be those who are frightened and those who are not; those who will know what to do and those who won't. The unafraid will have found the BALANCE between inside and outside, above and below, first and last, male and female, objective and subjective.
These people may or may not be familiar with the words of the historic Christ Child, but they will know those words are true and faithful, having found the Child themselves.
The Child takes us to the Balance quickly. The Child tells of the Equation wherein life prospers with security, grace and decency. The Child takes us to the non-spatial place of Identity where we EXCHANGE the things Above and give them below, not theorize and talk about them endlessly; where we pass the reports from outside and give them inside. Those who stand on that High Ground will be (are) the final harvest and final seed of the Tree of Life.
"What about the rest of us, Willi Boy?
A good question. Who are "the rest of us"? What happens to our friends in a dream when we awaken? They were never more than the dream itself, the powerless straw dogs about whom LaoTse speaks. They are, until they find the subjective idea, the dead burying the dead, that Jesus spoke of. It is up to us to get THIS one I AM and its subjective world straight within ourselves. This one that reads these words gets his world straight. Then, "all mankind will be drawn unto me."
It is said that "Whatever is bound on earth is bound in heaven. What is freed on earth is freed in heaven." Could it be we take our subjective world with us, forgiven or unforgiven, freed or still bound? "You can't take it with you" has been the world's belief for so long. I often take my day's adventures into the dream at night. I often awaken to more clearly understand the things I've been dreaming about. Who is to say we can't leave the image of the Image to return to the Image? The essence of the Nag Hammadi Library says exactly that; subjectively understood, the Holy Books of the world say that-and now, agnostic science is looking at infinite possibilities and infinite dimensions, finding universes within universes, not unlike the New Jerusalem John foresaw.
My unseen reader friend, we have things to get straight, to understand and to DO in the days ahead. Let's get on with it while we can.
To us all towns are one, all men our kin. Life's good comes not from others' gift, nor ill. Man's pains and pains' relief are from within. Thus have we seen in visions of the wise !. - Tamil Poem
