remembering

Gematria for Nachash (nun chet shin) = 50 + 8 + 300 = 358
Gematria for Meshiach (mem shin yod chet) = 40 + 300 + 10 + 8 = 358

Nachash is Serpent
Meshiach is Messiah

"Nachash is the guide that tempts us to incarnate. Meshiach is the teacher that leads us to wholeness. Two sides of the same door.

"All experience of pain comes from separation. All experience of joy comes from (re)union. In order to have the chance to re-member (-->joy) we need to choose to first forget." - Rabbi Ted

("New learning, new insight and new knowledge carry an energetic potential for change. Disjointed irrelevant data do not..." Reconnecting, re-membering, putting the joints back into alignment. 

I am going through my notebooks for the past more-than-ten years, choosing to remember after a long time of forgetting. These notes are from 2002.) 

seeing essence

More on essence:

"I think of what Doris Lessing wrote in The Four-Gated City: 'In any situation anywhere there is always a key fact, the essence. But it is usually every other fact, thousands of facts, that are seen, discussed, dealt with. The central fact is usually ignored, or not seen.' And a sentence of Yukio Mishima's in Spring Snow: 'To live in the midst of an era is to be oblivious to its style.'" - Michael Ventura, in We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse by James Hillman and Michael Ventura.

This lovely stained glass seems related to these thoughts, somehow 

(detail from Laura Fuller's Tree of Life, photo by Amanda Painter of Planet Waves). 

Even if just because they both caught my attention this same day.

noise and chatter

"Essence doesn't mean a little part hidden somewhere in us, the little teeny kernel of essence. Essence means the totality, the whole thing. Essence means the truth of you as opposed to the untruth of you.

"Essence isn't a small thing, essence is an immense thing. The essence of you is everything you ever see, taste, touch, and experience. Everywhere you go, every step you take, every breath you take is actually happening by the essence, of the essence, in the essence, and to the essence. All the rest is noise and chatter." 

~ Adyashanti