All I Know, All I Am

copyright, 1983, James Surkamp

The following essay was written spontaneously at one sitting from a lifetime of accumulated thoughts on June 22, 1980 in Hoboken, N.J. where I then lived and was meditating regularly. It felt very liberating and the writing concluded at the bottom of the seventh page. - JS.

Love is the First and Last. . .
Truth is born, not made, and constantly won anew.
Love is born, not made, and constantly won anew.
The love of all is there just for the having,
And it will set you free.
People before thing, but in a chord; heart before mind, but in a chord.
Character is shown in actions, but character is the motives behind the actions.
Sometimes motives are poorly translated into action.
Love you be, Love you do D0-BE-DO-BE-DO-BE-DO.
You are the action and motives of your life. You are the object and subject of your attention.
You seek an object and ultimately become your own object, your own goal.
On the way, you are the subject of your life's sentence.
This is called getting back to Godself.
The key to life is the point between being asleep and being awke.
The point between night and day,
The point between breaths,
The point between 'yes' and 'no,'
The point between action and understanding,
All famous artists and inventors - Mozart and Goethe for two- received the whole Universe in the elusive images of half-dreaming and half-waking. The Universe is born to you, and them, not made. This is the brief accident of time called the moment of perfect balance, of Nowhere-to-Go-Because-I'm-Everywhere, where the outer person of conscious ctionmeets the innter person of understanding of intuition.
This is the hub of the T'ai Chi. . .Enough.
Life: Risk It. Get in situations where you need God or Divine Will.
Life: It's all risk anyway. If you fall asleep, you risk not waking up again.
Life: you can't give it away, but you can possess it away/
Life: How to do it. Don't ask. Just go and find out.
Life: Attachments always and all ways lead to frustration and destruction, but actions are opposed toconscious commitment.
Life: How to do it. Be a Sun. Turn your flashes of illumination to an eternal day. Radiate! Bloom! How unimaginable to pull your green covering back around you. You feel for a purpose. shine equally in all directions. You are natural in choosing to where you shine.

Teaching: It's as simple as all the pure sunlight-guidance of the Sun in its daily labors. Be an example, not a prod.
Leadership: A great leader first serves. A leader first serves, but impartially. A leader receives trust for his or her service because his or her motives are the sum motive of all their subjects.
Purity of motive is the treasure in Heaven.

Life: Most of us live lives in preparation for a moment, day, or year in which events are made for us and our prepared statement. We are then gathered into lightning.

Who are you anyway? Besides being a lot of sunshine, you're a stream, a current, a flow. When each flow or person meets all and eachother, they become the One Flow, which means: "Universe: Get it?
Simplicity reveals all the Universe to the Receptive and Vulnerably Open and conceals it from the Closed, Hard, and Unreceptive.

What are you protecting your self from? Life!
Everyone I've known who does not accept death, does not accept life.
God bless all my friends who are waiting for a Big break, God bless all my friends who don't realize they are their Big Break.
God bless all my friends who have married a person with whom they are not of one flesh, who married beforethey had the self cohesion they needed to correct a later condition, that of being trapped in a closd life with a person who does not see them.

Following my heart saved my life and soul at least once, along with long-distance running, playing the guitar, and love of enthusistic movement.
God: Who is This? Enthusiastic movement in people. Smiling souls. Light-Souls. That's God-Through-You-Received gratefully by you.
Gratitude: Giving is well known, but gratitude stands so high.
All gifts become gifts in the moment of heartfelt gratitude not before.
All ways and all ways tell friends and strangers: 'Thank you, I appreciate many of your qualities.'

Love: You sometimes have to wrestle it out of people. Forgive the image.
Love is the purest motive. So it is sometimes poorly translated.
Love seeks and meets with purest gratitude. No wonder open love is frightening to some.

Love -mental and emotional - transforms every and any soul just keep t it. You'll see. Especially when they see Love is pure motive.

Living is giving is living is giving is living is giving is living.

If you feel you are empty, relax. Giving will always find some joy in youto share. You're bottomless, kid.

If you're depressd a lot, admit it. You want to be. Enjoy yourself and don't bother me. If you feel true need. I'm praying for you and helping if this is your unsaid hope.

Lonely: the privilege of the phony. Nothing keeps loving souls apart as simply and effectively as superficial labels (Mommy, Daddy, punk, wino).
Ignorance is but roleplaying, playing a role that doesn't express your full capacity for love and growth.
Evil is nothing more than ignorance manifested as hunger. Evil is all that is will-weakening. With some big exceptions, there are almost always damaged people, not bad people.
Bad people are damaged people. It makes no sense to judge a damaged person. You accept them as a form of damage. Try to help and don't let them share some of thier damage with you. A damaged soul often wants to damage others to have some peers and a group identity to hide in.

How to help? You can give all the water from your well, but you can't and never shall give away the bricks that made the well. Some damaging type folks will go for thebricks. Take just one brick you can spare and throw it at them. The brick well is nothing less than God's well called sacred Free Will.

Free Will: Without it, there is absolutely no conscience. Withou conscience there is precious little conscience-ousness - consciousness. (P.S. Did you ever notice that "Con-science" seems to mean a coming together of all science?)

You are nothing more than your Free Will guided by conscience. This is the hand and heart working together. You owe no one sacrifice of your free will to do good.

Free will is necessary first and before a soul can balance karma or set straight and even out past bad deeds.

That's what's wrong today. Institutions. The big ones. To work in a big institution preempts the exercise of free will. A person will simply be a tool in a larger intelligence called the corporation, the university, the government, the PTA.

Schools: The kids are taught to be skeptical about everything in the Universe, especially themselves. Distrust of self and high-horizon dreaming are the poison of our present form of teaching. Schools teach souls that they are simply a function, a training. This is, of course, lying.

The two real obstacles to this here culture: Materialism in thought that silences heart guidance or makes it near-mute and Institutions, our heartless overseers in all their self perpetuity.

The most important stuff I know is to follow your heart, don't care what naysayers say, and develop the sensitive soul for remembering dreams. Remembering dreams enough to consciously effect their events is absolutely the key to our self and potential.

We must proceed but with the great barge of society strapped to us. We tow the barge into greater light.

Knowledge: Knowledge doesn't accumulate if it's true. If it is true knowledge, it comes alive and is absorbed.

Love: Do justly love. No real love includes deception.

Language: All language gets down to just 'yes' and 'no.'
The force of the new age is inspiration. The force of the old age was money.
The form of language of the new age is the image, speaking. The form of the language of the old age was word, bound mostly to describing physical places or networks of terms.

The framework of understanding of soul in the new age is clear emotion. The framework of understanding the old age was heartless soul.

Knowledge is born, not made. Think picture, feel thoughts.
Never try to create or be born when you're tired.
When you're in someone's immediate sphere, at least give them a lirtle cheer. Be as wise as the all-seeing, untaught child. But having the grasp of a man or women's mind.

Who are we? One more time! We are all interconnections. No place for this ego. No flower goes gainst blooming in spring.

A pebble falls from on high and makes the greatest rings. You are once from on High and you leave the rings as your signature and gift and name.

Beauty is: Beauty is symmetry. Look again. Symmetry is beauty. Language is symmetrical. True power is all-dispersal.

We speak concepts and words like a planter of seeds which the listener experiences and cultivates with all the elements of his or her being. Often we are long gone when the seed manifests as a flower. We only remain to plant.

Thought: All thought is basically "likes to likes" but in a fludi hierarchy. This is what is called getting to the "point" on the spiral or pyramind.

Art: Art is the living word as we dream it. Self is the living word as we become it.

Experience: Experience is God's only chosen classroom the realm of teaching.
Experience: There's lots to go around. The more you experience life's lessons, the more unbelievable life becomes, the more believable becomes ther world of spirit.

The more you live, the more you follow your heart - the heart somehow remembers all those experiences that are helpful to your soul. If you're afraid of experience, you're afraid of life. You must think God is Santa Claus or an employe at Macy's. You're also afraid of death. Don't worry, you'll get over it. Life will kick you in the ass sooner or later and get you on your feet.

Life: It's deciding. You are not neutral about anything.

The greatest faults of this here culture: Thinking you can be neutral and not decide about the byways on your life path and not thinking that you can analyze away negative emotions. Focus on just the negative and all the moroseness in your soul puts on its tuxedo and comes out dancing. Turn your attention to postive activity. Move enthusiastically! Bloom! Radiate! Love every laughing man or women before every dryly intellectual man and woman. They're trying to figure out how "one" laughs. Bless them, and laugh.

Life: It's deciding, all right. But it's deciding on paths which as we walk, come to us. We don't decide where the road leads or "What is a road." We don't decide the number of byways ahead. We accept the road as conditions constantly presented in a beautiful unfolding tapstry and drama-who-dunnit. Don't try to shape all the facets of your life. especially the immediate future. Just learn to be ready, man.

Life: It's exchanging our likes and dislikes with other sin the form of love, thought, and action until there is no difference remaining between those exchanging which is all of us. We are then together as always and all ways on High.

Friends: They listen to you well. They become you for a while. They become you when you're imaging loneliness or if reinforcements seemlike a good idea in a private contest. Friends want your soul to fly. Friends eagerly want to see your higher self shine. Friends eagerly want tohold your highest goals and images of your self high and steadily before you as youpursue your goal.

Friends love to tell you the details and life int he wonderful vision of your self and your life. A husband amd wofe especially see their spouse as their verybest friend, and above all else, as someone never to be possessed, but someone to whom they have wonderfully privileged access.

To a good friend, you can give intepretations to experience, you can give certain shared anticipations of experience. But like the man pointing the way to the fair, you can only point the way and speculate on what is in the immediate offing.

So many wonderful souls have accepted thejobof the washerwomwn in the theater of their life. The empty stage begs their stardom. If you're their friend, usher them to the stage. They know every line of Hamlet, every note of every aria. But no one ever asked for them. Ask 'em for only their best. Throw away the bucket and mop, too.

Giving? Why give? Giving creates space in our soul for more light, more ideas, and above all for some of that wonderful gratitude.

Giving is the destruction of our own possessiveness, a momentary victory, a momentary ability to soar again.

Living means to be vulnerable enough to die often, this dying is the absorbing, transmuting and rising above experience that comes.

Words are seeds and bones. Seeds for another soul's flower. Words are bones that survive the immediate aliveness and experience.

Have faith tht you alreadyknow all this. Have faith. Have faith.

And above all, Truth is Beauty is Divine Power.

That is all. Thank you. And God bless you.

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