All of you bleeping people are sitting around waiting to be enlightened. Like they’re gonna call your table any minute. “Fickleman, Enlightenment for Four, your table’s waiting.”
And some bored waitron asks “What kind of whine would you like with that?”
And you say , “I want to be enlightened.”
“Why?”
“So I can hang out my shingle online and give the shingles to other people.”
“What an ass you are. You want to give people shingles?”
“Yes. Like Papaji. I want to spread enlightenment around like the butter on this roll.”
“Papaji? What language do you speak, for chrissakes?”
“It’s Advaitaspeak, sir. I learned it online at enlightenednincompoops.com.”
“Let’s just call you an ass and be done with it. Let’s just call you shitonashingle.com and get you out of here.”
And that’s when the brawl started.
“There is no here, sir. There is no you and there is no me. There is only the Self.”
Bam. Teeth fly out of the Self’s mouth.
The waiter pumps his fist. “Yes! I got it! There is no such thing as enlightenment. There are only idiots waiting to be served up a plate of horse hockey so they can sell it to other idiots wanting to be enlightened.”
And suddenly the room grew quiet and Papaji himself materialized from a disco ball hanging low. He stood there grinning from ear to ear.
Vicki Woodyard’s new book, Life With A Hole In It: That’s How the Light Gets In, would make a great Christmas gift.
In this issue is my review of Vicki’s book. If you’ve enjoyed her writings, you have to see them in the totality of a book, with wholeness and continuity. It’s a much grander experience. I recommend it.
Vicki Woodyard tells about her experiences, feelings, friends, teachers, and spiritual realizations during her husband Bob’s nearly five year struggle with the cancer known as multiple myeloma.
Vicki says on page one, “I just want you to have an experience.”
This book IS an experience. You’re going to take Vicki’s approach:
“Oh God, I am not strong enough. I can write, I can joke, but I cannot cure my own heartache. The irony is that I know that nothing will take it away. I would choose insanity if I could, but choice has nothing to do with things like that. My teacher [Vernon Howard] said, `When you are carrying your cross up Crucifixion Hill, offer no resistance whatever.’”
You’re going to walk the chemo halls with Vicki, yes, but you’ll also share a table with her and the Buddha at the Waffle House. More buttah? More wisdom that brokenness brings?
While experiencing these stories of struggle and humor, and while being brought as low as one human spirit can go, you somehow rise to an experience of rich wholeness and the truth of being human.
How is that done? By facing pain and suffering so that you see it in fullness, which is its abidance within a peaceful energy field.
Regardless of what Vicki went through in the loss of her husband, the loss of her seven year old daughter to cancer, the losses of close friends to cancer, there was never a severing from inherent wholeness, nor, as Vicki says, can there be. “The eye of wholeness doesn’t cry.”
This book is often hard-going, sometimes light, deeply loving and humanitarian. It requires the reader to face pain and suffering. This is a powerful, cleansing, truth-talking book. No other nonduality book has the texture, the quality of writing, the points of focus as Life With A Hole In It. It is an extremely worthwhile addition to one’s nonduality education. Read an excerpt and order “Life With A Hole In It” from Booklocker.com Order “Life With A Hole In It” from Amazon.com
Vicki Woodyard is called to talk about the dark side of her life, the deaths of her young daughter and her husband’s succumbing to multiple myeloma. She says,
“The dark night of the soul is slap-up against the treasure and my life has been about that. I am called to write and speak about the darkness and the light and they always go together and there’s always a punchline to the darkest hour.”
Listen about a broken heart, a broken life, a broken mind, and its sharing:
Dec.26, 09–There comes a time in every aspirant’s life when push comes to shove. When we think our little candle may go out. When the world conspires to push all of our buttons. And then you remember to be dust under the guru’s feet. Here is another way of saying it. Let thought be dust under the feet of awareness. That brings it back to you being the One. The only. It reminds you that it is all maya, that the cards were played long, long ago and that the house is rigged. And yet Christ said that there were other mansions, better and higher places to live. It ain’t on Househunters.
In my life there have been many years of genuine sorrow. Times when I have done nothing but study truth, ponder wisdom and try my best to walk the path. And there have been times when I have realized that I knew nothing for sure. And that is the direction of self-abandonment.
I have been watching accounts of people stuck in their cars in this winter’s December blizzard. Stuck at the airport. Stuck on airplanes themselves. Surprisingly, these people were cheerful and following the way of tao. This attitude, too, is self-abandonment. Caught in snowdrifts, they responded like old Chinese sages.
Today I drove to the mall to meet a friend for lunch. There had been a water main break and the mall had shut down until it was repaired. I drove home and called my friend to say we couldn’t meet today. Then I hassled with my insurance company because the system had spit me out. I had driven into a very small snowbank. I put on a new pair of fuzzy slippers and hoisted myself onto the couch to watch TV. My attitude, I noticed, was cranky. Apparently I needed to watch reruns of those people stuck in the blizzard.
Real sorrow is behind everyone’s attempt to awaken. Never mind what anyone says to the contrary. This world is a pit and a snare even while wearing fuzzy slippers.
You’re better off if you know certain people, and, for me, Vicki’s one of those people.
Vicki has the gift of showing us our heartbreak and our natural state.
Out of crushing heartbreak, most people would run from God. Vicki “ran to” God, or Self. Not as an escape, not to deny that any heartbreak ever happened, but to go deeper into the darkness.
These talks last five minutes each:
Listen to “An Important Talk.” Reclaiming the power of your inner world, of your inner wisdom. Honoring one’s limits and losses rather than overcoming them. In that honoring we are brought to our knees and we recognize the one truth. One of the great source teachings of VW.
Listen to “Zits, Incorporated.” Vicki mixes silliness, the nuts of bolts of life, death, and real reality. “With zits and gas, I think it’s time to start dating again.”
Listen to “The Voice Inside.” “The inner voice is unerringly right. … The world lies to us. This voice is the voice of your guidance.”
Listen to “It’s About the Music.” “I knew that my daughter was gone, but I knew that God was not gone. So I set on a path of inner discovery. This path is never ending. But for some of us it is music.”
) Space is open, accepting, unconditional… Isn’t that what we call love? xoxo
