William Samuel

William Samuel
William Samuel

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Letter To Joseph





A Letter To Joseph         By William Samuel 

Hello, dear Joseph...

 Your letter is most insightful, fun and sincere. I can understand Rachel's joy in corresponding with you.

 It is just before a spring storm here, I hope. The trees and other green things are eager for the rain. Black clouds are gathering in the west. A north wind hints of a blow and the new apple blossoms are dancing in anticipation.

 Joseph, your seminary friend sounds like a genuine greatest-character-I've-ever-known person. You asked how I would “handle” such a situation as that—a man who loves dogs so much he has forty of them in his home. Are you ready for this?

 I would decide to know this man better than anyone I'd ever known—as if I were going to write a paper about him to submit for publication.

 Most certainly I'd not attempt to change him. Day after day I'd let him tell me exactly how he feels about dogs—and why—and where his grand love for them developed. With all my heart I'd try to get inside this man's heart—because there is something special there, very special, Joseph! I would let him become my “writing discipline” for a month or so—or longer if it takes longer to hear him open up and pour out his inmost feelings. How does he relate his spiritual ideas to his surroundings and pets?—and friends? Such inner questions would be tremendously interesting coming from one who lives as you relate, sleeping with his animals. But CHANGE him? Never. If he were to act like other people, he wouldn't be as unique, different, unusual, remarkable, distinctive, divergent, incomparable, or sweet. Would he?

 Gosh, Joe, this guy is extraordinary! LEARN from him. 

 We all play roles, don't we? Look at the silly one I have! How did I get saddled with being a luminary or an authority on anything? EVERYONE is a luminary! Over the years so many have tried to change my way of looking at the world. Oh, how the churches tried to conventionalize and modify my insights. Suppose they had succeeded? The NOTES FROM WOODSONG would be relative at best—and ordinary. Charles is Charles—unique and beautiful. If Charles didn't act as he does, Charles wouldn't be Charles anymore, but only our notion of what he should be. 

 So, there you have it, Joseph. As you look closer into Charles's feeling and tender places, he will begin to appear different TO YOU. Right? It's sorta like taking a walk in the woods one has been afraid to walk in before. It appears different when we get INTO the place—and there are NEW things to discover there. Our first attempt is to change the whole woods into a conventional place we are accustomed to and aren't afraid of—but, when that doesn't work (and it isn't supposed to), we change ourselves by broadening our outlook. The more I think of your friend, Charles, the more I'd like to know him. To REALLY know him. The marvel is, when we know like that, the one “out there” changes right before our eyes.

 An old man in the Smoky Mountains taught me what “contradistinction” means. One day I asked why he stayed in those lonely mountains. He had been retained as a caretaker by the government, but was one of the original settlers of Cades Cove. He said he stayed because it was so beautiful. Then I asked him (he was a country bumpkin to young, arrogant me) what he meant by “beauty.” With great patience he told me about leaving the cove and going to work near Washington, D.C., during the war. While he was there he had unbelievable difficulty—losing his wife and son and developing a lung ailment of some sort from all the factory smoke. When the war was over, he returned to the cove alone. He said he looked around and saw the blue sky for the first time in his life. He tasted the sweet water for the first time—and watched the beauty of the changing seasons—all things he had seen and known many times before, but NOW he knew what real beauty was, having seen so much that WASN'T like his Cades Cove. 

 I spent many days camping there—and hours talking to that kindly old man who sold honey, fifty cents a quart jar, on the narrow, dirt road that runs through the cove. His notched-log cabin is still there in the park.

 Suppose someone had changed him, Joseph? No, he changed ME—and that's always the only place real change can honestly happen. Here as I-Identity. Never out there with people. I change Me by understanding the Divine-I more fully—and then I see people more clearly.

 I hope I haven't bothered you with too many words, Joseph. I am practicing on my fancy new word processor—a little computer that some thoughtful folks knew would make my work easier. I'm learning slowly but surely. Everything gets named here at Woodsong and the computer's name is Rabbi Moses Goldberg. He's quite a guy—librarian, lexicographer, file clerk, typist, accountant, indexer, semanticist and all-round good guy, willing to work at all hours for cheap—as long as the electricity is on and it looks like it may go off at any moment as the storm approaches. 

 Kindest love to you, Joseph, and many thanks for your encouragement, without which I couldn't write these letter. This work at Woodsong IS YOUR WORK, TOO!

Woodsong
1984

If you would like further guidance in understanding any of William Samuel's work based on Self discovery - you are welcome to contact me, Sandy Jones  -- samuelandfriends@gmail.com - Ojai, California -   







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Saturday, December 21, 2013

What Christmas Is All About



"Ojai Christmas Night"  By Sandy Jones

Celestial Song 


WHAT CHRISTMAS IS ALL ABOUT

By William Samuel

Asked directly "When will the New World come?" the Light of Christmas replied to his disciples, "What you expect has come but you know it not." Our prosperous and fearless life is HERE, awaiting simple, childlike acknowledgment. This "Illumination" of our life is sure and certain. We cannot escape it. King David said, "If I say the darkness shall cover me, even the night shall be a light around me….if I make my bed in hell…even there shall thy hand lead and thy right hand shall hold me." The Christmas Season ever marks the birth of--the personal recognition and acknowledgment of-God as all, God as only. The Christ is the Truth and the Truth is here, ALREADY bestowing its gifts. To the human sense of things it only awaits our recognition and acceptance. We DO it and the "new world" appears.

Only the Truth is true. Only the Real is real. Whatever the evidence of poverty, unemployment and fear, there is no reality to it. To the real of us, to the Truth of us, to the Child of us, Deific Allness-God-is still at the helm. In Truth our welfare does not lie in the hands of government and its people but lives securely, prosperously, harmoniously and fearlessly in the Truth of Being, in the Light of Life. The Lights of the world have told us this for generations and every student of Truth must admit it is true.

CHRISTMAS IS THE FEARLESS CHILD WE ARE

If the joy of this season has lessened over the years for us, it is the consequence of old-world weariness-the intellectual struggle to measure up to human demands and the weight of guilt we bury ourselves beneath: the guilt of age, the guilt of failing health and diminishing vigor, the guilt of fear, the guilt of GUILT.

If one wishes to joy in the holidays again as in those days of yore when the child-heart of us nearly exploded with anticipation-if we would enjoy those Christmas pleasures again with enthusiasm unabated by years-we can. We can! We need only uncover the HEART again. We need only put intellectualism aside for a time and let the child-heart sing.

We really ARE children at heart and remain so eternally. No matter how one's world may seem this day, the Child of us still lives! Our years past are the adult lived in vain-that we might RECOGNIZE the Child we are again! The WHOLE Child, the Christ Child, right here, right now!

The tender heart, in moments of honesty and childlikeness, will at special moments allow one to become aware of a new heaven and earth; a new land of perfection and well-being, already present here and now, spread over the whole face of the land--and a perfect harmony that has always been here as our very own Life and Being. It is as though, in these moments of inner clarity, the resistless Child of us allows something to flow from the peripheral unconscious into the conscious; as if, for a moment, the ego-playing mask is put aside and in an instant we see, hear, feel and know some small aspect of Being unseen before. This knowing comes with its own grace and absolute certainty- -----for a moment.

For a moment? Why just a moment?

Listen gently: However unregenerate, scarlet and guilty we may think we are, these special moments are not uncommon to any of us. They happen often but are so quickly under attack. While they arrive like a cooling, healing rain on parched land, though they come like a breath of fresh air, like sunshine, like a smile, like a gentle touch, like laughter, like the song of a nigh bird in the midst of a dark and sleepless night, they come also like a swinging, sundering sword, like a sharp spike that shakes, shatters, slaps and sickens the old nature of us and sends the fearful of us back to the ego-defences again-that puts the old mask in place again.

For me-and I can speak of no other experience with authority-each new glimmer of Light has come from my anguish, helplessness and childlikeness. Yet, it was only a matter of days, hours, minutes until that very glimmer had so aroused and angered the intellect of me, the adult of me, the great "common sense" and smartness of me, that I would shove the New Light back into the darkness of intellectualism. "I was just carried away. It was the emotion of the moment." I would say, attempting to limit the Illimitable to an explanation, as the intellect ever insists!

But, Reader, now I know-I KNOW without doubt or reservation, "without purpose of evasion"-that the immaculate Child is everpresent to disclose the utter simplicity of Being and its ALL-rightness! Yes.

Yes, this is so! The Child of us LIVES!

Who sees the sparkling stars? Who enjoys the brighted Christmas tree, hears the carol, smells the yule log and scented candle? Whose Life is there but God-Life-I?

Where is the bell tower that heralds the season? Where falls the soft snow? Where is the laughing face, the ribboned gift, the mistletoe and the vision of sugar- plums? Here! Here as Identity-I! Here as the Child-awareness that God-Life is! Here as the very one WE are.

Yes! The One WE are.

Joyful Season from Woodsong, William Samuel (1986)





If you would like further guidance in understanding any of William Samuel's work based on Self discovery - you are welcome to contact me, Sandy Jones  -- samuelandfriends@gmail.com - Ojai, California -   





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Wednesday, November 27, 2013




CHRISTMAS IS THE CHILD I AM                    By William Samuel 

The Christmas Season is more than the matter of a few days.  Christmas is the Heart’s Season and the Heart is forever.  Christmas is Love’s Season and Love is without end.  Christmas is the season that belongs to children and there is no time when we are not children.

What is meant by the Christmas Story of “the coming of the Christ”?  The Christ is the Truth.  The Truth is the Christ.  Truth ‘comes’ as a dawning.  The Christ is our discovery of the Truth we are.  The yearned-for Messiah is none other than the here and now awareness awakened to the meaning of these words.  Does not the Christ say, “I am the truth”?  We declare without doubt or hesitation that we are the Presence of the living Comforter come to “set all things straight.”  We take this Identity unto the Self and live it.  We gird up the loins and live it. 

Somewhere along the line comes the truthful (Christ-full) discovery that we are not a finite body containing life, awareness, within it, but that we are awareness, Life, Love, containing all bodies within “us”.  Reader, for me that awakening is the Christmas of the Christ-I-am—a pure and pristine Light out of a new day, immaculately conceived, untouched by the world—a holy Child born in a manger.  But a child beset quickly by the intellectual Herod I fancied myself to be.

The child we are survives, however.  The child of Light “grows strong” and dares, with simple honesty and actions that coincide, to challenge the fiction for the fraud it is.  This is your Season, Reader.  This season commemorates your Self-discovery.  This Christmas is YOU.  The pealing bells, the carols, the holly leaves, the laughter, red noses, plum pudding, tinsel and happy tears are yours.  These things, every one, are ours.  They are us.  They are Identity.  This holy season is the merriment that Love is and it commemorates our own Identity discovered.  

The discovery may seem to do with time, but the Discovered and the Discoverer are eternal, quite beyond the clock, above the measure of months, more than can be circumscribed by strings of twinkling lights or the jingle of bells.  Love is the measure of this Season.  Love tells its story.  Unbound, honest, simple, gentle and childlike LOVE is the gift we open and the gift we are.

THE GIFT 

At this moment it seems to me that we have a most important “mission”.  It is to discover and live the Christ-Love we are that we may be found to be the comforter of this world of images
that appears within the Selfhood that Awareness is.  As I be lifted up,” says the Christ, “all mankind shall be lifted likewise and drawn unto Me.”

We give the gift of Childlikeness to our world.  We give the gift of unbounded joy.  We give the gift of tenderness that warms the Heart and brings the soft breath of happiness, the tender touch and the unrestrained tear of gratitude.

We tell the story of Identity.  We tell the weary who they are.  We show them the Kingdom of their heritage.  We hand them their scepter and point to the limitless Light of Love
which is their dominion.  We look up and out and “show unto mankind his uprightness.  This is the Father’s business, so let us be at it.

Dear Mary and John, 

Happy Christmas to you folks!  This Christmas Season finds a New Star in the Heavens—this one to tell those with ears to hear of the New Jerusalem wherein there is neither sorrow nor darkness, nor age nor death.  

The Holy City is already the fact, you know.  Isness is the totality of all Being within which there is nothing that makes a lie.  In all singleness there is nothing to make it dual, and we do not have to wait to see this fact!  While there presently appear to be an inside and an outside, a here and a not-here, a now and a not-now, all these things are only aspects of the Whole, the All—for which this Awareness “we” are is the activity.

Mind (1) aware (2) of Itself (3) is a Holy Trinity Itself.  “Itself” knows these three are One Mind, one Love.

Well, this started out to be a simple Christmas greeting.

Don’t you forget that all the carols and bright lights, decorations and happy children are for you!  Who else is the Christ?


WE COME HOME TO CHILDLIKENESS

The Christmas Season commemorates our own awakening, birth of the Christ Truth within, arrival of our own Identity.  The Christmas Season marks the prodigal’s return from the land of husks.  This is the time when the fires of the hearth are rekindled—the time for coming home.

Coming home to what?  To consciousness, to Identity, to the heritage promised us from the beginning, to the Love we are, to the carefree Child we are, to warmth and tenderness, simplicity and gentleness—to the happiness that REALITY is!

Reader, if I could give you the gift of childlikeness, I would.  But this is our nature already—and this is the only nature that comes to see, accept and live the Real.  Intellectuality decries the season, anxious to explain it and then to have it over.  But childlikeness sees the sparkle of silver tassels all year.  Childlikeness listens to the laughter of angels every minute.  Childlikeness tastes the sweet sugarplums of Simplicity right here, right now—and feels the gentle Love of Christmas forever!  

From THE AWARENESS OF SELF-DISCOVERY  by William Samuel



If you would like further guidance in understanding any of William Samuel's work based on Self discovery - you are welcome to contact me, Sandy Jones  -- samuelandfriends@gmail.com - Ojai, California -   





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