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#3884 - Thursday, May 6, 2010 - Editor: Gloria Lee
The Nonduality Highlights - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NDhighlights


Yes, this issue has a lot. A book review, CD music links, even a book excerpt.
Greg and Alice will richly repay your time spent. Best to go listen to his songs,
words cannot do them justice. -Gloria


The Now Exspirientuality - The Way of Unity: Conversations with Dog - Book 1

by Greg Allen Morgoglione





What happens when a singer, songwriter, musician really and truly "gets" what life is all about? To begin with, it puts him on a somewhat different career path than the road to seeking stardom. He starts playing his guitar for the old and sick in nursing homes, and then singing to the young children who are going for treatment of severe afflictions. And then, perhaps surprisingly, Greg writes lyrically of how they are "the band of angels comin' for to carry me home" while giving much of the credit for his insights to his dog. And he's not kidding! OK, there is a playful sense of humor at work in Conversations with Dog, but essentially the Canine Messiah's wisdom is not some clever joke. Alice can smell phony a mile off and will have none of it.


The songs came before the book, and introduced Alice, the Canine Messiah, and her wisdom to the world. Alice believes "you can teach humans new tricks". She says, "It's as though you'd been asked how things might go in Your Vision of Heaven...Show Me, you know. And Now, Gregory, you find yourself Here, waking up with your Fellow Beings, waking up with me." The lyrics are a distilled essence of Alice's vision, and the music itself is folk-rockish. People who heard "It's Time That Time Was Overthrown" wanted to hear more from and about Alice, which prompted writing the book. I want to mention here that you can listen and catch the flavor for yourself at the music link. These profound and inspiring tunes are a good way to take Alice on the road with you. Did I mention Greg rides motorcycles?

Now, this book is way, way more than another journey to some future enlightenment. That whole trip is dismissed in the Preface. "Sometimes it seems as though This Here Now is a problem for Utopia-talking spiritual seekers. [...] Let me find another book that laments This Here Now, and yet another with steps to a Dream of That There Then, where no one has to Be Like Them." No, all that talk is just more fuel for getting through the illusion of Time. "Time will not get you to where you have long dreamed of Being. Time is where you have long dreamed of Being." If the real story begins with Unity and ends in Unity, then hey, what else can this seemingly in-between time be but Unity? "Our stories have convinced many of us that This Here Now is an exception to Unity." When really, it is like this, "The Kingdom of Heaven is spread upon the Earth, but men do not see it," as Jesus put it.


If we convince ourselves that we don't see Unity, then we aren't likely to express Unity, nor likely to act as if we see it. Alice simply says, "Look Again." Because quite simply it all begins with seeing Unity, not thinking about it or trying to believe in it. It's not that complicated, because what you see is what you get to experience. If this book were a movie, right here is where the spoiler alert would need to appear. "It reveals The One Exercise-an immediately accessible real-time meditation to practice on the streets of your life as a way to enlightenment-Now!" Can the Canine Messiah show you how to see Unity? I believe so, I truly do.
The world is all a stage, and thus each of us is a showman, staging the show
of our LifeTime, our show of how it might go. And a showman, as Alice
points out, is a shaman, a dreamer of healing dreams, one who sees beyond
and brings healing visions back to share, to act out with healing intent.


Book website: www.thenowexspirientuality.net

Music website:
www.gregallenmusic.net

[use the Catalogue link for Time O.T. CD, mp3 only $5.]

Greg Allen Songs previous albums


Book Excerpt:

The Now Exspirientuality and
Kluge Children's Rehabilitation Center

On the fourth Friday in September 2007, I ran face-first into the overwhelmingly enlightening realization of The Now Exspirientuality. It had been four weeks to the day since I had been introduced to The One Exercise and chosen to engage it. Kluge Children’s Rehabilitation Center had been instrumental on both Fridays.

Community Venue shows, in my mind, are performances. I have the sense that most “real” musicians, and most folks in fact, categorize them otherwise, but I do not. I have never been comfortable with the idea that I am somehow special because I “play for Them.” Feeling sorry for Them is not why I started playing at a nursing home in 1995. I started playing there because I am a musician and I was asked to begin playing there. It’s an audience thing…

So I’ve always rejected the “special me” idea. Most certainly I am participating in something special, but I have never felt like I was the special thing in the mix. It has always seemed a naïve idea to me. And yet, there was this recurring thing…


On the fourth Friday in August 2007, I’d had an “emotional” moment when some parents wheeled their child over to enjoy the music. It was clear that he was enjoying the music, and there I was, unable to continue singing. The thought ran through my head that “these are the moments that I do SongSharing for, and here I cannot handle it. How lame.”

“Gosh, Alice,” I had said when I got back to the van. She waits outside KCRC, van parked in the cool morning shade. “It happened again – the emotional thing. What is that?” I explained what had transpired.

This is the result of a basic idea that you have, Gregory – the idea that Others should not have to Be as you think this young man is Being. You continue to hold on to the noble but misguided idea that in a perfect world no Others will have to Be like This.

This idea of Poor Others is born of your choice to See the World Divided, to adopt Divisive Vision that sees Self and Other, Duality, Multiplicity. However, as we have lately been discussing, most all of your cultural stories begin with Unity and claim to be headed back to Unity. This begs the question…

“What could This Here Now possibly be, besides Unity?”


Playing at the game of Duality, the game of Multiplicity. The ten thousand things.

The useful point for you is that the emotion you are experiencing and unable to channel into the performance is emotion you do not understand, that’s all. This is safe to say, yes?

“Yes. Most definitely. That’s a good way to say it, that I want to be able to channel this energy into the moment, not have it detract from it. And I definitely don’t understand it.”

You simply need to Look Again, Gregory, through the lens of Unifying Vision.


She went on to explain The One Exercise and I went on to engage it. It was an interesting four weeks, and the fresh Now perspective of The One Exercise grew quickly on me. On the fourth Friday in September, again at KCRC, a similar scenario began to unfold when some parents entered the lobby and heard music. They turned their son’s wheelchair and he lit up, and they headed my way. I relaxed further into Unifying Vision and the song I was playing. I allowed my eyesight to blur into the middle distance beyond the young man, allowing him into the soft, open musical space, allowing the aspects of Unified Experience to be as they be, and in a moment our eyes came together and…


In a flash I was beside myself, outside of myself, outside of my presence, something… I was still very much Here, playing my guitar and singing, and quite comfortable in that aspect; and I was simultaneously Here, observing, watching the KCRC scene unfold as though I was watching a play from a box seat above the stage. My cosmic partner and host was a profound presence of which I was highly aware, but not in any formal sense, and I know for certain that it was the young man from the wheelchair. There were Fellow Beings observing with us as well, but I do not know who. I know it was comfortable. I know it was all good.

We watched the musical moment unfolding in a sort of crystal orb, like a fragile, oblong, hollow glass ornament. At one point I had the image of those early glass orb ideas of the Universe. The space all around was filled with countless crystal orbs, each a scene; a sparkling crystal Universe dancing with ItSelf like the snow in a well-shaken globe…

And it became very clear to me that there is nothing wrong with this young man, nothing at all. It became very clear that there is nothing wrong with anyone in a Community Venue audience. I’d known it all along, but never like This. The overwhelming inescapability of pure equality was humbling.

As I eased back into a more familiar association with my physical form I felt electrified, and I’m certain I hovered above the seat of my chair on some sort of force field for the remainder of the performance. I wasn’t certain what had just happened, and I looked at the young man in his wheelchair. He wasn’t letting on anything, but he was digging the music. His whole body was smiling.

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