How We Practice

effort
Originally uploaded by littlelakey.

These Buddhas want it all from you.
Oh, they start out simply enough,
a little rice, a few sticks of incense.
But in the end, they’ll have it all
and you’ll be left with Emptiness.
And never happier.

This is their compassion.

*********

“I’m dying! and it’s killing me!” the thought explodes within me and I shake with sobs.

Then, another inner voice, “Well of course you’re dying. You’re alive, aren’t you?”

“Ah, the old half empty, half full?” I stop crying for a moment, breath suspended.

“Yes.” (That voice, so calm and smug.)
“No! I’m dying! and it’s killing Me!” I am sobbing once again.

Did this start when I first saw her picture?
Wasn’t it just yesterday when asked if I had heard from her, I had replied, “No! She said she wouldn’t and she hasn’t. And... she’s killing me!”

Ah. Yes. But that was simply round one.

“Tat Tvam Asi,” “I am That, Thou art That, All this is That” – one of the grand pronouncements of the Upanishads.
Now,This is That replayed one or two octaves higher.
Now, the Fat Lady’s singing.

This could be called “falling in love,” but more precisely I suspect it’s, “falling into Love.”
Forget that Hollywood version, this won’t be shown up on the big screen.

This is the Big Screen Itself, showing Itself.
The Self unfolds Itself, by Itself, to Itself- another one of those pronoucements.

This is what went on behind closed doors as Shams and Rumi locked themselves away for forty days. Shams was burning Rumi into Big Screen, Ocean, Absolute, God…
You name it.
I can’t be bothered.

“I’m dying! and it’s killing Me!”

… Silence is my only hope…

Instead, I must have played Johnny Cash a dozen times this morning.
“Love... is a burning thing... and it makes a firery ring.”

“I fell in to a burning ring of fire.
I went down, down, down and the flames went higher.
And it burns, burns, burns…”

Now, that was her doing!
And we're back to level one.

Falling in love is how we practice Falling into Love.

Falling in love is how we practice becoming Enlightened.

Those Buddhas want you to have it All.