Waking Up each Morning

early incarnation
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
Adrienne Rich, Power

Or to put this in another way and on another level:
It is necessary that the Current be attuned to the resources of the body and particularly the nervous system. While in the Current, I feel exaltation and a sense of well being that reaches well down into the outer organism, yet this does not change the fact that the Current is a powerful energy and does tax certain powers of endurance… The physical body is clearly the weakest link…

if the body is thought of as something like a ten ampere fuse, while from the transformer, just beyond, there is being delivered a current on the order of one hundred amperes at high potential. One is constantly under a pressure to use more than ten amperes and thus strain the fuse close to the point of burning out.
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy.

And in yet a third manner, this from Eckhart Tolle:
Chi is the inner energy field of your body. It is the bridge between the outer you and the Source. It lies halfway between the manifested, the world of form, and the Unmanifested. Chi can be likened to a river or an energy stream. If you take the focus of your consciousness deeply into the inner body, you are tracing the course of this river back to its Source…

You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains for a while when you return to the manifested, the world of separate forms. This energy is much more vital than food….

…use your inner body as a portal through which you enter the Unmanifested, and keep that portal open so that you stay connected with the Source at all times. It makes no difference, as far as the inner body is concerned, whether your outer physical body is old or young, frail or strong. The inner body is timeless…
The Power of Now.

Most mornings, lately, I wake up with something of an elevator ride.
It begins from the ground floor of “Existence”- I guess.
No object. No thought. No dream. Still, there seems to be something to the Nothing, when I look back in time. A bit of light, something even though there’s nothing, it is certainly not empty.

A swoosh as if some elevator is rising, pulls “me” out of That pure being, into a tingling field of energy as simultaneously I regain the ability for thought and to notice what is going on.
The tingling energy of rather dingy light (I want to call it “golden” – but that’s too clean and clear) this electric tingling of dirty dish-water energy swells up and floods my physical body. Instantly, my physical body is racked by inner trembling and nausea, where previously body was just fine and resting quietly.

Now, I can notice that it’s morning and the bedroom is surrounding me.
The elevator ride is over, even as awareness of my inner body remains.
I lie there for a moment hoping things will settle, become less intense, before I venture reaching out a hand to Bennie.

He is such a happy fellow. By contrast, I am feeling fairly trashed.
The ride up into "awareness of..." is such an uncontrolled process and where I am deposited is so very disappointing.
It all ends up in an “Ugh” and nausea.

Becky and I used to laugh about a picture of me as a baby in my buggy, ca.1952.
We entitled it, “Patty, trapped in her body.”
We joked about the shock of incarnating and how I’d been blessed with one solid chunk of body. (“Ninety-fifth percentile in every grade school class and all of it was muscle, dense.”)

Waking up these days seems to be a small scale recapitulation of that incarnating.
Leave the Light, take on inhabitation of this dross, dross body.
I find it tedious.
I also think of Maharishi saying whenever we’d complain, “Something good is happening.”

But, I think Tolle has put it somewhat inaccurately.
It does make a difference what shape your body is in.
(Why else do people become vegetarians, especially while on spiritual retreat?)

Each morning's re-awakening leads me to all sorts of questions.
Why is my inner light so dingy? What inner alchemy is this?
Does the physical body pollute the inner? Or, does the subtle stir-up the gross?
I bet both sides can be to blame. So, which direction, out-to-in or in-to-out, is causing my particular malaise?
Is this dross of physical or psychological origin? What did I eat yesterday? What can I change today? Is this toxicity from this life? A past life?
…so many questions… I will stop here.

… Or, perhaps, I’d do well to rethink the fact I’m sleeping with a dog.
Oh! That is simply far too sad.

Bennie stays.

PostScript:
And now I see. The physical body is the fuel. The inner body is the flame.
The inner body doesn’t care what the physical is like: strong, weak, pure, impure.
It’s all fuel for the fire and It will burn the dross until all the fuel is gone.
Nothing gross (including Bennie) can pollute this fire.
But, you can sure generate a lot of smoke, shakes, nausea, and more.

As with tending any fire, you want a clean and controlled burn.
And tending to the fire is a skill we each must master for our selves.

As for The Poet, Merrell-Wolff, and Tolle, they are right on – each in their own way.

You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone ...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down
the upbreathing air.

Adrienne Rich, “Twenty-One Love Poems,” The Dream of a Common Language.

Grief, Part III: dying, death, and birth

Canvas F
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

I thought it’d be nice to share the story of Ramana Maharishi’s enlightenment which is posted in greater detail here.
Notice how this Saint responded to the thought, “I’m dying.”
He was totally free from the drama, gyrations, and flapping arms that most of us go through. And yet, he still experienced that fear that the Taoists speak of as ru ding.

In his seventeenth year, in full health and in normal waking state he was suddenly overwhelmed with the fear of death and fully convinced that death was imminent. The inexplicable feeling would not leave so the boy began to ponder on the meaning of death. He was alone in his upper story room at the time so he decided to act out death and inquire into the meaning of it. He laid down with his arms stiffly at his sides as if dead, held his breath and said to himself;

Now death has come but what does it mean?
What is it that is dying?
The body dies and is carried off to the cremation ground and reduced to ashes. But with the death of the body, am I dead?
Am I the body?
This body is now silent and inert but I feel the full force of my personality and even the voice of the 'I' within me, apart from the body.
So I am the Spirit transcending the body.
The body dies but the spirit that transcends it cannot be touched by death.
That means that I am the deathless Spirit.

The awareness of this knowledge took full possession of him, not at the level of mere mental awareness but at the deeper level of complete spiritual self-awareness. He suddenly became the Spirit and knew himself as That, no longer identifying himself as merely the body form that had been called Venkataraman. Self realization was instantaneous, complete, and irreversible. His ego was lost in a flood of pure Self awareness.

How could Ramana Maharishi be so calm about it all?
Perhaps he had little if any pain-body. Maybe his ego didn’t fight him. Or perhaps the conditioning of his mind was not as deep as most.
Whatever the reason was, he wasn’t in the shape most of us are in.
Most of us have work to do, before and after awakening. We get to practice seeing through our conditioning and fears repeatedly on many levels.

…the vast majority of people who come see me, or any other teacher, would probably do well with a little help from a good psychologist… Somehow or other the conditioning will need to be addressed, either before awakening or after awakening. You can have direct experiences of deep reality, but if you have too much psychological conflict, or your ego is still too fractured and not functioning coherently, it will keep holding you back.
Adyashanti, Who Hears This Sound? The Sun, December, 2007

Ah, yes.
Adya has described this process of examining ourselves on deeper and deeper levels, as peeling away layer after layer of an onion. Eventually, all the layers are lying in a pile at your feet.
And you are left with Nothing in your hands.
The Nothing… (that is everything).

Well, I’ve opened enough presents wrapped in tissue paper to know that fingertips can tell what’s coming. I think the same holds true layers of an onion.
And so the whole process can be scary. You can feel the dissolution coming.
But, what does it really mean?

Somehow, you have to find the integrity to look closely and inquire.
So, let me end all this talk of grief and fear and dying with these words of the French Vedantist, Arnaud Desjardins (with thanks to Beth for telling me of him):

Westerners commonly consider life to be the opposite of death, but Orientals consider birth to be the opposite of death.
For them, life expresses itself through a movement of perpetual change: an uninterrupted play of death and birth… the birth of the child is the death of the baby; the birth of the adolescent is the death of the child.
Daring to live means daring to die at each moment.
But it also means daring to be born – daring to pass through important stages in life where the person you use to be dies, in order to make room for someone with a new view of the world…
To put it simply, daring to live also means no longer having the slightest fear of what we feel.
Arnaud Desjardins, The Jump Into Life: Moving Beyond Fear.

Grief, Part II: the Crucifixion

Canvas D
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

Pat had gotten up from the table, for a moment, leaving Becky and me quietly digesting. We’d been talking about their life in Mexico.
“What was Becky doing there?” She didn’t know. She only knew it was important, the next step for her spiritually.
Then out of that silent pause, I was looking up from my plate, eyes all watery.
The softest, most unanticipated thought had just surprised me and was settling upon my lips, “I’m dying.”
The tears were an expression of the gentle sweetness of this new understanding.
I hesitated. Was this the time to speak it out?
No – that would require too many words, words that were better left to others:

But, as even the personal man is much more than the physical body, the price goes deeper than the body.
There is a kind of dying, proceeding in the midst of continued bodily existence. Doubtless it is but natural that the personal nature should dread all this and, in a measure, grieve. For here we have the true meaning of the crucifixion….

Awakening calls for a profound, though possibly subtle, virility…
A fire descends and consumes the personal man.
For a time, short or long, this Fire continues.
The personal man is the fuel, and the fuel, in greater or lesser measure, does suffer.
But the fire does not destroy; it simply transforms.
Franklin Merrill-Wolff, Experience and Philosophy

I bet that everyday, somewhere in Mexico, there is a re-enactment of the crucifixion.
Earlier at dinner, we spoke of how the myths that really catch on are the stories that hold true on many levels.
Now that Becky lives part of every month in the land where she was born, Jesus finally made sense to her.
In Mexico, Catholic cathedrals were put in place right over Aztec pyramids.
This is a people who know all about human sacrifice.
And here I had told them about the words of Merrill-Wolff regarding crucifixion.

But, I hadn’t mentioned why I was rereading him.
I have been watching this grief inside me, wondering if the energy/emotion will resolve before it actually shreds my heart. Sometimes it has felt fairly nip and tuck.
The aneurysm they found in January, right where the aorta ascends from my heart, is obviously bulging from the strain.
“Hypertension,” they say. And there are all kinds of calculations as to the chance of rupture, and all kinds of drugs to swallow.

Here too, a story holds on many levels.
How will it all play out?
How much of me is dying?
And what will be the price?
Not that it really matters.
I am ready to pay anything… almost.

My final word on this particular subject is: I sought a Goal the existence of which I had become convinced was highly probable. I succeeded in finding this Goal, and now I KNOW, and can also say to all others: “IT IS ABSOLUTELY WORTH ANYTHING THAT IT MAY COST, AND IMMEASURABLY MORE.”
Franklin Merrell-Wolff, speaking of his own enlightenment.