Enlightenment, in the end is nothing, more than the natural state of being…Natural of course means a state of being which is not contrived, a state of being which does not need effort or discipline to maintain, a state of being which is not being enhanced by any sort of manipulation of the mind or the body. In other words, a state of being that is completely natural and spontaneous.
Adyashanti, True Meditation, CD 1, track 4.
In true meditation we’re starting from the foundation of allowing everything to be as it is… In true meditation we’re not moving towards the natural state, or trying to create the natural state, we’re actually starting from the natural state… and that’s what I started to discover when I allowed everything to be as it is… the peace and the silence and the stillness I was trying to obtain was actually already there… and all I had to do was stop trying to attain it.
Adyashanti, True Meditation CD1, track 7.
Being in silence, at the retreat at the Garrison Institute with Adyashanti, was defined as: no talking, no whispering, no gestures, no passing of notes. We weren’t even supposed to read, or allowed to takes notes during satsang. Eye contact and smiling were fine, but we were not to necessarily expect any return of recognition.
I was quite comfortable with these restrictions. I found I didn’t even want to write – (though journaling was permitted.)
And I did write a single entry:
September 12th - At a Loss
Adya has effectively stripped away every to-do, every move of spiritual jujitsu that I am aware of.
There is nothing, no effort I can make to bring me enlightenment.
It has to come from Grace.
And so I find, I am at a total loss.
What am I to do?
Surely there must be something!
Well, alright then. How ‘bout this: the effortless-effort?
I will think of life as meditation.
We sit to meditate knowing that effort on our part is incorrect technique.
Meditation must be effortless.
Yet still, even in True Meditation, as we allow everything to be simply as it is… we do have obligations.
I set the intention that when I recognize that I have become absorbed in thinking I will return to the breath.
It’s this one responsibility that distinguishes meditation from just sitting there.
After that the mind just does it thing – which usually means a bunch of babble.
And I have seen, time and again, that such babble doesn’t really prevent settling down into the Silence.
In meditation we don’t go to war against our thoughts. They are simply there.
But Adya mentioned last night something quite remarkable to me.
He asked, “What brings us out of thoughts when we become absorbed by them?”
I have always assumed it was my intention (long forgotten) – some seed planted in my subconscious that will call me back.
But Adya called it Grace!
A small and delicate impulse, Grace awakens me to the fact that I have been lost in thoughts.
And so it seems with life.
The ego can not participate in its own demise.
About the only practice I can do throughout the day is Tolle’s being with the Now,
which is just another way of saying accepting things as they are.
Or, as the instructions go for meditation, it is “allowing things to be as they are.”
And so I wait for Grace in Life to intervene and take me home.
I wait for Life to carry me through Life.
Or as Maharishi said in his commentary of the Bhagavad Gita, “The Self unfolds itself, by Itself, to Itself.”
So ran my thoughts during the retreat.
Since then, I have had time for more reflection.
This whole discussion leads to interesting considerations as to the relationship between Grace and the subconscious.
It’s another doorway into what I’ve written about before: scientific evidence that our thoughts come from “somewhere deep inside.”
I always thought of this as simply the subconscious. But, it is also the depths of consciousness, and somewhere in that Ocean of Wholeness flows the current we call Grace.
Monday, September 22, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
The End of Retreat
The end of retreat is when the real retreat begins. When you go back to your ordinary life of work, family, and friends, this is where true spirituality begins.
This is where the spiritual rubber hits the road.
Whatever you may have realized about the truth of your own being will be called forth in life…in the way that you move through the world…
Adyashanti, the little card that was on our cushions the last time we met for satsang.
I got home later than expected Friday night. Eddie didn’t greet me at the door which didn’t surprise me as cats can be… well, you know.
Though, it was a bit unusual. Arising from his love of Annie, his black cocker compadre, for years Eddie tried to behave something like a dog.
It was not until I read the pet sitter’s note, that I started looking for him.
“Eddie stopped eating this morning and was yowling. If you weren’t coming home today, I would have checked again after midday,”
I found him in the back bedroom. He didn’t move for a long time as I talked to him.
But, he started purring. I tried to clean him up a bit, and the floor, and opened the windows for some fresh air. There had been the multiple disasters of bowel and stomach.
That was when hospice for Eddie began.
After 18 years together, he deserved the best.
I called Becky and left a message.
Eddie was the last surviving member of what was once the Butler-Bralley household.
When I moved to my new house Becky insisted on paying for a cat door. She called it “child support.”
We had found Eddie while canoeing in North Georgia. We’d just gotten our canoe loaded back on top of the car when there was this screeching.
I looked up searching for a hawk. But, the sky was empty. I was confused.
Then I saw this little kitten barreling up the dirt road, small lungs screeching like some great killer bird.
We scooped him up and took him to McDonalds for a hamburger. He ate it all, insisting on the pickle too. From the bit of blood on his hind leg and his fear of the ceiling fan in our kitchen, we invented the story that Eddie was the sole survivor of a litter dumped on the banks of the Etowah River – the rest had been devoured by the hawks.
Saturday morning, I called Mom from the backyard deck of my house.
I wanted to report a safe return and knew she’d love to hear all about the retreat. I was going through that story when I noticed small downy gray feathers falling from the sky. I’d never seen such a thing. They came right out of blue sky like snow.
I watched them drift down for several minutes, but kept on with the telling of my tale. Then, Eddie’s history with hawks came stunningly to mind.
I blurted out to Mom, “Eddie’s dying!”
The snow fall of feathers continued for a good fifteen minutes, until the deck was covered with feathers.
I figured a hawk must be devouring a bird in the oak branches overhead.
But, I didn’t see or hear a thing and I’ve never heard of such behavior in the red tail hawks around here, though I did see one swoop up a squirrel once.
After the phone call, I continued sitting in the silence.
Suddenly, dropping out from the oak, came a huge bird – I thought “great blue heron.” But, the herons around here don’t sit high up in oak trees. So I changed my answer to “must be a hawk.”
And I knew it as a sign.
Then, as the day was finishing there was another startling rupture right before my eyes. Hovering a moment, breast and wings ablaze with the light of the setting sun, was the great red tail hawk.
Then, in a flash he flew past me into the West and was gone.
I wondered, “What is going on? Eddie’s just cat.”
Sunday, the next day as if deliberately flaunting any doubts, feathers of the softest down still fell from time to time, as I sat with Eddie waiting.
Even after he lost his purr, he seemed to want me by his side. So, we did just that.
I watched my aversion and grief arise. And I watched the silence – in me, in Eddie, and in the trees around us.
Twice Eddie disappeared - escaped.
Twice I got a phone call from neighbors down the street and went to bring him home. Later, I realized he had dragged himself down to the house where Oliver, the young black cocker, lived.
I don’t think Eddie knew Oliver. But, you know cats… they never tell you everything.
And Eddie had once adored a black cocker, a long time ago, when the Butler-Bralley household was a family.
And I mulled over how very curious it was that on the morning Becky and I realized that we were no longer meant to be together, a great blue heron had flown right up our driveway. Startled from our analysis and heartbreak, we took it as a sign.
And, as if Creation nodded in agreement, minutes later a red tailed hawk flew in from the West and settled in the tree right outside our door,
his chest a blaze with the glory of the sunrise.
Now, it seemed as if these signs had come round one final time as our final child took his leave. And then, as now, the issue wasn't about love, but rather time. Our time was up.
I find it all so very strange and rather miraculous and beautiful beyond what I could design.
So, Eddie finally passed on Monday afternoon.
He was just a cat.
Just a cat that kind of stirred all of Creation.
Just a cat that came from the Silence and then emerged back into It.
And I am no longer so clear on just where Retreat ended and where it started.
Saturday, September 06, 2008
The Seeker and Fear
We all have a deep longing and a Deep Fear of the discovery of what we are, and the mind devises any way it can to avoid this discovery.
The most effective way it (the mind) AVOIDS Awakening is to SEEK it.
Tony Parsons, The Open Secret
This Sunday I leave for a five-day silent retreat with Adyashanti.
I’ve been wondering if I’ll ask him a question.
And if I do, how can I word it?
Just now, I began it this way:
“I’m not sure if I have some strange metabolic state, some aberrant physiology that makes my daily consciousness seem strange, OR if I am ‘treading water on the void’.”
I then heard Adya say, “You know which it is.”
And tears broke into my eyes.
I do know.
I am treading water.
Some time ago, I gave a synopsis of Adya’s discussion with a woman who was also treading water.
She was using doubt, always doubting her experience, as a means of preventing herself from going deeper.
I am using fear. …Ok, and throw in a dose of doubting intellect and a dash of core issues regarding love.
But, for now let’s look at fear.
Fear in one form or another keeps coming up these days.
One version is intense anxiety. In the characteristic manner of painbody flare-ups, these attacks are way out of proportion to precipitating events.
The causes of my anxiety can almost elude my awareness and are simply the same daily pressures I have dealt with for years. But now, my reaction seems to fill every cell within me. Something obviously is going on.
So, it’s been easy, if quite uncomfortable, to simply focus on the physical sensations.
During these times of intense anxiety, I have some version of these words of Suzanne Segal running through my head:
Behind most spiritual practices is the belief that you have to get someplace you’re not- a destination called realization or enlightenment. But realization isn’t someplace else...
For example, when I described how much fear was present, people told me the fear meant that something must be wrong, because fear was an indication that I wasn’t in the proper state. But fear is just what it is, and it’s there too in the vastness of who we are.
And, just like that I can see the anxiety is on the level of something like a broken arm - I can feel it and it's no more a part of Me than, let's say, that chair. And then I try to see what IS me... and do not like the view. I do not like to even put the words to what I see. For, that is far too scary.
So, other times, there is simply down right fear.
For instance, recall awhile back I mentioned The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep? It’s been an interesting teaching and I was enjoying the book,
Until I came across these words:
The second way of understanding the practice is to realize that waking life is actually the same as dream,
that the entirety of normal experience is made up of the mind’s projections…
This is one way of articulating the realization that all phenomena are empty and that the apparent self-nature of beings and objects is illusory.
There is not an actual “thing” anywhere in waking life – just as in dream –
but only transient, essenceless appearances.
Arising and self-liberating in the empty, luminous base of existence.
Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche
This passage is now highlighted in yellow and in the margin you will find, scribbled in blue pen, “I hate this!”
I mean really, who wants such a vision?
Nothing is really real! Only temporary dreams rising and dissolving into emptiness!
(Yet, those trucks will flatten you.)
Sometimes, the paradox is so ludicrous I find it truly a cosmic joke and am filled with laughter.
But mostly, it makes me kind of cringe or leads to down right panic.
So, I have adopted a strategy. It consists of largely trying to ignore the vision, or quietly accepting it with a kind of periphery vision.
Either way, I consciously avoid looking at the situation all too carefully.
And if such behavior isn’t treading water, then I really don’t know what is.
In some version or another, this has been going of for years.
Years – Years! of suffering and drama to the point of near exhaustion and what a waste of life.
No not waste, it’s just the way I’m going about things.
But clearly, it is time for resolution.
And I have no idea of how to go about that.
Oh, I know the words comprising one answer or another.
Adya, has addressed it many times.
So have many others whom I do not even know, but I do enjoy their words:
One of the things I came to see is that Enlightenment only becomes available when it has been accepted that it cannot be achieved.
Doctrines, processes, and progressive paths which seek Enlightenment only exacerbate the problem they address by reinforcing the idea that the Self can find something that it presumes it has lost.
It is that very effort, that investment in self-identity, that continuously recreates the illusion of separation from oneness.
This is the veil that we believe exists.
It is the dream of individuality…
But your mind is frightened to let go and still has an idea that something special should happen…
Tony Parsons
Something special, yes. We all expect a bit of flash.
But, I think that in the end it just takes simple Grace.
...once again there was a pervasive silence and once again I waited for the onset of fear to break it up. But this time the fear never came. . . . Within, all was still, silent and motionless. In the stillness, I was not aware of the moment when the fear and tension of waiting had left. Still I continued to wait for a movement not of myself and when no movement came, I simply remained in a great stillness.
Bernadette Roberts
Have a nice week while I am gone. I will get back with you later.
Namaste.
PS - If you miss reading a post midweek, take the time to GO HERE and read an interview with Bernadette Roberts by Stephen Bodian. It's an old interview but rather remarkable, RE: The Void.
Thursday, September 04, 2008
Fishing with Mystery
at some point in my life, fishing was a way of achieving a timelessness, especially fishing in rivers because rivers have a very timeless quality.
They're always flowing, flowing, flowing.
They're flowing down to the sea.
The clouds form, they float over the countryside, the rain falls, they fill up the ground, the springs…
The stream is kind of this immortal entity, at least in my mind…
and you kind of get swept up in this immortal cycle and kind of lose yourself.
Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it.
It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist.
James Prosek
On Speaking of Faith last Sunday Krista Tippett interviewed artist, trout fisherman, and something of a mystic, James Prosek. I loved the show.
I’ve written before about the limitations of naming.
Prosek probably shares this critcism, but he arrives there from such a different path it’s well worth walking with him for awhile:
When I was four or five years old, I would draw birds at the kitchen table.
As I finished each piece I asked my mother to write the names of the birds beneath the pictures…Somehow a picture wasn’t finished if the animal’s name wasn’t there.
When I learned to write, I scrawled the common and scientific names of each creature beneath my drawings myself— by example of Audubon, or any others who made paintings in the natural-history tradition.
At nine I developed a passion for trout and began to compile a list of all the diverse types…
As I painted trout through my late teens, major shifts in trout taxonomy were taking place… I began to understand that species were less static than the fathers of modern taxonomy… once believed.
That nature was static and classifiable was an idea perpetuated by the natural history museum (repository for dead nature), the zoo (repository for living nature), and the book (repository for thoughts and images related to nature).
These mediums were all distillations of nature, what individuals of authority deemed an appropriate cross section to present to the public.
None had adequately represented Nature—at once chaotic, multifarious, and interconnected…
I was conflicted—I loved the names that had first led me to recognize the existence of diversity… but as I learned more I wanted to throw away the names, step beyond those constraints, in order to preserve a sense of wonder that I had felt from an early age.
Such thoughts were the origin of the curvilinear lines in my present work….
The first paintings I did with lines emanating from creatures were meant to be imaginings of what God’s or Nature’s blueprint of a particular creature might look like. … The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath….
James Prosek, The Failure of Names
Such lines also bring to mind the Australian aboriginal Songlines.
During the Dreamtime, archetypal ancestral spirits are said to have wandered across the Earth creating and naming trees, rocks, waterholes, animals and other natural phenomena.
Their dreaming and journeying trails became the songlines, an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and serve as subtle tracks for navigation.
To me, Songlines seem an earthly version of the energy channels and flowing Qi that one becomes aware of through meditation and an illustration of the Taoist emphasis of the connection between macrocosm and microcosm.
That Prosek seems to have discovered similar lines and meanings really delights me.
Click Here, if you’d like to see a “The Myth of Order,” a video of Prosek’s art accompanied by his own narration.
It’s well worth the three minutes –just be patience for Krista Tippett’s face to disappear.
Or, Click Here to see a tattooed Buddha – another artist’s vision of the energy channels?
They're always flowing, flowing, flowing.
They're flowing down to the sea.
The clouds form, they float over the countryside, the rain falls, they fill up the ground, the springs…
The stream is kind of this immortal entity, at least in my mind…
and you kind of get swept up in this immortal cycle and kind of lose yourself.
Naming gives us the illusion that nature is fixed, but it is as fluid as the language used to describe it.
It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist.
James Prosek
On Speaking of Faith last Sunday Krista Tippett interviewed artist, trout fisherman, and something of a mystic, James Prosek. I loved the show.
I’ve written before about the limitations of naming.
Prosek probably shares this critcism, but he arrives there from such a different path it’s well worth walking with him for awhile:
When I was four or five years old, I would draw birds at the kitchen table.
As I finished each piece I asked my mother to write the names of the birds beneath the pictures…Somehow a picture wasn’t finished if the animal’s name wasn’t there.
When I learned to write, I scrawled the common and scientific names of each creature beneath my drawings myself— by example of Audubon, or any others who made paintings in the natural-history tradition.
At nine I developed a passion for trout and began to compile a list of all the diverse types…
As I painted trout through my late teens, major shifts in trout taxonomy were taking place… I began to understand that species were less static than the fathers of modern taxonomy… once believed.
That nature was static and classifiable was an idea perpetuated by the natural history museum (repository for dead nature), the zoo (repository for living nature), and the book (repository for thoughts and images related to nature).
These mediums were all distillations of nature, what individuals of authority deemed an appropriate cross section to present to the public.
None had adequately represented Nature—at once chaotic, multifarious, and interconnected…
I was conflicted—I loved the names that had first led me to recognize the existence of diversity… but as I learned more I wanted to throw away the names, step beyond those constraints, in order to preserve a sense of wonder that I had felt from an early age.
Such thoughts were the origin of the curvilinear lines in my present work….
The first paintings I did with lines emanating from creatures were meant to be imaginings of what God’s or Nature’s blueprint of a particular creature might look like. … The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath….
James Prosek, The Failure of Names
Such lines also bring to mind the Australian aboriginal Songlines.
During the Dreamtime, archetypal ancestral spirits are said to have wandered across the Earth creating and naming trees, rocks, waterholes, animals and other natural phenomena.
Their dreaming and journeying trails became the songlines, an intricate series of song cycles that identify landmarks and serve as subtle tracks for navigation.
To me, Songlines seem an earthly version of the energy channels and flowing Qi that one becomes aware of through meditation and an illustration of the Taoist emphasis of the connection between macrocosm and microcosm.
That Prosek seems to have discovered similar lines and meanings really delights me.
Click Here, if you’d like to see a “The Myth of Order,” a video of Prosek’s art accompanied by his own narration.
It’s well worth the three minutes –just be patience for Krista Tippett’s face to disappear.
Or, Click Here to see a tattooed Buddha – another artist’s vision of the energy channels?
Monday, September 01, 2008
More on Dissolving Knots
The water method of Taoism is initially strong on the dissolving, or the breaking up of energy in the same way that water wears away a rock.
If you throw sugar inside of water, after a while it breaks the sugar down.
The water completely emulsifies it.
B.K. Frantzis
Well, just like that “Bruce Lee” did bring a visitor who left a comment on my last post.
Actually, he is a fan of B.K. Frantzis and he mentioned a nice link to a more detailed explanation of “dissolving.”
I want to share that here in a more up-front manner, as I think my Taoists friends will find it interesting.
These words by B.K. Frantzis touch on several things that interest me.
I've mentioned that my Taoist practice aims at creating “good human beings.”
Seems to me a lot of this transformation involves “dissolving” those “hot button issues” we all carrying inside our psychologies.
Adya also mentioned that he finds most students could benefit from psychotherapy either before or after awakening.
However, Frantzis seems to be saying meditation doesn’t work on the level that psychotherapy does. ... Or maybe "level" leads to mispintrepretation, and it'd be better to say the "methods" aren't equivalent. Here is exactly what he says:
Frequently I am asked if this method of Taoist meditation can replace the need for psychotherapy. Generally speaking, no. In modern life, you have to make a living and interact with other people. You can't withdraw to a monastery or ashram where all your needs are taken care of while you work through your problems…
Psychotherapy is more appropriate for dealing with the dysfunctionalities of a level of emotional development where taking full responsibility for one's emotions is not yet within an individual's capacity.
In Taoist meditation a worthy student was one whose emotional suppressions were such that the individual could feel that what was emotionally arising within themselves was essentially their own responsibility and not being caused by something outside themselves. …
Ahh! Actually, this is exactly the ability I developed through my Taoist practice.
I’ve learned to sit alone or with a group letting loose powerful emotions deep inside and when told to take a bow and stop meditating, I can quietly do that too.
Clearly there are different methods within Taoism.
Perhaps, we could say I have now become a “worthy student” having recovered from the great dissolving initiated by that awakening I had in 1975. Within a year that awakening had blossomed into a full spiritual emergency rather than emergence. The knots were not dissolving but were unwinding like supercoiled rubberbands generating so much heat that I was essentially fried.
Frantzis clearly describes working with the dissolving I spoke about last time, and he takes the consequences in an interesting direction:
All of these basic lower emotions are dealt with by first ferreting them out of where their energy is embedded in the actual tissue of the body; secondly by actually going into the energy channels of the body where they are located; and finally dissolving them all the way inside the system.
Then you start to literally transform these emotions as they extend outside of your physical body. Your own personal field has the ability literally extend to the end of the Universe.
If you do not clear out your own energy fields beyond the body, then all energies coming in from an external environment activate the unresolved energies in your own personal Qi. This causes you to be somewhat manipulated like a puppet by the energy emanating from the huge Qi fields of the stars. This creates a pattern that comes back in. That is what astrology is based on.…
Whoa! Astrology. Or why we can feel the feng shui of life.
And then Frantzis takes us back into the physical realm and very practical concerns as to “What does this mean for Me?” He shows me why meditators can sometimes become plagued with physical challenges, and why we should remain open to and respectful of paths that others tread.
When you start reaching into the emotions it is important you start tapping directly into the glandular system, as well as into your internal organs.
There are so many techniques it depends upon which ones are appropriate for a particular type of person or a certain situation. I am not going to get down and just talk about this technique or that technique. That is like a cookbook approach and the fact is that human beings don't quite work that way.
B.K. Frantzis
Not exactly my path, but Frantzis is well worth reading. In fact, here’s one final link that explains even better the process of dissolving those inner knots via the Water method of Taoism.
Namaste and Enjoy.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
No-mindedness
A gung fu man employs his mind as a mirror—it grasps nothing and it refuses nothing; it receives but does not keep…
Bruce Lee
I have a little site-meter attached to this blog.
It reports on how people find me.
So, I can tell you that many people come here after a Google search for “Laura Croft.”
I have to chuckle.
I must be such a disappointment.
And now, today, I find I want to quote Bruce Lee.
Well, perhaps he’ll boost readership and lead to more disappointed seekers.
Why Bruce Lee?
Serendipity.
For once again, my mind was feeling rather vacuous, quiet, and not so amenable to effort. Still, I was clearly awake and needing to look busy at work, so I thought I’d visit Seeker After Truth, the Mystics Reference Repository and do a random read.
There I found a long and thoughtful article written by Bruce Lee.
I also found an explanation (perhaps) of why writing entries here has become so difficult of late.
It was Bruce Lee’s mentioning of “physical loosening” that first caught my attention.
Last week at my Taoist group, a friend had mentioned she could see my hands holding onto these knotted ropes, and that I needed just to let them go.
It was simply an intuitive image that she saw.
But it alerted me to knots and there unwinding and dissolving.
Maharishi spoke of how stressing of the nervous system caused knots. Back in 1972, I thought "knots! - How can you get knots in neurons?" Alzheimers has shown us one way, neurofibrillary tangles they are called.
B.K. Frantzis in his book, The Great Stillness, writes about other kinds of knots. He writes about dissolving subtler and subtler, layer after layer of knots with his Taoist practice, deep within our psyches.
These knots must be dissolved if we are to grow, and if anything,
I have been “dissolving” lately.
So, Bruce Lee caught my attention during my random read:
To perform the right technique in gung fu, physical loosening must be continued in a mental and spiritual loosening, so as to make the mind not only agile but free.
In order to accomplish this, a gung fu man has to remain quiet and calm and to master the principle of no-mindedness (wu hsin).
No-mindedness is not a blank mind that excludes all emotions;
nor is it simply calmness and quietness of the mind…
it is the “non-graspiness” of the mind...
let the mind think what it likes without interference by the separate thinker or ego within oneself.
So long as it thinks what it wants, there is absolutely no effort in letting it go;
and the disappearance of the effort to let go is precisely the disappearance of the separate thinker…
Chuang-tzu, the disciple of Lao-tzu, stated:
The baby looks at things all day without winking,
that is because his eyes are not focused on any particular object.
He goes without knowing where he is going, and stops without knowing what he is doing.
He merges himself with the surroundings and moves along with it.
These are the principles of mental hygiene.
Yes, that’s it. I have been something of a wide-eyed baby of late.
Most evenings I sit in the backyard with my face raised towards the treetops.
I’ve no idea why I do this. It simply seems what I'm called to do.
It’s disorienting a bit, not in the sense that I’m spaced-out or non-functional.
I look at the trees. I throw the kong for Bennie. I pet and placate the cat.
But, all in all, I’m not doing much. And that’s what feels so strange – so empty.
From time to time I have the thought, “What are you doing?”
… Nothing. Sitting.
“Shouldn’t you be doing something?”
(I give myself a long and valid to-do list.)
Then, I’ll look back to the treetops.
It seems more important to simply, deeply experience not-doing anything.
There’s a silence here.
So I look at that.
And "Who is looking?"
No one apparently. "Oh, dangerous ground! No one!"
"Is that a thought or is that an experience?"
I watch some more. Now, maybe this is meditating, but it's not the way I’ve ever done before. It's not anything that I've been taught. Heck, there's nothing to this! ... simply sitting.
Ah, “mental hygiene.”
There you go!
Thank you Bruce Lee.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Drawing the Line
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
someone would call the authorities.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
full moon in each eye that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?
Hafiz
The other day my family got into something of a heated political debate via email.
It doesn’t really matter now what the issue was.
In the midst of the swirl my nephew wrote, “It doesn’t affect me, so I don’t care.”
Last night, I realized, “I care and so it does affect me.”
Apparently, self interests are determined by where we draw the line between my self and Other.
Dealing with this very line is the real task of spiritual cultivation.
For instance, we may come to understand:
The heart of a mother is full of tenderness, but it is limited to her child only;
but the heart of the Saint is all inclusive,
it knows the how and whence of the origin of each one and the vicissitudes they have to go through.
Nisargadatta
Or, as in politics, we might describe the issue from a very different angle:
Know that the outward form passes away,
but the world of reality remains forever.
How long will you play at loving the shape of the jug?
Leave the jug; go, seek the water!
Rumi
I found these poems and words at a wonderful site, Seeker After Truth.
It’s Sufi sponsored, but covers much Advaita and refers to itself as “A Mystic’s Reference Repository.”
I find it soothes my heart.
Enjoy exploring it. Meanwhile, I don’t think I’ll be writing here as much as in the past.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Is this how Buddha is suppose to look?
The idea of enlightenment is tied up with our images of wise men and wise women. We have all sorts of preconceptions about how such wise beings are supposed to look, supposed to talk, and supposed to act… Based on our particular preconceived notions, we may try to sort out who among us is enlightened to greater or lesser degrees. We would like to match what we see with whatever standard we have created. But in doing so, not only may we apply inadequate standards but we may also be fooled…
Judith Lief
And too, we hold ourselves up to these imagined standards, which can sometimes cause confusion.
We might even talk ourselves out of awakening.
You may or may not have noticed, that I feel a bit disappointed in my Taoist practice for the lack of emphasis it puts upon enlightenment.
This de-emphasis has even confused me, for Taoism does have a strong tradition of seeking enlightenment and becoming one with the Tao.
In fact, I loved the Taoist term for such a person. They are called “real human beings.”
So, on the path that I have walked, there have been these “tenors” to the different teachings.
In TM, we were all dead set, busting a gut on becoming enlightened.
Maharishi assured us it was possible, though he was also handing out no guarantees as to a timeframe.
Next, came Taoism and the de-emphasis. I know my initial interest with Adyashanti lay in his invitation to “all seekers of peace and freedom to take the possibility of liberation seriously.” So, you might call that something of a backlash.
Well, now, I have been listening to Adya for almost two years and I’m beginning to believe that we have little if any control upon our own awakening.
To paraphrase both Adya and Eckhart Tolle, our practice and meditation only point us in the correct direction, so if per chance Grace should strike and our ego lets go for a moment, perhaps we’ll stay awake.
So, on I plod each day now. (Will She strike today?)
And in my plodding, not so long ago, I came across Numinous Nonsense.
That’s a great name, Numinous Nonsense.
It’s also a website written by Vince Horn.
Here, I found the most cogent discussion of the spiritual seeker’s relationship to enlightenment I have ever seen.
The discussion is introduced with this quote from Buddhist teacher, Judith Lief.
So, I invite you to go there (here) to enjoy the whole discussion.
I think the topic is important.
It impinges upon “spiritual materialism” – that No-No I have often been accused of. (I can also end on prepositions.)
It also addresses best attempts to avoid this trap while still staying true to the quest.
And as long as I am on the subject, I will takes this opportunity to mention that Vince also runs a site called Buddhist Geeks which offers podcasts on interesting subjects.
I found the recent discussions on dream practice with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche very interesting.
I ordered Rinpoche’s book. Perhaps, in there I will find an explanation of my uncomfortable waking from sleep experiences. Or, an explanation of that dream I mentioned about flying.
So, that’s it for now. Don’t just sit there.
Click somewhere and learn something.
Maybe we can all have a bit of fun as we plod forward, waiting for Grace, free from spiritual materialism to whatever extent we can be. (Can you believe the term has made it into Wikipedia! How very funny and a bit strange.)
Judith Lief
And too, we hold ourselves up to these imagined standards, which can sometimes cause confusion.
We might even talk ourselves out of awakening.
You may or may not have noticed, that I feel a bit disappointed in my Taoist practice for the lack of emphasis it puts upon enlightenment.
This de-emphasis has even confused me, for Taoism does have a strong tradition of seeking enlightenment and becoming one with the Tao.
In fact, I loved the Taoist term for such a person. They are called “real human beings.”
So, on the path that I have walked, there have been these “tenors” to the different teachings.
In TM, we were all dead set, busting a gut on becoming enlightened.
Maharishi assured us it was possible, though he was also handing out no guarantees as to a timeframe.
Next, came Taoism and the de-emphasis. I know my initial interest with Adyashanti lay in his invitation to “all seekers of peace and freedom to take the possibility of liberation seriously.” So, you might call that something of a backlash.
Well, now, I have been listening to Adya for almost two years and I’m beginning to believe that we have little if any control upon our own awakening.
To paraphrase both Adya and Eckhart Tolle, our practice and meditation only point us in the correct direction, so if per chance Grace should strike and our ego lets go for a moment, perhaps we’ll stay awake.
So, on I plod each day now. (Will She strike today?)
And in my plodding, not so long ago, I came across Numinous Nonsense.
That’s a great name, Numinous Nonsense.
It’s also a website written by Vince Horn.
Here, I found the most cogent discussion of the spiritual seeker’s relationship to enlightenment I have ever seen.
The discussion is introduced with this quote from Buddhist teacher, Judith Lief.
So, I invite you to go there (here) to enjoy the whole discussion.
I think the topic is important.
It impinges upon “spiritual materialism” – that No-No I have often been accused of. (I can also end on prepositions.)
It also addresses best attempts to avoid this trap while still staying true to the quest.
And as long as I am on the subject, I will takes this opportunity to mention that Vince also runs a site called Buddhist Geeks which offers podcasts on interesting subjects.
I found the recent discussions on dream practice with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche very interesting.
I ordered Rinpoche’s book. Perhaps, in there I will find an explanation of my uncomfortable waking from sleep experiences. Or, an explanation of that dream I mentioned about flying.
So, that’s it for now. Don’t just sit there.
Click somewhere and learn something.
Maybe we can all have a bit of fun as we plod forward, waiting for Grace, free from spiritual materialism to whatever extent we can be. (Can you believe the term has made it into Wikipedia! How very funny and a bit strange.)
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Mississippi John Hurt
Yesterday, at the library, I discovered Mississippi John Hurt when I happened to pick up a CD, Avalon Blues.
His music and gentleness are my latest delight.
His music and gentleness are my latest delight.
Flying at Night
Most of my life I have had dreams of flying, though not so much any more. When I was about nine or ten the dreams were so vivid that I thought perhaps I really might have the ability.
So one day after school I tried. I held my arms out a bit from my side and ran about the backyard, duplicating the little run skip hop up into the air that sufficed in my dreams.
I didn’t work.
I tried again.
And again.
Until I became vividly aware of just how earthbound I was. I could feel within my cells the density, the utter dross that comprised my body.
That moment was revelation as much as disillusionment.
I would not try again until I was an adult. (Yes, even when I should have known better.)
For you see, I loved flying. The dreams were wonderful.
And there are ways to release the dross, ways for your body to become composed of lighter elements.
And through the years my dream flying had improved.
Once, I even soared straight up through the midnight clouds, tearing through the wisps, through the stratosphere out into the vacuum of space, past the moon, towards a distant star that grew in size, larger, larger, until it was revealed as The Eye of God.
I flew right into the black, huge, dilated pupil of that eye, and then began to fall.
Accelerating through black nothingness, until with a crash that shook the bed,
I landed There.
I opened my eyes as the words, “That was no dream!” reverberated.
All my other flying was is dreams and in all the dreams in was Night.
I don’t know what it is with having to fly at night, but it was with this history that when yesterday, at the library, my eyes happened to light upon the words, Night Flying, I stopped immediately and picked up the book.
Usually, I study the cover first to see what a book’s about.
In this case I didn’t.
I specifically wanted to discover this book with the first words of the story.
So, I deliberately sat down and began.
First, there is a family tree:
Louisa Carmelina Stravona Hansen, 1862-1924, was at the top.
Five generations lay below. I studied the names and dates:
Gilda Meredith Franklin Hansen, 1885-1953.
Isodora Cooney Hansen, 1910 –1978.
This was a matriarchal tree. I don’t belief I’d ever seen one.
And I realized I could not complete such a tree for my own life.
Furthermore, my ignornace had never crossed my mind.
I turned the page:
Night Flying.
Chapter 1.
The Hansen women have always flown at night, even in bad weather. Aunt Eva actually prefers storms. She says she makes better time that way. Though she ends up on the east end of town and has to walk back along the railroad bed if the wind isn’t blowing in her favor...
Oh. I was going to like this story! How often have I had to walk back in my dreams, caught at the southern edge of town, at night and vulnerable.
My aunt Suki stayed out all night once when she was sixteen. She went to the county line at Madison. She wanted to see how far she could go.
“That’s the danger with young fliers, “ Mama says. “They don’t know when to turn back.” Suki was in bed for two days after with a fever and cramps.
Turns out the Hansen women have a rule about only flying at night and never being found out. As the story progresses, young Georgia in a fit of anger takes off in broad daylight.
It is not a bad day for flying, but over the water, the air currents are more fierce and less predictable. I attempt to head north, but the wind picks up and I’m blown further south. I make an adjustment. This is what Eva calls it when the weather forces you to change plans. “You have to always be willing to change your mind, Georgia. Don’t get rigid in your thinking about how it should be up here. There is nothing in the sky that can’t change in an instant.” I pull my arms down to my sides in an effort to descend, but within a minute I’m blown in the direction of the mainland. There is nothing I can do. I can’t fight the wind, so I have to wait for it to change…
Fear grabs hold of me as the image of Charlotte’s gravestone comes to mind. Cold slate like the color of the dam. Charlotte flew alone before initiation, and look what happened to her. “For the one who flew too high. Dear Lord Have Mercy.”
…If someone had told me I’d be flying alone over Lake Champlain in the daylight, I never would have believed them. There was no way this morning I could have know where the afternoon would bring me.
Like Charlotte. She woke up that morning with only one thought in her mind. Skating. Skating with her father. She dressed, brushed her teeth, and kissed Isadora goodbye without much thought. Without any knowledge that it would be the last time. It makes me shiver…
I breathe in deeply and try to recall Eva’s words instead. We were flying in a hail storm last spring and Eva told me, “You may not know what’s ahead of you, Georgia. The weather could be better. It could be worse. But you can’t get stuck in the place of fear. You have to feel the fear, let it pass through you, and keep going.”
And so goes this children’s story… I haven’t finished it yet.
But, good luck with your flying. I do so hope you dream.
Monday, August 04, 2008
Knocking from the Inside
I’ve been living on the lip of insanity
Wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door
It opens
I’ve been knocking from the inside!
Rumi, translated Coleman Barks
I had dinner the other night with a young friend who related two stories that I’d like to share.
First, she mentioned that since her father’s death she has been doing paintings of his feet – just the feet, sticking out from under things. Painting after painting.
Oh! I thought, how appropriate.
But, then my next thought was, “Why? What is it about feet and death?”
I thought about my own father dying. I’d knelt down upon the sand and grabbed hold of his feet.
I’d hoped to latch onto his soul and not let him leave.
It hadn’t worked.
But, there was something else, something more universal about feet and the dead.
Then it hit me, “Ah, yes, the toe tag!” They tie your identity right to the big toe.
For a moment, I had this image of all the feet and toe tags lined up in the morgue.
Meanwhile, my friend was getting to her point.
She’d learned that in Japan there is the belief that when someone dies their souls, in the next world, walk upon the water. And the bottom of their water is the bottom, or the top (we had some trouble with the image’s topography) of the water that our souls walk on in this world.
As it works out, the soles of our feet can touch the soles of the dead.
And my friend had realized her feet were built just like her fathers. So, in painting him she was studying herself.
I looked at my thumb and index finger. After Pop died, with the body in the hospital, I had made a point of looking one last time at his hands and forearms.
I didn’t want to ever forget.
Now, I see how very similar we are. That knob of arthritis on my thumb, the flatness of the nail, they’re just like his.
I don’t know what I said, right there at the table.
But, I love the image of souls walking on the water and worlds interpenetrating.
Then, my friend wanted to know what I thought of pear trees.
“Only that a neighbor has one filled with luscious fruit that hang out over the fence and into the road. And I cannot take any, for they still belong to him, even though he doesn’t care. They’ll drop onto the ground and rot, but still I won’t pick any.”
Wrong answer. I knew that going in, but I go through this every year with the pears - forbidden fruit.
When my friend was a child she played alone for hours in the woods.
She’d meet deer and follow them. She would commune with the trees.
And then she had to “grow up.” She had to put the “fantasies” aside.
She was put on many medications. And this went on for years, until she was able to reclaim herself.
Back into her body, back into her strength.
The other day she was walking in the woods and came upon a deer.
It was the first time a deer had visited since those days “before.”
The doe walked across her path, stopped and looked at her.
She followed it into the woods, until it stopped at a pear tree ladened with fruit.
My friend thought, “So, you have brought me to the tree.”
And now she wanted my opinion on just what that pear tree meant.
I had no idea.
Pears? Do the specifics really matter?
Being led to a tree full of fruit, alone in the middle of the woods, by a deer was simply mythic to me.
I shook my head to clear out the astonishment.
Myths aren’t really told to us – they exist all on their own inside.
Deer have always been a supernatural animal.
Had she ever read The White Goddess, by Robert Graves?
A strange, strange book I read 30 years ago, about the power of sacred language and the Druids. Wasn’t there a white deer in that tale somewhere?
The White Goddess is about power, Nature, and the gods, as well as language, myth and poetry. I mentioned that with the Druids, poets stood right next to the king. Their language was that powerful.
I wanted to explain that once we start stirring the energy along the channels inside of us we start accessing the myths that reside there.
Our bodies spontaneously take on mudras and exotic dances. From our mouths come shouts and cries, and spats of poetry in tongues we do not know.
And this is why the deer returned and led her to the tree.
But, I couldn’t really get any explanations out.
Later, I would come across a young poet who knows, a Sufi who explains beyond any expression I might give:
Silence is a door to Allah – so is music
And both solitude and love are paths to Allah.
I am surrounded by doors, I can open none of them
For none of them are closed -
Nor can I go out to meet my Beloved
For He is here.
Tiel Aisha Ansari, Knocking from Inside
It’s all the inside, the poetry and myths and magic. Still we might insist that it is “out there.” And that is fine. It’s called Awakening.
Hearing Voices
"The poet doesn't invent. He listens." ~Jean Cocteau
Listen: what do you hear?
I hear a dead tree weeping in the rain,
sorrow hangs from her naked branches.
In the deep ocean, salmon sing of the return home.
Leaves whisper in the wind's tongue.
I hear cicadas in their strident triumph,
seventeen years of darkness ended at last.
Like a seashell lamenting the distant sea,
I empty myself and echo the world's voices
and call it poetry.
Tiel Aisha Ansari, Sol Magazine
Monday, July 28, 2008
Haunted by Nothing
What is the essence of this room? The furniture, the pictures, and so on are in the room, but they are not the room. The floor, walls, and ceiling define the boundary of the room, but they are not the room either. So what is the essence of the room? Space of course, empty space. There would be no “room” without it.
Since space is “nothing,” we can say that what is not there is more important than what is there. So become aware of the space that is all a round you… Pay attention to “nothing.”
Eckhart Tolle
Thursdays I usually join a few of my Taoists friends for an evening of meditation.
Recently events took an unexpected turn as Allan suggested we might enjoy seeing Elaine channel her higher-self.
“What?” was my initial reply.
Confused discussion followed until we just had Elaine do her thing.
What we saw was a woman go into a light trance, change her countenance, and then proceed to talk to us, dispensing a kind wisdom.
Afterwards I asked Allan to explain, for I suddenly realized we might not all be agreeing on the definition of “the higher Self.”
To me, the Self is pure consciousness, that emptiness of Awareness itself that Tolle describes as the Nothing, or pure Being.
It seemed to me that Allan was defining “higher Self” as a consciousness that still retained individuality and an awareness of X, Y, and Z.
While X, Y, Z might be wisdom that’s usually beyond me, this wisdom still falls short of what I regard as the true Self.
So, the channeling bothered me a bit.
This discrepancy in understanding of the Self is an issue I’ve continually wrestled with regarding my Taoist practice.
Now, I love my practice and am most grateful to have found it.
It has been immensely healing, beneficial, saved my bippy, and also fascinating.
But, Taoism has shamanic roots.
Because of this, there can be some pretty wild aspects to the practice.
We simply call this “moving energy.”
The old Taoists were masters of subtle energy.
They are the ones who discovered acupuncture meridians.
One way my friends and I cultivate the flow of subtle energy is through a practice we call “guided movements.”
Other traditions refer to this as “spontaneous qigong.”
And now, through the marvel of the internet, I discover that YouTube has videos in which traditions that feel Vedantic rather than Taoists display similar phenomena.
Here it’s called shaktipat, spontaneous kyrias and mudras, or more simply, kundalini.
What concerns me is when channeling and spontaneous movements are mistaken for the goal, rather than the means, of spiritual cultivation.
That concern got stirred up on Thursday.
My heart is set upon enlightenment.
My Taoists teachers down play this as a goal.
Instead, they emphasize, becoming “a good human being,” a lofty proposition in and of itself, and arguably more difficult than Awakening.
But, as I said, my heart is set elsewhere.
So, let me cut to the next scene of that Thursday night.
Mary and I are in her car and headed home, the traffic going by in a stream of lights, red and white currents in an ocean of black night..
I’ve already asked what she thought about the channeling and am fingering a box of CDs I had to move out of the way when I climbed into the car.
Mary kind of begs my question and starts in on what she likes about Deepka Chopra’s CDs.
“He’s saying that you can think about the space that fills a room as being like the Self.”
She then makes this huge, unstated comment:
The walls of the room may come and go, as did her son, Charlie.
But, the Self that was Charlie, the Self that abided in the room that we called Charlie – that Self is immortal, even while Charlie is forever gone.
And with these unstated implications something began dropping through me.
Something, indescribable moved. Down, down, down. In and through.
What was this?
I thought I ought to melt into a flood of tears in lieu of adequate speech.
But, I had no tears.
I could only say, “I am so glad you see.”
It seemed so long that a friend had understood… all the way down.
Somewhat else understood the love and longing that I feel for something beyond words.
It was if I have been haunted by the unspoken.
And it’s why some words have jumped out at me as I come across them on the internet.
Like Kate, writing of a woman in her fifties staring over in a new place:
Suddenly, I’m beginning to ‘see’ into the spaces in between things, into the interstices…it’s as if the surfaces of trees and bushes and dirt roads and stones and fences recede, or change in some way… so that the spaces they’d occupied stand out.
Everything for a moment is changed, as if reality has not fallen away but become more real.
Yes, you could put it that way.
The space within the interstices, where reality becomes more real.
Or there were these words in a poem by Pincushion:
Can you hear
The space between spaces
It calls to me…
The space between spaces
Overflows-
My heart cannot contain
It aches –
The space between spaces
Is…
Still
still
still
And that was what washed through me.
The internet’s anonymity almost seems most fitting.
Can you hear the space?
Pinchusion knows you can, as the kundalini dances.
Nothingness Itself longs for it’s Self.
And the route of the returning home is through my body.
Our bodies are the channels,
Words and tears and mudras the rivulets.
I see that now as Nothing haunts me.
(I've included many links here. Please take them as illustrating my point that Qigong and Kundalini can stir energy in similar ways. I am not in any way endorsing any particular teacher or practice. I don't know any of the teachers in the YouTube videos, nor do I know the writers describing spontaneous Qigong and kriyas. However, I do agree with alot of what they say.)
Thursday, July 24, 2008
When Everything Stops Working
Once we have seen beyond the veil, unless the illusion of me completely gives up all at once (which is very rare), the journey from that point on is very much about the complete dissolving of the remnants of personal will. Cause it’s the personal will that will go, “I want that experience back!”
And the Truth will say, “You have no power to get it back!”…
Oh you may be able to do it for awhile and some of you have. You learn what I call the spiritual chiropractic tricks of the trade. You heard a phrase and it kind of cracks your consciousness into clarity. And so you say that phrase to yourself every time you get into a state of disharmony or illusion.
And it works for a while…
And then it doesn’t work and you find some other trick of the trade, a little spiritual chiropractic-like adjustment. And they work and they bring clarity back into place. But over time everybody inextricably gets to the same place. As long as they work, great! Use them.
But I guarantee you the time will come when one by one they stop working, until eventually nothing works – nothing…
And then you encounter the total futility of any vestige of personal will… and in that is the invitation for total, spontaneous surrender of the whole thing… a total abandoning of self altogether.
Adyashanti, at the Omega Institute, July, 2007.
I have been thinking of these words the past few weeks, as things seem to be working less and less. But, I couldn’t recall just where I’d heard them. Then last night, quite by accident I came across them on a CD.
Oh, gee.
I edited out Adya’s comment at the end. As we all sat there kind of with our mouths open he added, “This is good news. Right?”
Oh or Ugh is how I feel.
Perhaps I’m creeping towards this point.
My adjustment of late has been repeatedly “letting go.”
Pick up the worry, the judgment, the pain, see it in my hands and then just let it go.
The mind complains even as the previous problem plops there on the ground.
And so I drop the complaint on top of that.
I have assumed I’m practicing some variety of surrender.
Then I heard Adya explain surrender is not something that we do it is what we are.
“I am surrender.”
… well, I’ve not yet seen that.
I am Silence, I am Unbounded, I am Nothing even.
But, Surrender?
That’s a verb.
Yesterday, I also came across this poem by Roethke.
I had never read it before and it left me stunned, as “Jesus!” escaped softly from my lips there in the lab.
It kind of fits with the hard, good news of Adya’s teaching.
But the language takes you to another level.
In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke
And the Truth will say, “You have no power to get it back!”…
Oh you may be able to do it for awhile and some of you have. You learn what I call the spiritual chiropractic tricks of the trade. You heard a phrase and it kind of cracks your consciousness into clarity. And so you say that phrase to yourself every time you get into a state of disharmony or illusion.
And it works for a while…
And then it doesn’t work and you find some other trick of the trade, a little spiritual chiropractic-like adjustment. And they work and they bring clarity back into place. But over time everybody inextricably gets to the same place. As long as they work, great! Use them.
But I guarantee you the time will come when one by one they stop working, until eventually nothing works – nothing…
And then you encounter the total futility of any vestige of personal will… and in that is the invitation for total, spontaneous surrender of the whole thing… a total abandoning of self altogether.
Adyashanti, at the Omega Institute, July, 2007.
I have been thinking of these words the past few weeks, as things seem to be working less and less. But, I couldn’t recall just where I’d heard them. Then last night, quite by accident I came across them on a CD.
Oh, gee.
I edited out Adya’s comment at the end. As we all sat there kind of with our mouths open he added, “This is good news. Right?”
Oh or Ugh is how I feel.
Perhaps I’m creeping towards this point.
My adjustment of late has been repeatedly “letting go.”
Pick up the worry, the judgment, the pain, see it in my hands and then just let it go.
The mind complains even as the previous problem plops there on the ground.
And so I drop the complaint on top of that.
I have assumed I’m practicing some variety of surrender.
Then I heard Adya explain surrender is not something that we do it is what we are.
“I am surrender.”
… well, I’ve not yet seen that.
I am Silence, I am Unbounded, I am Nothing even.
But, Surrender?
That’s a verb.
Yesterday, I also came across this poem by Roethke.
I had never read it before and it left me stunned, as “Jesus!” escaped softly from my lips there in the lab.
It kind of fits with the hard, good news of Adya’s teaching.
But the language takes you to another level.
In a Dark Time
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.
A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.
Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.
Theodore Roethke
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
What Was it Pogo Said?
We have met the enemy and he is us.
Pogo
Last week, I submitted the painting you see here to qarrtisluni for their issue on “Transformation.”
I explained that the painting is based upon a photograph my grandfather took in 1915.
(He was a student at Virginia Polytechnic and these are his fellow students in the snow.)
All I did was add a bit of asemic calligraphy and stamped a couple chops.
I also attempted to explain how the inking transformed the image.
The transformation simply amazed me.
Before I set my brush upon the picture,
I never knew that Virginia contained Asia within its energy.
But there before my eyes, I saw the Cadets of grandfather’s world,
Just Like That,
become “Soldiers of the Sun.”
Just Like That,
Western hero became Asian warrior.
I called the painting, “Transformation as a Just So Story”
because I didn’t believe such transformations could ultimately be True.
Really True, I meant.
The editors quickly declined with a polite, “No, thank you.”
I think perhaps they wanted transformations that were Real beyond dispute:
water into ice,
youth into old age.
In short, they were looking for the transformations that happen everyday.
I was addressing something of a different sort.
I was talking about the Other transformation that happens everyday,
but it is not of Nature, but rather, Man.
Everyday our minds take the One and break it into pieces.
Everyday we turn This into That.
I was talking about the transformation pulled off by Maya – that most skillful of Illusionists.
The unreal really happens everyday.
We take our fellow human beings and turn them into other and often enemy.
And we do it Just Like That,
just as easy as the squiggle of a paintbrush.
My calligraphy wasn’t even words. It was asemic and thus by definition without semantics.
Yet, obviously, below the words meaning got conveyed.
How else could I ever make warriors out of boys playing in the snow?
I have been dancing round here for a while now,
writing about labeling, and Dick and Jane, and taking life “simply as it is.”
Now, perhaps we’re getting to practical applications for what so often seems nothing short of the self indulgent ramblings of “Absorbed-in-Self.Com.”
Anyway.
A couple days went by.
Mom sent me this email.
It was a long editorial by Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine.
Tikkun translates as “to heal, repair, and transform the world.”
Rabbi Lerner was describing his experience at the World Conference on Dialogue convened by the King of Saudi Arabia, July 16-18 in Madrid, Spain.
God's will, praise be to Him, was that people should differ in their faiths.
If the Almighty had so desired, all mankind would have shared the same religion. We are meeting today to affirm that the religions that God Almighty desired for the happiness of man, should be a means to ensure that happiness.
King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud
Now, Rabbi Lerner is no fan of the King,
and I too am pretty skeptical of the King and his government.
Still, the conference brought together representatives of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism and Confucianism.
And some of Rabbi Lerner’s points really got me thinking:
… this didn't sound like the King I had come to expect from Western media.
This was obviously a new direction being articulated by the King of Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it was not just being articulated for a Western audience.
The King had convened a similar meeting of Islamic scholars and thinkers in Saudi Arabia six weeks before…
what the King of Saudi Arabia was doing was …of historic significance….
[I] find myself amazed at the humanity, intelligence, and shared commitment to rationality among all these leaders of the Saudi regime.
NO, I'm not giving up my skepticism, and no, I have not forgotten the barbarism…
I see the fundamental decency of some who are engaged in an effort to "reform from within," and am reminded once again of how ridiculous it is to talk about a whole society as though it represented a single perspective or shared a single worldview….
[T]his conference is a front page story in most of the world,
but is being largely ignored in the US media
who were notably absent from the hundreds of media covering this event.
This is a willed ignorance about the world…
What was also clear to me in this conversation was that these very enlightened Saudis had NEVER met or been in a conversation with Jews who held progressive values and took those values seriously.
For them, it was an exciting revelation that there were Jews who were both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, who could hold both narratives as having elements of truth and elements of goodness...
They too had fallen for the media distortions…
They too had fallen for that squiggle of the brush that can transform,
-Just Like That-
the Virginia boys of the First War into the Kamakazi of the Second War.
And Rabbi Lerner wrote of those who are now calling for a Fourth War…
With sincere apologies for my over simplifications.
To really get a feel of the intricate and insane swirlings that go on upon the surface politic:
You can find Rabbi Lerner’s complete comments here (a site organized under the auspices of Deepka Chopra).
You can find the Network of Spiritual Progressive here.
NPR’s brief comments are here. (It’s true the story was largely ignored. I had not heard a word until I got Mom’s email.)
And the press release of the Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington is here. (Well, actually back there. Ain't illusion grand?)
Namaste.
Sunday, July 20, 2008
With Apologies to Dick and Jane
See things for what they are… thoughts for thoughts and feelings for feelings and sensations for sensations.
Suzanne Segal, The Awakening West.
As soon as I posted my last entry regarding Dick and Jane, I regretted that someone might take it as a criticism of reading. That was not my intention.
I was simply trying to share what seemed to me a new way of approaching the whole idea of accepting Life as it is.
While perhaps that wasn’t very apparent, I hadn’t intended any further explanation or apology. But, then I came across a marvelous interview with Suzanne Segal that originally appeared in The Awakening West.
Suzanne addresses the points I was dancing around in a much more direct fashion – and you’re getting it from the Infinite's mouth, which certainly beats my twisted-sister brain.
So, I thought I’d exerpt a portion here.
JLW refers to John Lumiere-Wins, the co-author of The Awakening West. He began by asking Suzanne how she saw herself? He asked, “Who are you?”
SUZANNE: …There is only one answer that I can give you. I am the Infinite--no personal reference point--the substance of everything; I am the Vastness that is everyone and everything. And, I must add here, never for a moment does the awareness of that Infinite substance that is everything ever move out of the foreground of awareness whether there is waking, dreaming or sleeping states of consciousness occurring in the circuitry [of the mind-body].
…I have tended not to call this enlightenment and to call it only the "naturally occurring human state," because this is who everyone is. The most obvious thing to this view of the Vastness is that it is who everyone is. And so to call IT something like "enlightenment" or "awakening" - Swell, maybe.
The Infinite does become something that is forefront in the awareness, so I guess you could call it a "waking up" to That. But it is not like you become something else once you see That. It is who you are. It is always who you have been. So, it is the seeing of what you have always been.
JLW: …What can one do in order to have this experience?
SUZANNE: These "doing" questions are the ones that I have wanted to address the most, particularly in this Western culture which is so strongly based on doing in order to accomplish something.
From the point of view of the Vastness, doing something is slightly absurd. First of all, who would be doing the doing? And secondly, That which is doing has always been doing, and will spontaneously continue to do.
The only answer the Vastness has been able to come up with in terms of anything resembling an answer to this question would be to see things for what they are.
... It sees thoughts for thoughts and feelings for feelings and sensations for sensations. There is never a desire or request that anything be anything but what it is. The Vastness knows that everything is there just as it is, so the desire for something to go away, or be something different doesn't occur.
Let me get real specific in terms of what we were talking about.
A few minutes before we started taping, we spoke about the "I" construct that passes itself off as who you are, as your reference point. From the view of the Infinite, of the Vastness, that construct is seen for what it is--a construct, an idea. And an idea can only be what it is; it can only be an idea.
When an idea is seen for what it is, there is a way that it empties itself of what it appeared to be full of--some defining determinant of who you are.
And when the perception is emptied and seen as what it is--just a concept, a construct, an idea--it ceases to act as any sort of compelling screening of this Infinite Presence which you actually are...
JLW: There is a shift in identity though, or a dropping of this "I" construct. …Something happened for you.
SUZANNE: Something happens. It seems like most of this occurs within the mind. In the Western culture, which I am most familiar with, the mind is trained to adopt a personal construct as the reference point.
It just believes that there is a personal doer.
It's made to believe that you have to "make something of yourself."
The Western mind believes that you have to be a certain way and you have to figure out how your life is going to go in order for it to be successful, in order for it to happen the way you want it to. Everything that you hear in the culture, in Western psychology in particular, is all based on the assumption that there is a personal doer that has to be the best one it could possibly be. So there is all this work that is brought to bear on it...
JLW: And instead of trying to change the mind, your recommendation is to just notice, "Oh, it's the mind." Something like this?
SUZANNE: That is what the mind says, "Oh, it's the mind."
The view of the eyes of the Vastness is hard to describe as it is brought to bear on anything because it isn't perceived through the mind.
And it isn't perceived through the perceptual apparatus of the circuitry.
The view of the Vastness, the eyes of the Vastness, exist within the Vastness Itself.
It has its own sense organ that permeates it and exists at every point in it that is always seeing things for being what they are and seeing Itself for what it is.
And yet, it does seem that what happened when I was standing at that bus stop included the mind, and its circuitry became a participating portion of that sense organ of the Vastness.
It's like the mind and circuitry joined into the sphere of the Vastness.
I’ve never heard it put exactly like this. The interview is well worth reading.
Suzanne Segal, The Awakening West.
As soon as I posted my last entry regarding Dick and Jane, I regretted that someone might take it as a criticism of reading. That was not my intention.
I was simply trying to share what seemed to me a new way of approaching the whole idea of accepting Life as it is.
While perhaps that wasn’t very apparent, I hadn’t intended any further explanation or apology. But, then I came across a marvelous interview with Suzanne Segal that originally appeared in The Awakening West.
Suzanne addresses the points I was dancing around in a much more direct fashion – and you’re getting it from the Infinite's mouth, which certainly beats my twisted-sister brain.
So, I thought I’d exerpt a portion here.
JLW refers to John Lumiere-Wins, the co-author of The Awakening West. He began by asking Suzanne how she saw herself? He asked, “Who are you?”
SUZANNE: …There is only one answer that I can give you. I am the Infinite--no personal reference point--the substance of everything; I am the Vastness that is everyone and everything. And, I must add here, never for a moment does the awareness of that Infinite substance that is everything ever move out of the foreground of awareness whether there is waking, dreaming or sleeping states of consciousness occurring in the circuitry [of the mind-body].
…I have tended not to call this enlightenment and to call it only the "naturally occurring human state," because this is who everyone is. The most obvious thing to this view of the Vastness is that it is who everyone is. And so to call IT something like "enlightenment" or "awakening" - Swell, maybe.
The Infinite does become something that is forefront in the awareness, so I guess you could call it a "waking up" to That. But it is not like you become something else once you see That. It is who you are. It is always who you have been. So, it is the seeing of what you have always been.
JLW: …What can one do in order to have this experience?
SUZANNE: These "doing" questions are the ones that I have wanted to address the most, particularly in this Western culture which is so strongly based on doing in order to accomplish something.
From the point of view of the Vastness, doing something is slightly absurd. First of all, who would be doing the doing? And secondly, That which is doing has always been doing, and will spontaneously continue to do.
The only answer the Vastness has been able to come up with in terms of anything resembling an answer to this question would be to see things for what they are.
... It sees thoughts for thoughts and feelings for feelings and sensations for sensations. There is never a desire or request that anything be anything but what it is. The Vastness knows that everything is there just as it is, so the desire for something to go away, or be something different doesn't occur.
Let me get real specific in terms of what we were talking about.
A few minutes before we started taping, we spoke about the "I" construct that passes itself off as who you are, as your reference point. From the view of the Infinite, of the Vastness, that construct is seen for what it is--a construct, an idea. And an idea can only be what it is; it can only be an idea.
When an idea is seen for what it is, there is a way that it empties itself of what it appeared to be full of--some defining determinant of who you are.
And when the perception is emptied and seen as what it is--just a concept, a construct, an idea--it ceases to act as any sort of compelling screening of this Infinite Presence which you actually are...
JLW: There is a shift in identity though, or a dropping of this "I" construct. …Something happened for you.
SUZANNE: Something happens. It seems like most of this occurs within the mind. In the Western culture, which I am most familiar with, the mind is trained to adopt a personal construct as the reference point.
It just believes that there is a personal doer.
It's made to believe that you have to "make something of yourself."
The Western mind believes that you have to be a certain way and you have to figure out how your life is going to go in order for it to be successful, in order for it to happen the way you want it to. Everything that you hear in the culture, in Western psychology in particular, is all based on the assumption that there is a personal doer that has to be the best one it could possibly be. So there is all this work that is brought to bear on it...
JLW: And instead of trying to change the mind, your recommendation is to just notice, "Oh, it's the mind." Something like this?
SUZANNE: That is what the mind says, "Oh, it's the mind."
The view of the eyes of the Vastness is hard to describe as it is brought to bear on anything because it isn't perceived through the mind.
And it isn't perceived through the perceptual apparatus of the circuitry.
The view of the Vastness, the eyes of the Vastness, exist within the Vastness Itself.
It has its own sense organ that permeates it and exists at every point in it that is always seeing things for being what they are and seeing Itself for what it is.
And yet, it does seem that what happened when I was standing at that bus stop included the mind, and its circuitry became a participating portion of that sense organ of the Vastness.
It's like the mind and circuitry joined into the sphere of the Vastness.
I’ve never heard it put exactly like this. The interview is well worth reading.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
More Billy Collins, Now: Regarding Dick and Jane
When you can allow this moment to be as it is without needing to label it,
wanting it to be different than what it is,
you open to the vast power that is concealed in the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle, an interview with Mary O’Malley.
Even as a six year old, I was just a bit bored by the plot of these kids’ lives.
Though I did love Spot and the redness of the ball,
and “Look! Look!” fairly spilled with possibilities…
couldn’t we get on with things?
Let the adventure begin, for god’s sake!
Perhaps I shouldn’t blame plot
so much as the pace.
I was running to the future.
I could see it coming and it would be GREAT!
The Future clearly was much better than Now
right here in my hands.
Once, I told Pop I just so wished the next two weeks would go
and then we could have Christmas.
He looked at me with great seriousness.
“Never wish your life away,” and I was appalled.
Apparently, I had made a grievous error.
But, I had simply said I wanted Christmas to be here.
I didn’t want to be Here. I wanted to be There.
How old was I? Nine?
To welcome whatever arises in this moment is the ultimate spiritual practice.
If you practice just this one thing, you won't need to read any more books
or learn any other meditation techniques…
Eckhart Tolle
Oh man. So here is my practice.
This is my life
right now.
And perhaps, has always been.
First Reader
I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn…
the boy and girl who begin fiction…
It was always Saturday and he and she
were always pointing at something and shouting,
“Look!” pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father
as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,
waving at aproned mother framed in the kitchen doorway,
pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.
They wanted us to look but we had looked already
and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.
We had seen the dog, walked, watered and fed the animal,
and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking
permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.
Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,
we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.
Billy Collins
“forgetting how to look, learning how to read”
The words took me by surprise.
They landed hard and tightened in my throat.
They filled my eyes with tears.
The poet sees exactly how we’re robbed,
for the poet must hold on to the goods.
He must retain the ability to truly see,
to stay with the purity of “Look”
even as the label is applied.
The poet remains in Stillness, firmly rooted in the Now,
even as the mind spins out into the future
and the infinite permutations of the clicking alphabet.
It is as if the words are secondary.
It is the energy that comes with the words - or rather the stillness beneath the words - that is the greatest teaching.
Eckhart Tolle, interview with Mary O'Malley
But, they never taught us that.
They helped us to forget what we knew all along.
They helped us to move on into the Fiction and the Noise.
wanting it to be different than what it is,
you open to the vast power that is concealed in the present moment.
Eckhart Tolle, an interview with Mary O’Malley.
Even as a six year old, I was just a bit bored by the plot of these kids’ lives.
Though I did love Spot and the redness of the ball,
and “Look! Look!” fairly spilled with possibilities…
couldn’t we get on with things?
Let the adventure begin, for god’s sake!
Perhaps I shouldn’t blame plot
so much as the pace.
I was running to the future.
I could see it coming and it would be GREAT!
The Future clearly was much better than Now
right here in my hands.
Once, I told Pop I just so wished the next two weeks would go
and then we could have Christmas.
He looked at me with great seriousness.
“Never wish your life away,” and I was appalled.
Apparently, I had made a grievous error.
But, I had simply said I wanted Christmas to be here.
I didn’t want to be Here. I wanted to be There.
How old was I? Nine?
To welcome whatever arises in this moment is the ultimate spiritual practice.
If you practice just this one thing, you won't need to read any more books
or learn any other meditation techniques…
Eckhart Tolle
Oh man. So here is my practice.
This is my life
right now.
And perhaps, has always been.
First Reader
I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn…
the boy and girl who begin fiction…
It was always Saturday and he and she
were always pointing at something and shouting,
“Look!” pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father
as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,
waving at aproned mother framed in the kitchen doorway,
pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.
They wanted us to look but we had looked already
and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.
We had seen the dog, walked, watered and fed the animal,
and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking
permutations of the alphabet’s small and capital letters.
Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,
we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.
Billy Collins
“forgetting how to look, learning how to read”
The words took me by surprise.
They landed hard and tightened in my throat.
They filled my eyes with tears.
The poet sees exactly how we’re robbed,
for the poet must hold on to the goods.
He must retain the ability to truly see,
to stay with the purity of “Look”
even as the label is applied.
The poet remains in Stillness, firmly rooted in the Now,
even as the mind spins out into the future
and the infinite permutations of the clicking alphabet.
It is as if the words are secondary.
It is the energy that comes with the words - or rather the stillness beneath the words - that is the greatest teaching.
Eckhart Tolle, interview with Mary O'Malley
But, they never taught us that.
They helped us to forget what we knew all along.
They helped us to move on into the Fiction and the Noise.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Some Thoughts to Chew On
The essence of philosophy is that a man should so live that his happiness shall depend as little as possible on external things.
Epictetus (first century A.D.)
I came across this quote and it captures the exact point I have been debating of late in my mind:
How much of my happiness should I structure by my life “external” as opposed to turning within. I mean, even Eckhart Tolle speaks of the enlightened person, being a singular incarnation, still feeling the lack, the imbalance of complete Yin and Yang.
I.E. we need People in our life!
But, Tolle says the lack will be felt “only on the surface.”
Hummmm. Epictetus includes that caveat, “as little as possible.” I think that’s important and I’ve been overlooking it.
Here, is a poem by Billy Collins. Not the one I was looking for, but it will do just fine.
I Ask You
What scene would I want to be enveloped in
more than this one,
an ordinary night at the kitchen table,
floral wallpaper pressing in,
white cabinets full of glass,
the telephone silent,
a pen tilted back in my hand?
It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside—
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.
But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.
No, it's all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles—
each a different height—
are singing in perfect harmony.
So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt—
frog at the edge of a pond—
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
To me, Collins seems quite able to draw upon his own internal resources for his happiness. But, he also lives with a partner and a dog.
I have been sitting on my back deck these days, thinking of a river in the wilds,
wishing that I might camp at least one more time for a week in a place where the only other human light comes from a mile or so across the water in the night,
a place where loon and moose and otter are my only companions.
But, I am not up to the solo paddle.
There seems no way to get there anymore.
Then, I look up into the tree tops of my backyard and try to notice exactly what is going on up there. Isn’t the essence of the distant river also here?
Billy Collins:
The interesting part of writing for me is finding a point in a poem that allows me to slip into another dimension. Usually, that's moving from a literal plane to a completely hypothetical one. It's the hypothetical, I think, that makes us human.
Hummm, the hypothetical? Seems to me I might call it the transcendent.
Literal to hypothetical, concrete to abstract, Relative to Absolute.
It’s all external to internal,
the Ephemeral and Eternal juxtaposed.
Poetry has been saying that for a few thousand years.
Seize the day.
Do it now.
The sense behind that imperative is that we don't have an unlimited number of days.
Television says the same thing all the time—'Everything's going to be OK.' Contemporary novels are saying, 'Things are not OK.'
What poetry is saying is 'Life is beautiful but you're going to die.'
So much of poetry asks us to look at life from the perspective that death enhances life.
Billy Collins
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
A Matter of Balance
… mental labels obscure to you the depth that there is
and the aliveness
and the sacredness
that there is in every living thing.
And ‘living thing’ includes what the mind calls dead things.
Living things includes everything because everything is alive,
even the stone.
If you looked into the stone you could see that there's an intense aliveness there. …It looks to us as impenetrable, solid, and dead but its not.
So no matter whether we conventionally call it a living thing,
realize that whatever you perceive is alive.
Eckhart Tolle, transcript from Omega Retreat
And often as I have my breakfast on the back deck, and look into the tree tops as the rising sun peaks through, I remember that Tolle also described the morning light as Love the day that he awakened.
Light is Love.
It makes me smile, though I don’t really see it.
Sometimes though, I’m ready to just accept what someone else reports.
And so it goes with rocks.
I mentioned, last time, that my summer fun is expanding my flagstone patio
(A.K.A. an attempt to cut down on the mud and dust and dirt Bennie carries into the house.)
But, too, I want to stack some cairns and so have gone online to learn something about this new endeavor.
Googling so often brings delight.
And so it goes with rocks:
Everything, rocks and other solid objects or
anything else, have their inua (inner person).
Anything that is made or created has an inua.
Hubert Amarualik, Inuit elder
And then there were these photos of rather incredible balancing acts,
Like the BeBalance Gallery.
And the reports of what the “balancers” experience as they perform their feats:
There is nothing complicated about balancing a rock upon another.
It is child’s play.
Yet, just as a simple rock can change into something of grace and beauty upon being balanced, I believe the same type of transformations happens to the person doing the balancing.
Perhaps it is in the rapt attention and focus that is required to do a challenging balance.
Whatever the cause, invariably I come away from a session of balancing rock with a sense of equanimity,
a feeling of balance that does not leave, even when a rock, so delicately poised,
slips away at the slightest breeze.
It is just part of the process.
However, I speak only from my own experience.
Perhaps you would like to see for yourself. Anyone can do it.
As I said, it is child’s play.
Jim Morlock
I also came by this fellow, who probably doesn’t call himself a Taoist, but certainly might qualify:
In working with stone I have come to realize that even the most seemingly inanimate aspects of nature are very much alive with energy.
It's been an amazing realization.
One that has been validated time and again.
John Knight
Well, my rocks arrived last Thursday.
All 4,454 pounds of them are here on pallets, around the side of the house,
waiting for me to carry them into the backyard.
I moved six the first evening – and then didn’t sleep a wink all night as an electric jolt shot down my left leg about every thirty seconds.
I’m going to have to take this whole project very slowly.
Go stack rocks.
Be patient.
Look down at what is there.
Wait for the first one to call you. It will.
Look at what you've done with the first one and then look for its mate.
Repeat.
Go stack rocks.
Bigger rocks are easier, but work with what you can hold at head level for five minutes.
There is a vertical line.
See it. Put weight there.
Be patient.
Go stack rocks.
Buddy Smith
In Japan, Tibet, and South Korea stones are stacked as the embodiment of prayer.
In Canada and Alaska, stones were used to build free-standing totemic figures called inukshuk.
Just last week, a fellow down the block added one to his front yard.
I’m so glad he did.
It proved to me I needn’t do that. I am searching for something a bit rounder, The Cairn and Buddha Belly.
It is almost mystical… to feel a sudden realization of an
improbable equilibrium.
The most unexpected alliances can be
achieved, and as you gently move the stone on top you can somehow
sense whether the two can make a happy alliance.
You try one way,
then another,
you feel it might just be possible,
then the most tiny of adjustments and it suddenly locks into place.
You begin to set fresh challenges for yourself,
and look for bigger and more improbable
stones to try…
Rock balancers speak of this “click” when two stones suddenly align and lock.
Somehow, I know that click. It’s been replaying in my mind the whole past week.
Click. Not unlike a lock and load…
Once, I received a birthday card, or was it a Valentine, with the caption:
Two coyotes lost in the moment as love returns to the Land of the Rock Balancing Mountains.
It seemed so fitting of our lives that we framed it and hung it in the bath for years.
And again, I have to smile.
Rock balancing mountains and lifetimes…
The whole thing is so ephemeral, and yet it has an appearance of permanence.
Sometimes the equilibrium is so fine that if it has been achieved
when one of the stones has still been wet from the stream,
it can be lost as the sun dries out the stone,
and you hear one that ten minutes ago was standing quite firm
suddenly tumble into the water again.
The only thing for certain is that this unique display is transitory.
A balancer from Barga, Italy.
and the aliveness
and the sacredness
that there is in every living thing.
And ‘living thing’ includes what the mind calls dead things.
Living things includes everything because everything is alive,
even the stone.
If you looked into the stone you could see that there's an intense aliveness there. …It looks to us as impenetrable, solid, and dead but its not.
So no matter whether we conventionally call it a living thing,
realize that whatever you perceive is alive.
Eckhart Tolle, transcript from Omega Retreat
And often as I have my breakfast on the back deck, and look into the tree tops as the rising sun peaks through, I remember that Tolle also described the morning light as Love the day that he awakened.
Light is Love.
It makes me smile, though I don’t really see it.
Sometimes though, I’m ready to just accept what someone else reports.
And so it goes with rocks.
I mentioned, last time, that my summer fun is expanding my flagstone patio
(A.K.A. an attempt to cut down on the mud and dust and dirt Bennie carries into the house.)
But, too, I want to stack some cairns and so have gone online to learn something about this new endeavor.
Googling so often brings delight.
And so it goes with rocks:
Everything, rocks and other solid objects or
anything else, have their inua (inner person).
Anything that is made or created has an inua.
Hubert Amarualik, Inuit elder
And then there were these photos of rather incredible balancing acts,
Like the BeBalance Gallery.
And the reports of what the “balancers” experience as they perform their feats:
There is nothing complicated about balancing a rock upon another.
It is child’s play.
Yet, just as a simple rock can change into something of grace and beauty upon being balanced, I believe the same type of transformations happens to the person doing the balancing.
Perhaps it is in the rapt attention and focus that is required to do a challenging balance.
Whatever the cause, invariably I come away from a session of balancing rock with a sense of equanimity,
a feeling of balance that does not leave, even when a rock, so delicately poised,
slips away at the slightest breeze.
It is just part of the process.
However, I speak only from my own experience.
Perhaps you would like to see for yourself. Anyone can do it.
As I said, it is child’s play.
Jim Morlock
I also came by this fellow, who probably doesn’t call himself a Taoist, but certainly might qualify:
In working with stone I have come to realize that even the most seemingly inanimate aspects of nature are very much alive with energy.
It's been an amazing realization.
One that has been validated time and again.
John Knight
Well, my rocks arrived last Thursday.
All 4,454 pounds of them are here on pallets, around the side of the house,
waiting for me to carry them into the backyard.
I moved six the first evening – and then didn’t sleep a wink all night as an electric jolt shot down my left leg about every thirty seconds.
I’m going to have to take this whole project very slowly.
Go stack rocks.
Be patient.
Look down at what is there.
Wait for the first one to call you. It will.
Look at what you've done with the first one and then look for its mate.
Repeat.
Go stack rocks.
Bigger rocks are easier, but work with what you can hold at head level for five minutes.
There is a vertical line.
See it. Put weight there.
Be patient.
Go stack rocks.
Buddy Smith
In Japan, Tibet, and South Korea stones are stacked as the embodiment of prayer.
In Canada and Alaska, stones were used to build free-standing totemic figures called inukshuk.
Just last week, a fellow down the block added one to his front yard.
I’m so glad he did.
It proved to me I needn’t do that. I am searching for something a bit rounder, The Cairn and Buddha Belly.
It is almost mystical… to feel a sudden realization of an
improbable equilibrium.
The most unexpected alliances can be
achieved, and as you gently move the stone on top you can somehow
sense whether the two can make a happy alliance.
You try one way,
then another,
you feel it might just be possible,
then the most tiny of adjustments and it suddenly locks into place.
You begin to set fresh challenges for yourself,
and look for bigger and more improbable
stones to try…
Rock balancers speak of this “click” when two stones suddenly align and lock.
Somehow, I know that click. It’s been replaying in my mind the whole past week.
Click. Not unlike a lock and load…
Once, I received a birthday card, or was it a Valentine, with the caption:
Two coyotes lost in the moment as love returns to the Land of the Rock Balancing Mountains.
It seemed so fitting of our lives that we framed it and hung it in the bath for years.
And again, I have to smile.
Rock balancing mountains and lifetimes…
The whole thing is so ephemeral, and yet it has an appearance of permanence.
Sometimes the equilibrium is so fine that if it has been achieved
when one of the stones has still been wet from the stream,
it can be lost as the sun dries out the stone,
and you hear one that ten minutes ago was standing quite firm
suddenly tumble into the water again.
The only thing for certain is that this unique display is transitory.
A balancer from Barga, Italy.
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