Scene of the day:
A rather tired looking woman in dark surgical scrubs carries her son across six lanes of traffic – she has to make it before the light changes and so she lumbers on. He, meanwhile, looks out over her shoulder at all the cars whizzing by.
He is waving. Waving and smiling from ear to ear! Hello! Hello! To everyone.
Across to sidewalk she sets him down and pulls his shirt smooth with abrupt jerks that do not register.
Even now, he is looking back over his shoulder, eyes wide and seeking to return.
He still smiles. His hand, down by his side, is still open in the remains of wave.
Quote of the dawn:
There are many versions of realized death short of physically dying…there are also the quiet deaths.
How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba?
Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child,
between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust.
Feel your mature fondness for who you once were, and the recurrent need to protect innocence wherever you might find it.
The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is the most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.
… As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death, a little part of us is dying so that another part can live.
Matthew Sanford, The Body’s Grace… which is not so much about dying as it is about living without separation. Which brings me to…
Song of the Day; which came on the radio right after I saw the woman and the boy:
There's a reason why when my son (who's six) is crying, he needs a hug.
It's not just that he needs my love.
He needs boundary around his experience.
He needs to know that the pain is contained and can be housed, and it won't be limiting his whole being… he gets a hug and, mmm, he drops into his body.
And when you drop into your body, paradoxically, typically pain is less.
Matthew Sanford, The Body’s Grace
Friday, June 11, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Anthony de Mello: Three stories
A friend recently tipped me onto Father Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit priest and psychotherapist, born in Mumbai, India.
Yes, he was an Indian Catholic.
While I’ve broken the de Mello’s words into three stories here, they are actually an excerpt from the essay, “Losing Yourself to Find Yourself.”
That some of his writings were banned by Pope Benedict (when he was Cardinal Ratzinger) adds poignancy to the final lines of the last story.
One
Suppose somebody walks into my room one day.
I say, "Come right in. May I know who you are?"
And he says, "I am Napoleon."
And I say, "Not the Napoleon . . ."
And he says, "Precisely. Bonaparte, Emperor of France."
"What do you know!" I say, even while I'm thinking to myself, "I better handle this guy with care."
''Sit down, Your Majesty," I say.
He says, "Well, they tell me you're a pretty good spiritual director. I have a spiritual problem. I'm anxious, I'm finding it hard to trust in God. I have my armies in Russia, see, and I'm spending sleepless nights wondering how it's going to turn out."
So I say, "Well, Your Majesty, I could certainly prescribe something for that. What I suggest is that you read chapter 6 of Matthew: "Consider the lilies of the field . . . they neither toil nor spin."
By this point I'm wondering who is crazier, this guy or me.
But I go along with this lunatic.
That's what the wise guru does with you in the beginning.
He goes along with you; he takes your troubles seriously.
He'll wipe a tear or two from your eye.
You're crazy, but you don't know it yet. The time has to come soon when he'll pull the rug out from under your feet and tell you, "Get off it, you're not Napoleon."
In those famous dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena, God is reported to have said to her, "I am He who is; you are she who is not."
Have you ever experienced your is-not-ness?
In the East we have an image for this. It is the image of the dancer and the dance.
God is viewed as the dancer and creation as God's dance.
It isn't as if God is the big dancer and you are the little dancer.
Oh no. You're not a dancer at all.
You are being danced!
Did you ever experience that?
So when the man comes to his senses and realizes that he is not Napoleon, he does not cease to be.
He continues to be, but he suddenly realizes that he is something other than what he thought he was…
Two
How do you change yourself?
There are many things you must understand here, or rather, just one thing that can be expressed in many ways.
Imagine a patient who goes to a doctor and tells him what he is suffering from.
The doctor says, "Very well, I've understood your symptoms. Do you know what I will do? I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbor!"
The patient replies, "Thank you very much, Doctor, that makes me feel much better."
Isn't that absurd?
But that's what we all do.
The person who is asleep always thinks he'll feel better if somebody else changes.
You're suffering because you are asleep, but you're thinking, "How wonderful life would be if somebody else would change; how wonderful life would be if my neighbor changed, my wife changed, my boss changed."
Three
A friend of mine told me that there's an African tribe where capital punishment consists of being ostracized.
If you were kicked out of New York, or wherever you're residing, you wouldn't die.
How is it that the African tribesman died?
Because he partakes of the common stupidity of humanity.
He thinks he will not be able to live if he does not belong.
It's very different from most people, or is it?
He's convinced he needs to belong.
But you don't need to belong to anybody or anything or any group.
You don't even need to be in love. Who told you you do?
What you need is to be free.
What you need is to love.
That's it; that's your nature.
But what you're really telling me is that you want to be desired.
You want to be applauded, to be attractive, to have all the little monkeys running after you.
You're wasting your life.
WAKE UP!
You don't need this. You can be blissfully happy without it.
Your society is not going to be happy to hear this, because you become terrifying when you open your eyes and understand this.
How do you control a person like this?
Yes, he was an Indian Catholic.
While I’ve broken the de Mello’s words into three stories here, they are actually an excerpt from the essay, “Losing Yourself to Find Yourself.”
That some of his writings were banned by Pope Benedict (when he was Cardinal Ratzinger) adds poignancy to the final lines of the last story.
One
Suppose somebody walks into my room one day.
I say, "Come right in. May I know who you are?"
And he says, "I am Napoleon."
And I say, "Not the Napoleon . . ."
And he says, "Precisely. Bonaparte, Emperor of France."
"What do you know!" I say, even while I'm thinking to myself, "I better handle this guy with care."
''Sit down, Your Majesty," I say.
He says, "Well, they tell me you're a pretty good spiritual director. I have a spiritual problem. I'm anxious, I'm finding it hard to trust in God. I have my armies in Russia, see, and I'm spending sleepless nights wondering how it's going to turn out."
So I say, "Well, Your Majesty, I could certainly prescribe something for that. What I suggest is that you read chapter 6 of Matthew: "Consider the lilies of the field . . . they neither toil nor spin."
By this point I'm wondering who is crazier, this guy or me.
But I go along with this lunatic.
That's what the wise guru does with you in the beginning.
He goes along with you; he takes your troubles seriously.
He'll wipe a tear or two from your eye.
You're crazy, but you don't know it yet. The time has to come soon when he'll pull the rug out from under your feet and tell you, "Get off it, you're not Napoleon."
In those famous dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena, God is reported to have said to her, "I am He who is; you are she who is not."
Have you ever experienced your is-not-ness?
In the East we have an image for this. It is the image of the dancer and the dance.
God is viewed as the dancer and creation as God's dance.
It isn't as if God is the big dancer and you are the little dancer.
Oh no. You're not a dancer at all.
You are being danced!
Did you ever experience that?
So when the man comes to his senses and realizes that he is not Napoleon, he does not cease to be.
He continues to be, but he suddenly realizes that he is something other than what he thought he was…
Two
How do you change yourself?
There are many things you must understand here, or rather, just one thing that can be expressed in many ways.
Imagine a patient who goes to a doctor and tells him what he is suffering from.
The doctor says, "Very well, I've understood your symptoms. Do you know what I will do? I will prescribe a medicine for your neighbor!"
The patient replies, "Thank you very much, Doctor, that makes me feel much better."
Isn't that absurd?
But that's what we all do.
The person who is asleep always thinks he'll feel better if somebody else changes.
You're suffering because you are asleep, but you're thinking, "How wonderful life would be if somebody else would change; how wonderful life would be if my neighbor changed, my wife changed, my boss changed."
Three
A friend of mine told me that there's an African tribe where capital punishment consists of being ostracized.
If you were kicked out of New York, or wherever you're residing, you wouldn't die.
How is it that the African tribesman died?
Because he partakes of the common stupidity of humanity.
He thinks he will not be able to live if he does not belong.
It's very different from most people, or is it?
He's convinced he needs to belong.
But you don't need to belong to anybody or anything or any group.
You don't even need to be in love. Who told you you do?
What you need is to be free.
What you need is to love.
That's it; that's your nature.
But what you're really telling me is that you want to be desired.
You want to be applauded, to be attractive, to have all the little monkeys running after you.
You're wasting your life.
WAKE UP!
You don't need this. You can be blissfully happy without it.
Your society is not going to be happy to hear this, because you become terrifying when you open your eyes and understand this.
How do you control a person like this?
Monday, June 07, 2010
Why
I am not devoted to one master.
Still, when I read this story it brought a new understanding that cut me deeply.
T.K. Sundaresa Iyer (T.K.S) met Sri Ramana in 1908 when T.K.S was only a twelve year old boy. Bhagavan, although a full blown Self-Realized sage, was also quite young… One day T.K.S asked his cousin (Krishnamurthy) where he went every day.
Krishnamurthy told him about Ramana and said, “The Lord of the Hill Himself is sitting in human form, why don’t you come with me.” Both of them then climbed the Hill and went to Virupksha cave to visit the Sage.
Now the story in T.K.S.’s own words:
I too climbed the Hill and found Bhagavan sitting on a stone slab, with about 10 devotees around him. Each would sing a song. Bhagavan turned to me and asked, “Well, won’t you sing a song also.” One of Sundramurthy’s songs came to my mind and I sang it. It’s meaning was, “No other support have I, except thy holy feet. By holding on to them, I shall win your grace. Great men sing your praise Oh, Lord. Grant that my tongue may repeat Thy name even when my mind strays.”
“Yes. That is what must be done,” said Bhagavan, and I took it to be his teaching for me. From that time on, I went to see him regularly for several years without missing a day.
One day I wondered why I was visiting him at all. What was the use? There seemed to be no inner advancement. Going up the hill was meaningless toil. I decided to end my visits on the hill.
For one hundred days exactly I did not see Bhagavan. On the hundred and first day I could suffer no longer and I ran to Skandasramam, above Virupaksha Cave. Bhagavan saw me climbing, got up and came forward to meet me. When I fell at his feet, I could not restrain myself and burst into tears. I clung to them and would not get up.
Bhagavan pulled me up and asked: “It is over three months since I saw you. Where were you?” I told him how I thought that seeing him was of no use. “All right,” he said, “maybe it is of no use, so what? You felt the loss, did you not?”
Then I understood that we did not go to him for profit, but because away from him there was no life for us.
Yes. That’s it: away from That there is no life for me.
Still, when I read this story it brought a new understanding that cut me deeply.
T.K. Sundaresa Iyer (T.K.S) met Sri Ramana in 1908 when T.K.S was only a twelve year old boy. Bhagavan, although a full blown Self-Realized sage, was also quite young… One day T.K.S asked his cousin (Krishnamurthy) where he went every day.
Krishnamurthy told him about Ramana and said, “The Lord of the Hill Himself is sitting in human form, why don’t you come with me.” Both of them then climbed the Hill and went to Virupksha cave to visit the Sage.
Now the story in T.K.S.’s own words:
I too climbed the Hill and found Bhagavan sitting on a stone slab, with about 10 devotees around him. Each would sing a song. Bhagavan turned to me and asked, “Well, won’t you sing a song also.” One of Sundramurthy’s songs came to my mind and I sang it. It’s meaning was, “No other support have I, except thy holy feet. By holding on to them, I shall win your grace. Great men sing your praise Oh, Lord. Grant that my tongue may repeat Thy name even when my mind strays.”
“Yes. That is what must be done,” said Bhagavan, and I took it to be his teaching for me. From that time on, I went to see him regularly for several years without missing a day.
One day I wondered why I was visiting him at all. What was the use? There seemed to be no inner advancement. Going up the hill was meaningless toil. I decided to end my visits on the hill.
For one hundred days exactly I did not see Bhagavan. On the hundred and first day I could suffer no longer and I ran to Skandasramam, above Virupaksha Cave. Bhagavan saw me climbing, got up and came forward to meet me. When I fell at his feet, I could not restrain myself and burst into tears. I clung to them and would not get up.
Bhagavan pulled me up and asked: “It is over three months since I saw you. Where were you?” I told him how I thought that seeing him was of no use. “All right,” he said, “maybe it is of no use, so what? You felt the loss, did you not?”
Then I understood that we did not go to him for profit, but because away from him there was no life for us.
Yes. That’s it: away from That there is no life for me.
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
Song of the Day
I was telling a friend recently I have kind of got off-line mentally.
This was not my intention. Rather my belly drove me there – too much stirred up energetically and finally the mind just quit.
My friend had warned me: belly trouble means resistance.
So now, the resistance has stopped… no more brain.
The eyes see. The ears hear. The brain does not make so much a story.
Which brings me to “The Song of the Day,” heard on the radio while driving to work.
It had me dancing in my head. It had me humming along.
It had me chuckling.
I often hear “Song of the Day” while coming to work. I always spare you.
Well, not today.
Hear. See. Do. Share.
The song? … you’ll have to hear.
Stupid? Yes. (Eyes closed may help.)
Revealing my age? Sure!
Enjoyable.
Oh, Yes!
This was not my intention. Rather my belly drove me there – too much stirred up energetically and finally the mind just quit.
My friend had warned me: belly trouble means resistance.
So now, the resistance has stopped… no more brain.
The eyes see. The ears hear. The brain does not make so much a story.
Which brings me to “The Song of the Day,” heard on the radio while driving to work.
It had me dancing in my head. It had me humming along.
It had me chuckling.
I often hear “Song of the Day” while coming to work. I always spare you.
Well, not today.
Hear. See. Do. Share.
The song? … you’ll have to hear.
Stupid? Yes. (Eyes closed may help.)
Revealing my age? Sure!
Enjoyable.
Oh, Yes!
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
The Slow Cook
A complete recognition, maybe the recognition of seeing what’s not true, what’s not you - it can happen in an instant.
[Or] it can be a slow cook.
It happens in different ways, this recognition.
It’s not that the Self or Reality happen - but the recognition of it. The recognition of it can be something of an event, something falls away… a kind of peeling away of like a cataract of illusory identification…
But even if it happens quickly, there’s a slow cook aspect of it that continues.
It seems paradoxical even, but there is a sort of maturity that continues to happen, but against a background of unchanging awareness at the same time… a slow burning away of the noise of identity…
Anyone who are somehow in the taste of this self-experiencing recognize that something is dissolving by itself. And there’s a sense of an eagerness to be out of the way mentally with it.
If you’re hammering at trying to believe something, it doesn’t really work.
It’s a whole move where you find yourself somehow just like if you fall in love.
No one has to remind you to remember your beloved.
I’m comfortable with the word grace in this way. There’s something that you feel compelled to complete… so you go for it.
Mooji, Before I Am, video on Conscious.TV
I transcribed this segment from the video sometime last week, really appreciating the phrase slow cook.
And yes, something is dissolving. That’s another way of describing the flimsy cheesecloth sensation I wrote about.
So, I wanted to hear more.
A slow burning away, doesn’t sound that bad.
But, it doesn’t always feel that good.
Still, I loved the words, There’s something that you feel compelled to complete… so you go for it… just like if you fall in love.
I wouldn't trade this for the world.
Monday, May 10, 2010
Unenlightening Yourself
When a person’s awakening vacillates, he or she often asks me, “How do I stay in the awakened state? That is asking the wrong question… Spirit never asks itself, “How do I stay within myself?” That would be ridiculous. It just makes no sense...
What makes more sense is to ask how you unenlighten yourself.
What is still held on to? What is still confusing? What situations in life can get you to believe things that aren’t true and cause you to go into contradiction, suffering, and separation? What is it specifically that has the power to entice consciousness back into the gravitational field of the dream state? ...
How is it specifically that I’m putting myself back in illusion… even though re-identification is totally spontaneous and it’s not happening to anybody and it’s not anybody’s fault – we still need to investigate how it happens.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World.
As I took up my investigation into “witnessing” I saw clearly that my pattern for many years has been to have a period of intense witnessing during which I was sure consciousness had shifted. Then, after some time, I would begin to doubt the authenticity of both my experience and interpretation.
I would decide, “No, this isn’t witnessing,” but merely something totally out of kilter physically. In essence, I would pathologize the situation. And off I’d go, stewing in that direction. How could I mend my body? Then, hopefully, the gap of witnessing would close and the unreality of creation would feel real once more. And I would stop telling myself a pretty spiritual story when in fact I was “sick.”
But, when I decided to accept that witnessing was a foundation I could count on, a fairly permanent, consistent spiritual experience, and investigate into the nature of the witness, I had to drop the habit of pathologizing.
Not that the habit didn’t try to re-establish itself. But, now I see it as that – simply a habit, a pattern of thought. I also see the power this belief has to immediately unenlighten.
So, I let it go. Dropped it. And guess what:
Our ideas about what’s good and bad and what’s happening to us are TOTALLY conditioned. We prefer soft grace over fierce grace. But soft grace is actually no better than fierce grace. It’s all grace…
If you want it to become stable, as I said, don’t worry about trying to get enlightenment back. Look in the moment, this moment, any moment: How am I unenlightening myself?
If you want to become stabilized in It – That’s how to do it.
“Humm, how am I un-realizing myself right now?”
Cause you can always see that.
And when you see that, the realization reveals itself of its own accord.
Adyashanti, Omega Institute, July, 2007.
Adya was right.
I dropped pathologizing and the witness became “the stick that stirs the funeral pyre [and] is itself consumed by the fire.”
But, this still left the doubt of consistency and permanency in the experience of consciousness. There are varying levels of intensity to the witnessing.
And again, doubt would always enter: “Have I lost it?”
I must have been mistaken. I am not enlightened.
Then, I recalled what “coming out” had been like. Discovering the truth in this instance had seemed a life and death decision. And I agonized for years.
Once I finally found the truth (and it wasn’t a decision- it was a seeing), I went through several days of fearing I would lose my realization if it slipped from my awareness.
So, I tried to hold it in my mind, “I’m gay. I’m gay.”
Well, guess what – sexual orientation doesn’t depend at all upon keeping it in your attention day and night. Which is not to say clearly knowing the reality doesn’t make all the difference in the world! It's just that the reality doesn't depend upon always noticing, "I gay."
Couldn’t awakening and enlightenment be similar?
You have to see and know. But, it needn’t be right there in your face every waking and sleeping moment.
Perhaps the Witness could also come and go in intensity without changing the reality of the situation. Because, whenever I chose to look, to pay attention, there it is unchanged.
I suspected that once again, holding an incorrect belief made me doubt my experience, made me unenlighten myself.
A couple days later I came across these words of Douglas Harding:
[Ramana] said when he was asked whether he was brilliantly awake or alert all the time that sometimes it’s like the treble melody in the piece of music which you attend to; if you’re attending to that music then that’s what you attend to, not to the bass accompaniment. But if the bass accompaniment were to stop you would notice it, and sometimes his experience is more in the bass accompaniment, and sometimes in the treble melody, and therefore there are rhythms of attention.
And the way I put it, is this. I think practice is enormously important indispensable to keep coming back to this. Coming back to it until it’s natural to be natural.
…it’s like my love for Catherine, for instance. For hours and hours, it might be the whole day when I didn’t think of Catherine. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love her anymore. There’s a level in my being where I go on loving her whether I’m celebrating it and spelling it out or not.
The love is going on anyway, and it’s similar with who I really, really, really am. I mean this deep, deep conviction of who I really, really, really am is not an idolatrous being hooked on all the time in being absorbed in that Reality… I’m convinced that it doesn’t have to be raised to consciousness the whole time. To think that it has to be raised to full consciousness the whole time seems to me a species of idolatry.
So, I was right. And Adya was right.
And, one by one, I have been examining how it is I unenlighten myself.
I am seeing what isn’t true.
Each “seeing” bursts a false belief and soothes my mind, my over active, scientific, skeptical, aggitated mind.
So, for most people some version of this is part of the phase of how awakening happens.
You know, awakening is sudden.
Enlightenment is the total harmonization of the Absolute and Relative so that we not only see and realize that the Absolute and Relative are One, but feel it, act it, and behave it on all levels of being.
Adyashanti, Omega Institute, July, 2007. CD 9 Track 6
Adya told me this three years ago. But, I hadn’t really listened.
Friday, May 07, 2010
Witnessing Part 2 or 3 or some such
One way to see through this apparent watcher is to become absorbed into it, understanding that it will eventually collapse of its own accord. Ramana Maharshi referred to the Witness as "the stick that stirs the fire and is eventually consumed by it." When the Witness dissolves, you will find that you have naturally arrived at …the direct apprehension of buddha nature in your own being.
With this in mind, dwelling as the Witness is seen as a transitional step. It could be said to lie halfway … between the object-oriented practices of concentration/insight and the complete surrender to what is, also known as non-duality.
Kenneth Folk
I feel like I have fallen way behind on recording what I intended to here- a journal of sorts on what happened after I decided to stop “unenlightening myself.”
So, in an attempt to catch up, I am cobbling some things together. Let me begin by going “way back” to notes from maybe 10 days ago as I began to investigate “the witness”:
….suddenly we’re not witnessing from the outside anymore. Instead, witnessing is taking place from everywhere simultaneously – inside, outside, around, up, down. Everything everywhere is being witnessed from inside and outside simultaneously, because what is being witnessed is what is witnessing.
Adyashanti
These words of Adya have stuck with me the past couple weeks.
When I first read, “witnessing is taking place from everywhere simultaneously – inside, outside, around, up, down….” I thought, “Oh my.”
I couldn’t conceive of such a witness.
My witnessing has been like that of the movie-goer staring up at the screen:
What is witnessed is seen to be like a dream, like a movie or a novel, unfolding in front of us.
Such witnessing has made it rather easy to realize that the world “out there” is somewhat less than “Real.” And this has been going on for years and years now, fading in and fading out of intensity so that I have finally adopted an attitude that mixes ignoring, frustration, amazement and pathologizing.
But then, my friend asked me, “What if you never decide?” And I realized if I simply accepted the status quo I could very well spend the rest of my life “unenlightening” myself.
So I took up examining the witness and things immediately began to shift.
Just those words from Adya, “witnessing up, down, outside, inside” while beyond my ability to imagine, started a kind of disintegration, a dissolving.
This is the power of words spoken from Truth.
They resonate with the Truth inside. They light the fire.
What I noticed after a few days was the world felt so much softer. Whatever was looking out through my eyes, that center of “me-ness,” no longer peered out across a great gap. The gap (between the movie viewer and the silver screen) was gone. “Out there” now seemed much more like a continuum with myself. Creation and I became a soft and somehow watery continuum.
But while the gap had disappeared, the Unreal nature of Creation was maintained. And, I couldn’t say that witnessing was occurring from everywhere. There was still a duality.
A few days after that, I began to notice that “I” (for lack of a better word) was beginning to disintegrate. I was losing the fabric of my individuality- not by merging into One, but through disappearing entirely.
A photo I’d made of the Buddha covered by cheesecloth came to mind. Yes, it seemed the fabric of “me” was becoming cheesecloth. Something un-namable was breaking through.
It wasn’t too uncomfortable. But, it was strange.
My stomach was having trouble: it began to love, it began to sob. It physically hurt most of the time and I was reacting very intensely to the simplest events.
Then, one day at work, I feel a bit on edge, a bit lost, and wanted very much to call a friend.
Not that I had anything to say. I tried to think of something worth a phone call and came up blank.
I just wanted to have her on the phone, to hear her voice. Finally, I realized that what I really wanted was to touch this most familiar someone whom I knew and loved; because now, the world had taken on that same rather cheesecloth-like flimsiness.
I felt like I no longer held onto anything: I couldn’t hold onto my self identity. I couldn’t hold onto Creation. I stood there in the middle of the lab frozen in place in a Void that still gave rise to appearance.
Then, I realized even a vague discomfort can be clung to and apparently, that’s my belly’s job these days.
After that I went about in a world gone soft and the gap closed. From my shoulders up past my head there seemed to open a vast beam of consciousness. Below my shoulders my belly periodically erupted with various emotions and nausea.
As a practice I just kept falling back into my self. At times I tried inquiry. That’s what Nisargadatta recommends.
Today I found this discussion by Kenneth Folk entitled “The Witness: Turning the Light Around” :
…[So] far… it is as though we have been looking down from on high at this odd creature, saying “Ha ha. See how it does this? See how it does that?”
If we want to go to the next level…. We are going to turn the light of attention back on itself, and we are going to ask this question: “Who am I?” Or “Who is looking?”… There are various ways to get in touch with this. The simplest and most practical and consistently effective way is to ask the question “Who am I?” …
When you do “who am I?” and become absorbed as the Self you eventually transcend the Witness and get to this place where the kundalini energy comes back down from the head: it actually goes out the top of the head—you can actually feel this and see this—and circles back down to the body and comes to rest primarily at the heart center but also at all of the chakras along the way. It forms this kind of circuit, this kind of cocoon of energy… At this point you are no longer dissociated from your experience the way you were when you were dwelling as the Witness.
I found it impossible to do inquiry as it felt like “turning the attention around” and that seemed simply impossible. Perhaps this was because I conceived of inquiry as turning a skinny little beam of attention around to look within, as if the finger that I had been pointing out to Other, now turns to point in my own face.
I found that my awareness, or attention, or I could even call it “the light” (but don’t picture any beam of light) was far too unbounded to turn. I could no more shift the direction of my attention/consciousness around than the universe could turn around so that It might gaze at Its own navel.
I did the only thing it felt possible to do with this field I’d labeled as The Witness – I sank back into it. I allowed the wavelet of me to relax and melt back towards the ocean of Witness.
When the light is turned around, the energies of heaven and earth, yin and yang, all congeal. This is what is called "refined thought," "pure energy," or "pure thought." When you first put this technique into practice, there is seemingly nonbeing within being. Eventually, when the work is accomplished, and there is a body beyond your body, there is seemingly being within nonbeing.
The Secret of the Golden Flower, translated by Thomas Cleary
I'm not so sure what Cleary has translated here. But I hope it will become clear.
Tuesday, May 04, 2010
Florian Schlosser: The Subtlest Identification
In that realization that nothing is real, all reference points disappear.
Yet, the Nothingness itself becomes a new reference point.
And this is the subtle identification.
I see it in other teachers. I see it in people going to satsang… If they speak with you… “It’s not real.”
But this is a concept, a reference point.
Florian Schlosser
Something has been bothering me about some of the teachers in the new crop of non-dual (Neo-Advaita) teachers. Something about their teaching doesn’t always ring quite true…at least not to me.
It got me thinking about a story Maharishi once told us. His point was that there was historical precedence for groups of people to practice together and become enlightened together. He told an ancient story of a group of sages who did many austerities and became so pure they ascended to heaven. There they joined in the banquet that the gods were enjoying, until one god stopped everything cold declaring, “I smell a human.”
The other gods alerted, then sniffed and the three sages were summarily tossed back to earth, betrayed by the stink of the last vestiges of their human impurity. So, they rededicated themselves to purification and in the end once more ascended, this time for good.
So, see, Maharaishi said, we can meditate in groups and together rise to heaven. Well, to me, the story also speaks to this feeling I have of “something fishy” about these newly realized teachers. And I’ve begun to think that perhaps I am simply noticing that last little trace, “a whiff” of ego. When I first realized this, I had to laugh. Of course!
“Takes one to call one,” we used to retort as kids. And wouldn’t that be just the way of egos- to be very sensitive to and ready to bust another ego.
Well, Florian Schlosser has made very good sense of all this for me. And then, I realized Adya also has spoken of this trap that awaits many after an awakening.
After realization of Nothingness, the ego then identifies with Nothing.
Florian Schlosser:
That realization is the absence of, the complete vanishing of the sense of me, together with the world. Nothing remains. All that is there is consciousness. Yet, as long as the body is alive unavoidably there remains a last sense of indestructible identification (…that would be the end of the body.)
I still was able when someone called my name to turn around and recognize them. So, that is indestructible. As long as the body survives we are literally bound to a certain limited degree of identification. [Otherwise] we wouldn’t be able to function. I was hardly functioning anymore. Yet, what I saw is that that subtle sense was (and I saw this about half a year later) [it] started to pick up that Nothingness, and the sense of me sneaked in through the backdoor and now identified itself with the Nothingness.
So now, it was, “I am Nothingness.”
It was not Nothingness. It became a subtle identification with the Nothingness…
I’ve written before about my own mini-version of this locking onto a realization and how my Taoist teacher broke me of it. Even a moment’s insight can be grabbed up by the ego. So, I’m very grateful to be clear on the mechanics.
So, let’s go on with Florian:
When the residue of the sense of me identifies with Nothing it experiences everything as Nothing, and it also responds as if it it’d be Nothing.
So, you don’t hear anymore. You don’t listen.
Everything that people say, it’s just nothing, because that’s your nature. You’ve become nothing. And the seeing from Nothing means there’s no way to relate…
it was the ultimate way to protect my heart from meeting other people…
It was bliss inside, but it didn’t have relation to anything because everything was unreal.
So, why should I relate with something? Not even my partner…
And guess what? His partner fell in love with someone else and left him.
It was like someone taking the Zen stick and hitting me. And I fell from that Bliss bubble. It was a dropping from paradise… Even that ultimate realization of Nothingness is another way [of] protecting yourself from being visible, from what you really are…
Florian goes on to speak about embodiment- consciousness coming down into the tissues. He slaps his leg as he says this, but also waves his hands around his belly.
I hope to speak more about the belly… but that will have to be another day.
Meanwhile, I hope you can find the time to listen to all of Florian’s interview. I love what the Iain and Renata McNay are doing with Conscious TV.
Yet, the Nothingness itself becomes a new reference point.
And this is the subtle identification.
I see it in other teachers. I see it in people going to satsang… If they speak with you… “It’s not real.”
But this is a concept, a reference point.
Florian Schlosser
Something has been bothering me about some of the teachers in the new crop of non-dual (Neo-Advaita) teachers. Something about their teaching doesn’t always ring quite true…at least not to me.
It got me thinking about a story Maharishi once told us. His point was that there was historical precedence for groups of people to practice together and become enlightened together. He told an ancient story of a group of sages who did many austerities and became so pure they ascended to heaven. There they joined in the banquet that the gods were enjoying, until one god stopped everything cold declaring, “I smell a human.”
The other gods alerted, then sniffed and the three sages were summarily tossed back to earth, betrayed by the stink of the last vestiges of their human impurity. So, they rededicated themselves to purification and in the end once more ascended, this time for good.
So, see, Maharaishi said, we can meditate in groups and together rise to heaven. Well, to me, the story also speaks to this feeling I have of “something fishy” about these newly realized teachers. And I’ve begun to think that perhaps I am simply noticing that last little trace, “a whiff” of ego. When I first realized this, I had to laugh. Of course!
“Takes one to call one,” we used to retort as kids. And wouldn’t that be just the way of egos- to be very sensitive to and ready to bust another ego.
Well, Florian Schlosser has made very good sense of all this for me. And then, I realized Adya also has spoken of this trap that awaits many after an awakening.
After realization of Nothingness, the ego then identifies with Nothing.
Florian Schlosser:
That realization is the absence of, the complete vanishing of the sense of me, together with the world. Nothing remains. All that is there is consciousness. Yet, as long as the body is alive unavoidably there remains a last sense of indestructible identification (…that would be the end of the body.)
I still was able when someone called my name to turn around and recognize them. So, that is indestructible. As long as the body survives we are literally bound to a certain limited degree of identification. [Otherwise] we wouldn’t be able to function. I was hardly functioning anymore. Yet, what I saw is that that subtle sense was (and I saw this about half a year later) [it] started to pick up that Nothingness, and the sense of me sneaked in through the backdoor and now identified itself with the Nothingness.
So now, it was, “I am Nothingness.”
It was not Nothingness. It became a subtle identification with the Nothingness…
I’ve written before about my own mini-version of this locking onto a realization and how my Taoist teacher broke me of it. Even a moment’s insight can be grabbed up by the ego. So, I’m very grateful to be clear on the mechanics.
So, let’s go on with Florian:
When the residue of the sense of me identifies with Nothing it experiences everything as Nothing, and it also responds as if it it’d be Nothing.
So, you don’t hear anymore. You don’t listen.
Everything that people say, it’s just nothing, because that’s your nature. You’ve become nothing. And the seeing from Nothing means there’s no way to relate…
it was the ultimate way to protect my heart from meeting other people…
It was bliss inside, but it didn’t have relation to anything because everything was unreal.
So, why should I relate with something? Not even my partner…
And guess what? His partner fell in love with someone else and left him.
It was like someone taking the Zen stick and hitting me. And I fell from that Bliss bubble. It was a dropping from paradise… Even that ultimate realization of Nothingness is another way [of] protecting yourself from being visible, from what you really are…
Florian goes on to speak about embodiment- consciousness coming down into the tissues. He slaps his leg as he says this, but also waves his hands around his belly.
I hope to speak more about the belly… but that will have to be another day.
Meanwhile, I hope you can find the time to listen to all of Florian’s interview. I love what the Iain and Renata McNay are doing with Conscious TV.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Wolter Keers: The Witness
I continue to try to see more clearly into what I’ve been calling “the witness.”
This morning during breakfast, I promised myself that tonight I will take the time to truly allow myself to settle back into It. I can’t recall how I exactly came to this resolve.
It may well have been after a glimpse at the trees once more produced the sensation of falling back into Nothingness and intuiting how such a falling back would snuff out all of Creation.
This sensation/perception has come up several times of late: while driving the car (not an opportune time to give into the urge), while at work (again, not real good timing). Once it came in the midst of doing the dishes. The form was somewhat different. I had the thought, completely out of the blue, “I must go pray.” I knew I didn’t mean prayer but rather complete transcendence. And I knew I meant “right now.” Even then, I hesitated a couple moments before giving in and drying off my hands. Oddly, I can’t recall just how all that played out.
Meanwhile, there’s one more day of work and a bit more time for perusing the internet for a teaching that speaks to me a bit. I found Wolter Keers:
After the finish of an action or a thought, a feeling or a sensory perception, an 'I' projects itself at the end, as a sort of tail. During listening there was no I. But, at the end of the story an I who heard the story, is manufactured.
How can an I, that isn't there at all, hear a story?
The 'I' is nothing but an invention. There is no such I and you have never done anything in your life. Things do themselves.
You are the witness of the movements of the body, also of the movement of what you call ‘your will' and that possibly precedes an action.
You are, whether you want to or not, and without any effort, the witness of fleeting thoughts and feelings. And you are - and that is the most important thing to see - also always witness of such an I-thought that you tack on like a tail behind a thought, a feeling, a perception or an action.
The I-thought is just a thought, similar to the thought about a nephew or niece, or about the Eiffel tower. It is one pan in the row of pans on a kitchen shelf. You are no more the one 'I-pan' than you are the other big and small pans…
The only thing that needs to be done is to see exactly that…
Oh! So any resistance I have to letting go is also not my doing?
Apparently I’m kidding myself to think I choose not to transcend while driving, or at work, or while sitting in the backyard. The Ocean is simply bidding it times and will take me when it wants…
I think I can feel this, at least partly. I certainly feel that something is pulling me along.
Even when I feel into “my” resistance it seems so rooted in my body that I sense it’s “not my doing.” I cannot choose to simply let go. Or so it seems.
Still, it feels like the situation is most delicate and brings to mind another teaching:
If you believe that there is something lacking, it is not quite so.
But if you think there is nothing to do, nothing needed, that is not quite so.
Elihu Genmyo Smith
It seems to me that there are two sides to the coin of language: one side speaks from the perspective of the One. The other side speaks from the perspective of the individual. As a seeker approaches the precipice it seems like you can get listen to both sides, as if the coin is stood up and balanced on its side. Yes, Grace is carrying me along. And still, it feels that “I”, this little me, has some responsibility. It’s not quite as if there’s nothing to do.
I was watching Wayne Liquorman this morning. He gave the best expression of this position: that even after enlightenment, there will be an expression of “individuality” as it runs about in a singular body. Maybe he is not into as thorough a Unity as other teachers of non-duality. Who knows? But, I liked how he put his teaching and he also wonderfully illustrated how we have to give up even our most cherished beliefs.
And I know I have my beliefs.
So, let’s get back to Wolter Keers:
Question: … I still think it is hard to achieve…. that getting the apparent-I out of the way is difficult to achieve.
W.K.: These sorts of remarks are an escape. Self-realization has nothing to do with easy or difficult. You don't need to do anything to look. Even if you close your eyes images come up. In this room there are at least four people who have completely seen what they are and what they are not.
Why them but not you?
Because they have opened themselves up to anything that wanted to come up for witnessing, sometimes slowly, and in some cases quickly. They never bothered with the question of whether it is easy or difficult. They consciously held their 'eyes' open and looked in clarity, surveyed.
That is the only possibility.
People who find this all too difficult are only lazy, nothing else. They are not destined for self-realization. The only qualification one needs to have is complete seriousness; that one is ready to jump into the abyss. But, whoever continues to listen to their fears, their cozy comfort, their laziness, remains where they are…
Question: Nevertheless it remains difficult to see that it isn't difficult.
W.K.: Whoever is in love, which literally means 'in the state of love', is a good lover, and if the partner is also in love, they are a beautiful couple. But whoever is neurotic thinks that they should love more than they do. In other words, whoever lays the accent more on himself instead of the beloved, and thinks that he, the personality, has to produce love, for him even love is an impossible task.
If you, you, you just don't do anything; if you just allow yourself to dissolve in the love that you are in the deepest part of your being, all other problems are solved.
The Rabbit In the Hat, Wolter Keers
This morning during breakfast, I promised myself that tonight I will take the time to truly allow myself to settle back into It. I can’t recall how I exactly came to this resolve.
It may well have been after a glimpse at the trees once more produced the sensation of falling back into Nothingness and intuiting how such a falling back would snuff out all of Creation.
This sensation/perception has come up several times of late: while driving the car (not an opportune time to give into the urge), while at work (again, not real good timing). Once it came in the midst of doing the dishes. The form was somewhat different. I had the thought, completely out of the blue, “I must go pray.” I knew I didn’t mean prayer but rather complete transcendence. And I knew I meant “right now.” Even then, I hesitated a couple moments before giving in and drying off my hands. Oddly, I can’t recall just how all that played out.
Meanwhile, there’s one more day of work and a bit more time for perusing the internet for a teaching that speaks to me a bit. I found Wolter Keers:
After the finish of an action or a thought, a feeling or a sensory perception, an 'I' projects itself at the end, as a sort of tail. During listening there was no I. But, at the end of the story an I who heard the story, is manufactured.
How can an I, that isn't there at all, hear a story?
The 'I' is nothing but an invention. There is no such I and you have never done anything in your life. Things do themselves.
You are the witness of the movements of the body, also of the movement of what you call ‘your will' and that possibly precedes an action.
You are, whether you want to or not, and without any effort, the witness of fleeting thoughts and feelings. And you are - and that is the most important thing to see - also always witness of such an I-thought that you tack on like a tail behind a thought, a feeling, a perception or an action.
The I-thought is just a thought, similar to the thought about a nephew or niece, or about the Eiffel tower. It is one pan in the row of pans on a kitchen shelf. You are no more the one 'I-pan' than you are the other big and small pans…
The only thing that needs to be done is to see exactly that…
Oh! So any resistance I have to letting go is also not my doing?
Apparently I’m kidding myself to think I choose not to transcend while driving, or at work, or while sitting in the backyard. The Ocean is simply bidding it times and will take me when it wants…
I think I can feel this, at least partly. I certainly feel that something is pulling me along.
Even when I feel into “my” resistance it seems so rooted in my body that I sense it’s “not my doing.” I cannot choose to simply let go. Or so it seems.
Still, it feels like the situation is most delicate and brings to mind another teaching:
If you believe that there is something lacking, it is not quite so.
But if you think there is nothing to do, nothing needed, that is not quite so.
Elihu Genmyo Smith
It seems to me that there are two sides to the coin of language: one side speaks from the perspective of the One. The other side speaks from the perspective of the individual. As a seeker approaches the precipice it seems like you can get listen to both sides, as if the coin is stood up and balanced on its side. Yes, Grace is carrying me along. And still, it feels that “I”, this little me, has some responsibility. It’s not quite as if there’s nothing to do.
I was watching Wayne Liquorman this morning. He gave the best expression of this position: that even after enlightenment, there will be an expression of “individuality” as it runs about in a singular body. Maybe he is not into as thorough a Unity as other teachers of non-duality. Who knows? But, I liked how he put his teaching and he also wonderfully illustrated how we have to give up even our most cherished beliefs.
And I know I have my beliefs.
So, let’s get back to Wolter Keers:
Question: … I still think it is hard to achieve…. that getting the apparent-I out of the way is difficult to achieve.
W.K.: These sorts of remarks are an escape. Self-realization has nothing to do with easy or difficult. You don't need to do anything to look. Even if you close your eyes images come up. In this room there are at least four people who have completely seen what they are and what they are not.
Why them but not you?
Because they have opened themselves up to anything that wanted to come up for witnessing, sometimes slowly, and in some cases quickly. They never bothered with the question of whether it is easy or difficult. They consciously held their 'eyes' open and looked in clarity, surveyed.
That is the only possibility.
People who find this all too difficult are only lazy, nothing else. They are not destined for self-realization. The only qualification one needs to have is complete seriousness; that one is ready to jump into the abyss. But, whoever continues to listen to their fears, their cozy comfort, their laziness, remains where they are…
Question: Nevertheless it remains difficult to see that it isn't difficult.
W.K.: Whoever is in love, which literally means 'in the state of love', is a good lover, and if the partner is also in love, they are a beautiful couple. But whoever is neurotic thinks that they should love more than they do. In other words, whoever lays the accent more on himself instead of the beloved, and thinks that he, the personality, has to produce love, for him even love is an impossible task.
If you, you, you just don't do anything; if you just allow yourself to dissolve in the love that you are in the deepest part of your being, all other problems are solved.
The Rabbit In the Hat, Wolter Keers
Thursday, April 29, 2010
John Wren–Lewis: Part 2
I suspect gnosis comes as 'grace' because there are as many different forms of it as there are people. Yet because we're all in this together, sharing experience is integral to its fullness. Whatever experiments you make, share your 'failures', your hints and guesses, and your awakening too if it happens, with warts-and-all honesty, because 'everything that lives is holy'.
John Wren-Lewis
Last time I wrote about finding the writings of John Wren-Lewis. Two quotes stick with me.
The one above went home because I struggle with writing this blog. On one hand, I’m beginning to realize I’m here and have the time, so why not babble? But too, it often seems sheer foolishness. However, I’ve had this half baked notion that perhaps my ramblings might be of some small help, and here Wren-Lewis spoke to that.
The second quote is from an essay about G.K. Chesterton. I like it as it touches upon, so exactly, the simplicity of seeing that amazes me – as something as simple as “squareness” that can stop me in my tracks, completely stunned by the light pouring through.
Everything his eye fell on it feasted on, not aesthetically, but with a plain, jolly appetite as of a boy eating buns. He relished the squareness of the houses; he liked their clean angles as if he had just cut them with a knife.
G.K. Chesterton, in Joy Without a Cause, by John Wren-Lewis
I appreciate these words as they come as something of an encouragement in this process I’ve undertaken of … what… “being with the witness?” I have the habit of dismissing the strangeness of a very awake witness as the consequence of aberrant physiology – hypoglycemia, some unspecified toxicity, or low grade migraine. I have come up with many excuses. But, to have my attention pointed towards a less controversial experience, the innocent delight in squareness for example, encourages me to interpret the witness in terms of a legitimate refinement in consciousness. Or, in other words to stop “un-enlightening myself.”
Actually, I want to get back to more a direct discussion of working with witnessing. But for now, let me end with more words of John Wren-Lewis:
…while there are mystical traditions the world over which offer 'paths to higher consciousness', it doesn't seem to me that any of them has a very encouraging success rate…
My experience… suggests that liberation isn't at all a matter of taking 'the long voyage Home'.
It simply means waking up to the consciousness which is already the basis of our very existence…
What I suspect we need is not any kind of path or discipline, but a collection of tricks or devices for catching the Dark at the corner of the eye, as it were, and learning how to spot its just-waiting-to-be-seen presence, combined with strategies for stopping the hyperactive [mind] from immediately explaining the perception away. ..
Against this background, the main positive advice I would give to spiritual seekers is to experiment with any practice or idea that seems interesting - which is what the Buddha urged a long time ago, though not too many of his followers have ever taken that part of his teaching seriously…
John Wren-Lewis
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
John Wren-Lewis: Prose and Poetry
Even so, there have been plenty of problems in adjusting to awakened life, because the rest of the world is still taking the separation state for granted, and my own “resurrected” mind still contains programs based on the assumptions of that state. So in the early days I made every effort to assume the role of spiritual seeker in the hope of finding help…
Fortunately the mystical state seems to have a growth pattern of its own which is gradually enabling me to deal with the adjustment problems—and a fascinating process it is.
John Wren-Lewis
I was reading about (and the words of) John Wren-Lewis yesterday. That brought me to T.S. Elliot’s Four Quartets. Now, the good thing about receiving a solid education in the sciences is that the rest of your life can be spent discovering the wonderful poetry no one thought to tell you about.
Perhaps the poems will be new to you too:
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
Burnt Norton, #1 of Four Quartets
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away…
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing—
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
East Coker, #2 of Four Quartets
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable…
The river is within us, the sea is all about us
The Dry Salvages, #3 of Four Quartets
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Little Gidding, #4 of Four Quartets
To read the entire poem, go here.
Friday, April 23, 2010
The Genjokoan
Zen master Baoche of Mt. Mayu was fanning himself. A monk approached and said, "Master, the nature of wind is permanent and there is no place it does not reach. Why, then, do you fan yourself?"
"Although you understand that the nature of the wind is permanent," Baoche replied, "you do not understand the meaning of its reaching everywhere."
"What is the meaning of its reaching everywhere?" asked the monk again. The master just kept fanning himself. The monk bowed deeply.
The actualization of the buddha-dharma, the vital path of its correct transmission, is like this. If you say that you do not need to fan yourself because the nature of wind is permanent and you can have wind without fanning, you will understand neither permanence nor the nature of wind.
From “The Issue at Hand,” the Genjokoan, by Dogen.
The complete koan and other translations are here: CLICK
I’m thinking this is just another way of saying:
If you believe that there is something lacking, it is not quite so. But if you think there is nothing to do, nothing needed, that is not quite so.
Elihu Genmyo Smith
Which is to say, even though the Self unfolds Itself, by Itself, to Itself – it can feel like you’re working your butt off.
But, hey, I may be wrong… it’s a KOAN.
And it doesn’t seem to tally all that well with Nisargadatta:
There are no steps to self-realization. There is nothing gradual about it. It happens suddenly and is irreversible....Just like on sunrise you see things as they are, so on self-realization you see everything as it is. The world of illusions is left behind.
But then, dawn is not at all like high noon.
As I waited for the bus to approach, something in consciousness was loosening somehow. And when it got there--I am sure it had nothing to do with the bus driving up--this reference point of an "I," a someone that everything was about and that everything that occurred in life was structured around, was gone. It was like a switch had been turned off. And it was never to turn on again. The first response that the mind had to this completely ungraspable experience was absolute terror; but that terror never changed the experience for a moment… Towards the end of the ten years, there was a clear awareness that this was not something that was going to go away…
[So] I found a Zen teacher up in Northern California who told me that I was seeing with the eyes of the ancients; his assurances that the fear reaction was just a season and that spring would come were very helpful. …I saw that the presence of fear meant only one thing - it meant that fear was present. …
Shortly after realizing this, I had the experience while driving that I was driving through myself to get to someplace that I already was, because in fact I was everywhere. I wasn't going any place because I was already everywhere. There was a shift from no personal self, no "me," to seeing that this experience of no personal self was actually the substance of everything.
That is when the springtime began…
Suzanne Segal
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Not Knowing No Longer an Option
There seem to be two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish . . . and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and playacting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to dis-identify themselves with the ego, by realizing its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure Being.
Wei Wu Wei Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon: Reflections of a Pilgrim on the Way
…if you're enquiring merely to get rid of the pain, if you're using the enquiry as a pain-killer, it might work, [but] maybe not... It's not the purpose of the enquiry. The enquiry is to find out who suffers, to come to see that it's not what you are, but that it's the idea of yourself that is suffering. A concept is suffering from a concept.
Mooji
How silly is that? A concept suffering from a concept!
Several weeks ago a friend asked me to please excuse the distastefulness of the term “enlightened” and to simply tell her where I was evolutionarily.
I do indeed dislike the question (see Joan Tollifson for an explanation) but, having been asked, I gave an honest answer my best shot: “I don’t know. I cannot decide.”
Perhaps this sounds a bit ridiculous, but it was the closest I could see into my situation. Well, my friend is marvelously direct, and her short reply cut through all the crap: “What if you never decide?”
Again, I considered simply and directly.
I was totally surprised by the answer.
I hadn’t seen it coming and suddenly there it was so starkly obvious that I broke out laughing:
“I would probably be enlightened and continually un-enlightening myself.”
This struck me as the silliest behavior imaginable and because my reaction was so guilt free and filled with loving amusement – I knew it to be true.
This was not philosophical gymnastics on my part – this was seeing deeply into the matter.
And because of that truth, it wasn’t long before the silliness wore off.
I had received my wake-up call.
“Not knowing [was] no longer an option” and since that day, Life has been roaring through, unfolding on its own.
I found these words in a story told by Adyashanti’s wife, Mukti. She too had received a wake-up call:
…we attended a satsang with a teacher named Gangaji. Right away Adya got up and spoke with her from his perspective. I could see that the dialogue that ensued was from a shared, awakened perspective of knowing Oneness, and that it was a dialogue in which I was not able to participate. As I witnessed their exchange, something came fiercely alive inside me, saying, “In order to have a true spiritual marriage, a true meeting of Adya, I must know this perspective.” And my seeing this didn’t come from a place of jealousy. It just came from a knowing that this must be—it was as though within myself, without literal words, my Being was saying, “This must come to pass. So that I too can meet my husband from this perspective.”
…“this must be.” There was just something inside me that made not knowing no longer an option, and in that sense it was as though time had run out.
Well, why not? Next month, I turn sixty.
Perhaps, I have finally become that second kind of seeker.
Wei Wu Wei Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon: Reflections of a Pilgrim on the Way
…if you're enquiring merely to get rid of the pain, if you're using the enquiry as a pain-killer, it might work, [but] maybe not... It's not the purpose of the enquiry. The enquiry is to find out who suffers, to come to see that it's not what you are, but that it's the idea of yourself that is suffering. A concept is suffering from a concept.
Mooji
How silly is that? A concept suffering from a concept!
Several weeks ago a friend asked me to please excuse the distastefulness of the term “enlightened” and to simply tell her where I was evolutionarily.
I do indeed dislike the question (see Joan Tollifson for an explanation) but, having been asked, I gave an honest answer my best shot: “I don’t know. I cannot decide.”
Perhaps this sounds a bit ridiculous, but it was the closest I could see into my situation. Well, my friend is marvelously direct, and her short reply cut through all the crap: “What if you never decide?”
Again, I considered simply and directly.
I was totally surprised by the answer.
I hadn’t seen it coming and suddenly there it was so starkly obvious that I broke out laughing:
“I would probably be enlightened and continually un-enlightening myself.”
This struck me as the silliest behavior imaginable and because my reaction was so guilt free and filled with loving amusement – I knew it to be true.
This was not philosophical gymnastics on my part – this was seeing deeply into the matter.
And because of that truth, it wasn’t long before the silliness wore off.
I had received my wake-up call.
“Not knowing [was] no longer an option” and since that day, Life has been roaring through, unfolding on its own.
I found these words in a story told by Adyashanti’s wife, Mukti. She too had received a wake-up call:
…we attended a satsang with a teacher named Gangaji. Right away Adya got up and spoke with her from his perspective. I could see that the dialogue that ensued was from a shared, awakened perspective of knowing Oneness, and that it was a dialogue in which I was not able to participate. As I witnessed their exchange, something came fiercely alive inside me, saying, “In order to have a true spiritual marriage, a true meeting of Adya, I must know this perspective.” And my seeing this didn’t come from a place of jealousy. It just came from a knowing that this must be—it was as though within myself, without literal words, my Being was saying, “This must come to pass. So that I too can meet my husband from this perspective.”
…“this must be.” There was just something inside me that made not knowing no longer an option, and in that sense it was as though time had run out.
Well, why not? Next month, I turn sixty.
Perhaps, I have finally become that second kind of seeker.
Tuesday, April 06, 2010
You Are Not the Body
At present you wrongly identify yourself as the body.
Body is given a certain name; that is ‘you’; you consider it to be like that…
I have been very open, very explicit. I’ve been telling you that
you are not the body…
Nisargadatta
Part One:
There seems (broadly speaking) to be two kinds of people in life when a camera is pulled out: those that eagerly jump before the lens and those who flee in terror.
I am a self confessed jumper. I love to have my picture taken. And I am always eager to see the results.
Do I look good? Do I look weird? I am fascinated to find out.
Why?
Well, of course it’s great to have a flattering photo.
But, I’ve come to realize there’s something subtler going on here: I can’t believe I look like that.
“Like that!”
Last year in something of an epiphany I was suddenly struck by, “The camera doesn’t lie.”
Be it good or bad photo – that is how my body looks from that angle, in that light, after that much sleep, and in that wind and those clothes.
Good or weird doesn’t matter.
I look like… That!
What a wonderful discovery. The world is trying to get me to swallow the line that I can actually look like that.
And somewhere deep inside I know so clearly: “I” do not look like “That.”
What do you really look like? Compare the image to how you really feel.
You can try this as a bit of self inquiry:
Surely, I don’t have those squinty eyes? Not like that.
Geeze, I don’t have a head that long and strangely oblong.
I am not like that.
I am more like … what… ?
Nothing at all like That.
Nothing!
Part Two:
This is over nine minutes long, but worth it, I think.
Dean Radin describes experiments testing the relationship between mind and matter. He begins with “intention” experiments and then goes on to “attention” experiments. In these experiments, random number generators are used to test whether collective human attention corresponds to a change in the physical environment. …. It does. Checkout the GlobalOness Project here. It is inspiring.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Transcending
“The trinity of experience becomes the unity of experience.”
So went the definition of transcending that one of the shankaracharyas shared with Maharishi. It is short and concise.
I came across this more lengthy description that I share here as something of a background for the following post on Witness-Consciousness. It’s an excerpt from Maharishi’s commentary on a verse from the Bhagavad Gita.
As long as mind is associated with the object, so long is it the experiencing mind; but when the object of experience has diminished to the point where it has disappeared, the mind ceases to be the experiencing mind. Conscious mind becomes consciousness. But during this process of transformation, it first gains the pure state of its own individuality…
The verse does not speak of the mind but of “thought” as being steady. The Sanskrit word used is chitta, which signifies that aspect of mind which is a quiet and silent collection of impressions, or seeds of desires. Chitta is like water without ripples. It is called “manas” or mind when ripples arise.
When the mind gains this state of chitta, or thought, then it stands steady, like “a lamp that does not flicker in a windless place”. It holds its individuality in the void- the abstract fullness around it – because there is nothing for it to experience. It remains undisturbed, awake in itself. Imagine a silent wave on a silent ocean, ready to expand and merge into the silence of the deep.
And I have to wonder: is chitta the repository of what the Buddhist calls conditionings?
Is this individuality in the void the “silent witness”?
How is this individuality different from ego?
I am not sure. So, read on:
…This verse describes a further step in the practice… [having taken] the mind to the state where thought – the resolute intellect – stands by itself, steady and unmoved….[then] with continued practice, this steady intellect gains a clear experience of its individuality, it begins to retire. The process of retiring begins with the expansion of individuality, and when this happens the intellect, begins to gain the unbounded status of Being.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 6, v 19 & 20.
And there you go. The trinity of experience has become the unity of experience.
So went the definition of transcending that one of the shankaracharyas shared with Maharishi. It is short and concise.
I came across this more lengthy description that I share here as something of a background for the following post on Witness-Consciousness. It’s an excerpt from Maharishi’s commentary on a verse from the Bhagavad Gita.
As long as mind is associated with the object, so long is it the experiencing mind; but when the object of experience has diminished to the point where it has disappeared, the mind ceases to be the experiencing mind. Conscious mind becomes consciousness. But during this process of transformation, it first gains the pure state of its own individuality…
The verse does not speak of the mind but of “thought” as being steady. The Sanskrit word used is chitta, which signifies that aspect of mind which is a quiet and silent collection of impressions, or seeds of desires. Chitta is like water without ripples. It is called “manas” or mind when ripples arise.
When the mind gains this state of chitta, or thought, then it stands steady, like “a lamp that does not flicker in a windless place”. It holds its individuality in the void- the abstract fullness around it – because there is nothing for it to experience. It remains undisturbed, awake in itself. Imagine a silent wave on a silent ocean, ready to expand and merge into the silence of the deep.
And I have to wonder: is chitta the repository of what the Buddhist calls conditionings?
Is this individuality in the void the “silent witness”?
How is this individuality different from ego?
I am not sure. So, read on:
…This verse describes a further step in the practice… [having taken] the mind to the state where thought – the resolute intellect – stands by itself, steady and unmoved….[then] with continued practice, this steady intellect gains a clear experience of its individuality, it begins to retire. The process of retiring begins with the expansion of individuality, and when this happens the intellect, begins to gain the unbounded status of Being.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Commentary on the Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 6, v 19 & 20.
And there you go. The trinity of experience has become the unity of experience.
Witness-Consciousness
First we must know ourselves as witnesses only, dimensionless and timeless centers of observation, and then realize that immense ocean of pure awareness which is both mind and matter and beyond both.
Nisargadatta
I have been thinking about witnessing.
I have been wrestling with the experience for so long, I think it worth the effort to untangle.
Nisargadatta says:
First, we must know ourselves as witnesses only…
And only then is there a next step or
[Ultimately] there is no subject and object, whereas in the witness there is still subject and object, but the subject no longer identifies himself with the object as the ordinary man does.
Paul Brunton
Right there, so much gets explained. So much gets established.
The trinity of experience is introduced:
experiencer, process of experiencing, object of experience…
In the witnessing consciousness there is both subject and object, but the subject is no longer identified with object. This is a good definition for what Maharishi Maheshi Yogi termed Cosmic Consciousness:
The identity of self has been disentangled from objective relative. And it this sense it can be called self-realization.
The self is recognized and experienced as separate from activity, thus establishing a true duality from which one can awake.
Prior to this there has been what Maharishi would call “the unity of ignorance” as self is all bound up with identification.
Curiously, the ego (be that defined as “individuality” or the sum total of our conditionings) remains fairly well intact.
Maharishi taught that in Cosmic Consciousness a person had become enlightened, but that was not the end to evolution. Unity was possible. But the process of evolution took time and there were no specific techniques to speed the transformation along.
What Maharishi encouraged was meditation that allowed the mind to become more and more familiar with subtle levels of experience. In essence, the senses become refined – purified. This helped Cosmic Consciousness to transform into God Consciousness – still a dual awareness because both you and God exist. Purification occurs in the body, through refined digestion and the production of soma. As the senses become refined, the heart opens. Through Love the heart unites that which the intellect had separated.
In some respects, this differs from the position taken by many of today’s teachers of the Direct Path. Adyashanti teaches anyone can awaken at anytime: no need to become a good person, no need for purification. One awakens from the mind through techniques of inquiry: “Who am I?” and “I am….”
But, Adya also teaches that for “emptiness to dance” this realization must settle deeper as if into the heart and belly. He calls this embodying awakening – and it too is a process that takes time and can be miss managed.
I so appreciate Adya for teaching about the subtleties of this process and the stumbling blocks:
… the position of the witness can become a fixation… this means of course, that there hasn’t been a true and thorough realization. It is more like a half realization; it’s like being half awake…
and then he sites this famous saying:
The world is illusion. Brahman alone is real. The world is Brahman
Ramana Maharishi
This saying speaks to certain insights that come with awakening. The first insight, that “the world is illusion,” is not a philosophical statement. Seeing that the world is illusion is part of the awakening experience. It is something that is known; we discover that there is no such thing as an objective world out there…This first statement, then, is pointing to this insight, which comes with realization.
The next statement, “Brahman alone is real,” points us toward the recognition of the eternal witness. The witness to the world is where all the reality is. From this perspective of awakening, the witness is experienced to be much more real that what is witnessed. What is witnessed is seen to be like a dream, like a movie or a novel, unfolding in front of us. There is a great amount of freedom in this, but also a great tendency to become stuck in the idea that, “I am the witness to what is.”…
[“Brahman alone is real”]…could also be understood as “The witness alone is real.” But without the third statement, “The world is Brahman,” we would not have true non-duality. In the statement, “The world is Brahman, “we have the realization of true oneness. “The world is Brahman” collapses the position of the external witness. The witness position collapses into the totality, and suddenly we’re not witnessing from
the outside anymore. Instead, witnessing is taking place from everywhere simultaneously – inside, outside, around, up, down. Everything everywhere is being witnessed from inside and outside simultaneously, because what is being witnessed is what is witnessing. The seer and what is seen are the same. Unless that is realized, we can get stuck in the place of the witness. We can become stuck in a transcendent void, in emptiness…
the next phase of the journey of awakening [is] the collapsing of the witnessing position. It starts to collapse when we see that if witnessing is different from the witness, then there is inherent division. Letting yourself see this division is the beginning of the collapse… you can start to see the elements of ego that are using the witnessing position as a way to hide, to not be touched by life, to not feel certain feelings… Make no mistake – to see a fixation within ourselves because someone explains it to us is not enough… It must be discovered in oneself, for oneself.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World.
Nisargadatta
I have been thinking about witnessing.
I have been wrestling with the experience for so long, I think it worth the effort to untangle.
Nisargadatta says:
First, we must know ourselves as witnesses only…
And only then is there a next step or
[Ultimately] there is no subject and object, whereas in the witness there is still subject and object, but the subject no longer identifies himself with the object as the ordinary man does.
Paul Brunton
Right there, so much gets explained. So much gets established.
The trinity of experience is introduced:
experiencer, process of experiencing, object of experience…
In the witnessing consciousness there is both subject and object, but the subject is no longer identified with object. This is a good definition for what Maharishi Maheshi Yogi termed Cosmic Consciousness:
The identity of self has been disentangled from objective relative. And it this sense it can be called self-realization.
The self is recognized and experienced as separate from activity, thus establishing a true duality from which one can awake.
Prior to this there has been what Maharishi would call “the unity of ignorance” as self is all bound up with identification.
Curiously, the ego (be that defined as “individuality” or the sum total of our conditionings) remains fairly well intact.
Maharishi taught that in Cosmic Consciousness a person had become enlightened, but that was not the end to evolution. Unity was possible. But the process of evolution took time and there were no specific techniques to speed the transformation along.
What Maharishi encouraged was meditation that allowed the mind to become more and more familiar with subtle levels of experience. In essence, the senses become refined – purified. This helped Cosmic Consciousness to transform into God Consciousness – still a dual awareness because both you and God exist. Purification occurs in the body, through refined digestion and the production of soma. As the senses become refined, the heart opens. Through Love the heart unites that which the intellect had separated.
In some respects, this differs from the position taken by many of today’s teachers of the Direct Path. Adyashanti teaches anyone can awaken at anytime: no need to become a good person, no need for purification. One awakens from the mind through techniques of inquiry: “Who am I?” and “I am….”
But, Adya also teaches that for “emptiness to dance” this realization must settle deeper as if into the heart and belly. He calls this embodying awakening – and it too is a process that takes time and can be miss managed.
I so appreciate Adya for teaching about the subtleties of this process and the stumbling blocks:
… the position of the witness can become a fixation… this means of course, that there hasn’t been a true and thorough realization. It is more like a half realization; it’s like being half awake…
and then he sites this famous saying:
The world is illusion. Brahman alone is real. The world is Brahman
Ramana Maharishi
This saying speaks to certain insights that come with awakening. The first insight, that “the world is illusion,” is not a philosophical statement. Seeing that the world is illusion is part of the awakening experience. It is something that is known; we discover that there is no such thing as an objective world out there…This first statement, then, is pointing to this insight, which comes with realization.
The next statement, “Brahman alone is real,” points us toward the recognition of the eternal witness. The witness to the world is where all the reality is. From this perspective of awakening, the witness is experienced to be much more real that what is witnessed. What is witnessed is seen to be like a dream, like a movie or a novel, unfolding in front of us. There is a great amount of freedom in this, but also a great tendency to become stuck in the idea that, “I am the witness to what is.”…
[“Brahman alone is real”]…could also be understood as “The witness alone is real.” But without the third statement, “The world is Brahman,” we would not have true non-duality. In the statement, “The world is Brahman, “we have the realization of true oneness. “The world is Brahman” collapses the position of the external witness. The witness position collapses into the totality, and suddenly we’re not witnessing from
the outside anymore. Instead, witnessing is taking place from everywhere simultaneously – inside, outside, around, up, down. Everything everywhere is being witnessed from inside and outside simultaneously, because what is being witnessed is what is witnessing. The seer and what is seen are the same. Unless that is realized, we can get stuck in the place of the witness. We can become stuck in a transcendent void, in emptiness…
the next phase of the journey of awakening [is] the collapsing of the witnessing position. It starts to collapse when we see that if witnessing is different from the witness, then there is inherent division. Letting yourself see this division is the beginning of the collapse… you can start to see the elements of ego that are using the witnessing position as a way to hide, to not be touched by life, to not feel certain feelings… Make no mistake – to see a fixation within ourselves because someone explains it to us is not enough… It must be discovered in oneself, for oneself.
Adyashanti, The End of Your World.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
On Being Alone in the Library: my inheritance
You asked me what is the good of reading the Gospel in Greek.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
along letters more enduring than those carved in stone…
Czeslaw Milosz, “Readings” from Bells in Winter.
The other morning as I perused the newest issue of “The Whole Dog Journal,” which I considered safe and grounding reading, suddenly the words were staring up at me: “anticipatory grief.”
Well, I guess that’s what I get for slipping into hospice literature even if it is directed towards dogs. But, it’s also kind of nice to know that there is a label for the waves of grief that have been submerging me.
Last week my siblings and I took turns selecting the items that now constitute “our inheritance”: my father’s Mettlach steins; my mother’s paintings- the watercolors and the oils; furniture we grew up with, containing secret drawers: the butler’s chest that road the ox cart in Virginia before the Revolution; the table the Kearfott cousins, Yankee and rebel, sat ‘round peacefully one evening during the Civil War. We delighted in discovering my father’s penciled comments on 3 X 5 cards slipped inside the steins forty years ago. I jumped on finding that Mom had stashed a packet of Poppie’s ashes inside his first and favorite stein. His 3 X 5 commentary, “… the finest example of inlay work that I have ever seen,” became a bit ironic.
The grief has been coming in waves.
By Saturday, I was in such a state I simply drove to the library, the goal two-fold: to sit there by myself and not to be alone. I couldn’t think of any other activity that allowed me just to be.
The grief has been exhausting, coming in intense waves with very little story, subsuming my body as an almost purely physical force of light and energy.
Is grief different every time?
Last time round I learned that grief can be the darkest bitter chocolate variety of love, and something not to miss.
And grief has always seemed a heart breaker. I learned that my senior year of college.
But, this time round the descriptions don’t seem to hold. I find there’s nothing left to break, no boundary, no container, nothing there inside, no resistance anywhere.
And grieving simply means, “there’s grief.”
But, the process’s intensity has been shifting my consciousness, which is why I want to make this note.
To begin let me be clear, I wouldn’t call my situation anything like a “tragedy.”
On the contrary, Life unfolding naturally pretty much decrees that a child survive the parent.
None-the-less, I do like these words of Eckhart Tolle by way of explanation:
There are many accounts of people who experienced that emerging new dimension of consciousness as a result of tragic loss at some point in their lives. Some lost all of their possessions, others their children or spouse, their social position, reputation, or physical abilities…
We may call this a limit-situation. Whatever they had identified with, whatever gave them their sense of self, had been taken away. Then suddenly and inexplicably, the anguish … gave way to a sacred sense of Presense, a deep peace and serenity and complete freedom...
Or in my case, immense Silence, an ocean of consciousness in which the surface waves dance out the human drama – all the stories, all the pain and joys, the ticking of the days and years and lifetimes. In these waves the “me” resides, continues even as identity withdraws to the silent ocean depths. From this vantage point I see both the surface and the depths.
I am here and I am also “up there.”
And in the next moment it becomes quite clear for an instant, “I do not exist.”
This seems a gentle surprise and I’ll look again.
Sure, enough, there is no “I” which is curious, given that I still have thoughts.
And then, more curiosity kicks in and the moment’s gone.
What had been so obvious is soon too paradoxical to hold on to as direct experience – it becomes a memory.
I let it go and just sit. Observing the surface, observing the room, observing the swimmer in the oceans waves as “me and my life,”
alone in the library enjoying the light streaming through the windows.
Enjoy the waves, enjoying the depths.
When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since the ego is identification with form…
When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter…
Not everybody who experiences great loss also experiences this awakening...
Some immediately create a strong mental image or thought form in which they see themselves as a victim, whether it be of circumstances, other people, an unjust fate, or God.
This thought form… immediately takes the place of all the other identifications that have collapsed through the loss.
In other words, the ego quickly finds a new form…
Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield…
Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.
You are open to life.
Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the ego.
…If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, chapter 2
So, I sat there in the library with a volume of poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
After a while I took up a pen, retrieved a scrap of paper from a trash bin, and jotted down more bad poetry.
On being alone in the library:
How is it possible
when every volume speaks-
“A Book of Luminous Things,”
Czeslaw Milosz
Billy Collins
Louis L’Amour
Susan Sontag
“Sailing Alone Around the Room”
in the cacophony of Silence
drowned in the sunlight
numbed by life’s passing
shadows of heat waves play on the desk top.
How is it possible?
Shadows of heat waves-
“The Incredible Lightness of Being”
being alone in the Library.
In the morning I will insist to my sister-in-law
I must proceed more slowly
That it is indeed proper
that we move our finger gently
over letters more enduring than those carved in stone
as we accept
our heritance.
I answer that it is proper that we move our finger
along letters more enduring than those carved in stone…
Czeslaw Milosz, “Readings” from Bells in Winter.
The other morning as I perused the newest issue of “The Whole Dog Journal,” which I considered safe and grounding reading, suddenly the words were staring up at me: “anticipatory grief.”
Well, I guess that’s what I get for slipping into hospice literature even if it is directed towards dogs. But, it’s also kind of nice to know that there is a label for the waves of grief that have been submerging me.
Last week my siblings and I took turns selecting the items that now constitute “our inheritance”: my father’s Mettlach steins; my mother’s paintings- the watercolors and the oils; furniture we grew up with, containing secret drawers: the butler’s chest that road the ox cart in Virginia before the Revolution; the table the Kearfott cousins, Yankee and rebel, sat ‘round peacefully one evening during the Civil War. We delighted in discovering my father’s penciled comments on 3 X 5 cards slipped inside the steins forty years ago. I jumped on finding that Mom had stashed a packet of Poppie’s ashes inside his first and favorite stein. His 3 X 5 commentary, “… the finest example of inlay work that I have ever seen,” became a bit ironic.
The grief has been coming in waves.
By Saturday, I was in such a state I simply drove to the library, the goal two-fold: to sit there by myself and not to be alone. I couldn’t think of any other activity that allowed me just to be.
The grief has been exhausting, coming in intense waves with very little story, subsuming my body as an almost purely physical force of light and energy.
Is grief different every time?
Last time round I learned that grief can be the darkest bitter chocolate variety of love, and something not to miss.
And grief has always seemed a heart breaker. I learned that my senior year of college.
But, this time round the descriptions don’t seem to hold. I find there’s nothing left to break, no boundary, no container, nothing there inside, no resistance anywhere.
And grieving simply means, “there’s grief.”
But, the process’s intensity has been shifting my consciousness, which is why I want to make this note.
To begin let me be clear, I wouldn’t call my situation anything like a “tragedy.”
On the contrary, Life unfolding naturally pretty much decrees that a child survive the parent.
None-the-less, I do like these words of Eckhart Tolle by way of explanation:
There are many accounts of people who experienced that emerging new dimension of consciousness as a result of tragic loss at some point in their lives. Some lost all of their possessions, others their children or spouse, their social position, reputation, or physical abilities…
We may call this a limit-situation. Whatever they had identified with, whatever gave them their sense of self, had been taken away. Then suddenly and inexplicably, the anguish … gave way to a sacred sense of Presense, a deep peace and serenity and complete freedom...
Or in my case, immense Silence, an ocean of consciousness in which the surface waves dance out the human drama – all the stories, all the pain and joys, the ticking of the days and years and lifetimes. In these waves the “me” resides, continues even as identity withdraws to the silent ocean depths. From this vantage point I see both the surface and the depths.
I am here and I am also “up there.”
And in the next moment it becomes quite clear for an instant, “I do not exist.”
This seems a gentle surprise and I’ll look again.
Sure, enough, there is no “I” which is curious, given that I still have thoughts.
And then, more curiosity kicks in and the moment’s gone.
What had been so obvious is soon too paradoxical to hold on to as direct experience – it becomes a memory.
I let it go and just sit. Observing the surface, observing the room, observing the swimmer in the oceans waves as “me and my life,”
alone in the library enjoying the light streaming through the windows.
Enjoy the waves, enjoying the depths.
When forms that you had identified with, that gave you your sense of self, collapse or are taken away, it can lead to a collapse of the ego, since the ego is identification with form…
When forms around you die or death approaches, your sense of Beingness, of I Am, is freed from its entanglement with form: Spirit is released from its imprisonment in matter…
Not everybody who experiences great loss also experiences this awakening...
Some immediately create a strong mental image or thought form in which they see themselves as a victim, whether it be of circumstances, other people, an unjust fate, or God.
This thought form… immediately takes the place of all the other identifications that have collapsed through the loss.
In other words, the ego quickly finds a new form…
Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield…
Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.
You are open to life.
Resistance is an inner contraction, a hardening of the shell of the ego.
…If the shutters are closed, the sunlight cannot come in.
Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, chapter 2
So, I sat there in the library with a volume of poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz.
After a while I took up a pen, retrieved a scrap of paper from a trash bin, and jotted down more bad poetry.
On being alone in the library:
How is it possible
when every volume speaks-
“A Book of Luminous Things,”
Czeslaw Milosz
Billy Collins
Louis L’Amour
Susan Sontag
“Sailing Alone Around the Room”
in the cacophony of Silence
drowned in the sunlight
numbed by life’s passing
shadows of heat waves play on the desk top.
How is it possible?
Shadows of heat waves-
“The Incredible Lightness of Being”
being alone in the Library.
In the morning I will insist to my sister-in-law
I must proceed more slowly
That it is indeed proper
that we move our finger gently
over letters more enduring than those carved in stone
as we accept
our heritance.
Thursday, March 04, 2010
Some Poetry at Breakfast
Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels…
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
Billy Collins, Marginalia
Oh, that last line got me and I had to read it over one more time:
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.
Don’t we all do that? Or try? Or hope?
And what might that vessel be?
Not that I thought all these words. No, they stirred around inside me quite unspoken as I stirred my oat meat in its bowl and read the words yet a third time enjoying once again all the questions still unheard.
I’ve been reading Billy Collins for the past week in small, delicious bites: at breakfast, at the hospital, reading aloud a poem or two to Mom and my sister as we wait for doctors, for drugs to help, for healing to begin, for the next “to do.”
It’s been nice. We’re not a family given to reading poetry to one another.
But this past week it has been just right, and this morning Billy didn’t fail me:
Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.
All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.
But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.
Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it
striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?
How would you like it?
I can tell you that this past week I have found it rough going
And the very essence of awakening.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Even Angels Can Get Tired
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
Billy Collins
Monday it took a long eight hours to get my mom checked out with all the pre-op interviews and tests for surgery this Friday. At one point I sat going over a form with her: did she want to temporarily rescind the “Do Not Resuscitate” order currently in her Living Will.
She did not.
I tried to explain that this meant that if during surgery or in the recovery room her heart stopped, they could so something.
She replied, “Maybe I should take it as a sign.”
In my head I heard myself almost shouting, “Mom, you got to try. You got to try for me!”
But, as I looked at her I saw how hard she has been trying for months. Her body shakes with the effort life requires and she is tired to the bone.
No words came out my mouth.
I lowered my eyes as they started to tear and became loss in a tangle of ambiguity: love, my needs, her life, until I heard her say quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Tuesday I awoke feeling trashed. Movingly slowly through the morning routine I wished I could just burst and let some of the emotions out. But, something was all sealed over and safely battened down.
Then at breakfast I read a poem, “Questions About Angels.” The last stanza blew me open and for that I shall ever be most grateful. At the time, I didn’t understand why or what had registered.
Now, I see it s about the gentleness of acceptance and that everyone, even angels get worn out.
At least, that’ show I interpret it. I hope you enjoy it all on your own.
From Billy Collin’s Sailing Alone Around the Room:
Questions About Angels
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
Billy Collins
Monday it took a long eight hours to get my mom checked out with all the pre-op interviews and tests for surgery this Friday. At one point I sat going over a form with her: did she want to temporarily rescind the “Do Not Resuscitate” order currently in her Living Will.
She did not.
I tried to explain that this meant that if during surgery or in the recovery room her heart stopped, they could so something.
She replied, “Maybe I should take it as a sign.”
In my head I heard myself almost shouting, “Mom, you got to try. You got to try for me!”
But, as I looked at her I saw how hard she has been trying for months. Her body shakes with the effort life requires and she is tired to the bone.
No words came out my mouth.
I lowered my eyes as they started to tear and became loss in a tangle of ambiguity: love, my needs, her life, until I heard her say quietly, “I’m sorry.”
Tuesday I awoke feeling trashed. Movingly slowly through the morning routine I wished I could just burst and let some of the emotions out. But, something was all sealed over and safely battened down.
Then at breakfast I read a poem, “Questions About Angels.” The last stanza blew me open and for that I shall ever be most grateful. At the time, I didn’t understand why or what had registered.
Now, I see it s about the gentleness of acceptance and that everyone, even angels get worn out.
At least, that’ show I interpret it. I hope you enjoy it all on your own.
From Billy Collin’s Sailing Alone Around the Room:
Questions About Angels
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Bad Poetry
I’ve been writing what I call “Bad Poetry.” It started as an effort to conserve the one-liners that spontaneously arise in my constantly chattering mind – those snippets that suddenly stop me in my tracks and momentarily stun me into Silence.
Like the time my partner called from the distant kitchen, “There’s a cricket in the teapot.”
Or the other morning as I dragged myself outside for a cup of coffee only to be amazed by the sunrise and I heard the comment, “God doesn’t know it’s a Monday.”
To me these moments are brief epiphanies that invite poems I have never finished. And so recently I sought to remedy that. Thing is the Moment has long passed and I am left to write the poem itself from a very ordinary state. I went with the appellation, Bad Poetry, kind of an excuse and apology. Though, I do discover that the slow reworking of the lines day after day does begin to shift my brain until it begins to function differently. I begin to feel the original expansiveness that the first line stirred.
There’s a cricket in the teapot –
decrying kitchen accident
her intent was never poetry
though linguistic ambiguity
encourages the paring down
as one might peel an apple
until she could not help herself
until delight became intolerable
until with thumb and forefinger
she placed the phrase... there
right beside the cup.
Presentation, presentation,
she whispered
satisfied.
OK, bad poetry. But, I enjoyed it.
In fact, I have long forgotten bits of bad poems scattered through computer files and scraps of paper tucked away which I find from time to time. It was in this context that a few day as ago, while sorting though old stock trading notebooks (a whole other life and story) my eyes fell upon a folded paper stuck in a notebook pocket. There in my own hand once deliberately set upon the page and now totally forgotten were these words:
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bench of shadow…
Whoa! No recollection of doing this at all. What an awkward line! What was I thinking? What patios? I don’t know no “patios.” So I started from the top and read slowly once again. My displeasure with the first few lines settled a bit after a few repetitions. I let them off with a "well, OK" as I began to catch the rhythm and could continue on. I began to like each line more and more:
To have watched from one of your patios
the ancient stars
from the bench of shadow to have watched
those scattered lights
that my ignorance has learned no names for
nor their place in constellations,
to have heard the note of water
in the cistern
known the scent of jasmine and honeysuckle,
the silence of the sleeping bird,
the arch of the entrance, the damp
these things perhaps are the poem.
Jorge Luis Borges
This wasn’t my poem! My brain shook itself like some loose jowl dog shaking drool in all directions. And then I was laughing and understood.
It was a real poem, by a real poet. And it was a keeper.
At the bottom of the page I had written:
It is the poem, it is the Silence
of our Self and wanting to come home.
And now I am wondering if maybe the journey would go easier if I didn’t prejudge and label from the start my efforts as “bad poetry.” Not that a discerning eye isn’t necessary – but how quickly discernment becomes merely critical, or worse cynical, or even worse, worse sophisticated.
What we need is simply an eye that notices.
An eye that is awake.
An ear that really hears.
So I’m sticking with the poetry. I’m betting Life will hurt less.
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