Can you sit briefly, even a few seconds, without knowing anything? What is present? Can you name that? If you name it, it is not that. Can you practice not naming that and welcoming it just to be what it is? Sensing it? - which is it sensing you. This is holy communion.
Twenty years ago, I came upon a saying on climbing by a Rene' Daumal. He wrote, "There is an art of finding one's direction in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least know."
I have never been a climber, so I cannot understand what that experience is like. Nonetheless, I can sense how the principle applies to a spiritual path, for I have encountered a placeless place where all my prior experience and knowledge were proven inept. I was walking down the Way and, suddenly - so it seemed - I had no idea where I was or where I was going. I had to learn to close my eyes. I am still learning to close my eyes so I can be carried along - rather than try to move myself along - inside this place of no eyes.
There is A place where you no longer see You only know What you have no name for
Go there!
Where you no longer need eyes Your Heart follows some Light No one has ever seen No one has ever named
* * *
When you begin consciously walking the Way (consciously, for we are on the Way before), you may think you know what it is, what you are, and what you need from the walk and Way. Ha! Ha! I began with that attitude; everyone does. And we keep returning to that mindset while it slowly exhausts itself. Over time, our ultimatum for control over the Way, rather than cooperation with the Way, loses steam.
If we are devoted to the Way long enough, we arrive where we cannot do anything other than what the Christian Scripture says, when it says, "Walk by trusting." This is true for anyone. Not for it is a Christian teaching. It is true, for it is true. Any spiritual path, whatever we call it, leads to this. At some point, we have no other choice. Well, we do... we can resist. But that does not solve anything. It only complicates matters.
When we finally release into the ease of welcome rather than resistance, we discover a new pace, inwardly and outwardly. Octavia F. Raheem, in her Rest Is Sacred, writes of moving at the "speed of trust." When we sense this ease of natural being, we are no longer fighting with reality, trying to force it to please us. Pleasure does arise, naturally, and pleasure does go, naturally. Life becomes more pleasurable, for we are no longer trying to compel it to please us. We live more and more from gratitude rather than entitlement.
* * *
When you have found your own [inner] clarity, you are more peaceful, and then you are satisfied. You don't blame, and you don't make demands on the outside world, you don't demand pleasure from other people. In fact, if the external world doesn't work for you, who cares! Somehow you are no longer afraid that you won't get chocolate because you've found your own inner chocolate. Like this, you liberate your mind.
*Thubten Yeshe . Mahamudra.
* * *
Some form of meditation practice, one in which we rest with awareness and silently, can train us in this natural ease. We are not present, then, to have any particular experience. We are present easefully, observing what happens. We are relaxed and wakeful. We observe thoughts and feelings inside as they come and go. Sounds outside, likewise, as they come and go. If eyes open, sights outside. We welcome the wakefulness of all the senses.
Of course, if we meditate to impose our egoic agenda on the practice, that will only strengthen our felt need to fight with reality and force reality into a shape that pleases us. So, meditation can work against us, not for us. But, then, can we call such meditation at all? I am not sure that most of what goes as "meditation" is meditation or "mindfulness" is mindfulness.
* * *
Christian mysticism has called this place of not seeing by "bright darkness." Why? Well, we have been drawn into a space where the Light is so bright it appears to our usual perception as the absence of Light. Another knowing arises and does not fit conceptually. We know, but we do not know how we know. We just know. As Daumal wrote, "When one can no longer see, one can at least know."
So, if someone asked me, "Brian, what will walking a spiritual path bring to me?" I could say some things. They would be shadows. The most true thing I could say would be, "I don't know. You'll have to find out for yourself to know."
