When one is able to overcome the romantic and emotional attitude, one discovers truth even in the kitchen sink.
*Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.
To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery ... being at home in the unknown.
*Rebecca Solnit, in A Field Guide to Getting Lost," quoted by Leslie Hazleton, in Agnostic ~ A Spiritual Manifesto.
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Allow, even bless, the flow of sensations arising and dissolving in the body. Observe this. Do not try to change it or judge as good or bad, better or worse, right or wrong. Sense each feeling as what is, just as is, do not interpret this in any devotional, even spiritual, sense. This is totally physical. You want to commune with reality. Varied senses do arise in the Silence, as well as generally in life ~ romantic, sexual, happy, fearless, forgiving, awe ... boredom, grief, anxiousness, revenge, guilt, frustration ~ an array of feelings can arise. Observe how this feels bodily, do not get stuck in analyzing, keep coming back to the body. All this is present before the mind begins to analyze; sense, feel, with equanimity. This is effortless, natural.
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We come to see we have principally identified with and so been controlled by not feelings, but stories we apply to feelings. To apply the story, we move from the body to the head. Feelings are just feelings. Stories, however, can add a lot of punch. From the feeling of hurt to "She hurt me" is a big jump. Then comes more story, which might be, "I should forgive her" or "How could she do that?!" or "What did I do to provoke her hurting me?" or "Well, it is just karma." A jump back from the story to the hurt is a way to honor the feeling being feeling, to have compassion toward the hurt, rather than get caught in a story and its aftermath. Moving away from the hurt, then, is how we oft fail to honor the hurt, that we can be hurt, do at times hurt by something said or done. This can be applied to any feeling, pleasing or painful, subtle or pronounced.
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Feelings are just feelings, now that is simple, but a life-changing truth. Learning this, not just hearing it, but applying it, we come to peace with feelings we once refused, sensing life in all feelings. We find feelings are not as clear cut, like sadness being only sadness. We might be surprised to find joy in sadness, sadness in joy. Or how both feelings of love and hate may be present together. Fear and fearlessness may be together, in an inexplicable harmony.
Everything takes on a new tint, for we are no longer demanding life to satisfy us with pleasure, our version of what feels good. We are not imposing a consistency. That provides a welcoming spaciousness to experience, not an idea of how life ought to be. Life becomes richer, even what appears mundane we find to be filled with a freshness we had not known before, when constricting life to a version of life. Everything becomes pregnant with naked isness. Life is known as pregnant with unborn potential waiting to appear out of nowhere ~ for this unborn, fecund spaciousness is nowhere, and everywhere. Really, we are nowhere, too. If something is nowhere, it can move anywhere. There is immense room in that. This is what makes possible the dance of phenomena. Life is dancing nowhere, we decide to join. We discover we were already the dance. Wow! That is the sense of this, when you see that truth is as much in the kitchen sink, as you move your hands in the warm water and brush over a plate or a coffee cup, as much as in a church, school, temple, anywhere. You drive down a road and see all these vehicles and persons in them are all arising in this space. Like the space burping everything out.
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So, we need to think big, bigger than we ever have, in the sense of this opening to a huge sense of space out there that we live within, a space intimately here always. We need to allow the walls of our version of reality to dissolve. That is the unknown, the mystery. When we feel the fear of that huge space, we can simply relax into it and the fear will lessen. Rather than choosing fear, we can be curious, expectant, ready to be surprised, rather than living life within the walls we have come to see as normal, right, the way it has to be. Yet, we cannot control this, as though if I do this, only pleasant things will come my way. Like when I go out to cycle, I know I could get hit by a vehicle. That would be a surprise, but that is not a place to put my mind, rather by being in the moment and the truth right here, I am less likely to be hit, more likely to return home feeling real good about the joy of exercising. So, this openness is not mere positive thinking, which is trying to create a version of life, one to our liking, no, this is an abandonment to life. Like, here I am, ready to see what happens, ready to commune totally with it, pain or pleasure. And this is not like some who think trusting a higher being means that being will protect them. No, this is more like saying, I am serving my God, but my God may watch me drop dead right now. Now, if my God protects me from falling dead right now, okay, but that is not what this is about. So, we are not into bargaining with life, with karma, with God, with anything. We choose life, instead.
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To live this way, in this spaciousness consciously, we cannot just float in that huge welcoming openness. We ground ourselves in the body, then arises a sense of anchoring to the world. The world is not out-there anymore, we are it, this body is the body of the world. A real sense that my foot does not belong to me anymore than the tree outside or the bird flying over that tree. We are grounded, everywhere. A twitch in the finger, leaves dance in the wind, clock ticks. All happening, always. Spawning spaciousness keeps giving birth. We are not splitting off, see, but with it all by being totally, bodily here. Even if you feel resistance, you are one with it all, embracing the resistance as part of the whole, for resistance and nonresistance belong together. ~ Who told you otherwise? Not life ~ This is like going into an ice cream store and getting a dip of chocolate ice cream, but in tasting it, tasting every flavor there. If you tasted every other flavor except the chocolate, however, you would have tasted this one flavor too. To be in harmony with all life, we must be in harmony with the particularities of life. There is only one ground, but this parcel of ground under my feet I need to relate with intimately, or I will not be grounded harmoniously, I will be divided, splitting off in different directions, splitting off from life. Maybe things are otherwise in another dimension, not here, not among us humans. Humanness is grounded, an in-body experience.
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We, then, find life itself is pleasing, with no need for emotional trips or pleasure detours. We find the beauty of truth showing itself everywhere; that truth is not separate from us, yet sometimes it may appear that way, and that is part of the play of oneness arising out of nothingness. We are allowing life to be in life and ourselves to be hosted by life, and we are hosting life, one hosting. We find, everything belongs, and we do too, and we do not need a theory of creation or evolution, no theory of how this started or is continuing or will end. Life is so intimate, we do not feel a need for an idea of an afterlife. We trust this process will take care of itself, in some way. We do not demand to know what that means, the how of it.
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We celebrate we are in this life by showing forth a markedly embodied sense of pride, not egoic, but dignified pride to be on Earth and belong here, right here, for a time. This pride means accepting oneness with everyone, not inferior or superior, while appreciating our particular self. We step out in that pride, claiming our particular way of being and doing. We have nothing to prove to gain worth, that relaxes us and makes action more free and joyful. We keep saying "Yes" to life itself, aware we may still not see all the illusions we still hold to, without our seeing them yet. We relax with that, those illusions, we know, will be seen in time. We trust life. In trusting life, relaxing, we can make choices on how to relate with it all and how to co-create in the spaciousness, how to be in communion with that and what is moving inside it. Again, we are not feeling all this is fate or decided by a higher being. We have choices, even if limited. Here, now, however, our motivation and style of action is different than before, more natural, with nothing really to prove to anyone. Work becomes with the flow of the spawning spaciousness; we are one with the grace of life itself, not trying to get grace, not really knowing much about life at all. And that is okay, wonderfully okay. Even disharmony as itself, remaining itself, is harmonized within this all-embracing, unconditional spaciousness.
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Grace and Peace to All
Lotus of the Heart is an interspiritual offering of Brian Kenneth Wilcox, who lives in Florida USA. Feel free to submit a query to Lotus of the Heart...
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