Recently, in a group I was facilitating, I spoke of love. A man asked, "What is love?" He waited for an answer, as did the thirty-three other men present. I could sense everyone waiting for a reply. I looked at him silently, not knowing what to say. I do not recall all I said. I remember beginning, "That's a good question." I spoke some more, briefly, and never tried to explain love.
How do you tell someone what is the scent of the rose? You can invite them to inhale the smell. All the words are illusions, but they can awaken a desire to do more than know about, which is to know. And we only know love by love, even as we only know the rose scent by a direct meeting, outside words, with the rose.
Otherwise, what we call knowledge is pointing at the Moon. You cannot have a something called knowledge of anything, for everything is alive ~ you can only know with it, and knowing is only present tense.
When you inhale the rose scent, then the rose, the fragrance, and you can merge into a single meeting. Meeting is all happening. Time drops. Wholly communion, innocence meeting innocence. Something untouched arises, already present in the trinity of the rose, the fragrance, and you. Life making love with Life. Inhale Life, learn not to touch it with words - bliss! But who knows? Only knowing.
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If you want to be bathed in the Light
Come out of the shadows be held in the Sun's arms
If you want to be Loved
Come out of hiding offer yourself wholly to the Beloved
Don't worry about who this Beloved is - Just do it!
It's that Simple... living in Love
Stop trying to figure it out... jump! ... inside
*Brian K. Wilcox. May 21.2012
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Words are thoughts framed to give meaning, but meaning escapes. Everything alive escapes thought, like air flees hands that try to trap it inside.
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Where is Love? Here, waiting. Waiting for us to come out of our holes into the Whole. This can feel risky, but we find it to be liberating.
And this Beloved? A who? A what? Both? You do not have to have a name, a title, an identity for It. If one or many help, okay, but it is not a requirement. Some prefer an abstract way of speaking of Life, some an anthropomorphic. Either or both is alright.
We impose on experiences of sacredness a prior - so past - understanding. We try to live in other people's words. We seek to capture the nonconceptual in conceptuality. Yet, the experience itself is free of thought. The experience is a meeting. The meeting has never occurred before, will never again.
Experience is thoughtless. Labeling comes from prior conditioning. We are told in advance what the meeting is and will be. The Word is worded for us. We think we know it, for we were told what it is to know it. A label is an alien something added to it. But you can not stick a label on the Wind. You can only think you can.
A Buddhist has a spontaneous inner communication and refers to it as wisdom arising. A Christian has it and says the Holy Spirit or God spoke. Both had the experience. The revelation was alike, the understanding differed. Either can come to the awareness that something happened that fits nowhere. We are shaped to fall in love with what does not fit anywhere.
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An important spiritual practice is to sit with not-knowing. A more subtle, true knowing can present and be with us in not-knowing. Over time, we get more comfortable with not-knowing. Our sense of self moves from the head to the body. We can use words as needed but no longer feel attached to them. Yet, we may find out, as I have, when someone wants me to explain the experience, a subtle ache arises. How do you pour the Ocean inside a water bottle?
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I have had many unusual experiences on the Way. I have arrived at some understanding of them. Still, I cherish the experiences in their innocence, free of interpretation. Interpreting spiritual experience - any experience - is like trying to position a landscape inside a frame by painting it and putting the representation there. A landscape lives as the landscape, not the representation. When you see a landscape, you can imitate it but not replicate it. Spiritually, seeing is always fresh, always liberating.
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox and title and place of photographs.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
