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Brian Wilcox 'Blue Columbine - 2'
"My life" is fictitious. Meditation is all about waking up to life, real life, not artificial, conceptual life, but life that is mysterious and magical at the same time too. It is hard to describe the wonders of life. All we can say is that it is mysterious and beautiful. It is intrinsically wondrous. It is transcendent reality because the rational mind cannot comprehend the inherent wonder, the miracle, and the sacredness of life as it is. And life is already happening, now.
*Anam Thubten. The Magic of Awareness.
* * *
From the perspective of the person, Mystery is an elusive unknown, the spectacular to be sought, or to think futile for which to hope. Mystery can seem like a vague something, very strange, of another realm, indeed not here in this human place, except maybe by intrusion or luck or coincidence on rare occasions and happening to the few spiritually elite. Such is the self's outlook, not the Soul. What if, instead, the Incomprehensible is commonplace, not an exception, but the norm? What if we are awash in the Light?
* * *
our relationship with Mystery
leads from trying to find
to being found
leads from looking for
to being shown
leads from Mystery as an object
to Mystery-with-Mystery
to Mystery
the seeker found to be the sought-for -
passive receptivity to and in Mystery
is the spaciousness for the Ineffable
to be and become
* * *
My friend, an Episcopal priest, handed me a written sermon to read. The homily was by someone else.
The clergyperson recalls being a boy playing in the basement of the family home. His dad had told him not to go into the basement. The boy, this day, wandered into the basement, which had a dirt floor. He was digging in the soil. The father found the boy in the basement, told him to leave, and the boy left knowing something was in the dirt. Just before his parent discovered him, the son had come on something in the ground, but he did not have time to dig it up.
The family moved from that house. The boy, now the adult clergyperson, shared how he had lived in wonderment since, questioning what he almost uncovered, what remains hidden in that basement.
* * *
Everything is one playfulness of Spirit, one moving which entices and evades the grasp of minds, but the heart knows. That raindrop on the roof is a revelation of Mystery. You know the Mystery in knowing the raindrop immediately, in totality, not as an object you know upon: Mystery is Mystery known within Mystery. Nothing is known intimately as a conception. In the person, to intellectualize is a retraction from the Inscrutable.
* * *
The leaf moving in the wind is already the unveiling of Spirit-moving. This Ineffable never becomes ineffable, yet the Ineffable is within the becoming of what becomes, as what becomes is within the Ineffable.
* * *
Regardless of how I have found answers through many years of study and spiritual practice, Mystery leads to Mystery. The more I know, the less I know; the less I know, the more I know. There is always something - Something - immaculately lovely just out of my reach, and for that I am thankful. Anything I say of Spirit is, at best, a scent arising from It and that one may follow to the Truth that is Presence, Intimacy unknown in intimately knowing.
* * *
Now, what is this Mystery? this Spirit? the Ineffable? No answer corresponds to the question. One must taste the Light to know and love the Light. And, then, the question dies inside the tasting, for the intimacy dissolves the interest to find an answer.
Taste and know the Living One is good (or, gracious, beautiful).
*Psalm 34.8
* * *
For some reason, Spirit seems to like to come out and play, entice, evoke the search, and lead us to a conclusion that is no conclusion, only a more subtle unknowing. Possibly, then, the best response to this cosmic Conundrum, if a best can be, is the laughter that arises from loving that Something one knows in unknowing.
* * *
*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2020
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher FirstBooks. The book is a collection of poems based on the mystical traditions, especially Christian and Sufi, with extensive notes on the teachings and imagery within these traditions appearing in the poetry.
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