the sacred dimension

The natural way of being after death of a loved one is suffering at first, then there is a deepening. In that deepening, you go to a place where there is no death. And the fact that you felt that means you went deep enough, to the place where there is no death. Conditioned as your mind is by society, the contemporary world that you live in, which knows nothing about that dimension – your mind then tells you that there is something wrong with this. Your mind says “I should not be feeling peace, that is not what one feels in a situation like this”. But that’s a conditioned thought by the culture that you live in. So instead we can recognize when this happens, when that thought comes – recognize it as a conditioned thought that is not true.  

It doesn't mean that the waves of sadness don’t come back from time to time. But in between the waves of sadness, you sense there is peace. As you sense that peace, you sense the essence of your children as well – the timeless essence. So death is a very sacred thing – not just a dreadful thing. When you react to the loss of form, that’s dreadful.

When you go deep enough to the formless, the dreadful is no longer dreadful, it’s sacred. Then you will experience the two levels, when somebody dies who is close to you. Yes it’s dreadful on the level of form. It’s sacred on the deeper level. Death can enable you to find that dimension in yourself. You’re helping countless other humans if you find that dimension in yourself – the sacred dimension of life. Death can help you find the sacred dimension of life – where life is indestructible.

Surrender can open that door for you. Complete acceptance of it. So honor that sacred dimension and realize that what your mind is saying, that it isn't right, is just a form of conditioning – it isn’t the truth. It is supremely right.

This is always the window into the formless. As you accept it, surrender. Because the form is gone, your mind becomes still when you surrender to death. It’s not through explanations that you accept death. You can have explanations, mental explanations that say, well, he or she will move on or reincarnate, or go to some place of rest. That can be comforting, but you can go to a deeper place than that, where you don’t need explanations – a state of immediate realization of the sacredness of death, because what opens up when the form dissolves is life beyond form. That is the only thing that is sacred. That is the sacred dimension.

~ Eckhart Tolle

if you open yourself

Nature uses few words:

when the gale blows, it will not last long;

when it rains hard, it lasts but a little while;

What causes these to happen? Heaven and Earth.

Why do we humans go on endlessly about little

when nature does much in a little time?

If you open yourself to the Tao,

you and Tao become one.

If you open yourself to Virtue,

then you can become virtuous.

If you open yourself to loss,

then you will become lost.

If you open yourself to the Tao,

the Tao will eagerly welcome you.

If you open yourself to virtue,

virtue will become a part of you.

If you open yourself to loss,

the lost are glad to see you.

"When you do not trust people,

people will become untrustworthy."

~ Lao Tzu

from the Tao Te Ching, 23

translation by j.h. mcdonald

what the heart cannot forget

Everything remembers something. The rock, its fiery bed,
cooling and fissuring into cracked pieces, the rub
of watery fingers along its edge.


The cloud remembers being elephant, camel, giraffe,
remembers being a veil over the face of the sun,
gathering itself together for the fall.


The turtle remembers the sea, sliding over and under
its belly, remembers legs like wings, escaping down
the sand under the beaks of savage birds.


The tree remembers the story of each ring, the years
of drought, the floods, the way things came
walking slowly towards it long ago.


And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches
where it was broken. The feet remember the dance,
and the arms remember lifting up the child.


The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,
everything it lost and found again, and everyone
it loved, the heart cannot forget.




~ Joyce Sutphen
from Coming Back to the Body

present, above time

These roses under my window make no
reference to former roses or to better ones;
they are for what they are;
they exist with God to-day.

There is no time to them.
There is simply the rose; it is perfect in
every moment of its existence.

Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts;
in the full-blown flower, there is no more;
in the leafless root, there is no less.

Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature,
in all moments alike.
There is no time to it.

But man postpones or remembers;
he does not live in the present, but with
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of
the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe
to foresee the future.

He cannot be happy and strong until he too
lives with nature in the present, above time.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

 from Self-Reliance, an 1841 essay

witness

You often say, "I would give, but only to the deserving."

The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.

They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

Surely he who is worthy to receive his days and his nights, is worthy of all else from you.

And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.

And what desert greater shall there be, than that which lies in the courage and the confidence, nay the charity, of receiving?

And who are you that men should rend their bosom and unveil their pride, that you may see their wealth naked and their pride unabashed?

See first that you yourself deserve to be a giver, and and instrument of giving.

For in truth it is life that gives unto life -- while you, who deem yourself a giver, are but a witness.

~ Kahlil Gibran

from The Prophet

unawakened gifts

Those who are willing to stand out and take the risk of following their gifts place a mirror to our unawakened gifts. To know they are there, day in day out, at the frontiers of their own limitations and vision, probing further into new possibility, enduring at lonely thresholds in the hope of discovery, to know they are willing to risk everything is both disturbing and comforting.

In a small town near us there was a lovely writer and musician who lived a rather bohemian life; he was given sometimes to the drink but he had a beautiful, awakened mind.  He was a kind of 'undercover mystic' and many people, especially young people, came to talk to him when they felt their minds troubling them... I once asked him how he had managed to live alone on that edge.  He said: 'I was a very young man when I first felt the burn of that old mystical flame within me. I realized immediately what an adventure and danger it would be and that there was no going back. On that day I made a bargain with myself, the bargain was; no matter what came I would always remain best friends with myself.  I am old now but I never broke that bargain.'

~ John O'Donohue

from The Invisible Embrace, Beauty

Who would have thought my shriveled heart
Could have recovered greenness?

~ George Herbert

 

doubts and loves

From the place where we are right 

Flowers will never grow 

In the spring. 

The place where we are right 

Is hard and trampled 

Like a yard. 

But doubts and loves 

Dig up the world 

Like a mole, a plow. 

And a whisper will be heard in the place 

Where the ruined 

House once stood. 

~ Yehudi Amichai

(from: The Selected Poetry of Yehudi Amichai, 

translation by Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell)

photo by Eliot Porter.

wherever we taste

.

A wife loves her husband not for his own sake, 
dear, but because the Self lives in him.

The husband loves his wife not for her own sake, 
dear, but because the Self lives in her.

Children are loved not for their own sake, 
but because the Self lives in them.

Everything is loved not for its own sake, 
but because the Self lives in it.

This Self has to be realized.

Hear about this Self.

As a lump of salt thrown in water dissolves 

and cannot be taken out again,

 though wherever we taste, the water it is salty,

 even so, beloved,

 the separate self dissolves in the sea of pure consciousness,

 infinite and immortal. 

 Separateness arises from identifying the Self with the body,

 which is made up of the elements;

 when this physical identification dissolves,

 there can be no more separate self.

~ from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

.

music and survival

~ Alice Herz-Sommer

At age 110, Alice Herz-Sommer the world’s oldest pianist and oldest holocaust survivor, retains an unshakeable faith in the beauty of life and humanity, not unlike an awestruck child. She maintains that even the bad is beautiful, for it is part of life. To this day, Alice lives alone in her North London home, and practices the piano each day for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. People from everywhere come to listen outside of her building. She is the ‘lady in number six’. To claim that music is and has always been her salvation would be an understatement, in Alice’s own words:

“I felt that this is the only thing which helps me to have hope… a sort of religion, actually.

Music is God."

"I knew that even in this very difficult situation, there are beautiful moments... even the bad is beautiful."

 [ also known as Alice Sommer (26 November 1903 – 23 February 2014), was a Prague-born Jewish pianist, music teacher, and supercentenarian who survived Theresienstadt concentration camp. She lived for 40 years in Israel, before migrating to London in 1986, where she resided until her death, and at the age of 110 was the world's oldest known Holocaust survivor until Yisrael Kristal was recognized as such. Kristal was also a Holocaust survivor, and was born two months before Herz-Sommer ]

~ from Wikipedia

glide

The soul, then, being thus inwardly recollected in

God or before God, now and then becomes so

sweetly attentive to the goodness of her well-beloved,

that her attention seems not to her to be attention, so

purely and delicately is it exercised; as it happens

to certain rivers, which glide so calmly and smoothly that

beholders and such as float upon them, seem neither to 

see not feel any motion, because the waters are not

seen to ripple or flow at all.

~ Saint Francis de Sales

from An Introduction to the Devout Life 

silence and meditation

One day some people came to a solitary monk  . 

They asked him:

"What is the meaning of silence and meditation? "

The monk was just the scooping of water 

from a deep well. 

He said to his visitors: 

"Look into the well. What do you see?" 

The people looked into the deep well and responded: 

"We see nothing!"

The monk put down his bucket. 

After a short while, he urged the people once more: 

"Look into the well! 

What do you see now? " 

The people looked down again: 

"Now we see ourselves!" 

"You could not see anything," replied the monk, 

"Because the water was restless as your life. 

But now it's quiet. 

This is what the silence gives us : one sees himself "

Then the monk told the people to wait a while. 

Finally, he asked them: 

"And now look again into the well. 

What do you see? " 

The man looked down.

"Now we see the stones on the bottom of the well." 

The monk said: 

"This is the experience of silence and meditation. 

If you wait long enough, you can see the reason of all things. "

~ author unknown

inner wildness

Our bodies are wild. The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, 
the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat 
in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments 
relaxing, staring, reflecting – all universal responses of this mammal body… 

The body does not require the intercession of some conscious intellect 
to make it breathe, to keep the heart beating. It is to a great extent self-regulating,
 it is a life of its own. The world is our consciousness, and it surrounds us.
 There are more things in the mind, in the imagination, 
than ‘you’ can keep track of – thoughts, memories, images,
 angers, delights, rise unbidden. The depths of the mind, the unconscious, 
are our inner wilderness areas, and that is where a bobcat is right now. 

I do not mean personal bobcats in personal psyches, but the bobcat that roams
 from dream to dream. The conscious agenda-planning ego occupies
 a very tiny territory, a little cubicle somewhere near the gate, keeping track
 of some of what goes in and out, and the rest takes care of itself. 
The body is, so to speak, in the mind. They are both wild.

~ Gary Snyder

from The Practice of the Wild

kindness

 



I used to be libertarian. I used to be atheist. I used to want America to be more atheist libertarian.
All my voting, preaching, discussing and complaining reflected those desires. I'm still libertarian and atheist, and now I'm vegan to boot, but none of that matters any more. I no longer care.
All I want out of America now is kindness. That's all. The past few years have filled too many of our friends and neighbors with hate, and it breaks my heart. Some people started acting hateful, crazy and nasty so that they could win, and then people who disagreed with them acted the same way. They disagree in content but agree wholeheartedly in tone. 

So many of us now agree with the message of hate, and play "ideology" as team sports. The message doesn't matter when the medium is hate. My friends who work on TV, people I love personally, are using a tone and a meanness in their jobs that they never used before. Is hate where the money is? I don't know if fighting fire with fire actually works, but I do know that fighting hate with hate never works. 

It makes me cry. I've read about family members not invited to Thanksgiving because of political disagreements! The Clash sang "anger can be power" and I believed it. Maybe I still believe it, but maybe I don't want power any more. Can't we replace the word "evil" with the word "wrong?" Everyone is wrong sometimes and nobody is evil ever. The America I want is kind to people who are wrong. 

I'm like a dog, I don't hear words anymore, I just hear tone. Anyone whose tone is kind will get my complete support. Libertarian, Democrat, Republican, Socialist, Green . . . anything else you got. I've always been left out of team sports. I don't want to win enough. I'm not part of a team, I'm part of humanity. I want kindness. There's no other team for me. Let's love each other, and then discuss how to run our country together. 

~ Penn Jillette, of Penn & Teller

 with thanks to fivebranchtree

love amid owl cries

It is not
the altar that matters,
not that,
nor the shape
that is found there.
The ghostly ideas
come and go, one after another.
But the place endures.
The fact that there is a door.




~ Jane Hirshfield