a longing that burns

There is a longing that burns at the root of spiritual practice. 
This is the fire that fuels your journey. The romantic suffering 
you pretend to have grown out of, that remains coiled like a serpent 
beneath the veneer of maturity. You have studied the sacred texts.
 You know that separation from your divine source is an illusion. 
You subscribe to the philosophy that there is nowhere to go 
and nothing to attain, because you are already there
 and you already possess it.

But what about this yearning? What about the way a poem by Rilke
 or Rumi breaks open your heart and triggers a sorrow
 that could consume you if you gave in to it? You’re pretty sure 
this is not a matter of mere psychology. It has little to do with unresolved
 issues of childhood abandonment, or codependent tendencies
 to falsely place the source of your wholeness outside yourself.

 The longing is your recognition of the deepest truth
 that God is love and that this is all you want.
 Every lesser desire melts when it comes near that flame.



—Mirabai Starr

from Parabola  July 2017

art by Fra Angelico, c.1437–1446

find all the barriers

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers
within yourself that you have built against it.

Then when you see what is around you as
not other-than-you, and all and everything as
the existence of the One;

when you do not see anything else
with Him or in him;

but see Him in everything as yourself and
at the same time as the nonexistence
of yourself;
then what you see is the truth.



~ Ibn Al-Arabi

to find himself in another

No, the great business of our time is this: 

for one man to find himself in another one who is on the other side of the world. 

Only by such contacts can there be peace, 

can the sacredness of life be preserved and developed 

and the image of God manifest itself in the world.

It is as if we met on a deeper level of life 

on which individuals are not separate beings...

it is as if we were known to one another in God.

...

Although we are separated by great distances and even greater barriers 

it gives me pleasure to speak to you as to one whom I feel to be a kindred mind....

...

It is true that a person always remains a person and utterly separate and apart from every other person. 

But it is equally true that each person is destined to reach with others an understanding and a unity which transcend individuality, and Russian tradition describes this with a concept we do not fully possess in the West- "sobornost."

from his letters to Boris Pasternak

~ Thomas Merton
from  A Life in Letters

art by Tony Karp

lifting of the burden

To me it seems that at those moments, which are characterized 
by the sudden lifting of the burden of anxiety and fear 
which presses upon our daily lives so steadily 
that we are unaware of it, 
what happens is something negative: that is to say, not ‘inspiration’ 
as we commonly think of it, but the breaking down of strong habitual barriers
—which tend to reform very quickly. 

Some obstruction is momentarily whisked away. 
The accompanying feeling is less like what we know as positive pleasure,
 than like a sudden relief from an intolerable burden.

~ T.S. Eliot

 describing moments of clarity and inspiration

art by Emil Nolde

a walk

Each time he took a walk, he felt as though he were leaving himself behind, 
and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, 
by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think,
 and this, more than anything else, brought him a measure of peace,
 a salutary emptiness within… By wandering aimlessly, 
all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. 
On his best walks he was able to feel that he was nowhere. 
And this, finally was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere.

~ Paul Auster

from A Piece of Monologue

 

by whom

The Student

.

Who makes the mind think?

Who fills my body with vitality?

Who causes my tongue to speak?  Who is that

Invisible one who sees through my eyes

and hears through my ears?

The Teacher

The Self is the ear of the ear,

The eye of the eye, the mind of the mind,

The word of the word, and the life of life.

Rising above the senses and the mind

And renouncing separate existence,

The wise realize the deathless Self.

Him our eyes cannot see, nor words express;

He cannot be grasped even by the mind.

We do not know, we cannot understand,

Because he is different from the known

And he is different from the unknown.

Thus have we heard from the illumined ones.

That which makes the tongue speak but cannot be 

Spoken by the tongue, know that as the Self.

This Self is not someone other than you.

That which makes the mind think but cannot be

Thought by the mind, that is the Self indeed.

This Self is not someone other than you.

That which makes the eye see but cannot be 

Seen by the eye, that is the Self indeed.

This Self is not someone other than you.

That which makes the ear hear but cannot be 

Heard by the ear, that is the Self indeed.

This Self is not someone other than you.

That which makes you draw breath but cannot be

Drawn by your breath, that is the Self indeed.

This Self is not someone other than you.

~ The Kena Upanishad

translated and introduced by Eknath Easwaran

There is a Sufi story about a seeker who calls on Allah day in and day out for years and finally throws himself down and sobs,  "How long have I been calling and you do not answer!"  Then he hears a voice:  "Who do you think has been making you call me?"

Kena, in the title means "by whom?" - that is, impelled by whom do all the motions stir?  Or in Shankara's brilliant paraphrase, "By whose mere presence does that desire arise which moves the universe?"

The Heart of Herakles

Lying under the stars,
In the summer night,
Late while the autumn
Constellations climb the sky,
As the Cluster of Hercules
Falls down the west
I put the telescope by
And watch Deneb
Move towards the zenith
My body is asleep. Only
My eyes and brain are awake.
The stars stand around me
Like gold eyes. I can no longer
Tell where I begin and leave off.
The faint breeze in the dark pines,
And the invisible grass,
The tipping earth, the swarming stars
Have an eye that sees itself.





~ Kenneth Rexroth
from News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness
chosen and introduced by Robert Bly

the soft animal

.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~ Mary Oliver

every breath taken

Every breath taken in by the man

who loves, and the woman who loves,

goes to fill the water tank

where the spirit horses drink.

~ Robert Bly

.

our group identities

When you seek to affirm your unity by denying that you have anything to do with anyone else, by negating everyone else in the universe until you come down to you: what is there left to affirm? 

 The true way is just the opposite: the more I am able to affirm others, to say “yes” to them in myself, by discovering them in myself and myself in them, the more real I am. I am fully real if my own heart says “yes” to everyone.

 I will be a better Catholic, not if I can refute every shade of Protestantism, but if I can affirm the truth in it and still go further. So, too, with the Muslims, the Hindus, the Buddhists, etc. . If I affirm myself as a Catholic merely by denying all that is Muslim, Jewish, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, etc., in the end I will find that there is not much left for me to affirm as a Catholic: and certainly no breath of the Spirit with which to affirm it.

~ Thomas Merton

from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

somehow

I find that somehow, by shifting the focus of attention, 

I become the very thing I look at, 

and experience the kind of consciousness it has; 

I become the inner witness of the thing. 

I call this capacity of entering other focal points of consciousness,

love; 

you may give it any name you like. 

Love says "I am everything". 

Wisdom says "I am nothing". 

Between the two, my life flows. 

Since at any point of time and space 

I can be both the subject and the object of experience, 

I express it by saying that 

I am both, and neither, and beyond both.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj

the secret

.

Since I am

Somebody's dream, 

I have a good life.

Sometimes I go away in my sailboat on a cloud

and take a quiet little trip.

I have a secret

which I have learned how to read inside myself;

if I told it to you, 

it would make you laugh.

My heart is naked

and no one can put clothes on it,

and nothing can be put on

that will not immediately fall off.

My secret is ignorant,

it doesn't sing songs,

no lie,

it has nothing to tell you.

My two eyes 

are maps of the planet -

I see everything

and nothing upsets me.

Just now

I was in China

and saw there a great piece of happiness

that belonged to one man.

And I have been to the center of the earth,

where there is no suffering.

If on your loneliest nights,

I visit other planets

and the most secret stars of all,

besides being no one,

know that I am you

and everybody.

But if I go away

without giving you a name to remember me with,

haw will I find

the right dream to return to?

You won't have to mark down

on your calendar that I am coming back;

don't bother to write me into your notebooks.

I will be around

when you aren't thinking about me,

without hair or a neck,

without a nose and cheeks

no reputation -

there won't be anything.

I am a bird

which God made.

~ Thomas Merton

from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

song: if you seek...

If you seek a heavenly light

I, Solitude, am your professor!

I go before you into emptiness,

Raise strange suns for your new mornings,

Opening the windows 

Of your innermost apartment.

When I, loneliness, give my special signal

Follow my silence, follow where I beckon!

Fear not, little beast, little spirit

(Thou word and animal)

I, Solitude, am angel

And have prayed in your name.

Look at the empty, wealthy night

The pilgrim moon!

I am the appointed hour,

The "now" that cuts

Time like a blade.

I am the unexpected flash

Beyond "yes,"  beyond "no,"

The forerunner of the Word of God.

Follow my ways and I will lead you 

To golden-haired suns,

Logos and music, blameless joys,

Innocent of questions

And beyond answers:

For I, Solitude, am thine own self:

I, Nothingness, am thy All.

I, Silence, am thy Amen!

~ Thomas Merton

from The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton

art by Edward Hopper

when the body and mind grow weak

When the body and mind grow weak, 
the Self gathers in all the powers of life and descends with them into the heart.
  As prana leaves the eye, it ceases to see.
 "He is becoming one," say the wise;  "he does not see. 
 He is becoming one; he no longer hears. 
 He is becoming one; he no longer speaks, or tastes, or smells, or thinks, or knows." 
 By the light of the heart the Self leaves the body by one of its gates;
 and when he leaves, prana follows, and with it all the vital powers of the body.
  He who is dying merges in consciousness,
 and thus consciousness accompanies him when he departs,
 along with the impressions of all that he has done,
 experienced, and known.

~ from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

art by van gogh

the dying now to the now

.

When effort is needed, effort will appear. 

When effortlessness becomes essential, it will assert itself. 

You need not push life about. 

Just flow with it and give yourself completely to the task of the present moment, 

which is the dying now to the now. For living is dying. 

Without death life cannot be.

~ Nisargadatta Maharaj