Waking up can be
much more painful
than the agony
of your dream,
but waking up is real.

~ John de Ruiter

John de Ruiter, J Krishnamurti and UG Krishnamurti are alike in seeing clearly that the courage needed to turn to ‘look one’s self in the eye,’ to face the void or the faceless is far more than most of us possess.  This is why we invent esoteric worlds of power, magic, the paranormal, and fantasize about what we think ‘awakening’ might be – or endlessly read or listen to the versions put forth by those ‘in the know’ – rather than truly facing its shattering nature. UG’s words are uncompromising:

This state is not in your interest.
You are only interested in continuity,
probably on a different level,
and to function in a different dimension,
but you want to continue somehow.

You wouldn’t touch this with a barge pole.
This is going to liquidate what you call ‘you’,
all of you – higher self, lower self,
soul, Atman, conscious, subconscious – all of that.
You come to a point, and then you say “I need time.”

So Sadhana (inquiry and religious endeavor)
comes into the picture and you say to yourself
“Tomorrow I will understand.”
This structure is born of time and functions in time,
but does not come to an end through time.

If you don’t understand now,
you are not going to understand tomorrow.

What you are looking for does not exist.
You would rather tread an enchanted ground
with beatific visions of a radical transformation
of that non-existent self of yours
into a state of being which is conjured up
by some bewitching phrases.

That takes you away from your natural state
– it is a movement away from yourself.

To be yourself requires extraordinary intelligence.

You are ‘blessed’ with that intelligence;
nobody need give it to you,
nobody can take it away from you.

He who lets that express itself in its own way is a natural man.

~~~

It’s almost a decade since she-who-scribbles tumbled into the free-fall that would bring to an end her notions of who she was and the nature of self, mind, and world. Re-reading UG’s words today, especially the line “You are ‘blessed’ with that intelligence;” brought on an outpouring of gratitude. Who’d have thought that the estrangement and agony, the confusion and the sheer vertigo of dropping out of every version of a self would eventually be known as a blessing, a grace beyond words? But words are all she has, so the song goes like this:

the blessing

emelle says

homeless
I found the unassailable
rock of refuge

penniless
I found the treasure
that can’t be bought or sold

exhausted and ill
I found healing
in that which is ever whole

purposeless
I found delight
in every uninvited chore

outcast
I found my tribe:
the wild wideawake
wanderlings
whose only muse
is this nameless name
and whose only beacon
is this unlit light

 ~~~

]]> http://thisunlitlight.com/2012/02/18/why-you-dont-really-want-to-awaken/feed/ 13 unlitlight http://thisunlitlight.com/2012/02/04/a-mind-full-of-light/ http://thisunlitlight.com/2012/02/04/a-mind-full-of-light/#comments Sat, 04 Feb 2012 05:39:34 +0000 miriam louisa http://thisunlitlight.com/?p=1598 Continue reading →]]>

A drop of water has the tastes of the water of the seven seas: there is no need to experience all the ways of worldly life. The reflections of the moon on one thousand rivers are from the same moon: the mind must be full of light.
~ Hung Tzu-ch’eng, 1593-1665

How do you get a mind full of light? That is an intriguing question. Like a dipper of cold water, a mind full of light would be soothing to the parched soul. Enlightenment must equal that.

But wait a minute. Hang on a sec; there is no mind. It has been said, however, that when the mind is still it can reflect the Self. That is why we sit in meditation, pray, do zazen, whirl, and so forth. We want what we haven’t got, a mind full of light.

I am not such a good student of Zen koans. To me the sound of one hand clapping is pretty clear. A dog has Buddha-nature and you can’t put a head on top of a head, but I am getting off topic. I see that someone has put up a sign saying, “Mind has just been mopped. Stay off of it.” Okay, okay.

Right now I am in the school cafeteria of life and as usual I have put more on my tray than I can eat. First I grabbed dessert—lemon icebox pie. Then I saw clear red cubes of Jell-o and grabbed that too. Next came fried chicken and mashed potatoes and green beans—gotta have a yeast roll and a cup of coffee. That’ll be—how much?!

I sat down with some other students and saw that they had done the same thing. Bitten off more than they could chew. Karma, predestination, free will, nonduality all look pretty tasty until you start to consume your attachments. Belly ache, get the Pepto, call the witch doctor—where’s a good shaman when you need her?

I had completely forgotten that I wanted a mind full of light—an empty tray sitting serenely, reflecting light from the overhead fluorescent bulb. I come to myself—hear dishes banging, silverware clanking and water running. I just sit and take it all in. So that’s how I get a mind full of light. Neat.

~ Vicki Woodyard

If you haven’t delighted in doing so yet, this guest post from Vicki is a gentle reminder to read her book, LIFE WITH A HOLE IN IT: That’s How The Light Gets In.

The e-book  and paperback versions can be ordered here: http://www.booklocker.com/books/4931.html

Jerry Katz has said, “Vicki Woodyard is one of the treasures of spiritual literature.”

I so agree!

When we taste the infinite Absolute of consciousness, the world is seen just as it is—radiant, perfect, and whole. The relative, however, does not cease to be. Quite the contrary, both the pains AND the pleasures of our relative lives are intensified to an unimaginable degree.
~ Ken Wilber

Gratitude to Rashani Réa for contributing this video – ma petite maman would have loved it as much as I do.

]]> http://thisunlitlight.com/2012/01/29/the-paradox-of-passion/feed/ 5 unlitlight http://thisunlitlight.com/2012/01/27/birthday-poem/ http://thisunlitlight.com/2012/01/27/birthday-poem/#comments Fri, 27 Jan 2012 05:36:06 +0000 miriam louisa http://thisunlitlight.com/?p=1557 Continue reading →]]> In this uncreated emptiness

- an unfurling, unfolding
energy-locus trembling with
sensations so varied
they appear to hold
no common currency -

experience swings

from melting tenderness
and wide-eyed wonder
to the creaking pain
of bodybits worn and stressed
(there’s a tutu pirouetting
on satin points in one scene;
stomping across the stage
leaden-hoofed in another)

In this uncreated emptiness

there’s a seeing, a knowing
a luminous awareing of every tonality
and every texture
every nuance of light and shade
shimmer and flicker
conspiring to create an apparent world

there’s an immaculate stillness
unchanging, unmoving, unaffected
by the stories told by
pleasure, pain or perfection

there’s a brilliant beingness
in which every dance
listed in life’s repertoire
is danced by be the one

whirling
crazy lover
inexhaustibly romancing its insatiable
self

emelle says:
off with the training-wheels,
away with the Zimmer-frame
I raise my glass to Life!

Beloved, let this heart beat long enough
to whirl a few more orbits of the sun
dissolving, giddy and swooning, into your arms
which are
none other
than
my own

~ miriam louisa

To believe we control the movement of life is to believe we are driving a bus on which we are merely passengers. We feel as if we are in control when the bus takes us where we want to go, but when it keeps chugging merrily on its way despite our attempts to turn or stop or slow down, we are incredulous. We grip the frozen steering wheel and stare helplessly out the windows muttering that teenagers shouldn’t be having babies, corporations shouldn’t be exploiting legal loopholes for profit, and a cure for cancer should have been discovered by now.

Life asks many things of us, but suffering for our delusions isn’t one of them. The biggest delusion is that life should unfold in ways that make us happy. Since we weren’t even around when life began, our happiness could hardly have been a bullet point in its mission statement. Finding happiness is our job, and there’s more of it to be found when we meet life with open arms rather than with a fistful of angry questions. 

~ John Ptacek – from Reality Check

I love John’s honest wisdom-wordsmithing. Find more at his website: On Second Thought

Image source

~

In the light of consciousness all sorts of things happen and one need not give special importance to any.

The sight of a flower is as marvelous as the vision of God.  Let them be.  Why remember them and then make memory into a problem?  Be bland about them; do not divide them into high and low, inner and outer, lasting and transient.

Go beyond, go back to the source, go to the self that is the same whatever happens.

Your weakness is due to your conviction that you were born into the world.  In reality the world is ever recreated in you and by you.

See everything as emanating from the light which is the source of your own being.

~ Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

.

one bright new now
you looked around at your life
and you realized
that with very few exceptions
those who had shared time on your path
for years (or just a blink)
had failed to understand
the choices you appeared to make
and you felt the quiver of their
condemnation in your heart

it was never easy walking the Fool’s highway;
sometimes you even fell by the wayside
convinced that you were terminally confused
as you glanced in the mirror of mainstream mediocrity
with its demands for evenness, respectability,
predictability

often it was too hard to find words
that would find a lucid landing-place
in the minds of those you so dearly wished
could understand your crazy irrationality,
that would make it clear that you weren’t depressed
or ill, or lost

but that you were a soul driven by a contract with Truth
(you had signed up, remember, when still too young
to understand the consequences)
that you were a thread of gossamer
on the breath of Life

emelle says:
let me die to the dull respectability of the world
with its need to turn me into a story
let me forever be a Fool
in the hands of the lawless Lover

~ miriam louisa

Image: Tarot of the Magical Forest by Leo Tang

Another year approaches its use-by date and I am moved to thank each one of you for your interest in this little blog over the past year. Your company on the Way is cherished.

May your holiday season be joyful and safe.
May the New Year bring untold gracious blessings.
May you be always anchored in the unborn, undying Light.
May Love be your only guide, and may you know deep abiding contentment.

I see the candle, the face, the eye,
an altar where the soul bows,
a gladness and refuge.

My loving says, “Here – I can leave
my personality here,”
My reason agrees! “How can I object
when a rose makes the bent backs
stand up like cypresses?”
Such surrender changes everything.

Be secluded and silent. Stay in
the delight, and be brought the cup
that will come. No artfulness.
Practice quiet and this new joy.

~ Rumi

Image –  miriam louisa simons, Rose:  painting on Duppion silk, 100cm x 100cm

the sheer simplicity

the utter obviousness

the unavoidability

of

.

T H I S

.

which we ceaselessly chase

as some wild idea

is its greatest

disguise

.

BOO!

.

~ miriam louisa

Meet the Great Illusionists – fast-talking clusters of brain cells that map out a ‘me’ and its entire experience of time and space – and just for a moment contemplate the utter unreality of your entire mental and physical landscape. It will change you forever.

Down the rabbit-hole we go … spinning, whirling whiffs of emptiness …

~
The illusion that one can hold any fixed mental position even for a millisecond is untrue.  All mental objects, thoughts, and sensations are fabricated.  Don’t believe me, take a close look.  To do so will take pellucid, naked mindfulness and inquiry, unbroken by thoughts and distractions.  No amount of intellectual certainty will be enough.  Reading a modern neuro-cognitive textbook that says the same thing will not be enough.  Yet the illusion of permanency and constancy, formed by a lifetime of talking brain cell clusters makes this fabrication appear to be very real.  In modern neuro-cognitive terms, these fabrications are ‘maps’ in the mind.  Our images and concepts of body, feelings, self and other, are but maps.  The tree you see, the bell you hear are not out there; however something is, but ‘it’ is fantastically vast in scope.

Ordinary experience, even most profound meditation and visionary experiences, are not what is.  Experiences appear solid only by conditioning.  Knock out those brain cells, those patterns or maps formed by normal conditioning, through physical-mental trauma or temporarily through insight meditation, and it all goes.  Deeply relax the rigidity via deep meditation and the illusion vanishes.  It only takes a small needle in a small part of the brain, and a human cannot recognize him or her-self, even when looking in a mirror.  Or use the sharp needle of penetrative insight, while looking in a mirror: “Is that Uncle Fred or perhaps… it is familiar… yes, hummm, Aunt Marge perhaps in that mirror?  And, more precisely, what do you call that thing I am looking at!”

Many illusions, really delusions, appear to exist, veils upon veils.  There’s the illusion that heaps of information are the same as meaningful content.  The illusion of not needing a Noble Mentor.  The illusion of permanency.  The illusion of concreteness.  The illusion that one can hold any fixed mental position.  The illusion of self.  The illusion of not-self.  The illusion of separate entities.  The illusion of happiness.  The illusion of unhappiness.  The illusion that objects are bad or good.  The illusion that we can Google our way out of this thicket.  The illusion that all thoughts are bad.  The illusion that thought is ultimately bad.  The illusion of speech as an inferior way of communicating.  The illusion of everlasting peace.  The illusion of space and light.  Even the illusion of some-body to become enlightened.  The illusion of a mind!  Cut through them all!  Cessation of clinging means cessation of clinging!

How many nice Buddhists keep forgetting the Four Noble Truths?  Far too many!  Practitioners are often looking for some higher, deeper, more esoteric instructions.  Finding something better than “Cease clinging (tanha) and dukkha ceases?”  Trying to negotiate out of the truth?

St. John of the Cross, a Spanish saint of the 16th century, declared the vital point of non-clinging in his famous and glorious poem, The Ascent of Mount Carmel:

When you turn toward something
you cease to cast
your self upon the all
For to go from the all to the all
you must leave your self in all
And when you come to the
possession of all
you must possess it
without wanting anything
In this nakedness the spirit
finds its rest, for when it
covets nothing, nothing
raises it up, and nothing
weighs it down, because it is
in the centre of its humility
When it covets something
in this very desire it is wearied

Compassion!

~ Lama Mark Webber

In a similar vein:
finding my mind …  isn’t mine!
nonduality and the mutating brain