Last week was a bit strange. I guess I’m slowly learning what many others have discovered before me, which is that the more one reaches out towards this – immense unknowableness – the more it seems to advance. These are crazy words, for there is no reaching and no advancing and never any separation, but how to speak of it?
Adyashanti says “Truth is a sleeping giant, which once aroused and awakened, becomes an unstoppable liberator.”
Unstoppable. That’s what I’m learning. Extend invitations at your peril!
So, what happened last week? Well, I wrote a few fairly innocuous words about minding the gap. I wrote about how the gap between thoughts was succulent silence and the flowering of pure Aware-ing, about it being my version Graceland. Well I must have left an arousing calling card, for the next thing I knew the gap got me good. I was cast like an aged ewe upon the zafu. It wasn’t that I was in bliss-bunny land, or that I was tired. I was simply … hollow. There were no bones in my bodysuit.
Hollow like bamboo. Thoughts bubbled up through the hollowness occasionally like echoes from outer space. There was no intention to remain hollow, or not. But there was a gentle sort of curiosity. The sensation was of floating, buoyantly bodiless – as though held in a gravity-free womb.
It went on without interruption all day, over night, and all the next day. I had been gobbled by the gap.
Don’t be fooled – there’s nothing human here. She-who-writes is a gap-scat in disguise.
– miriam louisa
Image source: Osho Zen Tarot –copyright Ma Deva Padma
this unlit light 
“Extend invitations at your peril!” Man if that’s not the case I don’t know what 🙂 I remember writing up the request to PLEASE ‘just show me’ what it was I was holding on to. Man-oh-man. No wonder the retreat was held in paradise…
XOXO
-Leslie
I have experienced something similar! – like being in suspended animation (like your picture here depicts). It’s the sense of being “unreal” – yet suspended in total Reality. At the same time it feels like a deepening (what you call “advancing’?) – like being pulled in by “the Unknown”, into “succulent silence” as you call it; like a current pulling you in deeper and deeper into the depths… And very much like being suspended in a womb… And – (is there more!) – like being held intimately by “The Lover.” Here I am trying to put words to the Indescribable! But you get the what I’m saying 🙂 It’s such a delightful invitation!
Dear Christine – wonderful to have your comment.
Yes. Impossible to speak of really.
Ineffable Unknowingness.
But one thing is for absolute sure: if you’ve *been there* it’s undeniable.
And another thing: it wants to be acknowledged.
And so we write our inadequate stumbling sentences.
m-l xxxxx
Dear Miriam Louisa,
This morning I was reading this sweet post again. And the feeling was way different. Weird what the mind does. The past few month there was a hiatus from open spaciousness. The last couple evenings, however, there have been whisperings of this letting go again. So there was space but there also seemed something hanging this up…if that makes sense. Anyway…looking back it seems that is what you were talking about ‘minding the gap’. Okay.
Then on a couple occasions and quite by surprise…I mean SURPRISE…there would be this way deeper catapult into Space. Like gone. And another surprise (also while minding the ‘gap’ a little over a year ago) of an intimacy like I had never experienced before. That ‘surprise’ definitely felt like the ‘gobble’ you refer to. That gulp was delicious.
This morning there seemed to be a deeper recognition of the benevolent nature of everything — just as it is. Even with just a shimmering through I could sense the potential of huge freedom in that acceptance.
Thank you again for this lovely post. I love it when the cursor goes over that sweet image and the word ‘trust’ pops up. 🙂
XOXO
-Leslie
True intimacy is always a surprise – a shock, even – because it is always new.
I love the way you express this Leslie – and especially that sense of the benevolent nature of everything. This is what heals the heart, no? The heart, and the world.
*… a shimmering through …*
Beautiful.