Tag Archives: inescapable Being

are you on fire?

Posted on by

14

Sages have often spoken of the necessity of bringing an urgency to our inquiry into the Real – as though we were literally on fire with earnestness. The insinuation is that many inquire from mere intellectual curiosity, or an appetite for philosophical entertainment. Sometimes spiritual seeking becomes a type of insatiable addiction; Trungpa cautioned about that, Krishnamurti too. Dorothy Hunt’s words remind me of the compassionate severity of their words. What drives our inquiry? To what degree are we ready to “get Real”?

This Unlit Light - How serious is your inquiry?

How deeply do you want to go in your spiritual life? Are you satisfied with a glimpse now and then of your true nature? A retreat now and then to remind you of the power of Silence? An intellectual knowing of a path, a teaching, or a memory of a past awakened moment – then it’s back to “life as usual”?

How much do you want to live from truth rather than think about it? How much do you want to open your heart and let its love and compassion flow to yourself and to a suffering world? How much energy do you expend trying to “pull the weeds” of your suspected egoic deficiencies, or holding onto the “flowers” of lovely, desired experiences rather than returning to the Ground from which the seeing and being of all moments spring?

What do we DO to keep alive our remembering?

We stop relying on memory of the known, and return again and again to being awake NOW, opening to the moment as it is now, paying attention to the undivided Ground more than weeds or flowers, and being willing to see more and more deeply the subtle ways our conditioned mind attaches, sometimes with great emotion, to its belief in a separate “self.”

Our home ground, our source, is always available. We do not have to import it. We do not create it, and we cannot hold onto it. It is present in every experience. It is in the smile on your face, the frustration of a mind that cannot “get” what it is seeking. It is here now in the taste of morning tea, the challenging boss at work, the beauty of a sunset. It is here seeing, awaring, loving, being all moments, all experiences. As you no doubt have discovered, it is easy to remain awake in heaven. But what is awake is awake in the hellish moments as well. And beyond any experience, there is our true source, “making everything shine.”

© Dorothy Hunt, 2016

In reality there is only the source, dark in itself, making everything shine.
Unperceived, it causes perception. Unfelt, it causes feeling.
Unthinkable, it causes thought.
Non-being gives birth to being.
It is the immovable background of motion.
Once you are there, you are at home everywhere.
–Nisargadatta Maharaj

 

Also see:

2016 – what I wish for you

continuous awakening – Dorothy Hunt

Dorothy’s words were originally posted at Science and Nonduality – gratitude!

Image source: the incomparable Bob O’Hearn

in praise of the wayfaring life

Posted on by

0

I have been a wayfarer for the better part of my adult life. There’s something in these genes that finds life on-the-road ease-full and natural – and frankly, more alive than staying in one place.

There are two types of men in this world:
those who stay home, and those who do not.
– Rudyard Kipling

Perhaps, as Bruce Chatwin speculated, we carry either the Abel gene or the Cain one. We settle and farm like Cain, or we wander and gather like Abel. (I’m keeping my hands off the rest of the Biblical story about these brothers and their weird experiences with the God-bloke.)

I’ve often had cause to wonder why those why are inclined to stay-at-home (apart from very well-planned vacations) tend to consider their wandering siblings in a lesser light.  Ask any frequent traveler – even those who travel as foreign correspondents and have incredible stories to share. They inevitably report that upon arrival ‘home’ few folk will ask them about their trip. No one wants to listen; they would rather talk. All they want to know is when one is planning to ‘settle down’.

I have been without a home for the last nine months. It wasn’t planned that way. Now that I am about to move into my own burrow again I can’t help but notice nods of satisfied approval. A little post scribbled itself down. It’s dedicated to all who follow the call to wander.

***

“Wherever you go, there you are.” (Jon Kabat-Zinn) It’s a delicious statement, one which never fails to remind me that the wonder of Being that I is/am is inescapable.  What a relief – I can neither lose myself nor can I find it. Ever.

Yet the same statement is often trotted out as a kind of admonition, as though one ought to stop, constrain oneself, stop exploring, stop following the heart’s call or the soul’s whisper or whatever imperative it is that pulses through the veins insisting that it’s time to go. As though moving is somehow sinful, a problem, a defilement about which one ought to feel guilty. As though the ‘you’ that goes is running away and must be faced, tamed and contained. As though it must fit within a  prescribed pigeonhole  and act predictably – for your own good of course.

Well my version of the ‘you’ that goes is much bigger, braver and authentic than that. It can’t be corralled. (If it is, it will quickly wither and fall ill in body, mind and spirit.) It can’t be tamed or even schooled. It’s the you that’s ubiquitous, revealing Itself in every facet of experience. It adores meeting Itself wherever it goes; it never tires of the fresh and the fantastic, no matter how challenging. It sniffs the wind and scans the horizon and instinctively knows how to proceed, how to survive and thrive. It follows no fashion, hoards nothing ‘in case’, keeps no keepsakes and delights in the unknown.

The beloveds who stay at home are following their own imperative and I have no interest in changing it – for the ‘you’ that stays at home is no different from the ‘you’ that doesn’t. But it’s pointless to believe a judgmental story about how those who wander are ‘running away’. They will go anyway. It’s an imperative. It just may be that they are running with the wild wideawakeness that they are, and that they know it.

Whether we go, or whether we stay, it makes no difference to the choiceless Awareness shining through all experience, whatever the imperative.

***

blog maintenance has prompted a new page

When I launched this little blog three years ago I was clueless as to how to organize its contents – I didn’t even have a clear idea what would be written or included. All I knew was that there was a compelling movement to present material relevant to the enduring theme of nondual divine light | pristine awareness | mystical luminosity.

Re-reading the posts recently as I edited the code on some, I saw how they could have been more usefully grouped, and the categories better defined. So I decided to do a bit of reshuffling, hoping that items of specific interest to readers can be more easily accessed. (The search box – lower right sidebar – is also handy for tracking specific topics.)

This new page, located in the menu bar above, presents an overview of the new groupings:

the categories

You can go to a separate page listing each individual category’s posts, by date, by clicking on the title.

I hope this is helpful – let me know what you think!

~ ml