Tag Archives: nondual perception

And there was endlessness

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The wholeness of undivided, intimate attention – an awareing that has no boundaries, no sense of separation, where observer and observed are both obliterated in a single movement of observing – is the subject of one of Denise Levertov‘s last poems, First Love.  The whole poem is sublime, but the final few lines speak so powerfully to me that I’m singling them out for this post.

It seems to me that one taste of that timelessness changes everything. This is not some cunning escape into yet another thought-bubble; not some desperate effort to transcend one’s mediocre little life. This is an experienced glimpse of another order of relationship. Haven’t we all had this glimpse? For me, it took hold of the steering wheel and has driven the trajectory of my life.

Through the entirety of your lifetime, what is it that you’ve deeply desired?

What has been – is – the Great Motivator of your days?

 

Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968)

 
 
[…]

`Convolvulus,’ said my mother.
Pale shell-pink, a chalice
no wider across than a silver sixpence.

It looked at me, I looked
back, delight
filled me as if
I, not the flower,
were a flower and were brimful of rain.
And there was endlesness.
Perhaps through a lifetime what I’ve desired
has always been to return
to that endless giving and receiving, the wholeness
of that attention,
that once-in-a-lifetime
secret communion.

 

– Denise Levertov, from First Love
 in This Great Unknowing, Last Poems

 

Painting by Léonard Tsuguharu Foujita (1886-1968), Morning Glories (Convolvulus)

 

the altar of this moment

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A beautiful poem for a Sunday: The Altar of this Moment by Dorothy Hunt.

 
For Simone, who was gratefulness and generosity embodied. And who left us seven days ago.

Reblogged with gratitude from the wondrous science and nonduality website

Photograph by Juliana Nan

 

Place everything you can perceive—
everything you can
see,
hear,
smell,
taste,
or touch,
upon the altar of this moment
and give thanks.

It is over so soon—
this expression,
this single moment of your precious life,
this one heart
pounding itself open
with fear or wild joy,

this one breath rising
in the cold winter air
smoothly and gently
or coughing and sputtering.

Bow, while you can, before
this one taste
of afternoon tea
warming its way to your belly,
or the fragrant orange
exploding its sweet juice
in your grateful mouth.

You have to love
the antics of your mind,
imagining life should only be sweet.
The bitter makes the sweet; and life is both.
It is whole, like you,
before you think yourself to pieces.

Place this moment’s pain and confusion on the altar, too,
and give special thanks for such grace
that wakes you up from sleeping through your life.
Pain is greatly under-rated as a pointer to Unknowing,
yet greatly over-rated when taken as identity.

In this one moment,
your eyes meet mine and there is
a single looking.
What is peering from behind our masks?
Can it touch itself across the room?

Place your palms together;
touch your holy skin.
In another moment it will shed itself.
What will you be then?
What were you before you had two hands?
What are you now?

You cannot capture That
and place It on the altar of this moment.
It is the altar,
and this moment’s infinite expressions,
and the Seeing,
and its own devotion to itself.

You are That.

– Dorothy Hunt

 

Image credit – Juliana Nan

Also by Dorothy Hunt:
when God comes in your house

taking it all to heart

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Photograph by Alan Larus

what shall it profit me to know
that the leaf
has no color, shape or form
save those assigned by a bunch of brain cells?

to know that it has no existence
in time or space
aside from the space-time grid in my memory?

to know that it isn’t really anointed with
sparkling diamonds of dew
and it doesn’t really tremble
in the delicate dawn sunlight?

to know that all this appearance
is a figment of imagination?

in other words,
what’s the big deal to know
that form is emptiness?

if I stop there
where does it leave my heart?

I’ll tell you:
high and very very dry

but when I fall
into the suchness of the leaf
and wear its diamonds with delight
on my soft velvet greenness,
when I feel its quiver as my own
and float in its airy spaciousness

then I find, to my astonishment,
that the leaf’s gorgeous, sensuous livingness
and my own
cannot be wrenched apart

that’s when my heart leaps with juicy joy
and tears moisten my cheeks;
that’s when emptiness reveals itself
as none other than form,
and it’s so very clear
that love lies in the looking

–

It’s odd how outpourings are triggered. This morning this quote from the Bible fluttered across mindspace during a rapturous morning ‘meditation’. The last time I heard – or thought about – this quote was probably more than fifty years ago, when it was thrown, by a seriously strict teacher, at my friend and me for helping each other (cheating!) in a high school exam:

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?
– Mark 8:36 King James Bible “Authorized Version”, Cambridge Edition

It’s normally taken to refer to greed, ill-gotten gains and the loss of integrity, but after the poem wrote itself down I realized my take had shifted, or expanded. I think it could also apply thus:
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain intellectual knowledge of the world, and lose his own heart’s intimate intelligence?

The Heart Sutra had to get a word in as well. Mark the Apostle meets Avolokitesvara. You never can tell what/who will turn up on retreat!

Photograph by Alan Larus, who tells me he just “clicks the button”. His modesty is as awesome as his artwork.