Tag Archives: red herrings

caught in the crosshairs

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'Crosshairs', computer art by Danielle Navarro

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I am caught in the crosshairs: At the still-point of being, where the wondrous ever-presence of that-which-can’t-be-lost and the streaming sadness of my losses intersect.  And cannot be torn apart.

It mystifies me that some speak of ‘Awareness’ as something separate from what it ‘awares’, or of ‘Knowing’ as separate from its ‘knowns’.  As though one can step out of consciousness and still be conscious…

The idea-lisation of some kind of primary state – Atman, Godhead, Emptiness, Creation – that somehow exists apart from the activity of my experience, turned out to be a monstrous red herring.  I muse that it might be the most unholy black joke, the ultimate conspiracy of misinformation that humanity has dreamed up.  But what do I know?

This:  Primordial* Awareness is inseparable from both the capacity to be aware, and whatever activity it is awareing.  It’s also inseparable from the space in which the entire show appears.  I can’t face it.  I can’t escape it.  Imagine the relief of realising there’s no way out and nothing to escape.

Please check it out for yourself.

Mark Nepo expresses this seamless interaction exquisitely in his poem, ‘Adrift’

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ADRIFT

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief.  The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat.  The breeze
makes the birds move from branch to branch
as this ache makes me look for those I’ve lost
in the next room, in the next song, in the laugh
of the next stranger.  In the very center, under
it all, what we have that no one can take
away and all that we’ve lost face each other.
It is there that I’m adrift, feeling punctured
by a holiness that exists inside everything.
I am so sad and everything is beautiful.

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Mark Nepo

Art by Sydney-based computational artist Danielle Navarro

* Primordial comes from the Latin words primus, ‘first’ and ordiri, ‘to begin’.
When something is described as being primordial, it means it has existed since time was invented.  No wonder I feel weary.

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not one iota of change, ever

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First we had Simone Weil advising us to beware of imagination’s superglue at work patching up the rips in the ‘me’-cocoon.  Then Teresa Dunyati-Long, warning us not to get stuck in the imagination because its pretty pics and stories are sourced, by default, from the past, from memory.  So?

The movement of thought which we label ‘imagination’, and which we tend to value very highly, turns out to be an unhelpful tool if we are serious about what it might mean to know unconditional freedom.  The problem is that it’s so easy to – yes – imagine what freedom will be like, what it will mean.  Or happiness, enlightenment – whatever.  But as everyone knows, painted cakes don’t satisfy hunger.  And our stories, richly illustrated and annotated, are just painted cakes.  Yummy, not.  Thing is, we love our stories.  So much so that we starve for the very thing we hunger.

When it comes to Truth-being, even for one minute, we know how impossible it seems, at first, to simply … be It.  Right now, just this, here.  The movement of thought is faster than our ability to see it coming, and before one knows it – literally – it’s off spinning pictures, labels, formulae, strategies about Truth-being.  It’s the magic carpet zooming in and whisking one off to … fantasy land.  Again.

Sooner or later it’s understood that the very thing we idolize as being our major tool for awakening – for freedom from the manic boredom of our lives – is its arch enemy.

Don’t get me wrong, imagination is a cool tool.  It serves our lives in untold exciting ways.  It just depends on what we want.  Do we want endless entertainment?  Fine, perfect tool.  But if we’re after the godly goodie spoken of by all the sages and saints who have walked before us – the changeless peace that “passeth all understanding,” it is useless, and worse.  It’s the super-spawner of countless red herrings.

Check it out for yourself:  Whatever can be imagined, however potent or paralyzing, sublime or depraved, makes no difference whatsoever to the Truth-being that is aware of it.  Did Einstein’s e=mc leave one tiny trace?

Not one iota of change.  Ever.  This unlit light remains unsullied, unaffected, undivided.  Just so.