What I know makes me proud and small.
The Unknown humbles me and makes me vast.
Through the practice of Unknowing, I am human.
I am a speck of dust, vibrating with the music
of stars. O Lord, hear my prayer.
You should be out of both
these traps... neither bondage nor freedom... because
this is a concept. Bondage was a concept, now concept of
freedom. Get rid of
both these concepts and now where are you? Here... here is
neither a trap of
bondage nor of freedom. Here is here.
~ Papaji
on
“spiritual inquiry” – be warned
if you endlessly ponder
your seeming lack of
enlightenment
(the proof of; the
reasons for; the need to overcome)
your life appears to be
unenlightened
and is experienced
accordingly
-
if, for one instant, you
stop your pondering
the Real is found to be
already and always there
(luminous;
changeless; already perfect)
and your life, in that
instant, IS enlightenment
and is experienced
accordingly
-
you don’t need to seek or
strive or supplicate
you don’t even need to
understand or accept or believe
you just need to slow down
get really quiet
and stop
-
how cool is that?
They have come to make
love with you...
There is so much
intelligence in your hopelessness if you will turn toward it and
mine the wisdom it offers. You have been taught that hope is
required and that it
is a true “spiritual” quality which is necessary to open your
heart to this world.
But the wild reality of love will never conform to your hopes
and fears.
There is a line between
sanity and confusion which is not nearly as solid or
continuous as it may appear. We could say that love is the
bridge between the
two, though it is not the love that the mind knows. This bridge
is translucent, and
is crafted of your self-kindness and luminous creativity,
emerging out of the
unknown to reveal the wisdom within your neurosis.
Your hopelessness is path,
and is a pure reflection of untainted original
awareness, revealing the most radical truth that there is no
ultimate reference
point in which you can rest any longer. Groundlessness is
becoming your home
now, for it is within this raging crucible of hopelessness that
the conceptual
world falls away. In its place is wide empty space, but it is so
warm there, and
so pregnant with the qualities of love. It is this warmth which
enables you to
share yourself with others and with this precious world. You are
no longer
ashamed to be what you are.
Your sadness, your
vulnerability, and your hopelessness – these guests have not
come into your experience so that they can be healed,
transformed, changed, or
transcended. They are not problems which need fixing or more
evidence of your
failure. They have come to make love with you, and to reveal
their nature as
path, weaving and interpenetrating your tenderness with
everything around you.
~ Michael Chilcoat
THE OPENING OF EYES
That day I saw beneath
dark clouds,
the passing light over the water
and I heard the voice of the world speak out,
I knew then, as I had before,
life is no passing memory of what has been
nor the remaining pages in a great book
waiting to be read.
It is the opening of eyes
long closed.
It is the vision of far off things
seen for the silence they hold.
It is the heart after years
of secret conversing,
speaking out loud in the clear air.
It is Moses in the desert
fallen to his knees before the lit bush.
It is the man throwing away his shoes
as if to enter heaven
and finding himself astonished,
opened at last,
fallen in love with solid ground.
The Opening of Eyes
From River Flow
New and Selected Poems
David Whyte
