Playing Small Doesn't Serve Anyone

Essence
Chelan Harkin
from: “Let Us Dance! The Stumble and Whirl with the Beloved” Soulfruit Publishing, 2021

There's an Essence
within you
that can neither be
enhanced
nor diminished

it spans Universes
and embraces the minuscule
the infinitesimal

it is infinite
in the way that the numbers
between 0 and 1
are infinite
which is complete
and wondrously
eternally satisfying
and yet allows for infinitely more
infinities

it is the exaltation of the hermit crab
when it ceases to need
to scurry from shell to shell
to find respite

it dips into pools
of intergalactic radiance
for play and restoration

it tickles the stars
and high fives
the suns

it has no need to bypass
the trappings
of the small mind
but nor does it take them seriously

there is nothing to prove or do or please
to earn this --
this is your birthright
that I solemnly swear
no -- joyfully exclaim!

all humanity is growing into.

 

 DO watch / listen to an excellent, inspiring, energizing interview with this wonderful young poet / mystic Chelan Harkin: https://batgap.com/chelan-harkin/

 

     “One day, when working under guard in a grey dawn landscape (Nazi concentration camp), feeling somewhat numb, (Viktor Frankl’s) mind again questioning and resisting the apparent senselessness of his existence, he suddenly, as it were, ‘heard’, a triumphant affirmative: the word ‘Yes’, filling his mind and his entire soul. At the exact moment, a light was lit in a farmhouse in the distance, as if to confirm the fact of a sacred light ‘shining in the darkness’. This is the light, St. John tells us, that cannot be overcome; a powerful message of hope.
     You do not have to be a psychologist, or even an educated person, for such an experience. The knowledge it brings is beyond thought. The whole psychological being of the person is involved – senses, thoughts and emotions – and such experiences can happen to anyone. They are not accompanied by any impulse to act, because the entire experience is one of being acted upon by some great and loving power. The feeling is of being in a state of awe and acceptance, of surrender, of grace and gratitude, of insight and understanding, of peace. In an instant, life becomes full, complete, and bursting with meaning, with the significance of knowing oneself to be part of and at one with a perfect, timeless, infinite and eternal whole, an indescribably sacred unity, an infallible source of hope. The Hamlet question becomes redundant. Life is no longer about being or non-being. The two are subsumed into one: being and non-being. This works because having once been, we cannot be obliterated. We leave an indelible imprint, an ineradicably secure trace in the realm of the human spirit.”
     Larry Culliford. “Love, Healing and Happiness: In Search of the Flipside of Suffering.”
       https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/members/sigs/spirituality-spsig/spirituality-special-interest-group-publications-larry-culliford-love-healing-and-happiness.pdf?sfvrsn=29f43365_2

 

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." Kahlil Gibran

 

Jackson Browne - "The Barricades of Heaven"

Ground of Being

     From a strictly intellectual perspective ("head" only), it's probably not possible to understand any of the below quotes. Nevertheless, many much wiser people than myself, from very different traditions & times, continue to come up with a strikingly similar message: 
     The ground of being (True Nature, Essence, Being, the Universe, Nature, Brahma, Godhead, Holy Spirit, etc) delights in manifesting & thus knowing itself, in innumerable distinct ways. In manifesting physical form, apparent opposites & other apparent paradoxes (eg countless separate individual people, countries, races, religions, political parties, etc all with apparently different "self-centered" agendas) appear. At this time, a frightening number of people rigidly identify with partisan politics and live (& will probably die) exclusively in echo chambers. When, by somehow sensing our one common origin, we're able to see past ("transcend") apparent opposites & paradoxes, we will find ourselves right back in, & living from, our ground of being.

     “the task is to stabilize attention on the fluid, unpredictable, and contingent nature of experience as the ground that enables one to take ethical choices that are not conditioned by habitual reactive patterns of greed, hatred, and self-centeredness.
     … this (is a) shift in perspective from a life governed by attachments, to one founded on a vision of contingency & nonreactivity.”

        Stephen Batchelor. “Secular Buddhism. Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World.” Yale University Press, 2017.

     “The enlightenment instinct is the instinct for the ground of being to become fully conscious of itself.” Adyashanti

     “Nothing is finite which doesn't include the infinite. The finite is the byproduct of the infinite as such becomes the outer form, the mirror of the infinite, its external revealing image. Essence and form are inseparable. Essence is the eternal Being. But living form is its constantly ever new manifestation - everlasting revelation... I try to learn from the finite sciences the lessons of the infinite.” Arthur M. Young 

     “True Nature needs no object to know itself. When the mind disidentifies from all movement, we stand at the threshold of True Nature, as radiant Being that transcends, yet exists in all movements.” 
        Richard Miller. “Yoga Nidra. A Meditative Practice for Deep Relaxation and Healing.” Sounds True, 2005.

Frederic Benaglia

Emptiness

     "Emptiness teachings demonstrate that the 'I,' as well as everything else, lacks inherent existence. The notion of lacking inherent existence has several senses. 
     In one sense, empty things lack essence, which means that there is no intrinsic quality that makes a thing what it is.
     In another sense, empty things lack independence, which means that a thing does not exist on its own, apart from conditions, relations or cognition. 
     A great deal of what one studies in the emptiness teachings demonstrates the relations between these two senses, and heightens one's sensitivity to their ramifications. 


     When you meditate on emptiness, what you actually look for is inherent existence. Instead of finding inherent existence, you will find the lack of inherent existence. This lack itself is emptiness."                                                  Greg Goode

http://www.heartofnow.com/files/emptiness.html

Listen with your Eyes, Watch with your Ears ...

      “… the shouts of children suddenly fell quiet, it was only now that I noticed. The bell had rung. The sounds here were new and unfamiliar to me, the same was true of the rhythm in which they surfaced, but I would soon get used to them, to such an extent that they would fade into the background again. You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how do we get there?
     This was the question I asked myself, sitting in a district of Stockholm drinking coffee, my muscles contracting with the cold and the cigarette smoke dissolving into the vast mass of air above me.”

       Karl Ove Knausgaard. “A Death in the Family. My Struggle: Book 1.” Vintage Books, London, 2014.

Martha