Momentary? Timeless?

     We think BOTH as if we had all the time in the world AND as if our hair were on fire! 
     A bit of self-reflection reveals how obsessed we are about the relentless, irreversible passage of time. 

     and every flower a tiny tributary 
     that from the ground flows green and momentary              Alice Oswald

     Yet, on deeper reflection, when the anxious "me" has settled down, isn't the one who looks through these eyes outside of time entirely? Isn't this "one who knows" entirely free of personal concerns, abiding in deep silence, stillness & equanimity?

Fear and Non-suffering

     “ ‘After thousands of years we’re still strangers to darkness, fearful aliens in an enemy camp with our arms crossed over our chests,’ Dillard writes ...

     When it comes to illness, dying, death – those darknesses – it seems we are still so very much Plymouth Pilgrims – all fear and fretting and fortifications, and a strong sense of our own alienness in a hostile land. We don’t begin to know what to do with ourselves. We cross our arms over our chests and try to look on the bright side as we starve.”
       Nina Riggs. “The Bright Hour. A Memoir of Living and Dying.” Simon & Schuster, 2017. 

     It’s so important to remember, especially for well-educated folks, that while we may consider ourselves highly rational, our thoughts, words & actions are mostly emotion-driven conditioned reactions ie we're sleep-walking through life. Our education allows us to rationalize more elegantly. Can we step back & notice every time we lazily start dumping an old stock opinion on someone? Aren't we all too often as brain-dead & dreary as a person spewing a sales pitch? Do we really want to be like a large ship, with no crew on board, blind momentum taking it to inevitable disaster?
     It's sad & frightening to see folks who seem to exist in a perpetual fog bank. They "try to" clarify things, but find existential & wisdom topics too complicated, too depressing, or they keep falling asleep as soon as they start listening, watching or reading about these. The possibility of avoidance doesn't seem to cross their minds.
     “… the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.”
       Paul Kalanithi. “When Breath Becomes Air.” Random House, 2016.

       “The best way out is always through.”                   Robert Frost 

     “… when my mind was focused on what was in my heart instead of all the fears from my past, I was able to experience myself as an unencumbered non-suffering being.

     In meditation we learn to cultivate and stretch the moments of being unencumbered, those places of non-suffering.
 
     Only through acknowledging and releasing blind emotions can I experience the inner unencumbered and harmonious being that is always present despite the suffering.

     We cannot fully practice any call for liberation without our lives being fully exposed. There is no hiding.”

      Zenju Earthlyn Manuel https://www.inquiringmind.com/article/2901_08_manual-the-terror-within/

"The Eternal Eye" by Alice Mason https://www.etsy.com/ca/shop/AliceMasonArtist?ref=l2-shopheader-name

Shifting from Fear to Love

     During a massive shit storm, persevering may be a heroic achievement. "We have to learn that what cannot be cured must be endured." Michel de Montaigne

      But here's the problem, the most significant of life's challenges - constant change, aging, sickness & death - are ultimately incurable, unavoidable, uncontrollable.
     “… living with a terminal disease is like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss. But living without disease is also like walking on a tightrope over an insanely scary abyss, only with some fog or cloud cover obscuring the depths a bit more – sometimes the wind blowing it off a little, sometimes a nice dense cover.” Nina Riggs. “The Bright Hour. A Memoir of Living and Dying.” Simon & Schuster, 2017.

     Montaigne once more: “Did you think you would never reach the point toward which you were constantly heading?”  
     What if our fervent wish to cure the incurable, or even to endure (while 'raging against the dying of the light') is completely wrongheaded? WHAT IF fearful aversion to life IS our actual basic problem?

     WHAT IF instead, we gradually lean in close to carefully examine real life, warts & all? WHAT IF without any judgment, without any preferences, with a truly open heart-mind, we open ourselves to real life, complete with its constant change, aging, sickness & death? This means letting go of ALL our deeply-conditioned aversions & associated magical thinking: secular, new age & religious. 
     Can we cultivate such a mature, honest direct relationship with life?
     This demands we let go of fear, and instead, approach life with LOVE. Very radical, counterintuitive, YET ...

     Imagine now continuously practicing this. The fact is, you really can, AND there's no better alternative! So how does embodying this radically new perspective change your understanding of the following, otherwise frustratingly inscrutable, wisdom sayings?

          "The mind creates the abyss
          and the heart crosses it."                                   Nisargadatta

          "I was born
          when all I once feared
          I could love.”                                                         Rabia Basri 

          "Always do what you are afraid to do."            Ralph Waldo Emerson's Aunt Mary

          “Someone I loved gave me a box full of darkness.
          It took me years to understand that this, too,
          was a gift.”                                                              Mary Oliver

 

Time to go LIVE?

     To what extent do YOU sleepwalk through life - your thoughts, speech & actions fully pre-programmed by your genetic & environmental conditioning? How predictable are you? Are you barely surviving on "story of me" re-runs?

          “To live is the rarest thing in the world. 
            Most people exist, that is all.”                         Oscar Wilde

     As one who’s spent far too much time & energy on (wallowing in) miseries from my childhood, I’ve come to wonder if such activity (or more accurately, lack of activity) is primarily an avoidant luxury when we have nothing truly important & urgent to deal with. 
     An incurable disease diagnosis with a month left to live seems to snap about 40% of people out of their “neurotic selfing habit” and right smack into the best quality of life they’ve ever known. And they’re profoundly grateful for the diagnosis! See: http://healthyhealers.blogspot.com/search?q=post+traumatic+growth

     An excellent, wonderfully well-written book IMHO is: Nina Riggs. “The Bright Hour. A Memoir of Living and Dying.” Simon & Schuster, 2017. A few relevant quotes from it:
          “Cancer removes whatever weird barriers we sometimes have with others. A mastectomy of bullshit, my mother suggests. All the o-yes-everything-is-great stuff eventually gets carted off in a bag of medical waste.”
          “Annie Dillard … reminds us again and again to clear our vision of expectations, to try to see without understanding.”

     And finally, a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke: 
          “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”

How Would You Live Today IF ... ?

     Today’s full moon is regarded as the anniversary of the Buddha’s Enlightenment.
     This Awakening is held to have occurred around the 5th century BCE under the Bodhi tree in Bodhgaya, India.
     On his enlightenment at the age of thirty-five in Bodhgaya, the Buddha proclaimed:

          Profound peace, natural simplicity,
          uncompounded luminosity,
          I have found a nectar-like dharma.

     This day also marks the anniversary of the Buddha’s parinirvana — his passing beyond this life. When Buddha lay dying in a forest grove in Kushinigar, surrounded by five hundred of his disciples, he said to them with his last breath: 

          It is in the nature of all things that take form to dissolve again.
          Strive with your whole being to attain complete Awakening.

     On this auspicious day it is held that the effects of positive or negative actions are multiplied ten million times.

     How would you live today if you were awake to the infinite consequentiality of every thought, intention, word, and action that you generate as it ripples out into the universe touching all beings in the most intimate of ways? 

     How would you live this day if you were awakened to the deepest dimensions of your True Being? These deepest dimensions encompass an underlying ground of reality that is shared by all things and all beings -- an inner open dimension of wakeful loving clear presence within all things and all beings in all moments of what we call time.

     May you live with this intimate sense of interbeing and with a heartfelt lovingkindfulness today – and all days.

Joel & Michelle Levey
WisdomAtWork.com

 

Loving Awareness

Going through Hell?

     If you're going through hell, 
     keep going.
     That is no place to stop!                          John Randall Dunn (paraphrased)

     Below are the words of a 35 year old, diagnosed with terminal lung cancer shortly before he would have completed neurosurgery training:
     "... yet now I felt that to understand my own direct experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.
     And so it was literature that brought me back to life during this time. The monolithic uncertainty of my future was deadening; everywhere I turned, the shadow of death obscured the meaning of any action. I remember the moment when my overwhelming unease yielded, when that seemingly impassable sea of uncertainty parted. I woke up in pain, facing another day - no project beyond breakfast seemed tenable. I can't go on, I thought, and immediately, its antiphon responded, completing Samuel Beckett's seven words, words I had learned long ago as an undergraduate: I'll go on. I got out of bed and took a step forward, repeating the phrase over and over: 'I can't go on. I'll go on.'
     That morning, I made a decision: I would push myself to return to the OR. Why? Because I could. Because that’s who I was. Because I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living."
        Paul Kalanithi. “When Breath Becomes Air.” Random House, 2016.

Precious Life

Who am I really?

     "What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself."                                                                                            Abraham Maslow
"From the same womb we came,
that of magnificent sovereignty.
Feeling lost in time
I tried on a thousand costumes
but only Infinite Knowing
will fit."                                                                                        Rumi

     "There is a light that shines beyond all things on earth, beyond the highest, the very highest heavens. This is the light that shines in your heart."                          Chandogya Upanishad

      "An awake heart is like a sky that pours light."              Hafiz