Noticings

As I reflected on how to begin this dance of words, I noticed how even in our occlusion we are given sign of the singularity from which our insistent plural identities run. Reading the words of others as we face what we do collectively, in a strange unity of isolation, I find I am more readily brought into the intimacy of being in this moment here now. Where we all meet without distinction. The beauty of the ugly virus lies in this, just as from dung come flowers, given the right seed. What is underneath all this is of a nature so grand and unconditional it can and does play host to all. Even by way of this lower form of bacterial life, the presence of something so much bigger than our collective dream makes itself known for those given the opportunity to see this.

I once read of an experiment in which a researcher worked with a group of toddlers. He would have an object in his hand – like a book – and convincingly drop the book as if by accident. Without exception each time he did so the toddlers would do what they could to help him, it was their first instinct. However when he would intentionally throw the book, not violently, but in such a way that demonstrated he was feigning needing help, the toddlers were not moved to help. There were different parts to this experiment, but the sum total of results seemed to point to an impulse that is innate in us to want to help.

As I see it, we are here to serve something too big and elusive to name. Which is why when we get to the place of genuinely exclaiming “OMG!” to a shocking jolt (and halt) out of our collective robotics, we see and feel the impulse to help emerge out of the very bottom line of who we are.

For the moment I see the possibility that communicating things I have noticed may at least move in the direction of help. These things have been noticed over the course of time and are not specific to this present collective experience. However it is this collective experience which prompts the wish to speak.

I have noticed a need to eschew all labels to the best of my ability while still remaining functional. I have noticed how impressions have the tendency to fall and feed the growth of constructs useless and impeding to my possible lightness of being. A lightness of being that I, for some unknown reason, feel moved to bear. Or strive to bear.

I have noticed I must accept my un-acceptance, and when I do it becomes a fluidity that can perhaps bathe me of what resists the breath that breathes me. Yes, I have noticed that I am being breathed. And when I cease to resist the unbearable tenderness of this, Love and beauty become more than a story. 

I have noticed when I say I do or don’t know, neither one speaks the truth of my state. In being fully my un-acceptance I become something else. Trying to capture a formula of living in surrender, which IS the way, I have seen, is like making ink marks on flowing water and expecting them to remain static. There is a stillness somewhere beneath it all. I know this stillness, but only in sublime absence.

I have noticed that sitting in a certainty the mind might grasp is a death sentence. And when I resist this by employing a trick (usually of self-depreciation) I am too hungry, too partial, to really live. There is no avoiding ego as a construct. There remains a view of ego that still seems helpful, though I am prepared for this to be dashed to bits from even these modest heights. But for what it is worth, I have understood ego to be a construct that was meant to navigate in physicality and its constant change. We get into trouble when we get stuck on a particular manifestation of this construct. We cut off our chances of “breaking the glass and falling back towards the Glassblower’s breath” as Rumi has put it. Collectively, we have obviously gotten into big trouble.

I have had to learn to open up to death. But as is the way in this dual world we share, the deeper into this opening I go, the closer I come to life, I have noticed. Helped to sacrifice the language and all the associations that used to bring me to poetic heights predictably, a new language emerged. It was comprised of synchronistic subtleties and fresh symbols in my atmosphere, defiant of old associations, yet all of which pointed to the sleep to leave behind. But not without first embracing it.

And then this was not enough, for these results were shown to be still too substantial in the realm of matter to be of meaning in the realm of spirit. In the essential. I have noticed that once anything sets anchor the move comes to cut the chain. Silence is sweet, but anything done to excess can become its own undoing. These words I offer here in the spirit of sacrifice.

Dreams can present a language that is closer to this realm of spirit, if one refrains from applying a symbolism of meaning which bears the cross of the grasping self. Rather I have been called to see dissolving obstructions in the flowing medium of Love. Dreams often now are as the broken pieces of icebergs floating, melting into the Ocean of being. Former constructs holding life forms of substantial beauty, giving way to a flooding away from time and space identities, an ever greater beauty. I have been given the grace of warning against many lowing golden cows.

This vertical dream we share of consensus reality seems not much different at the moment.

We are given much help, I have noticed. At times the Beloved, the Chef, seems incredibly cruel. In the hypnosis of these time and space traps we find ourselves in. I don’t know how to surrender to this – there is no formula, I have found. And there is no wrong way to surrender. When I am ground down to a powder that eventually heals me of my resistance – healing by small death - I see that even this grinding is Love. I see how incredibly slow I am in my learning, how patiently, “Something” waits in silence to bring us to a brink, a precipice, from which we are pushed to grow wings.

I have seen that we are indeed all returning to a home we share, yet our paths are marvelously different. And when I have failed to see this difference as Love, I have been given the grace of seeing my arrogance, which would limit the beauty and expansive mystery of Creation like the barbed wire of a concentration camp.

But these hard lessons have also brought me to notice how I now see more readily what once was curse has become blessing. I have noticed that some of the symbols of what I once called evil were entirely my own. The “Friend” repeatedly brought these symbols into my sphere until eventually, with the special medicine given along the way, with the unconditional love that only going to the depths can reveal, I could see them for what they were. And in this shedding of shell, light.

I have noticed how I have come to love this light, and its silence. And how this love will be exposed as seed that must die, buried in the soil of this incarnate existence, this mortal coil.

Yet to want union I’m told in so many ways is not the way, as it once was, in the beginning passion for walking this path. Union does happen, but it brings with it a hangover that eventually shows me Love is the separation as well. When my eyes tear over, as they do sometimes in the unbearable, unspeakable intimacy of some synchronicity, I also see that those tears prove that the vessel is present, solid, collecting the condensation. I have tried to grasp on to what can never be held. Yet the tears are also a letting go all at once.

How to live? As I am, to the best of my ability, moment to moment. Washing away what snags me away from the reality of this very moment. With the help of a Friendship too vast and great to be confined to any one form.