I love this . . .
The Great Tao
“The great Tao is everything, both on
the left and on the right.
Through it, all things come into being, and
it does not abandon them.
When its work is completed, it does not
possess them.
It loves and nurtures all things,
But does not rule them.
It never exists, so it can be called small,
apparently.
All things return home to it,
And it does not claim to own them,
So it can be called great, apparently,
It never aspires to greatness,
And therefore it accomplishes greatness.”
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
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Peace? Personal Growth? Pish Posh?!
What is personal growth anyway? Is it a process of losing immaturity and facing the facts of life? Is it a coming into peace? Is it the development of personal ideals into a vision of life? How can any of it begin to be possible without peace? Ever try to build a tent in a storm? Growth is like that tent-pitching adventure. We set up camp here and then there as we explore a terrain on a journey of wholeness, richness of living. How do we get there in turmoil?
The whole idea of feeling at peace with your self, with life, with others often – by its sheer contradiction to reality – lands on the mind with a comical mockery of all the chaos, internal agony and daily inundation of responsibility. Peace? Right! And the fairies leave me gold coins under the magnolia every evening! It can sound that ludicrous. Then we face the semantics of “finding” peace, even in a quiet home, sitting in “optimum” meditative pose (as if!). With all else clamoring within and around the next bend, it can feel like a gargantuan striving to be “at peace.” So many things in life scream out: “I am more real and more important!” The contrast of those screaming demands and issues pose the notion of peace as comical and the one contemplating it worthy of contempt or ridicule. The roof may cave in with the financial disaster. I might produce the same orphaning of my children though I’m technically more here than my parents were. There’s too much to do to even begin to imagine what it would be like to be a smooth-running overflowing river of peace in the middle of it all. Too much nips at the heels daily.
So, sit and rest into a sense of wholeness, peace? RIGHT! Besides, the attempt can, by its own efforts, destroy any suggestion of peace. So, it seems impossible. But it’s not.
There are layers to tend to first.
1) Focus on the body’s language
2) Acknowledge and work through (lifetime work) the injuries of the past that continue to visit today.
3) Establish a vision that will make possible the management of now’s needs and desires in conjunction with the repair work needful to relieve pain from past injuries. E.g. A person needs to feel capable of being present on certain levels with those s/he cherishes without the paralysis and inhibition created in fear of repeating history. There are ways to work through both needs. The importance of now and the critical drain of concern about the effects of the past on a life – these are both vital concerns. One does not negate the other. Your power is now. Sure. But that does not diminish how the past still needs a measure of your regard and attention. Development is essential in making the most of the power of your now. But…development is facilitated by recognition of what is NOT developed because of past influences. We can run. We can hide. But it profits us little in terms of depth change, the type of transformation that brings a person into a place of full presence, making the life a feast for self and for loved ones.
4) Recognize the path of peace is a process of increasing awareness, allowance, integration and release built on a foundation of self-acceptance and sobriety. All while making sure to grow and hold loosely to your dynamic vision of life as you, you as life.
5) Grow a sense of unity with all in an ever-increasing expansion of wholeness within, shedding perspectives of isolation and judgement.
Stay tuned… for a glimpse into the first layer mentioned above. Find a place today, a soothing place, sit with yourself and call every part of you that has been scattered back home. Visualization, as much as it cannot be proven, measured or otherwise grasped with anything tangible, is still a highly powerful tool of self-restoration, especially when feelings are allowed to have their full play without fear.
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When Seeing Blinds Sight, Going Stops Arrival . . .
“If I must cross every skyline to find out what is beyond, I shall never appreciate the true depth of sky seen between trees upon the ridge of a hill. If I must map the canyons and count the trees, I shall never enter the sound of a hidden waterfall. If I must explore and investigate every trail, that path which vanishes into the forest far up on the mountainside will be found at last to lead merely back to the suburbs. To the mind which pursues every road to its end, every road leads nowhere. To abstain is not to postpone the cold disillusionment of the true facts but to see that one arrives by staying rather than by going, that to be forever looking beyond is to remain blind to what is here.
To know nature, the Tao, and the ‘substance’ of things, we must know it as, in the archaic sense, a man ‘knows’ a woman–in the warm vagueness of immediate contact. As the Cloud of Unknowing says of God, ‘By love he may be gotten and holden, but by thought never.’ This implies, too, that it is also mistaken to think of it as actually vague, like mist or diffused light or tapioca pudding. The image of vagueness implies that to know nature, outside ourselves as within, we must abandon every idea, every thought and opinion, of what it is–and look. If we must have some idea of it, it must be the most vague imaginable, which is why, even for Westerners, such formless conceptions as the Tao are to be preferred to the idea of God, with its all too definite associations.”
Alan Watts – Nature, Man and Woman
Lose your mind, stop your go, find a place central within and unfold. It’s not bliss-ninny ohmmful denial of life’s demands or all those great plans. It’s a presence-centered way of being, always-the-lover-on-the-verge but mentally sharp in response to life’s provocation, always deeply looking. Not so much the frenzied, grab-it-all-fast and figure and finagle and fret. But respond from the soil of your life’s lessons. Define what matters here and now and cultivate the awareness of how alive and beautiful is that one glimpse of sky you reach. And watch, look, breathe it all in as you realize that the craving quest finds it all within.
Then from there, from that fullness the going, grabbing, exploring times hum with one who is always right here now, drinking deeply in love’s peace.
Is this where we end the addictive processes, in the feast of here, now, opening heart in love not because we’ll get a prize but because being is the prize?
Maybe…
jrk
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Freedom To Be The Failure That One Is ? !
A quiet moment, birds singing, front lawn mowed, back yard begun and I have to rest a moment, this book is always waiting, so I read. One passage of brilliant and deep illumination cannot go without noting. Here it is:
“For enlightenment, or accord with the Tao, remains unrealized so long as it is considered as a specific state to be attained, and for which there are tests and standards of success. It is much rather freedom to be the failure that one is.
Unlikely as it may seem, this outrageous and nonmoral freedom is the basis of all mental and spiritual wholeness, provided…that it seeks no result. But so full an acceptance includes also this seeking, along with just anything that one happens to be doing or feeling. The apparently extreme passivity of this acceptance is, however, creative because it permits one to be all of a piece, to be good, bad, indifferent, or merely confused, with a whole heart. To act or grow creatively we must begin from where we are, but we cannot begin at all if we are not “all here” without reservation or regret. Lacking self-acceptance, we are always at odds with our point of departure, always doubting the ground on which we stand, always so divided against ourselves that we cannot act with sincerity. Apart from self-acceptance as the groundwork of thought and action, every attempt at spiritual or moral discipline is the fruitless struggle of a mind that is split asunder and insincere. It is the freedom which is the essential basis of self-restraint.”
Alan Watts (of course!), Nature Man and Woman (from the chapter titled “The World As Non-Sense.”)
I am reminded of moments even just this weekend where I was split on “what next?” And with good reason. But I realize that the moment I accepted myself unconditionally, gave myself permission to feel what I feel, to act on it with wisdom and grace, in that moment I was released to flow into decisiveness and rest. We can make a mountain, even, out of self-acceptance. Or we can rest and trust the process of surrendering to all we realize about ourselves. There is this deep abiding with self, a deep releasing of all we value (simply in the moment) that enables what is always there awaiting emergence – that wellspring of resonance with Source or Spirit or Tao and it is a tremendous opportunity to be with. Be with faults, be with failings, be with what didn’t work and why (even if the “why” is ugly-seeming), be with desires, be with even the most troubling mental disturbance and, in that being with, resting in non-judgement. Not running. Not refusing to see. Not making a decree against. Just withness. In that moment, it is as if these roiling elements simply want mommy to come along and witness. They sigh. They settle after a few whimpers. They melt gradually. They fade. And in this process self-acceptance is not forced or brought about by some acrobatic mental exposition. It simply emerges. Then we taste freedom.
So, in this sense, this freedom is “amoral.” There is no bothering with good or bad. It’s a being-withness in acceptance that provokes a release, and it is that release that enables the very thing Watts highlights as a by-product of not effort supreme or hog-tying the ego – the emergence of self-restraint, when it matters most. And when it will produce the ripest, richest fruit.
It becomes a dance with Source, with love, with whatever you suppose to be Divine. With Tao. Not grasping, grabbing to be the grand evolved one. Just unfolding, witnessing and letting go of judgement.
Why does it matter? Don’t we just need to go get the groceries, fight corruption and plan out the summer? It matters because the peace and energy such a process releases is worth more than any notion of enlightenment or success. We become – while plotting, revolutionizing and shopping – the feasts we’ve always known we could be and life cooks us up from her grandest kitchen of delights. And yes, of sorrows. And it turns out that the “failures” provide some of the best ingredients in a rich stew.
But now I ramble…time to get back to work.
jrk
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God Re-Visited And Freedom’s Truth
The view from Alan Watts’ brilliant perspective, voiced here:
“In the West we have always admitted in theory that truly moral acts must be expressions of freedom. Yet we have never allowed this freedom, never permitted ourselves to be everything that we are, to see that fundamentally all the gains and losses, rights and wrongs of our lives are as natural and “perfect” as the peaks and valleys of a mountain range. For in identifying God, the Absolute, with a goodness excluding evil we make it impossible for us to accept ourselves radically: what is not in accord with the will of God is at variance with Being itself and must not under any circumstances be accepted. Our freedom is therefore set about with such catastrophic rewards and punishments that it is not freedom at all, but resembles rather the totalitarian state in which one may vote against the government but always at the risk of being sent to a concentration camp. Instead of self-acceptance, the groundwork of our thought and action has therefore been metaphysical anxiety, the terror of being ultimately wrong and rotten to the core.”
I recall my father saying of the devil – when I was a bit of an argumentative kid going on and on about the discrepancies in judgements of right and wrong, good vs. evil and how much God does or does not get involved and if he’s in control then why doesn’t he stop this said devil – “He’s God’s Devil.” Wrap your mind around that one.
And remember in Job, what did God say to this keeper of evil? “Have you considered my servant Job?” In other words, “I dare you to knock him around, to rape his family and kill them. Do it!!!” What a huge challenge to simply prove that one man would not curse God. How holy is that?
I don’t know why I’m dragging this out but I am. No. Now I know why. I’m realizing, more and more, that I’m more invested in being an oppression ouster than anything else. And there are beliefs and whole attitudes of living that originate in this wrong notion of God as the tooth fairy or as, cringe, “good.” Why d’ya suppose he forbade such knowledge?
I have days where I’m just not so sure I believe in any God’s existence. And then I stand under trees. God/dess is not yet and never will be measured by any religion, philosophy or belief system. But take a deep breath, feel the pulse of the earth of this planet, of your own body and you know the truth. And it’s all good/evil. It’s all there. In the blink of an eye, one moment can wipe out a life or birth another. How is that “good?” It simply is…
Alligators, rainbows and humans too! So, how can this God be good? Do we have to decree a final verdict? I think that, instead, I will go walk through the wet grass barefoot, breathe, feel, know without logic.
jrk
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Sunset . . .
I sit here in this chair
and stare at sky and trees,
glory in deep greens,
blues fading to white while night
gathers his cloak to shroud days story.
Symphony of sound resounds
from roof to twig.
There’s nothing but the best here,
deepest rest from fear.
Pride pounded out,
plied loose by love’s flood
shed in tears of gratitude.
Life’s loudest hullabaloo,
lambasting
liquid
lullabye:
lilting lift
of mockingbird fit
sent soaring to the sky.
Never wonder why.
Simply sigh,
crying,
flying along the sound,
the pounding
of night’s ponderous dance.
jrk © 5/30/03, 2009
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Sexuality and Nature…Forces of Evil?
“…the relegation of sexuality and nature to the forces of evil grows out of the belief that strength and clarity of consciousness depend upon cultivating a one-pointed and exclusive mode of attention. This is, in other words, a type of attention which ignores the background in fastening upon the figure, and which grasps the world serially, one thing at a time. Yet this is exactly the meaning of the Hindu-Buddhist term avidya, ignorance, or “ignore-ance,” the basic unconsciousness as a result of which it appears that the universe is a collection of separate things and events.”
Quoted from Nature, Man and Woman by Alan Watts.
This puts me in remembrance of the idea of “fallen” man. And woman. “The woman thou gavest me…” It draws up from the wellspring of my own personal experiences and takes me to that place where I recognized one thing pivotal about the Garden of Eden. The tree was that of the knowledge of good and evil. I ventured to see it as a moment of partaking of the awareness that evil exists, that good exists. But to assume that we would then be equipped to determine which is thus was . . . doubtful, a twist of “truth” for the truth that we cannot arrive at God via the knowledge of good and evil. For to be “like God” via that route, that knowing good is and evil is, is not to be Godly but to be a distortion of divinity, a taking on of “God-likeness” from a narrow view. You cannot, after all, see a whole forest when you are fixated on one tree.
No such venture succeeds except in reaching the depths of man and woman’s inability to be naked and unashamed.
It was that point of recognition that put me on a path of seeing Jesus as one who leads us, whether we believe he accomplished a great work (or whether he is merely symbolic, a representation of a vital part of transformation), he is one who leads us through and beyond the lies created by awareness of the existence of evil, of good. We are able, by dying to accusations created by judgements in the hellfire of good vs. evil, by dying to distortions of purity, we are able to resurrect that same intrinsic innocence found “in the beginning” and partake of the Tree of Life. We work out our own “salvation” from the lost realms of fixation and dependence on the knowledge of good and evil. We are redeemed beyond limiting knowledge while we learn how love safeguards our lives against forces truly destructive.
When we approach nature or sexuality from that idea of having “fallen” or when we approach nature or sexuality in a reaction against that idea, we miss it completely. We have an idol and an emptiness that whispers and cries for deeper, more sustaining feasts beyond comprehension. Rivers of living water . . .
jrk
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Chronic Flow
Nigel Richmond’s interpretation of the Yi Jing is by far my favorite at this point. And lately I’m focusing on the top line of Hexagram 25. It speaks to my heart, calms me into a slower, deeper settling flow.
Sometimes I think chronic illness is God’s way of keeping me in check. Otherwise, I’d run ahead of flow and wreck things. I asked Yi Jing once why I suffer CFS. I got a response from 34 that indicated my being held in check. That doesn’t jive with the laws of attraction, does it? More and more I think my suitor is unable to comprehend the depths and dances of free will with fate, divinity with “frailty.” But I probably don’t grasp it all.
I’ve haunted a blog for a while now and found the most recent post so healing I have to share it. The expression and art is stellar: A Woman Seeing For Herself. Patricia Bralley sees beautifully and with a perspective deep enough to embrace the soul.
On to 25.6, what do I find from Richmond’s jewels?
“Innocence brings on the unexpected, but to intentionally travel out to meet the unexpected is not innocence, it is a sort of cunning to defeat its unexpectedness. In the whole of this tao the harmonious is uncomplicated by desires and goals, identity is carried by the life force and has problems if it imposes its will
The Chinese image
Action amongst innocence
(or the unexpected) brings injury.
Any action that we take through our interest in the unexpected flow is bound to be an interference with it. As in the fifth line we are acting out of discomfort and not allowing it to pass through our experience.”
This response (25.6) is sometimes what Yi Jing has to say when I’m freaking out about something I think will happen soon and want to be prepared for. Freaking out is one way to disintegrate any strength to face change. Trying to make it happen faster is the same thing. If you have any psychic tendency, any ability to discern the future, this one grabs you and pulls you back into the flow fast. If you just think you know what might happen and you feel yourself grabbing at activity to greet what you’re certain is likely, this response reminds of the vital importance of simple depth being.
For that matter, so does chronic illness…
jruthkelly
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God Between The Toes?
Every part of you is spiritual. From the contents in your nose to the crud between your toes (especially if you’ve not had a bath yet and have worn wooly old socks on the treadmill) to the gnawing in your stomach to the heights of illumination and the depths of contented salvation, each bit and spit and pow of your now is a soup of spiritual potency. Pouring that potency into the various fields of personhood, of self-unity flowing into a rich expression of unique humanness is the deeper stuff of spirituality and tougher work than sitting for the om-teenth session of blissful progression. Spreading it out into a lifetime work that resonates beyond and into fields not even yet born, that is the diligent work of spirituality married to personal vision and truly does resonate to the grime on the soles of your feet, dark from dancing in the dirt and to the moment sweet with noting the slow but relentless progression of gardening or gasping at the world of mold in a cup forgotten.
Spirituality snuggles closer to the grubs ‘neath the shrubs than the mountaintop glory of exclusive knowledge. Spirituality’s sacred realms reveal their glory in the coveted mathematical equation catapulting us all into higher intelligence, is as holy as the vernix on a newborn fresh from womb’s clinging cloak, as evolved and transformed as the dance of a 6 year old across recital’s stage awkwardly enraptured in the body’s discovery, as hallowed as a naked woman awaiting one more touch before melting completely and as blessed as the check in the mail.
Heights of glory, prophetic revelry, angelic visitations and all things allegedly beyond are no more spiritually alive and authentic than any “common” experience. The work of drawing the purest energy from every one of these wonders, that very work is what weaves a rich tapestry of spirit woven with mind and body, as self and all in a dance with the One. The deeper we go into unity of being, into the knowing of our flesh and bone home, singing in every pore and every store of personal experience and knowledge, the more devoted we become to the humming dance and interweaving wonder between all the elements that comprise the human experience…in all these things we are climbing higher to the throne-room of God.
Where she will, no doubt, be trimming the gnarly hedges ‘tween then and now, singing in angelic tones of grateful unknown song, occasionally cursing the furious growth and wiping the sweat from her brow.
J. Ruth Kelly © 2005, 2009
