Meditation on A Well-Lit-Path

Our Daily Dance: An Intention

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I returned late last night from the annual Dance New England summer camp near Lake Ossipee in New Hampshire, and woke this morning with dancing tape still on a couple of toes, the echo of taut and trained muscle still in the sinews, and the ache of separation from that vibrant and affectionate community of dancers already wringing out some sighs.

A beautiful family event that has been going on for some 30 years, DNE Camp attracts top-quality teachers and chefs and musicians from all over, offering the best of what they have to upwards of 800 participants. The cost of classes, food and lodging is all part of the modest fee. This year, like most years, there were community elders in attendance, and adults who at one time were babies born to this once-a-year village; there were newly-inspired youth from all over the States and abroad; and toddlers to teens who arrived with their parents for this summertime camp.

The End of Summer

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

From “cannot imagine” to “will not accept”; from “will not surrender” to “can never forget”. The layers and levels we uncover in meeting this life challenge our small comforts. If we meet the surface, and draw it aside like a curtain that veils our senses, we reveal richer colors to our sight, intensify the sensation our exploring fingers find, satisfy the brightest/broadest savoring, remind us of a scent that drew us outward and upward, and make the dullest word with renewed connotation charge the mind.

1984

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Nineteen eighty-four.

What was at one time a distant dream, the darkness of a book, an election year, a future, became the present. We didn’t have to do anything; we didn’t lift a finger, but gradually the date overtook us and passed us by, leaving us stationary at the roadside, the dusty wind of its passage playing and tugging at our hair and our clothes, the sun baking the asphalt underfoot and burning our faces to leather.

Stillpoint

Sun, 20 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

What we repeat becomes our center, that’s sure. So when the wind is kicking up spray – when the movement of the air is really howling round you – we return to what we have repeated, what has become our rote. If it is made of wood, you will likely float; if it is a stone it will sink you.

Lately, the home that I thought was brick turned out to be sticks, and the sticks turned out to be straw, so that with a lick of the wind, with a flick of a match, all of the concrete that protected me from storm turned tinder, and took flight or caught flame. Work which together lifted me and a company as we grew together arrived at a natural and logical completion, so employment will change. A partnership which saw two continents, two children, two farms and two languages has followed the same living arc from a birth to a death, and all the twos have become ones. The home which housed a family now surrounds silence, both delightful and hollow.

To each music its refrain

Sat, 19 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Was the phrase “to harp on” really coined by Shakespeare – Still harping on, my daughter? – or did he conveniently lift it from earlier works, freshen it up, add a dash of dash, and re-release it to a marveling public?

Perhaps every artist should work this way. A rather recent invention of the overweaned ego, the Artist as Creator of All Things has got to go. The real artist is a channel for sunlight, not the sun itself: she drinks in the world through her senses, a true tantrika whose openness to life is unlimited (and not limited to sexual connection, as some small spirits would consider the Tantra, a Reader’s Digest version of the Kama Sutra), and being filled to overflowing with sight and sound and touch and taste and scent – as well as that subtle combination of what we do not outwardly sense – allows that water to pour out in whatever form it may take.

The conversation of touch

Thu, 03 May 2007 00:00:00 +0000

In our naturally egocentric way, we consider our senses channels of information that bring the world to us. We scan the horizon to identify threat or opportunity, we read; we listen to what is hidden or to what is spoken, what is sung; we are drawn to scents and repelled from odors, and we delight in the flavor of what is pleasing, disgorging what is foul; we feel heat and cold, abrasion and softness.

Spirit where spirit is sought

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The mind’s eye is easily occluded, as simply and as naturally as clouds form and veil the face of the Sun. Or the eye’s perception may be overwhelmed by the colors and the kaleidoscopic movement of the world. If that eye is clouded, we experience the surfaces of things; beautiful, plentiful, absorbing. But in all places the eye of the mind can seek further, see deeper, and finally deliver greater satisfaction as one becomes part of the environment, and the environment becomes part of you.

Choosing Light

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

I appreciate all the more how cultivating the habit of choosing Light instead of confusion changes not only my inner world, but paints the external as well. Early morning yoga feels to me as though I myself, infinitesimal against the backdrop of planets and galaxies, and infinite tracts of empty space, am the agent of sunrise: I lift my arms to praise the morning, and we move into the light of the sun.

This Life's Riches

Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When the eyes are open, all of Creation is reduced to surfaces… imagine the poverty in a world of surfaces. As though all that an ocean offered us was its waves! As soon as the eyes open, the interiors begin to close, the interiors of everything that sight obscures from us, the interior of our selves as well.

Eyesight is the sense of abstractions and of interpretation; we interact with the world at a distance, when our other and more proximate senses cannot give us their information. To close the eyes, one is taught, is to live in darkness; but to close the eyes with awareness, to be listening with your being, invites light – so much more than one can imagine.

Practice

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The earth turns toward the sun, the wake-up alarm rings; the cats begin to mill about the bed, waiting for their food; traffic begins to burn its way toward places of employ; a day begins.

The first moments of one’s day are the moments before the universe was created: all of life is waiting to be defined. In sixty seconds, or one hundred seconds, you are with the Creator, and invite the day to become what it will be.

The Archer's Aim

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

The archer strengthens the bow arm, grips the leather, nocks an arrow, and bends the sinew to the corner of the mouth. Breath enters as the bow is drawn, breath is stilled as the arrow is poised for flight, and all is released together. Release.

And the arrow, willed to its destination strikes home.

Meditation is the arrow on the string, and the fingers which hold it; it is the arrow in flight, and the fingers which let it go; and it is the arrow arriving at the heart of the archer.

Mantra (as it should be) revisited

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000

A song was running through my head all day today, a thread of sound sewn from the inside out, arriving at the inner ear audibly enough that I began to sing along… and so the music, which had already been part of the world, returned to it. What we take into us, changes us. What we allow into ourselves physically alters us, affects the way in which we think, the ways we feel and automatically interpret events, and therefore the ways in which we respond. Every sound takes root in the inner ear, and every smell takes root at the base of that sense. Everything we see is imprinted upon the inner eye, and is remembered in that vast – infinitely vast – record which is our conscious and subconscious mind. Everything we touch is recorded in the memory of a nerve, in the flow along an energetic channel.

A flower the color of silence

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The Indian master Osho spent most of his life seeking an unshakeable truth, in every conceivable branch and nationality of psychology or science of philosophy, following the traces of a Path walked and illuminated by spiritual teachers throughout history, following their practices with his own practice, taking their experiences and making his own experience. His methods were nonconforming at best and, following the tendencies of the 70s and 80s, subversive at worst, simultaneously earning him praise as an enlightened teacher and derision as a dangerous lunatic, the perspective depending to some extent on how dogmatically the person making the evaluation clung to ideas which he or she had never challenged.

The great silence

Thu, 28 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Silence is usually understood to be something negative, something empty, an absence of sound, of noises. This misunderstanding is prevalent because very few people have ever experienced silence.

All that they have experienced in the name of silence is noiselessness. But silence is a totally different phenomenon. It is utterly positive. It is existential, it is not empty. It is overflowing with a music that you have never heard before, with a fragrance that is unfamiliar to you, with a light that can only be seen by the inner eyes.

According to the Mystic

Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:00:00 +0000

As there is a category of facts to which our senses are our best available but very imperfect guides, as there is a category of truths which we seek by the keen but still imperfect light of our reason, so according to the mystic, there is a category of more subtle truths, which surpass the reach both of the senses and the reason, but which can be ascertained by an inner direct knowledge and direct experience. These truths are supersensuous, but not the less real for that: they have immense results upon the consciousness changing its substance and movement, bringing especially deep peace and abiding joy, a great light of vision and knowledge, a possibility of overcoming the lower animal nature [within us], and vistas of a spiritual self-development which without them do not exist.

Creation

Fri, 24 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The pattern for everything in life exists – within everything that exists. The strength of modern scientific process which seeks to name all things, giving them genus, order and phylum, or physical properties which can be described by the arc of an equation, carries its own limitations: by disconnecting one object from another, we gain control over it, we see ourselves acting upon a unique object – for the sake of argument, oil – while conveniently blinding ourselves to the fact that everything – everything! – is interconnected, socially, politically, and physically. Burning a gallon of oil here moves a dollar from my hand to the hands of another… and another and another. Those dollars transform the face of a desert, into a garden of wealth and into a cataclysm of civil war. A gallon of oil is a gallon’s worth of smoke, is a gallon’s worth of warming and greenhouse gases. A gallon of oil today is one gallon less oil tomorrow, and the day after and the day after, so the colorful streamers of automobiles heading home from work, rivers of aluminum and combustion in white and red, which repeat themselves in every city of the nation, in every city of the globe, from here to London to Moscow to Beijing to Kuala Lumpur to Solo to La Paz to Iringa… sooner or later the current of every single river on the planet ceases to move.

The Heart of Mantra

Mon, 20 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A repeated word or phrase, spoken aloud or under one’s breath, is a mantra – the thought and sounds made again and again, until the sound itself empties of sound, and the sense becomes empty of sense. The boundaries of the word are broken, and the meaning of it, revealed deep within the sound and beneath your making of the sound, is infused into you.

Flowery words for saying, in the pragmatic language of Science, that through a repetition of sounds and thoughts, you create new neural pathways, create a physical memory in your nervous and endocrine systems, into which the body may relax: sanctuary.

More on clarity of mind

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Just as you move into the body with awareness to free yourself from it – to no longer identify so completely with the physical body that your Self is veiled – just so with awareness you can lean into your thoughts, become intimate with the ways in which your mind works. Seeing your thoughts arise and pass away, you recognize how nebulous they are, how much a product of your own ego and your desires, and with a little practice you free yourself from them as well. The object of your attention becomes not the resolution of some perceived problem, nor planning some future which may not occur – you don’t give your attention to the results of some thought process – but watch the process of thinking itself.

More on embodiment

Tue, 14 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

A common misperception of meditative practice is that its goal is one of disowning the body. That becoming pure consciousness – of finding this “I” which is beyond the body – is a renunciation of the physical and the sensory.

The deepest and broadest result of meditation is in fact the opposite. For the years you have been granted in this life, yours is a physical existence – you, like the metaphor of Jesus, are a child of god, are the Divine manifest in this miracle of a living, pulsing body. You, like the metaphor of Shiva and Shakti, are part of the Creator extended into this living miracle Creation. If you haven’t watched or (as a woman) been active in the birthing of a child, you might mistake life as something other than miraculous. You might get caught up in the quotidian, in the net of the daily, and forget… but grant the possibility that this dance of energy is not simply toil, and you’ll remember that stepping to the music is a joy not easily to be discarded.

Another Horizon

Mon, 13 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

The practices of meditation and asana, and even the practices of work and community with which I have been involved, have all been driven together in the force of this travel. As I understood it would be, at a knowing, if not thinking, level. It has not been a pilgrimage to empty tombs – a “temple-tour”, where the religion changes, and the architecture, but what is seen is a building, and what is felt is felt only with the eyes – but an internal pilgrimage, one that has been supported by the philosophies and energies of this ancient yet modern country and its people.

Meditation

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

into the well
a silent pebble falls
and finds a voice

a body sinks;
the body’s echo climbs
into the light

who cast the stone
whose is the well
who waits for the reply?

The poem stands without the 3rd stanza koan, and stands as well without 2nd stanza commentary. Just as meditation stands without teacher and without guide – merely those who have practiced before, who say “The Well-Lit Path exists”. Once that truth is known, you find your own way. And once you find your own way, you are one who has gone before.

Matrimandir

Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

I can’t leave Auroville without making mention of its spiritual and physical heart, the Matrimandir… though at the same time I feel there is almost nothing I can say that does any justice to the vision behind it, the experience of the area around it, or the power of insight and meditation it brings one.

So. How to talk about it and not talk about it at the same time?