Spirit where spirit is sought
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.
For example, what is there in swimming with a fish? A fish, as my daughter observes, that is slimy, spiny, and destined as likely as not for someone’s table. If you allow your mind to be blinded, and the intensity of experience to be dulled, it is a fish, like any other fish. But if you ask what of the spirit can be found in a simple encounter, something of the spirit will always be discovered. If the mind’s eye opens, and the eyes of the heart open, then an encounter with a fish is a meeting with another world; then the edge of the reef, where it falls away to depth and darkness and unseen currents, becomes a greater world yet, where this small fish may venture when its feeding is complete.
Then the whalesong which is constantly in your ears while you are underwater is no longer background noise, undecipherable and nonsensical, but part of a mystery much larger than your immediate understanding; and when the possibility of the mystery presents itself, all the cheap façade of movement and color as entertainment falls away, leaving mystery upon mystery from daybreak to day’s end, and from the top of a mountain created with the earth’s muscle to the depths of the sea that gave birth to and receives everything.
One is here so short a time… to allow our attention to be held by trivial sounds, by television, by the movement of capital, instead of seeking out the sacred in all things, that is avidyaa, mistaking shallow waters for those that are in fact deep, and nourishment (of one’s life) with what is in fact unfulfilling.
Once one begins to watch, to look within, then the veils are not so easily held before the mind’s eye. Then the silence in the bowl of a volcano – the silence experienced when two people have descended to the floor of a an extinct volcano, after dawn, with the entire heart of the mountain occupied only by themselves – is more than a vista on a hike. Then you can feel the mass of 6 vertical miles of earth forced skyward from the heated core of the planet. Then you can feel the palm of the planet lifting you up into heaven, and heaven descending to greet you. Then every step has meaning, is both here in the moment, and here on the face of the earth. Then the light and the mists fill you because you have opened to them.
Then spirit answers, because spirit was sought.