My experience of life has been almost entirely spiritual of late. In those moments when it's not, I'm inevitably in a dysfunctional state. Peace and happiness, in other words, correlate completely with a spiritual framework of experience. It's just true most of the time now; this has been going on for a couple of weeks. I intend to appreciate it, and try to put some words down, if only to aid myself in the future.
It's like there are glimpses--frequent ones--of bigger forces at work. Living in that perception of grace not only feels better, but it's better for everyone around me. It's easy to have a generous heart and a sense of wonder, even if things don't go quite as planned. This..just this..is the dharma glimmering and being; life is a complete gift, and it just moves forward, unfolding and unfolding.
Not knowing helps. I'm approaching a period of transition where it's impossible to know what's coming. I spent last weekend in Portland walking around, ringing intercoms, placing phone calls, looking for a place to live. And I met with friends, and made new friends, and thought about wealth and True Wealth. I had no idea what the next five minutes would bring, or when I would hit the "jackpot" of a promising studio apartment. No idea if the lady trimming her roses might know of place. I was open, receptive, listening for the call. And I got exhausted--just totally whipped--over and over, quite pleasantly emptied and refilled, over and over.
If all goes as planned, in ten days I'll be moving 100 miles away. Knowing that is coming, and knowing I have not yet begun to pack, renders most assumptions about reality pretty obsolete. Mantra practice has been instrumental to this curious, opening, whole-mind listening. OM MANI PADME HUM has been permeating my life and body lately.
To me, and probably to others, repeatedly invoking the Jewel in the Heart of the Lotus is a constant reminder that the world is vastly more wonderful, complex, and (therefore) magical than I could possibly fathom. That it's all part of a great serene, roiling IS-ness. And that it's beautiful. It's beautiful all the time. Even when it's horrible, and people die terribly, in grief and rage, or not knowing what hit them. That this life, where the leaves bob in the wind and the raspberries are ripening like mad, is exactly perfect, flowing, and full of meaning.
Even saying "the world is perfect" set up a duality: the possibility of imperfection. Rather, it just IS. The trees emanante tree-ness, the birds shoot through the air, the water runs down the drain.
Seen this way, it is impossible to be bored with anything. I have chafed so incredibly against things in my life! And yet, I realize, I have never been bored by my body or my mind. The things I hated were experienced as externals. But if world-consciousnes takes over... then everything is myself...and what I do is done with the entire mind and body. If my life circumstances aren't sequestered outside myself, I don't think I can become fed up with them....
And what would that mean?
So OM MANI PADME HUM is the key, the ongoing reminder, that transforms the mundane, boring, irritating, unexciting world into unencumbered grace, light, and significance.
I am not the first or the last to see this. For example, Mary Jo in her fabulous fashion blog describes Joseph Campbell's realization, at the end of his days, that the life which had seemed so haphazard had actually unfolded in a rich and perfect order, as if guided by an unseen hand. Challenges and crises were the catalytic events that spawned great richness and transformation.
Mary Jo is a designer, and her quest for personal understanding has to do with making things of beauty, with creating something that moves us in ways we do not understand. Shopping isn't some aberration of modern postindustrial life. It's gathering, as in "hunting and gathering." And it's just as satisfying today as it was millenia ago to find the perfectest most wonderful thing! And bring it home! Only now, instead of baskets and pointed digging sticks, we have handbags and..um, stiletto heels?
Campbell was a mythologist, of course. But Mary Jo is also a mythologist, because she understands that what she does, and loves, is of a significance that cannot really be grasped with conventional language or ideas. We can talk about "why we shop," but we can't describe how it really feels to be enchanted by a new toy. But we do know the feeling, because we are human. And we all have access to mythological reality, somewhere down there beneath the mundane self-centered stories about life in the world.
Whether the world is none other than an expression of a consciousness too magnifcent to grasp; whether time and awareness are far more nuanced than generally imagined--these are not things we can debate. We can't know our life while we're in it, and reducing it to a materialist event-- seeing it as the meaningless adventures of a biological machine--is the silliest conceit of all: an arrogance born of profound insecurity.
I'm trying to express something, and it's possible to express that something incorrectly. But what I'm trying to say is not a rational argument--something that one believes after one has been convinced. Rather appropriate, considering that this is a positition arising from deep orientation rather than declarative knowledge. I am expressing (in my own limited way) a conviction, not an "argument" that "convinces." Nothing I say will persuade a skeptic, but if you know what I mean, you know. And you might find a more clear and useful way to express it.
One of the most bittersweet days of my life was when the person I loved and was--to all appearances--"made for" said to me, after a spirited (and of course fruitless) debate over the nature of human life/time/the world, "I know this (the deeper spiritual view) is true,"
but
I
cannot
accept
it.
Because to do so would entail living in a world out-of-control. And he couldn't do that.
This is the point where I have to stop. Too much feeling.
My darling, darling! I'll meet you on the other shore.
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