Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Heart of the Edge

I delight in the stark simplicity of various expressions of the "Perennial Philosophy", in which all experience boils down to the single crystalform I am That. Following anything back to its origin, those three words are probably the best a brain can do when it comes to verbalizing a human reality.

Nothing more needs to be said. We can all retire, now. :)

But here I am, an artist in a box of colors with pure, blank surface forever...a kid in a giant silly-putty universe...a self-spawning vortex. Scribbling, shaping and living/dying are details, beautiful, sacred and immersion-worthy! Immersion is attention. Attention is opening. Opening is feeling, viscerally and beyond.

What is that "thing", that consciousness that notices, loves, attends and opens? God, Love and Nature are good names. But there are no names, no symbols or representations that can fully and adequately capture the scope or the nuance of the metaphysical, alchemical reaction known as "this". People like myself keep on trying, though, convinced of the absolute value and finding great joy in the occupation.

I am interested in trying to evoke in others that indescribable feeling-state which involves much more than sense data. Senses are almost like "gateways" in and out of an utter mystery which all experience and all phenomena can only metaphorically describe. They are elemental and initiatory, the way an acorn can become an oak, or bread, or compost.

Fully "engaged" senses are willing teachers, open books, endless manna of potential for the soul. They always offer "extrasensory" perception, a refined sensitivity to what always is, as a sort of extension course, a deeper plunge into reality. In practical terms, this translates to vastly improved communication with oneself, and therefore, greater trust and increased openness, leading to greater stability. To put it graphically, even if you find yourself wandering around in carnage, it is experienced as God's guts, and your own. You cease to respond as a victim of senseless circumstance and have the option of acting with sensible (and sense-able) compassion. That kind of love, you see, is our basic design, program, structure, or however you'd like to think of it. We have to overlay it with a lot of garbage in order to get to the point of pathology.

Someone said--forgive me, I can't remember who--that love is like a basic immune response to dis-ease. So true. And it's what happens when we allow healing.

Love is a resolution, in both senses of the word. A resolution to love is a dedication to openness, an intention to awareness. And love--Big Love--is the resolution of the basic tension that we all are. We are like an invisible line between two primal conditions--an original duality, if you will--one which is eternal and unchangeable, and one which is in a state of constant and complete change.

We experience ourselves as this tension as we live in relationship to ourselves, each other and all of life. On one level, we relate to the world from a contained point of view--or a series of nested containers, perhaps beginning with the very local boundary of the body, nested in a community, a country, a planet, a galaxy. On another, we are aware of the fact that whatever container we identify with is somehow "permeable" to all the others, and that actually, we aren't sure where we begin and end. We are some kind of a "whole".

All life long, there is a fascinating pull between our timeless and our "timed" identity. It's a source of war, eternal suffering and struggle, or a source of creation and deep realization of harmony. There is no conflict when one finds the inherent flexibility to "straddle the line". There is simply appropriate and perfect motion with oneself as a kind of third alternative, which feels like a very passionate, always sought-but-realized kind of love. The container of being becomes both partial and indivisible, a sort of unbounded body which fills all and is open to all.

It is nothing less than ecstasy to "contain" these seeming opposites, to be free enough to know that they are created in an instant by This when a stepping-stone in emptiness is desired. It is nothing less than utter lucidity in an ultimate dream, in which things like silly-putty, attention and metaphor can conjure themselves from the glowing river of imagination. Upon arrival, there is no going back, because the new address involves at least a foot in every state...where we can all retire, now. :)

So I'm off to pick tomatoes and blackberries...

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