14 hours ago (davidprice-26453.medium.com)
Inner emptiness is not a void to be filled with comforts; it is a window to be looked through.
~ Alan Watts
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How much grief you’ve had in your life from grasping at and solidifying transient moments. So the key focus of the practice is to relax out of identification with the content of the mind, with what’s arising in the mind, and with this open to the empty mind knowing that the empty mind is always full. The mind is unborn and it’s filling or it’s showing or it’s display never stops. This is form and emptiness.
– James Low
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… The decisive question for man is this: is he facing infinity or not? This is the main issue of his life. Only if we know that the essential is the unlimited, can we avoid placing our interest in futile things, and in every kind of things that are not really important.
— Jung
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… Renunciation here means overcoming that very hard, tough, aggressive mentality which wards off any gentleness that might come into our hearts. Fear does not allow fundamental tenderness to enter into us. When tenderness tinged by sadness touches our heart, we know that we are in contact with reality.
— Chögyam Trungpa
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The most important lesson that man can learn from life, is not that there is pain in this world, but that it is possible for him to transmute it into joy.
~Rabindranath Tagore
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The unanswered question of what’s actually happening here — when the answer is wrong — introduces a certain desperation into your life. You fasten yourself to futile things, things that are not really important. You enlist in a wild goose chase that never catches so much as a pigeon, and you die exhausted from the exertion.
We do need to know we’re related to the Infinite and that the implications go deeper than our religion tells us. Our childish beliefs can’t imagine what the word “infinite” entails. I think it entails a responsibility to Creation and it implies a role, a purpose in living. Living for anything less is to lose the thread of meaning we and the world need if we’re going to thrive, or even survive.
We show, by chasing ephemera, that we haven’t figured out what is important. It’s important to ask ourselves what is futile and what is essential, and to answer the question so that we feel connected to an eternal and overriding sacred project.
Conventional religion proposes a myth we moderns have a hard time swallowing because its logic is too mythological for our literal minds. But those stories aren’t talking to the surface mind our culture thinks is the only mind. There’s a deeper mind that understands mythological thinking, we’ve just lost touch with it.
I’ve stepped back in time by living in a culture that celebrates mythological language in relation to the infinite, and it shows me that the deeper mind craves that language even if it can’t believe it literally. At deeper levels of ourselves we require metaphor and miracles, beauty and overriding meaning. This ancient mind that we’ve inherited needs mystery and overwhelming beauty or it loses touch with a sense of divine purpose.
Our culture offers us an array of peripheral things we might devote ourselves to. We don’t know when we’re young how dangerous it would be to devote our lives to such things. To begin with, our education should show us how to start our investigation into what’s not important by paying attention to how we grasp and try to fix our pleasures into some kind of permanent system.
It looks like we prefer building sand castles at the moment.
Trying to hold onto what’s ephemeral but denying the inevitable death of our individual identity puts us at odds with life. Going through a whole lifetime at odds with reality is a common misfortune.
Our whole life is a “transient moment.” If we can put that fact into a context that relates us to the Creative Principle, so that we accept our transience but know we are eternal, we will know why we live and we will have the energy to do it.
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Volume four of my series Meditations on Living is now published on Amazon. If you read it, please leave a review.
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Written by David Price
I write about creativity, loving, language learning and psycho/spirituality. I’m a longtime painter and reader.