Holding Our Self In A Headlock
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“ It is difficult to get the news from poems; yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is to be found.”
William Carlos Williams
Look around right now at our fellow inmates. We’re a strange, assorted lot; the embodiment of a wild and crazy god-guy-girl whirling away at the organ of life, simultaneously creating and destroying, creating and destroying. The hands of fortune dance across the keys, now in a slow adagio, now in a tense tremolo, now in a running trope velloce, now in pastoral andante. And ultimately in a sighing last note. It’s a seemingly endless loop, this mind – circle. Whether it’s running in our storied Past or in a conceived Present or in an imagined Future, it’s all happening right now only in one place: in our head. Whether we label it music or noise, nice or not nice, we’re convinced that our experience of what we individually see, hear, touch, taste, smell and think about, is reality. For better or worse, it is our reality. And from our sense of this self, we live and breath. Indeed, our whole world is resting on our shoulders! As the Indian sage Nisargadatta says, “ Both the world and the pain are within you.”
Sometimes, it happens that we see clearly that what we think is going on and what actually is going on, are different. When we do, we get a graceful glimpse into the truth of our Self. Of course, most of us pass over that still spot quickly, propelled by the sheer mass of mind momentum. But while we may or may not even record the insight, a haunting residue remains. Drip by drip, it accumulates someplace other than our head. And perhaps one day, sitting reading or on the computer over by a window, we find our self in the interstices between thought. We cease our continuous linear scanning of miles of lines of print going nowhere but in our head, and we know what we always have known. We know what the poet Keats was on about when he wrote:
Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty.
That is all you know on earth
and all you need to know.
So what exactly is it we need to know? Why is truth the be-all and end-all of our passage here?
No one can answer that for you, except you. If you want to know the beauty of it all, if you truly want to see into your self clear through to your toes, stop looking in your head. Stop looking. Stop. Let the repetition of your mind/memory Whirlitzer wind down, let the noise settle out. Let the body noise fade. Then, in the stillness, allow. Allow for that “ peace that surpasses all understanding” to arise. Their is nothing to do, no mind-made “spiritual” technique to achieve what you already are. Cease to circle around the truth, let go of the head-lock and hey, you never know what you might find! One thing is pretty much for sure: short of a total letting go of all identity, we will never know. Let go and know!
