THE DAWNING OF FREEDOM AND WONDER.
“Being conditioned, we live in the small space of our own consciousness. Our consciousness is very limited, which is reality, and from that limited consciousness can we explore something cosmic? To do that, one must break down the wall.”
~J Krishnamurti
Indeed, as the poet Robert Frost said: “Something there is about a wall that longs to tear it down.” That which longs is one’s inner being-nature which, now quietly, now insistently, pushes, pulls and otherwise prods some of us who are increasingly sickened and tired of the Daily Grind of graceless, reactionary living.. just to fight another day, yes 😉 We struggle mightily with the conflicts that our personal, particular and collectively condoned fears and desires insist upon..unless and until there’s a lifting of the veil that hides and divides.
“Oh while I live, to be the ruler of life, not a slave, to meet life as a powerful conqueror, and nothing exterior to me will ever take command of me. ” ~ Walt Whitman
In fact, what we infinitely are is veiled by an apparent believing in thoughts as being actually who we are and what we do, so to speak. We learn to believe as children. The clear sky of pure awareness becomes clouded with beliefs. An emerging mind-made ‘me’ seemingly appears; that newly minted ‘me’ is conjured out of a particular culture’s beliefs; it’s the basic mental, physical, emotional and psychological conditioning one innocently absorbs as a 2-4 year old discovering verbalized distinctions that personalize experience. There’s an initiation in becoming, in time, a somebody who does something. In this slowly believed self-identity ‘we’ apparently learn we’re ‘boys’ and ‘girls’ growing up in a supposed world that’s thought to be pleasant occasionally but which is experienced as almost always threatening in Oh so many ways.
“I too, like the rest, feel this modern tendencies…to turn everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatisfaction, death. Yet how clear it is to me that those are not the born results, influences of Nature at all, but of one’s own distorted, sick or silly soul. Here, amid this wild, free scene, how healthy, how joyous, how clean and vigorous and sweet!”
~Walt Whitman
That which is ultimately knowing the experience of reading these words now is not a “you” or a “me’; it is non-personal awareness. It’s a self-aware ‘knowing’ that’s akin to love, with or without any thoughts, sensations and perceptions appearing and disappearing. There’s no knower, nothing to know, nothing one needs to know. Indeed, awareness is peace. In direct observation, in aware knowing, the veil is seen as an illusion and the the infinite beauty of what is presents. There’s the wonder. 🙂
~ art: Margaret Cook, from Walt Whitman’s 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass.
