Loka Samasta...

Loka Samasta….

 I heard one day, albeit second hand,

that you requested a prayer for the end of suffering

for all sentient beings, in all the worlds

to be said, when it occurs to us to do so,

and so my dear friend, I take upon myself the task to

quietly chant in time to each footfall

through the mist shrouded forest

on this cool autumn morn,

the prayer of your request.

As the words slip from my tongue,

images of suffering…

from perfume laboratories

to African ivory poachers

leaving baby elephants abandoned

to shiver and starve

with the terror of their memories,

cattle sill alive after the nail gun to the brain

has failed to do its job

being hung from a hind leg to suffer in agony

for the convenience of those who stop at the drive through

for their lunch time burger…

little girl babies being raped for

so called “protection” from AIDS

and mothers watching helplessly

as their sons and daughters starve to death

for lack of concern by those who have the resources to help…

the religious zealots who send their children

to blow themselves to pieces

along with other women’s children

who happen to be in the way…

the old woman dying alone, in pain,

unattended in a shabby understaffed nursing home...

governments more concerned with acquiring wealth, and power

for the few to the disadvantage of the many…

the children who kill other children

because they have no hope…

and for those who have it “all”

but are empty and hollow inside;

...visions of suffering…

Tears welling at the images

spill onto the forest floor to the strains...

“May all of the beings in all of the worlds be well….

May all of the beings in all of the worlds be happy…

May all of the beings in all of the worlds be free from suffering…”

I am stopped in my tracks with the enormity…

the impossibility of it all.

Just as all is lost in the midst of broken hope,

the gentlest of breeze brushes softly against wet cheek,

drying in their places the tears of a moment ago.

The looking outward falls back on itself

and is pulled to the inward eye

which catches a glimpse of another reality.

In this world, where suffering is absent,

life continues to unfold not unlike the world

of outward texture where pain and death

and certain limitations exist.

In the outer world of suffering,

these experiences are shunned as undesirable,

and each man’s journey seen as a solitary venture

filled with fear of what may come,

and regret of what has passed.

Driven by fear, and ignorance,

the man of the outer world

strives for power

so as not to be found powerless.

He strives for more,

so as not to be seen as less.

He does not consider the effects of his actions

on the world around him, much less upon his own life.

And from this fear based striving to survive,

ignorance and denial of human commonality

color his actions, and leave him alone and separate.

There is no thought or concern for the suffering of

others like himself, caught in the hamster wheel

of attachment to the world of their agreement.

Nor is there concern for the innocent beings

he uses to achieve his ends.

In this world, even those who strive to change it

looking only outward cannot do much more than

rearrange the deck chairs of a sinking ship.

A change might occur, but without a shift

from attachment only to outer vision,

to the real roots of suffering

the changes will be temporary at best.

In the world that unfolds in the inner eye,

where pain and death continue,

happiness and well being are the standard,

and fear and lack are nowhere to be found.

What each has is enough, for the moment,

and the future is of no concern.

Work erupts spontaneously

from the necessity of the moment

rather than from the need to accumulate,

or from some long ago adopted rule about human value.

Others of differing opinions are not seen as threats

or, people to be converted to our “right” way of thinking.

Harmony is the natural state,

and no one strives to put himself above another.

Animals are treated with respect and honor for

the contributions they make in the world.

And beauty is not defined by garments worn

or the passing styles of commercial fashion.

Each man is content, living in the present,

with no concern for the future or past…

as the present lived well, takes care of the future

and  past lessons have been learned from attention paid at the time.

The mind is quiet, at peace, in spite of what calamities arise.

Life is seen naked, revealed as it is,

devoid of the trappings of the mental constructs

of obsolete belief systems that divide man against woman.

What arises with the inner view

on this mist shrouded morning in the autumn colored forest,

is not a command to deliver a message for others to hear,

or even a prayer from one,

for the sake of others,

but a silent song from,

and to one heart.

It is not something to attain…

it is the natural state which is untouched by

the vagaries of the mind and its manifestation

of the outer world.

It is that state within the depths

where all beings are one without division

which you, my friend,

have requested we summon

by means of a simple prayer.

J

Contemplate

When you believe yourself to be a person, you see persons everywhere.  In reality there are no persons, only threads of memories and habits.  At the moment of realization the person ceases.  Identity remains, but identity is not a person, it is inherent in the reality itself.
                                                                                                                    Nisargadatta Maharaj

Love & Inquiry

My friend (who is all love whether she knows it or not at any given moment), in comparing the path of love with the potential dryness of inquiry wondered, ‘what is love?”  I am certainly no expert, and as the word love has been used to describe so many states of experience who isn’t confounded by the definitions? I responded with what came up for me when I read her musings, from that illusive momentary place of ‘glimpsing’ the entirety of it all…"I don’t see a difference between love and inquiry."

"What is love?” Isn't it simply our natural state? In my experience this natural state occurs when the "I" I imagine myself to be (this woman, with these attributes) isn’t obscuring it with the insistence that this person and the world are alone real, to be managed and formed into some fixed personal ideal.

It is not an emotion though it manifests as emotion, just as it manifests in and as everything.  One way to move toward it (though it is the core of who we are) is to question what we think of as reality when we're looking through the eye of personality.  Through earnestness, and inquiry into the nature of the self we can also realize the love that we are.  I don’t find inquiry lacking in love.  In fact, in order to be vigilantly involved in the continuous inward looking there has to be a sincere earnestness.  To me earnestness in this endeavor is driven by love itself.  It could not happen without love.  AND, I feel my Sai's hand in it all.

 “Sit quiet for a moment and inquire what is it that stays and what is it that does not.  You are now eager to learn about the news of the world, changing fortunes of peoples and nations, of “isms” and movements.  But you have no thirst to know the conditions and conflicts within you happening against the permanent back drop of the pure unaffected Atma, which is your innermost Reality.  Know ‘THAT’, and everything becomes known.  Possess ‘THAT’ and all things are possessed by you.”

                                                            Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Who Am I?

One day in the darkness of a pre-dawn morning after having walked barefoot (the day before) along the rocky path around the base of Mount Arunachala with sight turned inward, and heart beating RAM with each step, I sat up on my pallet in a state of sleepy detachment in the room at Ramana Ashram where I had been staying,

As I sat on the edge of the bed my mind began to turn back on itself with one incessant question that arose in conjunction with each and every lazy awakening thought.

     “Who is it that is sitting?”  Who is it that is asking?  Who is it that is thinking?

     Who is it that moves to stand? Who is asking?  Who is walking?  Who is asking?

     Who stops before the sink?  Who asks?  Who is brushing teeth?  Who asks?”

This inquiry was not a process that I was doing.  Rather it was being done, as ‘I’ watched.  There were no answers, because before an answer could formulate, the question “Who asks?” would arise.  And because an asker could not be traced, there was, of course no answer.

This process went on for many days after I arrived back at the place I had been renting at Brindavan.   The questioning lasted so long and was so constant that it had virtually eliminated every trace of thought, until even the question “Who is it?” ceased.  There was no surviving the interrogation, even for the interrogator.  This state of suspended thought gave rise to an ever- expanding experience of spaciousness.  Time collapsed into an eternal NOW and I began to feel myself (or what I had thought myself to be) being drawn, as if upward, toward an immense ecstatic joy.

Why do I write about this?  I can’t really say.  Perhaps it’s to remind myself that this was a 'happening'.  This was not a discipline of inquiry that I had decided to practice.  In fact later, after it ended I could not for the life of me make it happen by consciously trying to catch every thought that arose to ask who was thinking it.  In fact all of the effort would only result in a pounding headache, disappointment, and finally giving up.  Beneath the disappointment of not being able to ‘make’ it happen, however, lay an incredible and most obvious truth.  I am NOT the doer.  In the moments in which that truth descends the relief is profound.   But if I am not the do-er, then…

who AM I?