self-inquiry

how a few moments of empty-mind spiked with questions of the unanswerable kind can deliver you to your effulgent nothingness

Edgar Degas, Woman, Seen from Behind, Drying Her Hair, c.1905 - 1910

 

I take off my clothes,

lift them to my face,

inhale the fragrance of my skin.

By what alchemy was that unique odour created?

  

I soak in the bath,

submerged to my chin.

Wetness, warmth: what registers these sensations

yet never gets wet?

  

I towel-dry my mop of silver hair.

I marvel that it grows, it falls out;

more grows, automatically.

Can I spin one thread of hair?

  

I trim a toenail.

How does this perfect toe-guard

know how to grow?

Is there a how-to manual for nails (and hair and cells)?

  

My scissors slip.

I watch my bright blood slowly seep,

congeal, clot (or not).

Can I control a clot?

  

I listen to the ambient sounds of my environment.

By what miracle can I hear

the kettle boiling urgently,

and those rowdy Kookaburras?

  

I make coffee and slowly savour the flavour,

asking myself,

(eyes shut)

Where exactly is ‘taste’ located?

  

Then, uninvited, the mother of all questions shows up:

Where’s my world viewed from?

I gaze undistractedly

at my coffee cup.

  

I can’t find a point of perspective.

So then I try to find a viewer.

Can I find a fixed point,

a “me”?

  

Almost 75 years of wondering, checking for myself,

what can I report?

Well, as the saying goes:  All the lights are on but

no one’s home.

  

I imagined myself into existence,

only to find I am unfindable.

What I find is inescapable space.

Space that’s unimagined, and unarguably aware.

  

Space – ceaselessly birthing

all experience in, and as, time,

including this tricky two-step called

BE-ing.

  

Aware space, dancing

as every sensation, feeling, thought,

every belief – questioned or not,

every thing and every no-thing too.

  

And I, hobbled and hollow-boned,

know its fancy footwork as my own.

  

  

Don’t you just love the way a few moments

of empty-mind

spiked with questions of the unanswerable kind

can deliver you to your effulgent nothingness?

 

– with a deep bow, ml

Art – Edgar Degas, Woman Seen from Behind, Drying her Hair c. 1905 – 1910.
Public Domain.

 
 

oh how I love being so deluded

 

Andrew Wyeth: Wind from the Sea, detail

 

I was asked to find my mind

and

I failed

I was asked to find my thoughts

and

I failed

I was asked to find my self

and

I failed

 

So then it seemed timely to try to find

the I

that was so successful at failing

 

ha!

it couldn’t be found

yet

it can’t be escaped

 

oh how I love being so deluded

that simply watching words leak out of a pen

can deliver shameless delight!

 

Image: Andrew Wyeth – Wind from the Sea
Tempera on hardboard, 1947, detail
[What moves – the curtain or the wind?]
Source: Washington Post

All writing on this blog leaks from the pen of Miriam Louisa Simons.  Over at my other blog this unlit light, you’ll find more of a smorgasbord of writing, including some of my own.
I chose this WordPress theme for its uncluttered minimalism, and because it’s responsive (i.e., it displays readably on all devices).  All the links that normally appear in a sidebar or footer are hidden behind the menu icon at the top of the page.  If you feel inclined to explore the offerings posted here since 2010, please click that icon.  You’ll also find a way to follow this blog by email there.  I promise you won’t be overwhelmed – emptiness has erratic and unpredictable habits.  Posts turn up.  I marvel.
– mls
Copyright © Emptiness

take a look, sister

355

Sometimes the *echoes* come up with a question for this scribbler on her zafu.

Sometimes it’s koan-like, and she sits with it stuck in her jaws, unable to swallow it or spit it out, while her brain reorganizes itself around the seed that’s cracking the conceptual concrete.

Sometimes it’s a direct hit at her self-honesty – slap!  This morning’s was one of those.

 .

Is your wideawakeness (aka enlightenment, awakening, realization, mindshift…)
big enough to contain every expression of Beingness?

Do you still have preferences for some, and find others a bit freaky?

Are you rattled when disagreed with, and fluffy when folk are in accord?

Do you harbor the notion that others will get to “where you’re at”
and understand you, one day?

 .

The reach of your compassion reveals the degree of your wideawakeness:
take a look sister.

 .

BOOM

~

the great escape routine

352

[From a letter to a friend.]

For decades I had read, been taught, and believed that the Real, by definition, must be omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent.  But I still believed it was something objective that I had to find, attain or ‘receive’.

What I had to do, I thought, was find where ‘it’ was hiding – or more to the point – why my perception couldn’t perceive ‘it’.  Which sounds easy, but dozens of years were spent traipsing around the spiritual circuit without getting one millimeter closer to my quarry.

It was a light-bulb moment for me when it sunk in that if the Real was totally accessible to me (and everyone), perhaps I should persistently ask myself

What’s the one thing I can’t get away from?  Ever?

And there it was – here it is.  Inescapably intimate.  Closer than my heartbeat.

Whenever protest or confusion arose, I’d just switch over to the Great Escape Routine again.  And laugh myself silly.

Well, you do have to laugh, don’t you?  Imagine.  All those years of seeking and sadhana, of surrender and self-inquiry, and here I am, prisoner of the Presence that I am.

Prisoner of the real dinkum Real.

~

‘oneness’ turns out to be a thought too far

334

In all these decades of stalking
the sages’ “who am I?”
I’ve only learned what I’m not.

I thought I was this body,
these thoughts and feelings
and the timeline on which
they inscribe their stories.

But how can I be anything perceived
or felt or conceived?
Or remembered or imagined?

I’d have to split myself in two:
one bit of me to be the viewer
and one to be the view.

If I can’t split myself in two
(have you tried it?)
well, um m m m m
how can I claim that I’m even one?

Indivisible  T H U S N E S S  is present;
yet to claim that it is ‘one’
turns out to be
a thought too far.

~

are beliefs of any kind necessary?

324

Echoes from Emptiness: Mt Warning - Woolumbin

Yesterday, on a drive to Wollumbin with S, we passed the gateway to a non-sectarian retreat center. A sign had been nailed up:

Are beliefs of any kind necessary?

How tempting to rush in with a yes or a no or a maybe, inevitably meeting the question with our pet beliefs and conclusions, and kidding ourselves that we’re having a profound dialogue…

But the question isn’t pointless. It has beauty in its potential to act as a pointer to the utterly imperative, yet impossible, question:

Who, or what, is asking?

If you tell me ‘you’ are, I’ll ask you to show me a ‘you’ that’s a stand-alone entity.
If you can’t, I’ll ask you how come you believe you are one when you can’t prove it.

With a bit of luck we’ll both end up falling in a heap laughing so hard we weep.

image source

 

your mission: find that independent, sinful, suffering entity

321

awakening is easy;
wideawakeness is the natural state of any sentient being
so no one has ever been anything but fully awake

so, why does it appear to be difficult to r-e-a-l-i-z-e?

simply because we fail to examine two notions that are automatically acquired,
assumed to be true, and that become set in concrete in our thinking:

 
1      there’s a separate entity here (somewhere) that thinks thoughts, performs actions, is independent and bears ‘my’ name
 
2      said entity and its life are imperfect, unsatisfactory, bound, limited and therefore in need of improvement, salvation and awakening
 

Echoes from Emptiness: Your mission? Find that entity

 

yet no one, among all the billions of human beings
who have incarnated throughout time,
has ever been able
to find that entity

Can you?

Image – artist unknown.