when the colour drains from life

Echoes from Emptiness: when the colour drains from life

 

my tail waggeth not

yet this crazy Love’s still here –

how mysterious!

 

you’d think it would flee

when the colour drains from life

but it just flows on

 

flows on – in and through

ev’rything thought, felt and known:

my refuge, my Love!

 


 

“crazy Love”? – what else can I call this Unknowable Presence that is not-other; that embraces ALL in its theatre of awareing, without preference or judgement; that isn’t a feeling, emotion or experience, yet makes these knowable; that is here, ever here, throughout the days and nights of this life I deceitfully call ‘mine’, yet know to be ITs own?

 


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game. set. match.

match. set. game. Photo: Shutterstock

 

One of the most prevalent and persistent myths swirling around the concept of awakening, is that those who have been obliterated by the irreversible EUREKA are instantly and henceforth rendered exempt from all the trials of the flesh that plague “the unenlightened”.

The mind loves to employ this fantasy to critique even the sagest of sages. (“How could someone like a Krishnamurti or a Ramana become a victim of cancer?”) But more sneakily, it turns its scorn upon one’s own delicate understanding.

It loves to hold up one’s (so-called) unattractive qualities – one’s addictions, physical ailments and emotional irruptions as proof that one hasn’t understood anything of import. Really.

What sport it is to watch and listen to this chattering, taunting, would-be bully. For a while you return the volleys. But it doesn’t take long to realise it’s a game without end and you grow bored – you know the score already.

So you serve your Ace straight up.

You simply ask whether the rock-solid immensity of Awareness is being affected, in any way, by whatever is coming at it.

The answer is always the same.

Game. Set. Match.

 


Jiddu Krishnamurti

Ramana Maharshi


In tennis, an ace is a legal serve that is not touched by the receiver, winning the point. – Wikipedia

Image: Shutterstock


you want the ultimate refuge?

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Echoes from Emptiness: bungee jumping

I was still very young when Granny taught me this little ditty:

sticks and stones
can break my bones
but words can never hurt me!

I hurled that little incantation at many a playground bully, oblivious to its profound truth.

Decades later I found out for myself that whatever ‘I’ is, it can’t be touched, let alone hurt, by words or anything else: no weapon, thought or circumstance has any power over ‘I’.

How could ‘I’ – a ‘something’ that isn’t an object of any kind – ever be a target?

What kind of weapon could ever affect a not-thing that has no particular place in time and space?
 

You want the ultimate refuge?

Break the bungee cord and free-fall into your very own ‘I’.

It’s nowhere near as scary as you might think.


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