323
this unknowable Knowingness
– creating, impregnating all appearance
yet carrying no traces,
harboring no memories
and expecting nothing of tomorrow
ever –
we seek It as the sacred
and give It a thousand names;
we worship It as something separate,
out beyond us:
cultivable,
attainable,
experience-able
until there comes the savage shock
– a mindshift so subtle it can’t be said –
It’s simply here
(and there and everywhere)
when we drop right out and disappear
~
315
When you come into Jung’s second stage, the last half of life, the quest is for the import of the OM that you’ve heard in the heart chakra, so that it will become the forming and structuring energy of your life, without care for achievement, without care for prestige.
~ Joseph Campbell
She-who-scribbles found that the quest doesn’t end with the finding of – and understanding the significance of – the OM in the heart chakra, although it’s a very pleasant place to take a rest.
The inquiry moves on. It now asks, what ‘hears’ the OM in the heart chakra? What is this slippery subject that seems to be aware of all this questing and OM-ing? Why can’t it observe itself no matter how cunningly it’s stalked? Why, when it can’t ever be avoided or escaped, can it never be known?
Then one fine day you’re sitting with these questions alone refusing to accept the answers of another no matter how reputedly awake and the penny drops right through the works and takes the questions with it and you just crack up guffawing. OM-G.
Image: Sculpture by Ernst Barlach, 1937, bronze, 20.8 x 30.96 x 12.38, Los Angeles County Museum of Art
308
There were dreams last night. They involved intense activity and the emotional involvement was amazing. This is curious, for in the dream state called ‘daily life’ there is, for the most part, quiet emotional equanimity.
But clearly emotional reflexes are still intact and available in the brain, and there’s an ego construct that can ‘feel’ them to be real, even while the watching ‘I’ – the Knowingness of the dream – does nothing but be and see.
The impossibility of the separate existence of an entity that can own and suffer emotions penetrates even the night-time dream.
Wondering wonders if there will come a time when night-time dreams will disappear completely.
Strange, but ‘I’ doesn’t give a toss one way or the other. Night-time dreams and the infinite versions of the daytime dream are all the same to this changeless ‘I’.
~
302
after the fall
into calamitous clarity
one cannot call either the state of war
or the state of peace ‘real’
the only reality is the knowing
of war or peace
this unknowable knowingness
which hosts and populates
perception’s phenomena
never takes sides
and has nothing to lose
or to gain
ever
~
295
what is, is always a somatic event, whether it be a mental or physical experience, whether it be of the ‘external’ world, or the ‘internal’ one
this body teaches me, guides me; it has its own way of regulating its miraculous system
when it’s happy it lets me know: it sleeps soundly, thinks clearly, stays centered in imperishable knowingness
I write “it lets me know” and instantly need to correct the illusion of two: it lets itself know, and a wee ‘me’ thought claims receipt
dear wee ‘me’ thought – you serve me well
now that you’ve revealed yourself as the ephemeral indispensable servant of the changeless Real, the Beloved, we are friends, we can make up, we can stop pretending this default dualism
at last
~
289
Apparently the Buddha said
The Great Way is not difficult, only avoid choosing.
The difficulty isn’t in the choosing or the not-choosing.
It’s in the notion that a separate *chooser* entity exists.
But choices arise spontaneously and choices are made spontaneously.
Assuming the existence of one-who- chooses,
when such an entity cannot be found,
creates the pits and potholes on the Way.
Believe in a self that can choose,
or a self that cannot choose,
and you’ll find the Way impossibly fraught.
The only way I found to “avoid choosing” was to track down the chooser. At some point on this hunt, I found that the chooser is a clever cartoon character dreamed up by a team of very creative fellow cartoon characters – the merry members of the local Think Tank. When they were seen for what they are, they shuffled back into the cartoon.
The naked light of Awareness that KNEW all this merriment turned out to be incapable of ever making a choice, yet it never fails to get everything exactly right!
~
284
My mother celebrates 90 orbits of the sun today.
Hale and hearty – if stone deaf and shorter than before,
she embodies the wideawake knowingness that what she IS
has never been born and will never die:
ageless unborn awareness.
It took a while, but daughter can at last confess that she’s a chip off the old block.
~
echoes from emptiness 