Trust Your Heart

George Harrison's song, The Inner Light is reported to be based on a section from the Tao Te Ching. I like it. I discovered the Tao Te Ching many years ago, and it helped me along the road of awakening to the inner world of my heart: new ways of looking at my experiences of the world around me, and how those experiences are organized into thought patterns that influence and reflect my beliefs and understanding. Eventually, I started to recognize that there are two distinct faculties for understanding within me. One is the intellect, which is derived from language and based on symbols of things. The other is the heart, which is uncreated and resides within me as a gift of my creation. When I say “heart” here, I mean that part of me that connects me to that essence of everything that is, and to everything that remains uncreated. I discovered that my intellect could only take me so far, but would always be bound by the limitations inherent in its basis in symbols. The name of the thing is not the thing itself. To experience the thing itself, I need to set aside my intellect and use my heart to absorb the essence of the thing, which can only be felt with senses that are more subtle than my sensory organs (eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin). I remember a poster that used to hang on the wall of the crisis center where I worked in the early seventies. It said, "The finger that points to the moon, is not the moon". Nor is the sound made by saying or listening to the word "moon",  the thing itself. Can you feel the wonder of the moon's light as it bathes your yard at night? Can you ever really explain how it feels to you, the wonder it evokes, or what comprises its beauty? How do you know the moon? How do you know yourself? Can you find the heart within you? This is a wonderful question to explore. I hope you are inclined to investigate it for yourself.

 From a FaceBook post 2105-11-21

2018/05/02 – Early morning - A note to a friend (mostly myself)

 …you are off to California for a few days – seeking a change of scenery… you already know that the disquiet you seek to calm lies within you, and you will carry it with you.  You said once that you seek Wisdom. What do you think Wisdom is?

 You are in two pieces.  You seek to be whole – complete – one (with yourself). Where will you find Wisdom? You seem to recognize it when you come across it. But, what is it? Do you see that it is the Wisdom inside you that enables you to recognize it in the world?

You are split into two pieces. One piece is at rest within you. The other piece looks outside of you for satisfaction. To become whole, each of us needs to turn the attention on the outside toward the inside. We cannot join the inside piece of ourselves with the outside piece of someone else. They won’t fit. That’s why someone else’s answers will not satisfy you. Only your answers will satisfy your questions. Religions arise when we try fit someone else’s answers to our own questions. The confusion comes from thinking that because someone uses the same words to formulate their question as we do to describe our own, that they are the same. We’re back to the problem I described in the earlier entry above: the “finger that points to the moon is not the moon”. We cannot drink the name for water. We need the liquid itself to quench our thirst. If everyone agrees with Socrates that we must know ourselves, it does not mean that we DO know ourselves.

 If I say, “I know I have the answer inside me” it does not mean I have found it there, or, even know how to go within to seek it. The outside world is very big. The inside world is even bigger. The heart is the trustworthy guide in both worlds. Trust your heart in all things.

 2019-02-23

My Mother's Last Days

 I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my life, my aspirations, my memories, what I have learned, what I have shared, what will remain when I am gone, what I will take with me, the thoughts, the feelings, the connections I’ve made along the way that never developed and how the choices I have made have brought me to where I am.

I know when I’m gone there will be nothing left of me. The memories of me will belong to someone else – part of their lives, part of who they are. But I will be gone.

And I wonder when I am absorbed back into the infinite from which I came, if all my experience, my feelings, my understanding, my joy, my gratitude, my love will somehow be dissolved into the primordial essence. I suspect it will. I suspect it’s always been part of it already.  I’m just so attached to my life that it is hard to let go. I can’t help wondering if I might get the chance to come back and explore some of the other paths and relationships I could have chosen. But of course I would no longer be me if I did that and I’m glad to be me.

I’m very grateful to have found my way to Prem, or, more likely, that he came and found me, and introduced me to the connection between me and the infinite within me.

I remember the night my mother passed away. She and my father met and fell in love when they were 20 and had to wait until she was 21 to get married because her father would not give his permission for her to marry before then. In those days the father’s permission was required for a young girl to get married. My father had died early Christmas morning, a little less than 2 months after he turned 60. A few days before he died the doctor had told him my mother had cancer that had gone to her brain. He died at home when he tried to stop drinking cold turkey. A few days after he died, my mother went into the hospital and the rest of the family learned about her condition. She had been living with lung cancer for quite a while before that, drinking her coffee so black that my aunt one day stood a spoon in her cup to see if it would stand up. In the the story I heard, it did. The first week in that December she was playing racket ball with a girl in her 20s. The girl cried when my mother beat her. My mother was 60 at the time. She had smoked since she was 16 and always said she could stop any time she wanted. When she found out about the cancer, she asked her doctor if should quit now. He told her it wouldn’t hurt, but it was too late to alleviate the cancer. She quit that day. 

So, after my father died, our lives all changed. My mother had brain surgery to determine the extent of the tumors. She had the pack of dogs that had lived in our house with us as four-legged members of the family (except for the little hound that had only three legs and slept with my dad) put down. She sold the house we had all grown up in and bought a condo along with the oldest of my younger sisters and moved into it when she got out of the hospital. There she continued to live an uncompromising life. She had had all her teeth pulled out the summer before and replace them with a set of “uppers” and “lowers” that sat on her bedside table most of time. Her hair that been all shaved off came back in as a grey stubble. But her eyes remained bright and alert and her attitude unfailingly positive. She had her bed set up in the living room and happily received her friends and family whenever they showed up. She wanted to be surrounded by her children and grandchildren as much as they could be there, and we all stayed overnight in the bedrooms upstairs and game room downstairs whenever we could. It continued through her 61st birthday in June. Every night my sister would fix her a chocolate Sunday with vanilla ice cream (some say it was raspberry sherbet) and lots of Hershey’s syrup (everyone agreed on that). My brother had arranged a new phone number for her, ending in 1234, thinking it would be easy for her to remember, but overlooking the obvious that she would never be outside her condo again to call back in. This oversight resulted in a nightly obscene phone call at midnight each day, which my sister had to answer. My mother, never phased, one night said, “Here give me that phone” and took it from my sister. She got on the phone and with her best toothless lisp told the caller, “Look Honey, I’m 61 years old and have no teeth and no hair, but I’m ready to go!” At which time he hung up and never called again.

Toward the end of August, three days before she died, she wakened my sister in the middle of the night completely happy and excited because she had seen “The Beauty”. For the next three days she was glowing and told everyone about it. People came to say goodbye those last days. And all her kids and grandkids came and stayed with her. After dinner on her final night, she sat on her bed full of excitement and tried to tell us all something. I remember we gathered around her – on the bed, on the floor, and in a couple of chairs pulled up close. She had aphasia and with her toothless lisp she kept repeating something over and over again. Finally, my brother got it: “Nice Life! Nice Life! Nice Life!” she kept saying. “YES!” she finally said, “Nice Life” and smiled her pink gummy smile and lay back down. She went to sleep a while later and the rest of us went to bed. Our sister wakened us in the early morning hours and said she had passed away.

My mother was totally focused on the present and opened each moment as a gift to be embraced and celebrated with gratitude. I want to be like her.

Wisdom

Wisdom

The following are some thoughts I shared in a note to my son…

You once told me that you seek wisdom. I think you might have said, “I want to be wise.”

I don’t remember if I said anything in response, but seem to remember thinking to myself that there is no higher aspiration. In my mind there is nothing else to aspire to. The very essence of aspiration itself is wisdom.

You can search the world and meet many people, but you will never find anyone wiser than yourself. This may sound strange but it is true. For whomever you meet and whatever they say or do that you learn from, you will always be learning something about yourself. And you are the one who is the gate keeper for what you are learning. You choose from your experiences what you want to accept and how you want to grow your understanding of yourself from those experiences.

How will you know when you learn something from someone “wise”? You will need to test it with your own understanding, your own wisdom.

If you want to be truly wise, explore your self. Get to know yourself.

Here’s a hint. Pay attention to your own breath as it comes into you and then leaves again. What does each breath give you in coming in? What does each outgoing breath take with it? Consider your life and the simple experience of the beauty of being. The wonder. And, feel the gratitude of just being alive.

You will find the wisdom you seek inside yourself.

Enjoy the joy of it!

october 2021