Where the Action Is

Great Blue Heron egg shell

Excerpt from Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life by Rabbi Irwin Kula: 

[Maybe] it was actually an act of love and mercy to disperse the people of Babel. The hope now was that, rather than destroying each other for the sake of being one, human beings could thrive, unfold, create breathtaking poetry in thousands of tongues, and spread light all over the earth. Rather than only One, there now would be an infinite number of ways to interpret and understand life.

One of the first nursery rhymes we recite to our children isn't so different from that biblical allegory. "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't put Humpty together again." It's an edgy tale, even for grownups. From a young age, our deepest fear is that we're Humpty Dumpty, that we'll fall and shatter into so many pieces that no one will be abe to put us back together again; that we'll be dipspersed across the face of the earth and be alone in our brokenness. The story makes us wonder if we haven't already fallen and become irreparably splintered. The ditty makes light of that very real fear and helps soften it.

But what if we taught this story differently? Maybe Humpty Dumpty jumped. Maybe he was stuck in his own Tower of Babel on top of that wall and wanted desperately to get down. Maybe the "great fall" was actually a deepening and expansion of his own consciousness—a startling vision of his many selves. What if Humpty didn't want to be what the king wanted him to be? He didn't want to be put back together again; to be an egg so full of promise of life but giving birth to nothing. He didn't want to reach for the heavens; he waned to be down on earth where the action is. What if what realy happened is that he hatched? 

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See also: 

• Relentless Search for the Next Magical Something
• Feeling Slightly Out of It Most of the Time
• A Marriage of Marriages

Be Openness

Excerpt from Instant Enlightenment: Fast, Deep, and Sexy by David Deida:

Go inside yourself as deep as you can. Feel inward, deeper and deeper. Is there an end to how deeply you can feel? If not, keep feeling inwardly until you are certain inward never ends.

All there is inside is a deeper and deeper openness.

Now, feel outwardly as far as you can. Listen to the most distant sounds you can hear, and then listen further, into the openness beyond the furthest sound. Notice the most distant light, and then gaze beyond it, into the endless openness...

Now, simultaneously, feel the openness that goes on and on, both inwardly and outwardly. Really do this, and you will discover that feeling never ends in any direction. The most basic sense of being, of existence, is the openness of feeling in all directions. Being is feeling wide open.

As soon as your feeling stops short of on-and-on, feel whatever you are feeling (a tree or a thought), and feel beyond it. You don't have to stop feeling anything (you can still feel the tree or the thought), but also feel the openness that goes beyond anything. Feel further than you've ever felt before, zillions of miles inwardly, and zillions of miles outwardly, on and on, wide open. 

This is who you are, this wide openness, feeling with no boundaries.

Be openness, feeling on and on, while having sex or during a conversation, and your lover and friends will begin to feel an unbound openness, too. 

Do you have a better way to live your life? The choice is yours. 

Constant Motion

Topiary Park, January 12, 2013

Excerpt from Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers by Leonard Kohen: 

Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness...While the universe destructs it also constructs. New things emerge out of nothingness.

But we can't really determine by cursory observation whether something is in the evolving or devolving mode. If we didn't know differently we might mistake the newborn baby boy—small, wrinkled, bent, a little grotesque looking—for the very old man on the brink of death.

In representations of wabi-sabi, arbitrarily perhaps, the devolving dynamic generally tends to manifest itself in things a little darker, more obscure, and quiet. Things evolving tend to be a little lighter and brighter, a bit clearer, and slightly more eye-arresting.

And nothingness itself—instead of being empty space—is alive with possibility. In metaphysical terms, wabi-sabi suggests that the universe is in constant motion toward or away from potential. 

A State of Flux

View from the ISS at Night from Knate Myers on Vimeo.

Marcelo Gleiser, from "The Mystery We Are," On Being, November 9, 2012: 

The way we understand the world is very much based on what we can see of the world. Science is based on measurements and observations. And the notion that we can actually come up and have a theory that explains everything assumes that we can know everything — that we can go out and measure everything there is to measure about nature and come up with this beautiful Theory of Everything. And since we cannot measure all there is to measure, since our tools have limitations, we are definitely limited in how much we can know of the world.

So you can even build a theory that would explain everything that we know now. But then two weeks from now, someone else will come and find something new that does not fit in your theory. And that's not a Theory of Everything anymore because it doesn't include everything that can be included.

When you look out into nature, everything is in transformation at all times. And we see this at the very small and we see this at the very large [scale]. When we look at the whole universe, it is expanding, it's growing, it's changing in time. And so I look at things much more as a state of flux, of becoming, of transformation, as something that has some static truth behind it. So the notion that we as humans could come up with a final answer to the mystery of nature it's pushing things a little too far for our capabilities.

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See also:

• "Limits," Radiolab, April 5, 2012
• "Amazing ISS Timelapse Photography Captures The Beauty Of Space," The Inquisitr, July 22, 2012 

Come and Go Freely

Antony Gormley: Exposure. Lelystad, The Netherlands

Through consistent practice we develop the skill of mindfulness, which allows us to detect with great precision the often subtle self-referential ideas and body sensations as they arise in each act of perception. We also develop equanimity so that we can allow these ideas and body sensations to expand and contract without suppression, interference, or clinging. Eventually, contact with the sense of self becomes so continuous that there is no time left to congeal or fixate it. The self then becomes clarified in the sense that it is no longer experienced as an opaque, rigid, ever-present entity, but rather as a transparent, elastic, vibratory activity. It loses "thingness." We realize that it is a verb, not a noun; a wave, not a particle. According to this paradigm, what is let go of is the unconsciousness and 'holding' associated with those ideas and body sensations which produce a sense of self. The sense of self becomes a home rather than a prison. You can come and go freely.

~ Shinzen Young, from Tricycle Magazine (Fall 1993)

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See also:

• What Disappears at Enlightenment?
• Appreciating Nothing