"Why do the river's work? The river knows how to flow." Pavel Somov

Like a rat in a maze I spent years scampering up and down the hallways of the mind until I read Eckhart Tolle and began to glimmer that there is more to reality than the maze, there is more to reality than the mind. Mind is one of those tricky words that means different things to different people. To me mind is thought, perception, images, the stories we tell ourselves, and it is a wondrous instrument; but identity is not equivalent with mind anymore than identity is equivalent with the liver or pinky, eyebrow or spleen. Awareness or being includes the mind, and the liver and pinky and eyebrow and spleen; but they do not include awareness. Awareness is more than mind-stuff, and the mind cannot encapsulate or fully comprehend what awareness is. We are so addicted to and drunk with the mind that we are often completely oblivious to our mind-possessed state.

I was happily surprised yesterday to see that this month Eckhart gives a 90 minute webcast on Emerson! This is hog-heaven for a girl who named her blog Emerson and Tolle. Eckhart reads this sentence from Emerson: "We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of its truth and organs of its activity...When we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow passage to its beams." (Self-Reliance) The intelligence, for example, of the human body never ceases to stagger me- and I am very much in the lap of this intelligence! Sometimes I turn away from the chatter in the mind and sink deeply into the intelligence that sweeps ceaselessly through the body. Eckhart calls it inner body awareness- being nonverbally alert and present to the intelligent energy animating every cell of the body. "Man is a stream whose source is hidden." (Eckhart reads this sentence from Emerson's The Oversoul.)
We are a stream whose source is hidden. But we live in the lap of that stream. Feel that! Slip out of the mind-maze into the effortless river of real life. "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." (John Lennon) It's not so hard to shift from the busy plan-making mind to the silent shock of the life that is happening right now. "Lose your mind to find your consciousness." (Pavel Somov) Today I'm feeling the current of the river, sometimes easy, sometimes swift and turbulent, flowing from me to you and from you to me, carrying along the crazy maze of mind, which is part of it all...

Cooking Noodles

I was standing at the sink watching the water pour into a pot for boiling noodles. I stood there looking intently for a good sixty seconds or longer as it was a large pot. The pot did not move. The water did move. What moves and what doesn't move?

Something about the stock-still pot and the rushing water from the tap and the two mixed together stayed with me and kept coming back to mind. So it seemed like synchronicity when the next day I chanced on these words: "Aristotle defines space to be an immovable vessel, in which things are contained." Space is the pot and everything else is the water. Why does this matter? Why does seeing this make life feel worth living? What moves and what doesn't move?

Emerson talks about the "meadow of space, strown with these flowers we call suns, and moons, and stars." Maybe there is a field of clarity strewn with moods, and emotions, and the flux of everything. The unmoving canvas beneath the swirls of paint, the unmoving screen beneath the flicker of images, the unmoving stage beneath the dancer's feet, the unmoving silence beneath the waves of noise, and the unmoving now beneath the permutations of time, are the presence of that which neither arises nor passes away, but is more real than bricks.

I'm seasick with motion unbalanced by stillness. Or I'm lost in stillness detached from motion. But this improbable union of that which moves and that which doesn't makes delicious noodles.

"The Eye Was Placed Where One Ray Should Fall"

In 1841 in his essay "Self-Reliance," Emerson wrote these words:

"The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify to that particular ray."

I was 15 when I first read these words and they burned into some place inside me with an indelible blaze.

Meanwhile, like most everyone, I underwent a divorce from myself. I came down with the "disease to please" and a sickening sense of inauthenticity pervaded my days.

Lately I'm looking toward an amiable reconciliation with myself, good, bad, and ugly. I'm interested in the power of autonomy without separation. Standing in the truth of my own experience, without closing down to other viewpoints, is the strength of autonomy.

I find it increasingly invigorating to look through my own eyes, and to see what is to be seen.