Schubert. Impromptu Op 90 No 899, 3 G flat, Andante. Alfred Brendel
Chariots of Fire. Theme song from movie Chariot of Fire
Incantation Deva Premal
Yemaya Assessu, Deva Premal
Gayatri Mantra, Deva Premal and Miten. Satsang-a Meditation in Song and Silence
Saturday, March 23, 2013
Truthfulness/realness and Falseness
Dear friends.
As we approach the ending of this year's sessions (end of April), we are going to explore some of the fruits of practicing presence, some of the faces of presence. Presence shows up in many flavors or tastes. Sometimes we feel a stillness, or a kind of clarity. At others we feel a settled gentle compassion. Sometimes we feel this sense of surging strength or capacity. In the Sufi tradition they say that God has ninety faces, the hundredth being unknowable.
This last Monday we looked at the quality, the flavor of the essence of truthfulness. Since this word truth can be daunting we used the words realness. We all know this particular taste of presence. Realness rings true, things line up, we feel clear and we feel alive and awake. We feel a sense of opening in our heart and the mind clears, and there can be a deep 'ah', or 'I get it'. And most importantly we feel real. The phrase 'the truth will set you free' makes sense. The realness of the truth feels free, unencumbered. There is a kind of inner freedom.
In contrast to realness we explored falseness. Mostly we are not aware of how false, fake or even dishonest we are. But as you turn towards your experience, as you practice being present you may begin to notice the actual flavor or taste of falseness. You may feel edgy, sticky, brittle, mushy, vague, agitated, dull, sleepy. Falseness has a bad taste. Something feels off. We feel defensive, off kilter. When feel this way we may become more defensive, trying to cover up something, trying to hide. We may even pretend to be real and honest. The superego can arise at this time attacking us for not being authentic. It can shame us for not being real. Or if we do expose more of the truth it can attack us mercilessly afterwards for being too open, for being vulnerable and exposed.
We can't help but be fake. Our ego is fake. It is made up of layer and upon layer of defense mechanisms, habitual unconscious patterns of responding that we learned in our formative layers. It developed to protect us from the pain of an unresponsive, abusive or miss attuned environment. We needed this shell to survive and function in the world . Thank god it developed. The fakeness arises out of the mechanicalness of the shell. We think we are free and spontaneous but once you turn inwards you begin to see the same repetitive, conditioned patterns. It is shocking at first to see how mechanical we really are.
Inner work is not just driven by the desire to be free from suffering but also for the longing for realness. We want to know and feel the truth of who and what we are, both at the level of our engagement with the world but also in the depths of our being. The inner journey inevitably forces us to face all the falseness, all the ways we distort ourselves, tie ourselves into knots in order to be accepted and loved, to avoid conflict, to be successful in a world immersed in so much superficiality. We try to be authentic and we try to be truthful. And these are vital efforts. They are part of our development. But you may notice that these efforts often involve hiding the falseness. We try to improve ourselves. But something is still off.
Curiously by embracing the falseness, by admitting it to ourselves and perhaps to others we actually begin to align with truthfulness. We are being real about our fakeness! This is not about a guilty confession. Nor is this about bashing people with 'my truth'. This gesture of aligning with the truth of my falseness takes sincerity, courage, vulnerability and especially a kind of love. This means admitting we cover our confusion, our doubts with a false bravado, an arrogant certainty; we are strong and yet we pretend to be small, we are silent and yet we desperately want to speak up; we pretend to be loving when we really feel hatred or indifference. Perhaps the most surprising cover up of all is when we deny our true presence, and insist that we are deficient egos. We discovered on Monday night that recognizing the inevitable falseness, allowing it to be held gently, allows an opening into presence. This is the presence of realness, of truthfulness.
Over and over we have seen that by turning toward our experience we open, and the grace of presence may arise to greet us. Presence holds all of us, all of reality in fact. Presence is not some mental, philosophical notion. It is palpable, it is welcoming. Nothing is rejected. This is not the realm of the judgmental punishing God or the superego. It is the mystery of blessing, which invites us to open into all our brokenness, into all our sins and all our falseness. As we turn inward, unlike what happened when we were children, we discover that presence meets us, greets, holds us and we can relax into the vulnerability of our humanness.
Questions from last session. Tell me a way you are false? Tell me a way you experience realness? Explore the movement of falseness to realness and back to falseness. How does realness feel? How does falseness feel?
Wednesday, March 6, 2013
Throwing out the baby with the bathwater/Preciousness
Dear Friends. Through these past months we have focused on the ways many of us got injured by religious institutions, religious ideas and religious teachers. We have explored the many ways the superego sneaks into sacred language, into our most precious longings. We become numb, or we leave; we accommodate and become dutiful church members. Many of us became disillusioned by the hypocrisy of church leaders or spiritual teachers and we walked away, looking for other paths or simply giving up. And yet we are here. Perhaps we are called by some intuitive feeling that there must be something real in all this religious stuff. Or perhaps it is a quiet longing and a need to find some depth. Some of us are facing life challenges or have been beaten down by difficult past histories, and we long for a safe way to connect spiritually. Some us came because we are drawn to inner work with fellow travelers Whatever your motivation for participating in this circle it means that you are turning away from something, and are turning towards something, drawn by some mysterious longing, by some insistent pull. This turning is crucial. It is the journey back from our spiritual wounds, all the disappointments and betrayals. It is not about fixing all of those wounds, but about an inner discovery of something that maybe at some level we knew all along.
Over these many months we have focused on how our particular spiritual or religious circumstances hurt us. Last Monday we explored how in order to protect ourselves we walked away, and what we lost in the process. For me, the turning began with my anger that somehow fundamentalists had taken over sacred language and distorted it so much, that for me, it had become a language of judgement and fear. The language and the spiritual practices had become dead skeletons and lost the power of living truth and wisdom. My own journey has taken me on a deep archeological dig through time to recover the essence of this language. It has been a thrilling five year journey of deep study, reflection and contemplation. And along the way living presence has opened up and now these sacred texts, these teachings both contemporary and ancient, are alive. Not all by any means and not all the time, but something is emerging as the living word, rather than the dead, boring, word. At the beginning the fuel was anger but along the way the fuel became an abiding curiosity and love.
Sometimes it is anger that wakes us up. Or it maybe grief of what we left behind, what we threw out with the bathwater. Sometimes it is the press of fear that time is short and there is an imperative to get beyond the superego and all the ways it permeates all that is sacred. This loss of presence is inevitable, it is occurs choicelessly through our early years. Layer upon layer of ego arises as self protection but also as a way to adapt and function in the world. By the time most of us go to school we have lost contact with our living presence. This is the initial turning away from presence. We don't decide to do this. It happens gradually. In someways this is the deepest wound. By necessity we all betrayed our divine nature. We had to. But the pain of losing the connection is very deep and painful. When we begin to see and feel what we have lost it can bring forth deep grief. This grief is not so much about the missed opportunities in life, the risks not taken, the mistakes made. This grief is more fundamental, it is the loss of what is most precious to us.
This is a necessary crisis and it is what brings us to spiritual work. People who are comfortable, secure enough most likely won't even consider this kind of journey. It is not journey for the faint of heart. We are on a mission to recover what is most precious, what some have called the pearl beyond price. We are drawn to this because we love what is precious to us. Often we project the preciousness onto our beloved, our children, our homes, our clothing, our pets, our special places. And they are precious to us. But what we don't understand is that this preciousness which seems "out there" is really a reflection of our own inner preciousness. Living presence is so, so, so precious; it is who you are, always have been. You are the preciousness. This face of precious presence lives mostly in the unconscious hidden away until the time is ripe. And when it is time the turning inward begins. You have all begun. And the turning never stops, as long as we keep coming back to this moment, this moment, this moment.
Last Monday's questions: Tell me something that is precious to you? Tell me a way you walked away from what is precious to you? Explore what it means to reclaim and recover what is precious to you in the midst of your wounding?
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