Nisargadatta Re-visioned
Nisargadatta: "Wisdom tells me I'm Nothing, Love tells me I'm Everything. Between the two my life flows."
Wisdom tells me I cannot be reduced to no thing, because the ground of Being has become me.
Love tells me I am everything, and that everything includes me. Because of the two my life miraculously flows!
Message from "God"
I am here, even as your anger and despair...
Once you find me here, you can find me any/everywhere!
How deeply can you enter this moment to be with me?
For to be with me is to be with you, to be with all of this
It's the truth - to fully feel me is to fully feel you.
If you only hear me in the spaces between sounds, you'll miss me in music
If you only look for me in stillness, you'll miss me as thunder
And if you only think of me as light, you'll not see me when I'm weeping...
If you only want me radiant, you'll reject me in agony, when I am (you) drowning
I am with you, wherever you go, whatever you do, but don't you see?
You don't really want all of me, when you don't want all of you!
Know that when you hold your hand, you're holding mine,
And when you take care of you, you're taking care of me too!
Once you find me here, you can find me any/everywhere!
How deeply can you enter this moment to be with me?
For to be with me is to be with you, to be with all of this
It's the truth - to fully feel me is to fully feel you.
If you only hear me in the spaces between sounds, you'll miss me in music
If you only look for me in stillness, you'll miss me as thunder
And if you only think of me as light, you'll not see me when I'm weeping...
If you only want me radiant, you'll reject me in agony, when I am (you) drowning
I am with you, wherever you go, whatever you do, but don't you see?
You don't really want all of me, when you don't want all of you!
Know that when you hold your hand, you're holding mine,
And when you take care of you, you're taking care of me too!
Cancel the Funeral
Non-duality, as in the unity of opposites
is not a funeral, it's a wedding and
the union of opposites sings no requiems
for anyone, or anything
It's song is the sound of wedding bells ringing
In the unity of opposites
the one and the many marry,
Make love and remain intertwined for all of time
The unity of opposites,
it's more like uni-duality
and it's not the end of your world
so there will be no dying for its' truth
instead a new beginning...
living, with the opposites unified
It isn’t about our disappearance
but our standing out fully
while also firmly embedded
in the web of the whole, the great everything
we're woven into!
It pledges no allegiance to limitlessness alone
for it has deep reverence for the limits
that make each thing shine as itself!
It worships not boundlessness alone
It is being bound to life!
to the entire universe
not a bondage of imprisonment
but the deepest kind of intimate relationship
in which the transcendent and the immanent
are forever bound together
Non-duality, as in the unity of opposites,
is wedding bells ringing in the land of the living
so unearth your soul and all you've buried alive
time for resurrection, time to be revived
💓
Non-duality, as in the unity of opposites
is not a funeral, it's a wedding and
the union of opposites sings no requiems
for anyone, or anything
It's song is the sound of wedding bells ringing
In the unity of opposites
the one and the many marry,
Make love and remain intertwined for all of time
The unity of opposites,
it's more like uni-duality
and it's not the end of your world
so there will be no dying for its' truth
instead a new beginning...
living, with the opposites unified
It isn’t about our disappearance
but our standing out fully
while also firmly embedded
in the web of the whole, the great everything
we're woven into!
It pledges no allegiance to limitlessness alone
for it has deep reverence for the limits
that make each thing shine as itself!
It worships not boundlessness alone
It is being bound to life!
to the entire universe
not a bondage of imprisonment
but the deepest kind of intimate relationship
in which the transcendent and the immanent
are forever bound together
Non-duality, as in the unity of opposites,
is wedding bells ringing in the land of the living
so unearth your soul and all you've buried alive
time for resurrection, time to be revived
💓
Gods' (Many) Face(s)
I step out into the street on a Fall morning, and struck by the very reality of the world,
I am thrilled by a curiously profound and buoyant sense of awe.
I hear the Nisargadatta's voice echo through time, "Refuse this dream the stamp of reality!"
But I will not heed this call because today life is no longer just a dream, not a bubble to burst,
it is dramatically, mind-blowingly real, and in its precious isness, everything radiates significance.
My soul flutters with delight watching god interact with itself everywhere I look. Everything a piece of god that contains all of god!
I hear Ram Das whisper, "Everything is god in drag!"
But this isn't true anymore, because now I see that god doesn't wear masks,
and world is not just an appearance!
This world of form no longer conceals the divine, but reveals him/her/it/us everywhere,
as each thing itself, no more looking through, behind, beyond, beneath, before
all of this is the revelation of god, it IS god expressing itself in infinite ways, god, the multi-faceted
I smile to myself because today I don't need to peel anything back or strip anything away to look upon god's (many) face(s).
Timelessness is Eons Old!
This now that feels timeless
This present moment
Is Billions of years old!
It’s the leading edge, this present
With an unfathomably epic past
Savoring the paradox:
This feeling of timelessness
is at least 140,000,000 centuries old!
And the universe is savoring
the wondrous mystery of itself, AS ME
because the ground of Being
evolved into humanity
The experience of simplicity
owes it's nature to an unfathomably complex
process that began ages ago
These are precious gifts
Evolution has given us
Everything this moment is,
Was once the size of an ACORN
Recalling the NOW's past
Instantly makes it riveting
immerses me more deeply in it
in the poignance of ALL OF THIS
that the past has led to,
That I am now thrillingly,
enigmatically, part of.
Even small talk is significant
When it's 14 billion years deep.
Then & Now
Back then, it was the feeling of collapsing into truth,
now it's of that primordial "ground" rising up into, and as me
What was once a backwards falling disintegration into truth
is now a felt sense of being that mystery, fleshed out
Back then, oneness had a human hole in it
Today, it has a human, whole in it.
Oneness Without a Hole in It
Driving through the Arizona desert, I'm in the passenger seat staring out at the mountains slowly streaming by, trying to recall how it felt to merge with my surroundings back when becoming one with everything meant disappearing, meant swiping myself out of the picture and dissolving into thin air, becoming nothing and everything. Well, everything except for me, except for somebody. Only in hindsight can I say that most of the time when following those pseudo non-dual pointers, I was not actually becoming one with everything, I was disappearing into it and there's a world of difference between the two.
But, in wanting to vividly describe it so that I can help others find a new way to experience oneness without dissolving, without losing themselves, I have to dip into my own absence again, to re-visit it experientially. Fearing that the re-entry gate might get jammed again, I hesitate before making my exit. It takes some effort, but pulling off the old self-swipe, my sense of identity, of somebody-ness, vanishes into thin air. Like so many times before, having once identified with the character of "Jessica" already feels like a memory of a distant dream, and the elbow resting against the window belongs to no one. My absence right now doesn't feel exquisite like it did before, or enlightening, but extraordinarily hollow, stultifying. Nonetheless, here it is again, along with the familiar tug of grief and muscle clenching that visits me when I remember with full clarity and feel the full weight of how much I lost in the abyss of self-effacing spirituality. Yes, I did find some rare jewels in no man's land that I carry with me, but I hope to god I never find myself stuck there again. I've gotten what I left for, so swiping myself back in, I return.
With a swell of relief, I summon my soul and psyche back to where they belong, as integral parts of this scene. How grateful I am for a new way to experience oneness - a oneness that includes me in it. To those soul-destroying, faux-enlightened ones who call this my fictional ego's attempt to "have it's cake and eat it too," I say to you that it's delicious. A real someone, this limited but real ego me, gets to be present to savor a oneness of diversity, a cosmic unity that we couldn’t even know, that wouldn’t even be had the "undifferentiated, impersonal ground of being" not evolved into this interconnected web of inseparably separate, and wondrously different, little me's.
How sweet it feels, this full-blooded, heart-bursting buoyancy, this thick and warm intimacy with the mountain range riding alongside me. I smile, knowing I'm living the marvelous paradox that whatever I'm communing with, I am also one with. Oneness only because there is relationship, and relationship only because there is more than one thing. Within this intimacy there's a wellspring of kindness towards my bruised heart, making sorrow feel like a privilege because it means I got to live for more than one day. When I feel intimate with all things, I can cradle my sorrow, and when it dances with joy, I feel utterly alive! I can set a place at the table for pain because it won't threaten my oneness with the mountains, our intimacy is too primal to be that conditional.
Drawing the world closer to me, it feels like I'm enfolding everything I see in an open embrace, taking the entire scene into me without it negating me. Nothing to negate here but negation itself. Looking out at the mountains now, we're woven together seamlessly and yet paradoxically without physical distance lost between us.
If I could, I'd run through the desert laughing and crying, my heart exploding and hair dancing in the wind. Drunk with aliveness and steadied on my feet by the presence of the One as "the ten thousand things". And there is more than "just seeing happening" without a seer, there's both a seer and a seen that need each other in order to be, and the miracle of my eyes through which to perceive. The cherry on the cake is that I no longer have to use air quotations to call them mine because with nothing to desecrate or deny, everything is re-confirmed, re-sanctified. And this little me who isn't all of me, but knows her place within the whole of everything, is grateful to feel not just profoundly wanted, but utterly necessary.