22 November 2005

Humility

Basically there are two realities – the reality of energy/heart/connexion and the reality of self. The reality of self is the sum of all your experiences and all your conditioning, it's like a large data base from which you constantly draw to make informed and sensible decisions and constantly add to as you have more experiences. It is accumulative. The manager of the data base is the thinking mind. When different selfs interact and communicate there is a transfer of information from one to the other. The reality of energy/heart/connexion is the opposite of this. When self diminishes, through work, suffering or trauma, the being starts to vibrate with energy, and then communication has nothing to do with information transfer and everything to do with resonance and fellowship. My teacher used to have a wonderful phrase to describe the students he found unbearably selfish – clotted with self. And self really is a congestion – a sticky glue that prevents vibration. It smothers the real world - the one of connexion. When you remove self then you have what was there all along but which self negated – energy. “Cease activity and return to stillness / And that stillness will be even more active.” As a teacher it is reasonably straightforward to wrench a student into the world of energy. What is frustrating and ridiculous is then watching them struggle to make sense of this world using the data base of self. They'll immediately start telling you about all the amazing and wonderful feelings their having, or about similar experiences they've had before, or (and this is the best/worst, depending upon your humour) about worthy books they've read recounting parallel experiences. It's enough to make you sick. No humility. The real world is not there to be made sense of it is there to be joined. You honour it in that joining and you become a tiny trembling part of it and that is enough. This is humility.
       rhythm of crickets
only a few beats faster
than your heart
Joseph Massey
I feel the two missing beats at the beginning of the third line - the communal heart.

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