THE BEGINNING OF DEVOTION
Attention, paying attention.
It’s the beginning of devotion.
And when you see? When there is seeing?
Well, seeing is praise.
When we see, what we see,
is God.
Not the god, or this or that god.
There aren’t lots of gods,
or so it seems.
And in the end, there isn’t even one god:
there is only God.
So it was said by the sages.
Greetings friends A poem today for you to read and enjoy
Just now, just here,
stirring the tea.
A flash, an insight;
in reality a realisation
dawned as the tea brewed.
Suddenly I’d seen the solution
to finding the real Self,
to success in the search,
to completing the quest for Truth.
Just keep doing this.
That was the sense of it.
That’s what I heard with the mind’s ear.
Stir the tea?
Yes.
Then? Keep on keeping on.
Step by step,
One task – or no task – to the next.
Just a wu wei flow.
In, through and on the ongoing moment;
on the path of least resistance.
But beware, take care:
That path is not the slippery slope
of apathy, of indifference.
It’s not the way of doing nothing.
It is the way of being,
Of being within your doing.
Fully present, only present.
The tea needs stirring?
Then stir it.
Be the actor – the stirrer.
Be the spoon,
Be the tea.
That’s all there is.
The inclination to seek knowledge is, for me, a gift, a blessing. And we live in a time when there are so many sources, so many resources available, and many are freely available too. There seems to be no limit to what the genuine seeker of knowledge can uncover.
Yes, of course, we’re swamped with information from all sides. We are deceived by fake news. And everything these days is a commodity, a thing to be bought, sold, acquired, or otherwise used for profit in the material world.
All true. However, this is where one’s discernment comes into play. It’s up to each of us as seekers of knowledge (on whatever topic or subject) to discern for ourselves the truth or otherwise of the information we use to form the knowledge we are seeking.
In my last post, I began to talk about two notes that I made in my notebook. These notes were quickly jotted down while seeking knowledge from two different sources about two distinct topics. Feel free to have a look at that post here if you happened to miss it.
Do your duty
Follow Dharma
Live a righteous life
These three lines are the sum of what remains of a session with my teacher, Swami Tadatmananda. It’s his short, succinct summary of the teachings I was trying to absorb from him that day.
You’ve probably guessed I am not a great note-taker; I like to just let sink in what wants to sink in, absorb what resonates for me. Perhaps on that day, I felt the summary was all I needed as a basis for later contemplation.
With that in mind, I would like, in this post, to reflect on these three injunctions, try to work out how I’m doing when it comes to taking notice of them, and actually where I’m at with actually living by them.
What does it mean, ‘Do your duty’? And what does it mean, for me, to do my duty?
Firstly, let me try to define duty. Not from the dictionary meaning, not from some outside ‘authority’. No, this is me talking about how I define duty.
Duty, for me, is defined by the activities I choose to prioritize in my life. These are the things that I believe best serve my true, essential nature. Acting in accordance with this true nature includes responsibilities such as taking care of my physical, emotional, and mental health. While this may not always be easy and sometimes feels impossible, it is my duty because my mind and body are manifestations of my true self, of the divinity.
Duty, again for me, means persuing activites – in the world as well as within myself – that nurture, protect, and grow, who or what I percieve that Self to be.
This Self I refer to is not restricted to the apparently separate entity I call ‘me’. That apparent separation is just that, an appearance: Self is all there is; I am not simply bonded or joined with all other living (and non-living) beings: I am those beings, just as they are me.
As such, my duty is to act in ways that benefit (or at the very least do as little harm as possible to) all beings, all life. Here, I guess, we could talk about Karma. But let’s leave that for now. It’s enough to say that nobody can tell me – or you – what is our duty. In fact, the truth is I already know the full extent of my duty, as we all do.
The only thing lacking for me is what I might call a full disclosure of what that duty is. That full disclosure can only come from me – as in the Self. As they say, I might know in my head what my duty is, but I’ve yet to fully realise it in my heart. And if I’m honest with myself I can say that my aspiration to do my duty is a constant reminder and motivation to do always the best I can to fulfill my duty.
In some areas I think I do my duty pretty well, but in others I have a long way to go.
In my next post (and the final one in this series: there just seems to be such a lot to think about when contemplating this topic), I will look at what it is to follow Dharma. Once again, it’ll be a very personal, subjctive answer because, to put it perhaps too simply, I like to think that I know right from wrong.
I hope this post has been of at least a little interest and value to you. I will look forward to seeing you here for my next post.
Thank you and I wish you peace.
Most likely I’m not alone when I say that when first listening to new information, a lecture, teachings or anything else for that matter, I will often forget either part of what I’m trying to learn or even all of it. In fact, I’m sure there are more than a few scholarly research papers that will tell us all about this universal phenomena with all facts and figures along with all the whys and wherefores.
Anyway, I was listening to my teacher ( Swami Tadatmananda) recently. He summarized the teachings he was giving on that occasion in three succinct, pithy lines. Thinking back now, I have no memory of the teachings being presented, and all I have is a quick note jotted down of the teacher’s summary:
Do your duty
Follow Dharma
Live a righteous life.
Fast forward a couple of days and I was watching a video about 19th Century English poets. Once again I’m not able to tell you the names of all those poets or what the show was about (actually to be honest, I got bored and stopped watching half way).
And, again, all that remains is a scribbled note about the pioneering of a particular rhyming scheme by one of the featured poets.
That revolutionary rhyming scheme is ABBA (where the first line of a verse rhymes with the fourth, and the middle two rhyme with each other). It’s as well that I did jot down a note: I have never been able to take in, much less retain in memory, all the technical stuff to do with poetics. Never.
But for some reason this particular idea appealed to me. Maybe it’s to do with how I was once a big fan of the Swedish pop group Abba? (okay, maybe I still am)
As it happens, my note on this appears in my notebook just below the first one I mentioned above. So, as I thought about ABBA (the rhyming scheme, not the pop group), I saw that first note and started playing with it:
Do your duty
Follow Dharma
Earn good Karma
Do nothing naughty
Okay, I know, it’s not exactly great literature is it? Never mind; it’s only an experiment. But, having said that, I do quite like this little, what shall we call it? This little ditty. It seems to be a nice, even quirky, little rephrasing of my teacher’s own summary.
This is all very well and good you might think, but what does it all mean? Does it actually mean anything? Well, my short answer is yes: for me it does indeed definitely mean something.
Actually, it means a lot. But as this post seems to be dragging on a bit, perhaps we will have to continue in another post.
Meanwhile, be blessed
I was out and about photographing for a few hours this morning. On such walkabouts I like to walk at a slow but steady pace, and in a contemplative frame of mind.
Usually I’ll also chant mantras as a way of focusing my mind, of keeping random thoughts from distracting my attention. And so it was today.
Deep into today’s walk, I was feeling ‘in the zone’, as I like to call it. Making photos and chanting mantra. All of a sudden I heard myself singing a bhajan (sacred song or hymn) in place of the mantra I’d been reciting.
This particular bhajan was By Your Grace, by Krishna Das, It’s a beautiful devotional song that you can listen to here. I’ve been listening to it and singing it for years, and I love it. I find it puts me in a nice prayerful state of mind, Anyway, here are the lyrics:
Closer than breath, you are the air
Sweeter than life itself, you are here
I am a wanderer, you are my peace
I am a prisoner, you are release
Jai Gurudev…
I am a pilgrim, your road so long
I am the singer, you are the song
Held in the open sky, so far above
I am the lover, you are the love
Jai Gurudev…
I follow your footsteps through the flame
All that I ever need is in your name
Carry your heart in mine, vast as space
All that I am today is by your grace.
By your Grace…
I live by your grace.
Now, the song was written by Krishna Das as a way of thanking and praising his Guru. But, the words and the power of the song can be dedicated to any of our own individual concepts of the Truth. Whether we call it the Absolute Reality, the Supreme Being, the Life Force, the inner Divinity, Nature, Consciousness, God, Guru, the Universe. After all, these are all simply names and forms.
I guess what I’m saying here is that the song is a fine prayerful and meditative way to express our gratitude to, our love for, and devotion to whatever it is in our heart of hearts we know as our support, our teacher, our creator, our Guru. Our very own Truth
Peace blessings from me to you
‘Looks like a comfy chair’.
That was the first thing my partner said when I showed her this photo. Her eyes – and perhaps even her heart – had found that which is illuminated by the sun, even though it’s surrounded by wreckage and ruin.
The wreckage by the way, of an abandoned and trashed store front. One of several in a small arcade, that’s long sat empty.
Ah, I thought: one more illustration of a metaphor I’ve been hearing a lot lately in my studies about consciousness.
Allow me, please, to adopt our teacher’s metaphor which, for me, really clarifies this concept of consciousness, or Atma as it’s called in Sanskrit.
Is the brilliant light streaming into this room and onto this chair affected in any way whatsoever because the chair is sitting amidst all that wreckage?
Is the sun shining any less brightly on the chair than it would if the chair was sitting in a luxuriously decorated space instead?
Of course the answer to both questions is no. The sun, and its brilliance remains undimmed, and completely unaffected, untouched, regardless of what it shines on.
The ‘I’ that photographed this scene, and my partner’s ‘I’ whose eyes were drawn to the chair in the scene, are both consciousness. Not ‘my’ consciousness; not ‘her’ consciousness. Consciousness is all; all there is. Boundaryless, infinite, all pervading. We can’t even say there is one consciousness, because there is only consciousness.
Ah, I hear you say: there is one sun shining on our world; and the sun isn’t ‘all there is’. Well, as our teacher likes to remind us, all metaphors are flawed: you can only take them so far.
Metaphors, are only meant to illustrate, to show us the way, point us in the right direction as it were. In our little example here, the metaphor is meant to help us gain some knowledge.
The knowledge that we are not what we see, hear, taste, touch, think or feel. We are that light – consciousness – that allows us to know what we experience with our senses.
One more thing: The light of the sun, flooding the chair with its brilliance, enabled my partner to see that it was comfy, even though it was sitting in that wrecked, abandoned and lonely place.
Just as in our lives, when everything seems to be crashing down around us and we feel we are the ones stranded in that wreckage, we can remember that the light of our own consciousness, is the way in which we may shine our attention on the truth of our unchanging eternal, and true nature, that is who we really are: perfect, eternal, absolutely unaffected by anything at all.
Peace and love
HOMAGE TO HOLINESS
Threads harvested from threadbare clothing.
Pea-sized bits of bread, sliced from meagre rations,
Secretly hoarded for sacred purpose.
Mala makers work at night
in the dark of the stinking and freezing stone cell.
Chewed bits of bread become dough again,
and, by feel, frozen fingers knead the dough
Until tiny beads of bread emerge.
A tiny twig, again by feel, pierces each bead through.
Then in solemn prayerful silence and focus,
the nun passes her harvested thread through the first bead.
She ties a knot, no easy task with freezing fingers in the frozen dark.
And so it goes; all sacred duties take their own time.
One by one; one bead of bread threaded; one knot knotted.
The nun nears collapse. But now, at last, her task is done.
As the last knot is knotted, the last bead in its place,
The nun sighs and mutters, whispers, a prayer of thanks.
One hundred and eight beads plus one.
She has made her Mala.
Om Mani Padme Hum
I’m not completely sure where I found this prayer. But I have a feeling it is by Thomas Merton, one of my most favourite and significant teachers and guides.
Thank you with Love
Creatures of the Air,
the Winged ones.
Same like you and me:
Bound to material nature.
Vibing on the mystic trees,
their upside is downside, their downside is upside
selves telling me:
You’ve got to cut through the attachments.
Then, not a new, but old made new again, insight
confirms, clarifies, brings details to,
shines a light on the specifics:
Stop desiring what you already have.
Notes from the Hermit's Cave 