April 10, 2011

It is early morning and dew still shines on the grass. All these chattering birds, all these expressions of nature breaking the silence of the unmanifest. A beautiful little finch has come to feed, an exotic strain with a bright orange belly, blue feathered wings, day-glow green crest. Something escaped from a pet store. It has found a mate, a dun and dusty little thing--mother nature has welcomed our parrot-bird with open arms.

Enlightenment is global consciousness in this sense: it embraces all 360 degrees of what is all the time, as opposed to the narrower beam of our attention. However, "global," like all these words thrown out there to appease the intellect, delimits the reality to which it points, which is ever limitless.

This is as good as it gets in succinctly expressing the how and why of this search: "Trust the teacher. Take my own case. My guru ordered me to attend to the sense "I am" and to give attention to nothing else. I just obeyed, I did not follow any particular course of breathing, or meditation, or study or scriptures. Whatever happened, I would turn away my attention from it and remain in the sense "I am." It may look too simple, even crude. My only reason for doing it was that my guru told me so. Yet it worked! Obedience is a powerful solvent of all desires and fears. Just turn away from all that occupies the mind; do whatever work you have to complete, but avoid new obligations; keep empty, keep available, resist not what comes uninvited. In the end you reach a state of non-grasping, of joyful non attachment, of inner ease and freedom indescribable, yet wonderfully real." N.M.

And so it is. This does not have to be taken on faith, though. It is there for each of us to experience, beyond words. Beyond thought even. This is not religion. It is the science of mysticism. Anyway, it works for me, provided that I turn away from all that occupies the mind. This does not mean that I should suppress thoughts or withdraw from events, only that I remain conscious of "am" at the root of everything.