A Meaningful Life

I haven't posted much recently, even though i would like to. In a sense, i feel that i've run out of words. I sit down at the computer (or more accurately, i lay down with the computer on my lap) and my fingers just dangle there at the end of my hands doing nothing; zippo; nothing comes out of them. And then on other days i feel that there's too many words i want to say; so many, in fact, that my fingers get confused and don't know where to start.

To make matters worse, i have always been a proponent of the concept that it's infinitely better to keep your mouth shut and have people "think" you're a fool than to open it and prove it for them. But i spent the entire day today at home with the radio and CD player off, doing nothing but reading and reflecting. It was a gloriously peaceful day.

Part way through the day one of those completely unpredictable thoughts popped into my head from god knows where and for reasons unknown but which would be interesting to figure out. The thought was a remembrance that sometime last year i had posted a very nice poem by Czeslaw Milosz. I remembered the gist of it, but not the poem itself so i went back and dug it up.

I found the poem in a post i had called "Death & Dying On The Border" and it is just as beautiful today as i remember it being when i first read it over a year ago.

This Only
A valley and above it forests in autumn colors.
A voyager arrives, a map led him here.
Or perhaps memory. Once, long ago, in the sun,
When the first snow fell, riding this way
He felt joy, strong, without reason.
Joy of the eyes. Everything was the rhythm
Of shifting trees, of a bird in flight,
Of a train on the viaduct, a feast of motion.
He returns years later, has no demands.
He wants only one, most precious thing:
To see, purely and simply, without name,
Without expectations, fears, or hopes,
At the edge where there is no I or not-I.

"At the edge where there is no I or not-I." That borderland where meditators go to die. That lost colony to which you can only go if you agree to kill yourself before crossing the border. And all who go there go willingly, even enduring years of effort just to find the border. And the good news is that you don't have to go anywhere to get there. That borderland is right under your zafu and that lost colony is right where you sit each and every day.

The road there runs, as i have said many times, right down that path found between two thoughts. When you first sit down the path may not be seen, it may be completely invisible. As time passes, though, that first gap makes its appearance, slowly widening with each mindful, quiet, minute that passes until, after a while, the path opens, wide as a summer prairie in the US midwest and as inviting as the eyes of the most beautiful of seductresses.

It's when you climb through that gap and reach the silent center of who you are that you are able, as Czeslaw says, "to see, purely and simply, without name, without expectations, fears, or hopes." And ohhhhh the beauty you see. Being, in all it's glorious splendor.

In the Burnt Norton chapter of that magnificent Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot puts it like this:

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.

"Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance." There is only the dance, nothing more. Some call it the Tango, others the Fox Trot, others Walking to the train station, others Reading a magazine, others Washing the dishes, others breathing...

The dance of life, in whatever form you are participating at the current moment, is only possible because of that still point, that silent center that you get to between two thoughts. It's not "out there" or "in here;" it's not danced today, yesterday, or tomorrow. It's danced now, and only now.

Eliot continues from above with:

Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.

When you are lost in the past and future you are barely conscious. Maybe enough to breath, to walk, to eat, and to do those mind numbing routines that you call Existing, but not enough to really Live. Enough to live life, to experience being in all it's glory. To be conscious, to Be, is not found in time, it's found in that borderland, that lost colony.

I remember reading recently in an online blurb for Phillip Moffitt's book Dancing With Life the publisher's comment that the book would be of interest to anyone who is searching for a meaningful life. I think that is what the person in Czeslaw's poem was searching for. I think that's what all of us are searching for, but the person in the poem had seen where that might be found.

Get out of your routines, get out of your rut, get out of the jail that you currently call You and reach for that still point, that silent center, that place where you can see, purely and simply, without name, without expectations, fears, or hopes. It may seem impossible when you first step on the path, but it's when you dare the impossible that the path opens up. As Osho said in that same post of mine last year:

"...[U]nless you can help a person to have a glimpse of the impossible, and you create a desire in him to long for the impossible, to desire the impossible, to be passionately, intensely in love with the impossible, you have not helped. If you can create this desire, he has a meaning."

In love with Life. In passionate love with the thought of the impossible. Coming to the realization that it's not impossible if you only quit searching, if you simply give up and be who you are, if you stop pretending to be something that you aren't.

Get to this place and you will have found a meaningful life, whether you've read Moffitt's book or not.