Silent Musings

Lately I’ve been feeling a lot of internal letting go, especially of certain long held views and mental habits. It’s difficult to explain this process, because it is not something that occurs through effort, and those habits are not necessarily ones that I have some intention to purge. In fact, I wonder a lot what will become of me as they go, as the one I call “me” is very much defined by them. Not in the sense of such definitions as “I am a scientist”, or “I like chocolate ice cream”, but rather at a much more fundamental level than this.

For example, I find myself beginning to question the importance of desire at all levels. Do I need to accomplish anything? Feel any pleasure? What would be the point? It all seems so shallow in comparison to living the Truth. At the same time, it is equally unimportant that this process should end up in any particular place. Desire could have a place here and now, even intensely so, or it could not. No agenda, no agent.

I don’t know what the Truth is, but I know what it isn’t. It isn’t pre-planned or known by anyone. It is a living organism, the unfolding cosmos, revealed only in its immediate existence and action.

When the saints speak of purification, I believe they are speaking of such a process of moving in the immediacy of the Truth. A living that is not determined by any particular habitual pattern, but rather by communion with what is. The notion of trying to eliminate sin or negativity only introduces entanglement. Somewhat like trying to tell God how to design a tree or a bumblebee.

I see beauty in everything, even in the infinite depths of attachment. Desire exists in every energetic movement of consciousness, and yet Shakti she is also completely unbound and unknowable. The deepest form of paradox. Such is the nature of her radiant splendor. With profound acceptance comes this purification of which I make such a feeble attempt to describe.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day
runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures.
It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth
in numberless blades of grass
and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers.
It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth
and of death, in ebb and in flow.
I feel my limbs are made glorious by the touch of this world of life.

And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

- Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali