Everything begins in humility.
In deep humility is where the spiritual search begins and also ends.
Humility unlocks all the secret doors, because in humility we can listen, we can hear the secret message of the infinite heart.
The infinite heart doesn't hang out with pride and worldly respect and puffed-up-edness. It is there, too, of course, because it is everywhere, but it can't be heard there.
The infinite heart is like water; it seeks the lowliest places in the heart. Those places where we don't know, and we're not sure, and we're surrendered to the ungraspable mystery of complete ignorance. Then the majesty reveals itself.
That is why pictures of prayer show people on their knees. Not because the ungraspable wants to lord it over anybody—it has no desires like that, and in any event is not separate from you in the first place.
Rather, someone on their knees in prayer is saying that they don't know and they don't understand and that their heart is simply open. In that deep humility, the radiance can come flooding in; not before.
But we don't need to be on our knees; we can be anywhere. When our heart is in deep humility, in any situation, the infinite presence that is always there can suddenly be noticed.
And it feels as if a heart-breaking radiance suddenly fills us, almost too great to be borne, and metaphorically we fall down on our knees in ungraspable love and gratitude.
Then everything seems like the features of one face. Then everything is in its everyday ordinariness is shimmering with an inner light that fills all things. Then there is no "two" anywhere. Then the heart understands what the mind cannot.
When we are puffed up with our ego and our rightness and our "truths" and our condemnations and our judgments, the door is closed. Then we see only the hard material world in all its separate, isolated thingness.
Jesus asked us over and over not to judge. "Judge not," he said. "Forget about the speck in your brother's eye and look at the log in your own." "Let that person who is without sin cast the first stone."
Jesus knew that judgment closes the door, and leaves us wondering why the world is so cold and lonely and hard. But it's only the hardness in our own heart, being reflected back to us, that we're seeing then. Jesus knew that the world is only a reflection of we ourselves.
In deep humility, all the ego "I" structures crumble for a moment in timelessness, and are replaced with emptiness and spaciousness and an open heart.
And in that empty heart something vast and unnamable, that is not separate from who we actually are, fills us with its mystery. And our heart breaks open and we die, literally die, to who we thought we were.
And something else is born, that was always there, infusing all things from the light of its ungraspable Heart, endlessly shining.
—jim sloman, 3/12/01 for Mar 12
|
