Mystical Ramblings

When you need a teacher, the Hindus say, a teacher will appear.  But, we cannot know in advance what we need to learn, else, we would not need to learn it.  Therefore, we won’t know who our teachers are until we have been taught.  As a result, every teaching is a surprise.  I am not a teacher; I am one single brushstroke in a big picture.  If I were a teacher, I couldn’t say: “Get the knowledge you can, then learn how to leave that knowledge behind you, because it can conceal from the you endless change in and around you.”

"The twisted path of a mystic leads to a simple vision.  The ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary and the ordinary in the extraordinary is the quintessential mysticism.  To most, the ordinary life isn’t enough.  If we endeavor to transcend the ordinary, the efforts to lift ourselves out of the ordinary will hide our true natures from ourselves.  The highest achievement of the spiritual life is within the full embrace of the ordinary.  Like our striving elsewhere, attachment to a discipline is but our desire for the extraordinary.  And, then, we need a discipline that undoes our attachment to a discipline."

"The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.”  The space, the nothing makes human existence possible, yet at the same time produces an anxiety in us so unendurable that we long to fill that nothing with something. But, filling the nothing with something is an attempt to become what we are not. This attempt is the basis of our unrelieved inauthenticity.

The false self that takes the place of who we are, that which some call the “soul” – all that in ourselves which has become an object for others or for ourselves.  It is  our visible self, the tangible, public aspect of a personality.  It is what we see when we look at ourselves; it is what we present to others to be seen by them.  It is what stands in the way of our oneness with others and with ourselves.