heart : song

Virtue vs Heart

It's been a bit of a sojourn, life seems to have gotten in the way of my blog, but time and space is all relative. So why not pick up where I left off ?

Often in constructed religion with think of aspiring towards virtue. We fabricate all kinds of rules and laws to keep us in check. Rules of morality, rules about prayer or practice. In some aspect these religious laws are there to preserve our human virtue.

But I heard it said that relying on human virtue is a very frail thing. What we need to rely on is the human heart. When we truly connect with each other at the level of the heart, we see the soul of our fellow beings. When we are at the heart level, we don't need any extrenal structures to guide us and keep us from doing wrong. The heart knows intuitively what is right and wrong and is free from conflicts that laws and rules often bring us.

Trust your heart , not your virtue and all will be well.

Making the Journey

We are all living our stories out and we can be very reactive. We want to put in our comments, give our point of view, maybe get some accolades or praise. But to really encounter love and find the silent witness of all beauty, we need to soften. We have to look at all of the armor we carry around and we have to take it off. We like to say " we all have some emotional baggage" ... like we have it, but we don't really carry it around. But we actually do carry around our pain, our humiliations, our vulnerabilities. But we need to set them down. We need to be as open to love as we can be. 

If we have some insight, we realize when we open and soften we need not be fearful. For when we live our life by our hearts we see how invincible we are. Not like a steel shield, but like water. We watch a sword pierce and be drawn through water. It cuts nothing, it only stirs and twirls waves and bubbles, but no one is hurt. It is actually beautiful.

As we witness divine presence, our hearts begin to be graceful. We can off er grace to others and in doing so enjoy the sublime peace that gentleness can bring to our souls.

The spiritual path is a gentle journey witnessed and sealed with love.

 

small voice

Our lives are really just a narrative that we hang on to. We remember what will like and try to forget and deny the things we don't like. This story of our past self that we carry on day by day changes over time and many of the experiences we have shape the way we might react to the present moment. Something might anger us or something might make us happy. We can get very caught up in this drama, so much so, that we become unwitting participants in an uncontrolled stream of hurt and worry, fear and desire, temporary happiness and a search for peace.

Sometimes, you may be lucky enough to catch this silly self and you can see it for what it is. Just a little melodrama, and as Ram Dass reminds us "grist for the mill".

The question always remains, who is the witness of all of this drama ? For me it is just this smallest voice, the sane observer who watches it all go by, and the one who remains when things like anger runs it's course.

We all have the same "small voice" of wisdom within us, and when we can listen to it and speak with it, our sense of peace and inner calm grows.

 

see everyone as God.

As we walk through the world we each have a self concept. We each believe ourselves to be a specific person. And as we interact we think of others as "other" specific beings. And as we setup this network of me and you, us and them,  we judge the world and we judge ourselves.

The judgments we make become the source of happiness or sadness to a large extent.

But in reality, all that we believe about ourselves and all that we believe about others is just a veil of delusion. Each of us is not deluded unto our own being, but rather each of us is in fact a delusion of god. Just like a caterpillar is deluded into his current crawling fuzzy state, he will soon become a butterfly, he just has no idea how magical he really is. In our process of metamorphosis, each us will someday find enlightenment.

Perhaps it is difficult to see ourselves as god, but I think it can be very helpful to see everyone else as god.

When we meet someone who is in pain or troubled, angry, difficult, abusive, neglectful,greedy,shallow etc.. we can understand this is only temporary. The seeds of the butterfly in these people has just yet to be watered. And perhaps when we make our mistakes, we can forgive ourselves too.

Surely we are not unhappy with plants that have yet to sprout. How can we be unhappy with ourselves in light of this view.

For me when I walk about and try to see everyone as god, it makes me smile. If it is really true, that everyone  is a "Buddha-to-be" , then all the suffering and turmoil, greed, materialism, wants, needs and desires... seem utterly ridiculous. How can we take any of this too seriously. This view draws me towards love and understanding and a willingness to give far more than I need to take, and it makes me realize my needs are for the most part, pretty silly.

one love,

trap or boat ?

We each are souls living out this lifetime as a karmic lesson. And when we begin to advance questions about our lives, like, "what does it all mean ?" or "why am I here ?", we are beginning a spiritual path of some sort. It might be agnostic , or atheist or in some form of religion of some kind. And as we begin to walk further along a spiritual path, we seek teachers and we find methods within these pathways and in a sense our soul (that which is witness to our lives).

But at the end of the day we do not want to become the pathways we are on , ie Buddhists, or Hindus or Christians, ... we want to become free.

The Buddha liked to talk about the eightfold path as like a boat crossing to the "other shore" of enlightenment. I think this is a very important thing to remember. We don't want the methods and the pathways we are on, to become traps. We don't want the boat to go on endless journeys up and down the river. We want to cross the river to freedom.

See your path and your practice and as beautiful boat towards enlightenment, but realize it is what it is, a means and not an end.