There are nights, like this night,
when I wonder if, in the end, never having achieved what I wanted to,
is not the greatest grace of all.
I wanted to be ordained a monk or bodhisattva, I had wanted this for a long time.
Events, or the absence of events, did not allow this sequence to unfold.
The events and … a wilderness of temper, not inclined to subordination and consensual statements.
In the early morning, I see this reality differently: far from giving rise to spiritual developments these ordinations and integrations into different communities would have had no other effect than to contain and restrict, and ultimately, to dent the great inner freedom, leading to raw and uncompromising investigations.
The prisms, would it be that of « Buddhist », « Zen Monk », would have placed me on rails whose route did not correspond to the layout of the path,.
Perhaps one travels there faster, and above all, in a share wagon, but this is not the advertised trip.
Moreover, the view that the window of the car gives to see is clouded, the glass is scratched by dint of passengers with noses and hands glued in tiles, the frame is narrow, the landscape cannot be contained.
From the lands of great freedom, unobstructed my field of vision,
While on the path, I move slowly and in the open air, I understand it.
The landscape also contains me
and along the paths, it softly whistles the air as it breathes it in me.
I learned to pierce the crust of the monk,
To see that in reality, it keeps me outside the practice.
This might be an unexpected lesson, that of a format defined as that taken by the practice on the track, which, due to an “inversion of support” becomes the obvious obstacle.
An adjuvant with strong inhibitory power in the blossoming of our spiritual path.
©ndraw@protonmail.com – Dec 2022
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As you know, from communications elsewhere, I have changed my position in so called spiritual matters a number of times. I was a member of a « church ».
Never again.
Oddly, I also have thought fondly about monasticism. But, I rather suspect, for me, that would result in a hermit life. I could not submit to the conformist pressure of communal, monastic life.
What you see in the morning is, I suspect, the greater clarity. Your path, not the Buddhist’s, not the monk’s, not even a path that belongs to « Zen ». Elements of these, perhaps, more or less, but elements only. And, I would hazard to say that no-one, really, belongs to any of these. It’s just that most do not realise it.
Welcome to heresy.
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Horizen
Thank you Simon for this beautiful message.
No doubt we are brother in wilderness.
I believe even heresy, the one you introduce me to and showed me around on several occasions ends up being a tag, a monastery, a religion.
Wouldn’t that make it the perfect trap ?
I agree with you : no one really belongs to any of these religious/belief/counter-belief bags,
For they have no reality anywhere else but in the minds that produce and sustain them,
Minds which are–should one spend but a few hours looking into it — the most perfect illusion engineering machines.
Thanks for reading this.
Have a very nice day.
(a short development to these lines may take the form of a short post anytime soon.)
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I have explored this a little further in the other thread. I have a suspicion you might be saying more metaphorically what I have tried to put there in more concrete terms, but you may have a different view of that.
But yes – heresy, as a doctrine, would be not only a trap, but a deadly self deceit.
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