A Touch of Now - An Introduction

“I sit here desperately wanting to create something; to say something on these pages that will convey my thoughts, the beauty of this spot; to share my experience of this moment in time. My chest aches and tightens, as if to squeeze out the salty tears of longing. I look up from my shaded table cracked and weathered like the hull of an ancient ship, my back warmed in the afternoon sun, and thought is inadequate to the task.
Emerald green waves, speckled white with tips of foam, roll toward me from a forest curling like a finger out into the sea. Puffy white clouds emerge from beyond this jagged green horizon and float in lazy patterns against a pale blue sky. Leaves flutter in the warm breeze and dancing shadows dabble all around my wordless perch as seagulls, screeching nature’s plan, dive for unseen morsels and a jittery squirrel buries his face in the still moist grass.
The scene is there for everyone present. My experience lost within me and an inability to truly share the wonder may be my greatest pain.”

When exactly I wrote this is uncertain. Why, is an even greater mystery? What I am certain of however, is the truth embraced by the experience. It describes a moment in which I felt the touch of “now,” and in that touch the truth was unmistakable, simple, clear, and thoroughly unspeakable. I was present to that moment and the moment shared with me all there is to know. This Blog is about my journey, then and now, into the moment and the truth I find there.


April 20, 2014

Let's Begin Again

     It seems that being required to purchase a new computer has lured me back to my long deserted blog. I can't explain why exact but so be it! I will try again share my psychic space with all who are bored enough to follow along.
     While perusing previously highlighted portions of Alan Clements book, Instinct For Freedom, I ran across two quotes - one his and the other by Martin Luther King - that were some 20 pages apart but rang my eureka-bell. I have always had a difficult time finding a clear understanding of Dr. Kings statement but when I read both in closer proximity to one another....well let me try to explain.
      Clements wrote, "As the theory goes, freeing the mind of one's primordial ignorance is considered a great act of compassion."  A personal note in the margin said, "Think about why?" And immediately I remembered reading, some minutes earlier, the statement by Martin Luther King. "All persons are tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly....I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality." 
     First let's think about the idea of primordial ignorance. I have come to recognize that our most basic ignorance, or simply - our failure - is to readily see that life is never alone. That is, all that we commonly refer to as life is not a group of individual, separate and unique, items that exist unconnected to one another. Life is a living tapestry - or as Dr. King wrote, a "single garment." And as a result the destiny of each, apparently separate, individual (or thread) in that tapestry is affected by every other thread. Each thread, each living organism in that cosmic tapestry is inexplicably connected to every other organism. We each happen to be but one such thread; a biologically dependent, myth-making mammal in a vast universe of living, interconnected, diversity. Each act by any thread in the garment (through what we know as cause and effect) impacts, directly and indirectly, each thread in the garment. And our primordial ignorance is the biochemical constitution that makes seeing this fact not only counter-intuitive but, confusing and very difficult to imagine and accept.
     It is for this reason that freeing the mind of this ignorance is to be considered a great act of compassion. It is an act that requires choice and a determined, intentional effort to pull back the shroud of our own ignorance in order to achieve the compassion that awaits our labor. And if we recognize that we are part of this enormous, living, interconnected process of life and death, and that what we can become is forever intertwined with others - and others with me - like the threads of a vast tapestry of all different colors, shapes, and sizes -- then and only then can I become all that I am able to be; that is the destiny of which he spoke. 
     And it is the very nature of this process that eludes us and imprisons us within the confines of our biological heritage. Our freedom however is not impossible to achieve. Just as many wise men and women have noted, the world is created by each of us within our minds. And the key is the freeing of our minds from the ignorance that plagues us all. It does, as always, begin with me. For I can't change others directly. I can only change myself directly but when I do, there is an indirect affect on all who I interact with, as stated by Dr. King  --"whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."
     So, I am left with, once again another moment of clarity that will surely slip from my awareness once more, as I continue to struggle to see the mountain that is no longer a mountain and bring it back to my everyday vision of my world and the interrelated structure of reality.
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