The Wisdom Within

My friend and former pastor, Robert Close, sends out a nearly daily e-pistle to his congregation and friends. This morning's derailed a perfectly good idea for a blog about another reading for this weekend's training. His call to seeking the wisdom within is not new, either to him or to me, but something about this Stephen Mitchell translation of the 121st Psalm, which he included in his email, stopped me in my tracks.

Bonsai SunriseI look deep into my heart,
to the core where wisdom arises.
Wisdom comes from the Unnamable
and unifies heaven and earth.
The Unnamable is always with you,
shining from the depths of your heart.
His peace will keep you untroubled
even in the greatest pain.
When you find him present within you,
you find truth at every moment.
He will guard you from all wrongdoing;
he will guide your feet on his path.
He will temper your youth with patience;
he will crown your old age with fulfillment.
And dying, you will leave your body
as effortlessly as a sigh.

I then pulled off of my refrigerator a magnet Michelle recently gave me:

at the center
of your being you
have the answer;
you know who you
are and you know
what you want.

(lao tzu)

So, I'm being called to trust some ineffable inner wisdom, but what is the Source? Lao Tzu doesn't say -- he just knows that the center of your being has the answer. But the Psalmist seems to know -- the Unnamable. To him, the Unnamable is present in my heart and shines from within there, almost through there. I'm reminded of the version of tonglen, a Tibetan meditative practice, that the Integral Institute's Fred Kofman teaches, in which the meditator envisions the "Net of Indira", a cosmic net that connects all beings to one another, with each intersection of threads occuring at the heart of each of those beings, which heart is represented as a jewel woven into the net. In this image, each heart glistens with a divine energy that comes from the entire Universe through this net and shines within each being.

I offer all these images to get at the rather simple point that Lao Tzu's admonition to seek the answer within my heart is not a call to narcissism, but instead a call to connection with each and every sentient being and, more compellingly, the transcendent nature of each of my fellow beings.

If that's the case, why go within? Why not just seek out this directly in others? I suppose you could, but these writers suggest that I might lose something in the process, that is, a recognition of my own transcendent nature, my own "jewel in the net". And, perhaps, this self-recognition may be essential to that connection with another. It may be that I cannot connect with your essential nature except through my own.

Heartempest

But how? It keeps coming back to mindfulness. Not just the kind one accesses when sitting on a cushion, but also the kind that one explores in yoga, dance, music, lovemaking, prayer, nature, and anything that both gets us in intimate contact with our present experience and lifts us out of our self-absorption.

The trick, it seems, is to permeate my day with this mindfulness. How? Regular practice of just these things that call me to this core of being -- yoga, dance, music, lovemaking, prayer, nature. And not stopping there -- what about transforming my notions of "work" such that work is not a distraction to mindfulness, but a playground for its practice?

Not a bad work project for today, really . . .