Writing from the Inside Out (18 page)

Give these two people a substantial amount of time to pursue their paths with all the resources they have available to them. Suppose that the two meet up again after a decade or two. Side by side, inside and out, how do they compare?

 

 

According to Sankya practice, we have five “organs for action,” meaning we have essentially five options for things to do:

Procreation, including everything related, such as dating, kissing, etc.

Elimination, which of course includes pooping and peeing, also sweating and other excretions l Locomotion, entailing all movement

Grasping, entailing manipulation, change of location or structure

Speech, which includes mumbling, moaning, yelling, and all communication

Living according to Sankya, you don't get trapped in the affliction of a compelling story, of desire, of any sort of clinging or loss. I can eat and digest an apple. I can speak. This, as a story, could become very complicated.

My practice deepens by discriminating actions, meanings, and scenes into component parts. Just understanding that it is possible to make such distinctions is powerfully liberating. Whenever I feel trapped, unsatisfied, or confused, I can return to the five organs for action and witness the natural play of pure being.

 

 

I was relaxed and in a good mood. I leaned back and put some of my weight onto my hand. My hand learned something — it had been placed against a hot stove. Reflex retracted the hand. Before I could assess the imprudence, a basic part of my mind reacted.

The mind receives sense information and sends signals to the senses, creating a response. It is what makes the body work as a sensing, locomoting machine. Whether you are being helpful or harmful, the mind performs its function.

Deepening my practice, I naturally withdraw my perspective to where it is distinct from the sensing, feeling, moving sense of self. Different, and yet the same, this witness gives potentiality to the self's expressions. The extent to which I move as that witness has to do with how much I step back my perspective. Withdrawing my perspective into the knower, I also withdraw my ability to claim a sense of self at all — even alive only for this moment, alive for an eternity.

I inevitably return to the truth that I am on a path already. As much as possible, I strive to pursue love's deepest expression to such an extent that there is nothing left over, no sense of self. No worries about who I am. All that I do and think are offerings, expressions of the divine paid back to the divine. I give to my heart's fullest extent.

The mind works with words, it facilitates the language of sensation and does so to support one's sense of self. The mind is always relaying information from the senses and self-organizing this information. This response is neither good nor bad; actually, it can be both. When a bus speeds down the street, and a person is in the middle of that street, it is good for that person that the mind can be the switching station to protect the person's cohesive ego in such a way that guides him to safety. If that person who just narrowly escaped the bus happened to be Adolf Hitler, we might have a different opinion of whether the mind, in this case, was a good or a bad thing.

Becoming more mindful is liberating because it helps us to become more balanced. We are integrating the mind's functionality with the self's true desire for liberation. Along with self-restraint and contemplativeness is lovingkindness. Balanced energy, transcendence — these things are intrinsically good. And there is something better: to identify oneself as wholly dissolved, one with impersonal nature, with intrinsic awareness only circumstantially situated within a person.

The ego's job is to get you out of the way of that bus, to praise you for doing so, and to surround you with people and an environment that supports your sense of self. In practice, you enter a place protected from the ego-threats of the world, a place designed to develop the internal witness. It is good to have a practice that is separate from the world, where you can give your full attention to what's real, devoid of worldly context. It is hard to maintain this attention either in practice or in the world, but it is at least significantly more straightforward in your practice.

Because the world supplies many convincing stories, fully integrating the privacy of practice with worldly interaction is hard. Thus sacred space is important. At its root, sacred means
set apart
or
separate
. A space is made sacred by giving it some boundaries from the world.

The hero of any story has to enter the dark woods before he or she is able to claim the hidden fruit. You want your sacred space to challenge you. Its sense of support guides you into greater dissolving and deeper communion. Its protection allows you to devote 100% of your focus and energy to what's happening on the inside, so you can cultivate a strong ability to embrace the bliss of dissolving and union. In that way, you can re-emerge into the world as one whose center of gravity is beyond the edge of your expertise, where fear has no effect because the object of fear has been burned off.

Miraculously, by virtue of the practice itself, you create an ego that is secure enough in what's higher that it will not look for stories in the world to validate the ego. When the sense of self is more accustomed to being dissolved in practice and is never far from this deepening relationship, the world will gradually lose the ability to threaten the ego. There just won't be anything there anymore.

Fragments and charges from ego issues will remain in the self for a long time. In being threatened, your ego may discover a story that it finds suitable as a means of defense. You may believe that you've gone far enough, perhaps farther than most, and that's good enough. At any rate, no one can really prove you right or wrong. If you're really seeking liberation, you're only going to trust that very thing that threatens to overwhelm the ego with bliss and lovingkindness — the menace of fully awakened energy.

When the ego trusts what is beyond and above the ego, the force that is acting is not the ego.

 

 

It is good to retreat into practice when you do so to develop a closer relationship to your life purpose, and when remaining in the world would not accomplish this aim.

Born of the world, who retreats from the world?

Retreating from the world, what do you retreat to?

What do you bring with you when retreating from the world?

How have you changed in re-emerging into the world? How are you the same?