what cannot be lost

Once you've recognized Ultimate Reality within and around you, the knowledge does not go away. You may have other doubts, but this doubt disappears. A certain confidence and trust arise - and never leave.

Mother Theresa of Calcutta also said something like this. Her words: "Once you've got God within you, that's for life. There is no doubt. You can have other doubts, eh? But that particular one will never come again."

According to one book about Mother Teresa, she had many doubts, but not an ultimate doubt. As I've read about this aspect of her life, I feel that the authors may do her and Truth a little disservice. She didn't seem to emphasize this doubt, but lived in faith of that which she knew to be true.

And I'd like to go a step further with this. Once we realize what is ultimately true...(we could use the word God here, as Mother Teresa would, but I prefer some less abused, more open-ended words like Buddhist translations of Nibbana. Naming only a few: Ultimate Reality, the Deathless, Truth, emptiness, suchness...)

Once we realize what is ultimately true, darkness is no longer a bad word, not a parallel of wrong, bad, or evil. It is open space. We may stumble upon and embrace a darkness that is pure faith and includes, even requires, release of reliance on self, or who or what we identify with as self.

If we are lucky this stumbling upon may be more like being grasped by deep hunger or even as a sense of being deeply loved. We may cling to the love as if it were a solid thing, ours to own, rather than opening to the great unknown, realizing love is a living flowing tide that only lives and grows as it flows.

Is it Not Time

Is it not time
to free ourselves from the beloved
even as we trembling, endure the loving?
As the arrow endures the bowstring's tension
so that, released, it travels farther.
For there is nowhere to remain.

Rilke

References to Mother Teresa from Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light - The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta

ulimate reality in bloom

“Just as... the great ocean is vast, boundless, fills not up for all of the streams [that flow into it]. Precisely so Nibbana [Ultimate Reality] is vast, boundless, fills not up for all of the living beings [that pass thereunto].

But again further, – the great ocean is all in blossom, as it were, with the flowers of its waves, – mighty, various, unnumbered. Precisely so Nibbana [Ultimate Reality] is all in blossom, as it were, with the Flowers of Purity, Knowledge, and Deliverance, – mighty, various, unnumbered.

Nagasena to Milinda (King Menander, a Greek king who ruled in northwest India from 163-150 BCE)

I love this passage. Can you consider all things that arise in this life as a kind of flowering? Everything is the result of causes and conditions. We can choose to participate in creating what is wholesome and beautiful. This is the nature of Ultimate Reality, to continually bloom.

ancestral healing

...they are in us, those long departed ones, they are in our inclinations, our moral burdens, our pulsing blood, and in gestures that arise from the depths of time. Rilke

Remembering the gifts, the character strengths of our ancestors, these can live on in us. They can develop, blossom, deepen. These strengths can infuse our lives and current culture with their wisdom, their truth. They can further our conscious evolution.

Of course, the primitive gestures of our ancestors also arise when circumstances call them forth. Our job is to be mindful enough to see what is arising in our continuum of experience and to bring to bear what is most wholesome in our inclinations.

It is so important to realize that these arisings are a result of causes and conditions, many beyond are conscious awareness or personal experience. But our conscious awareness and intentional responses do contribute to what is cultivated and what is dissolved or released and therefor to the good or ill of ourselves and all other beings.

Hypothesis:
Recognizing time as a construct, and therefore not substantially true; if time is then flexible, this wholesome awareness, response, and influence is something that might also positively influence anything "arising from the depths of time," including not only currently arising phenomena but those beings and events that we experience as long time passed.

beginning meditation

Beginning Meditation Course (online) and for donations only! Insight and Mindfulness Meditation - Vipassana

This is a course posted on line in 2004, a very rough beginning for the current computer based course, Going Beyond - First Steps. Though its structure has changed a little from the 2004 original, it remains very much as the original course.

Make a payment only after you have done the course. (It is delivered by autoresponder, which your spam checkers may not like. So check junk mail and watch for each of the 10 emails)