Tag Archives: Zen

The Angst of Duality and Rumi

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I feel like a broken record. Thinking back over my two years of blogging I realize there are certain themes that keep coming back, themes which are obviously very important to me, themes which one could even say haunt me. One of these themes is that life is not as it appears to be, that it is always something that is going on beneath the surface which must by design always elude us. It is kind of like a cat chasing its own tail; or better yet, the quest for it is like the mythological euroboric image of the snake trying to swallow its tail. I sometimes want to tell myself, “Hey! Stop this! Get a life! Get out there and make some money, watch a lot of reality TV, go ahead, drink that Kool-Aid.

And, spiritual lore in which I’m steeped even warns of the futility of spiritual obsession. For example, the Buddhist koan notes the lunacy of “riding an oxen, searching for an oxen,” the point being, “Hey, just quit trying! Don’t waste your effort. The thing you search for is already there. As W. H. Auden noted, “The Center that you cannot find is known to the unconscious mind. There is no need to despair for you are already there.”

From a clinical perspective, this quest can even be thought of as schizophrenic in nature and it is no accident that schizophrenics often have spiritual themes in their fantasies. The schizophrenic is trapped in a bifurcated world, not able to find his/her place in the “real” world and subjected to the torment of living in a hinterland, constantly buffeted by the daily torments that his “delusional” system presents to him.

So, let me demonstrate my venturing into another day of such mental machinations and share with you a beautiful poem by Rumi who too recognized the presence of this shadow world, insisting that it was the real one that we should give more respect to.

The Self We Share

Thirst is angry with water. Hunger bitter
with bread.

The cave wants nothing to do with the sun.

This is dumb, the self- defeating way
we’ve been.

A gold mine is calling us into its temple.
Instead, we bend and keep picking up rocks
from the ground.

Every thing has a shine like gold,
but we should turn to the source!

The origin is what we truly are. I add a little
vinegar to the honey I give.

The bite of scolding makes ecstasy more familiar.

But look, fish, you’re already in the ocean:
just swimming there makes you friends with
glory.

What are these grudges about? You are Benjamin.
Joseph has put a gold cup in your grain sack and
accused you of being a thief.

Now he draws you aside and says,
‘You are my brother. I

am a prayer. You’re the amen.’

We move in eternal regions, yet
worry about property here.

This is the prayer of each:

You are the source of my life.
You separate essence from mud.

You honor my soul. You bring rivers from the
mountain springs. You brighten my eyes.

The wine you offer takes me out of myself into
the self we share. Doing that is religion.

Mewlana Jalaluddin Rumi

 

“Unpacking My Heart with Words” Review

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When I started this “literarylew” adventure about two years ago, I prefaced my efforts with a line from the book of Job, noting that “my heart is full of words, like a taut wine skin, about to burst.” I then borrowed a line from the other important body of Holy Writ in my life, Shakespeare, and proposing that I would “unpack my heart with words.”

As I have been “unpacking” in word, and in the “deed” of my day-to-day life, I’ve realized that when you “unpack” anything at some point you empty it out. You realize the obvious, the suitcase or box is empty and you can quit unpacking. But when you “unpack” the heart, you do discover and experience “emptiness” but you find that it is a never ending “emptiness” and that, paradoxically, in some very uncanny way you are full when you are empty.

Now part of me is still very vain and wants the above to conclude with some report of an epiphany of sorts, some glorious spiritual experience which puts me up with the luminaries of the past and present. And, I might add, this “unpacking” spiel kind of invites it! But, it ain’t there! And I’m so glad I don’t want it to be and in part this is because of cowardice. I have a hunch it would be too painful. “It is what it is” or “I am what I am” or the Popeye the Sailor Man version, “I yam what I yam.” I know emptiness more than before but mine is mercifully a very prosaic emptiness. Thus I’m not a poet, huh?

We so miss the point. And we do it persistently, brazenly, and deliberately. This is because we do not like to confront our emptiness for doing so exposes our frailty and foolishness, showing us to be veritably “strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage.” Now, don’t get me wrong. My life is now also daily “strutting and fretting” but I view it with a different perspective now. I don’t take it (i.e., myself) so seriously and, paradoxically, realize just how infinitely important “it” is. The Infinite becomes manifest through each of us as we go about our day-to-day lives humbling chopping wood and carrying water.

I want to share again Lao Tzu’s thoughts about this emptiness:

Thirty spokes are made one by holes in a hub,
By vacancies joining them for a wheel’s use;
The use of clay in moulding pitchers
Comes from the hollow of its absence;
Doors, windows, in a house,
Are used for their emptiness:
�Thus we are helped by what is not
To use what is.
(trans. By Witter Bynner)