O149: I came to Myself

First day painting in weeks. A landscape that turned into a seascape along the way this afternoon. Beautiful day. So glad to be alive.

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Dante wrote:

In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost. It is a hard thing to speak of, how wild, harsh and impenetrable that wood was, so that thinking of it recreates the fear.

from Dante’s Divine Comedy, this copy from Poetry in Translation

Ecclesiastes 1.9 and TS Eliot said it better than I ever could, but here goes for today: How life turns and returns to the same familiar scenes! Always dressed in the fashion of the day, but “in the middle of the journey” I realize more and more that I have seen it all before. The same dramas at home and work, the same actors at meetings – regardless of the country in which you do business.

It becomes clear: I can end up pushing plates and condiments around on the table until I die, or at some point one can get up and walk into the sun. And you do this despite the fact that you are still conversing at the table. Always when this happens (yes, this realization also comes and goes), I go to the same old old simplicity. Each time the spiral moves up a notch.

What is MY simplicity? I return to my little black book with the distilled pearls from Nisargadatta’s I am That. For the past few days now, I have been returning as often as I can to my self – not the the one apart from others – but the perceiving center, the sense “I am”. Will I persevere? Let us see…

In one of those quirky synchronicity happenings – right after the first morning I returned to my book of notes from I am That, I saw that Open Window, a blog that focuses largely on the writings of Nisargadatta, was so kind to follow my blog. Everything points.

Moving an inch closer to your real self is not at all complex. It can happen in inches, and when you do, the Universe trembles slightly. Nisargadatta gave this supremely difficult, supremely simple formula:

Stop making use of your mind and see what happens. Do this one thing thoroughly. That is all.

I am That (43)

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