A Downwind Course
By Michael Erlewine
I thank all you for the show of support and I am marching through the process of taking care of this medical situation. Like so many things in life, I have no choice.
And so, I continue to dress up words with common sense, add ballast, what is called ‘meaning’, something not to be left behind. As they say, don’t leave home without it. And don’t think without it. I can’t NOT do this and I’m not sure you can tell if I have.
Like sailing a boat (I used to race sailboats in the Marblehead Regatta in Massachusetts), there is nothing like throwing up the spinnaker sail to catch the wind, and drive forward. Along with all these words is something sacred that cannot be ignored, that many of these words have bathed in non-duality. If you relax you can tell and recognize that.
How can we know where these words have been or what they have touched in doing so. Something inside us can sense or know this. This I know.
We are always just that close to what frees us, like the dew that bathes the summer flowers in the meadow at dawn. We too have that ability but perhaps do not yet realize it.
Anyway, I do my best to wrap words in sacred space, immerse them in the nature of the mind itself, and return them for recognition. Yes, yes, we can see through the veil or feel through that veil where these words have moved, can sense where they have been. Eternity can bless this moment, not the words mind you, but their association, their having been dipped in the water of non-duality.
And the waters of non-duality are not the waters of Lethe, of forgetfulness, rather they are the living waters of awareness, of clear Recognition. Dipping words in non-duality is like restoring what is freeze-dried to virility, making them vital, even feral.
Why is this not discussed or talked about? And here “this” means reflecting on the moments we spend in non-duality. Since moments spent in non-duality are just that, moments, there has to be some residual effects from the dualistic reflections that result from a non-dualistic moment.
In my own experience, mixing non-duality with words was not a slam-dunk affair. It took me well over almost a year of constant work to mix the two. I tried and tried and tried, but nothing moved.
Eventually I found that trying and doing didn’t do it. What it took was just the opposite, relaxing. When I finally began to relax, the needle moved.
And the more I relaxed, the more writing based on dipping my thoughts in non-duality worked. And now, many years later, I use it all the time and it seems to work well.
IMO, there is no substitute for Insight related words and writing. I can tell the difference even if no one else can, reconstituting English, bathed in non-duality until the words can breathe again.
I can’t seem to separate myself from these Insight immersed words, so that’s what I do, bathe my words in a bit of spacious eternity and give them flexibility — words at their best.
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I can’t really explain it, what happens. It’s just that as the words come back from full immersion in non-duality, they seem to have room enough around them to fit together just a little more correctly. I can tell at first sight if they have been immersed. And I see it right away from the way you use the words if you have the recognition.
The pizza goes into the oven, the words go into Recognition, and they come back crispy, fresh, and vivid.
Since I face Recognition all the time and want to do it, why not do just that, slip-slide into the Recognition process mode more of the time. If I can’t get around it, I may just have to go through it instead. It’s a doorway not an obstacle.
As the Beatles said: “No one will be watching us, let’s do it in the road.”
No one cares but me and my particular ‘I’ won’t be missed, so why not?
I don’t know whether the universe is expanding or contracting, but I would say it is expanding. Everything and everyone seem to be farther and farther apart. Perhaps that’s where the loneliness factor comes from. We are losing touch, increasingly numb, unable to feel.
Non-dual, Vipassana Recognition is the active process of expanding and extending infinitely, so what if it swallows itself and turns inside out, or is that what Recognition is doing, like a torus, turning samsara inside out, revealing nirvana — a process.
What if we take the effort out of Recognition? Just relax further, like the dewdrop slips into the shining sea, actually a mudra. See it more like an inversion, morphing, rather than a border crossing — a torus.
And if the two are getting closer until there is no difference, that describes what I am experiencing these days, the dwindling lack of difference, but it is not indifference.
The loss of differential means the loss of any difference on the empty plain of the same, the tip of the top of change, MEANING: I’m in the process itself. Right now, it seems I am bankrupt of further direction, no other place to go but the process itself. In essence, I’m reporting my own demise, turning myself inside out. I have arrived at where I can.
[Midjourney graphic prompted by me.]
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As Bodhicitta is so precious,
May those without it now create it,
May those who have it not destroy it,
And may it ever grow and flourish.
