Abandoned stones which I become interested in
invite me to enter into life’s purpose.
It is my task to define
and make visible the intent of their being.
…..Isamu Noguchi
enduring changes in our reality
What I find is that a lot of people don’t know how to inquire. They know the questions, but they don’t how to use them. It’s like thinking that because you have a hammer in your hand you know how to build a house. Just because you have a profound spiritual question, it doesn’t mean you know how to use it. The first thing I do is try to teach people how to use a deep spiritual question- which is meant to get us to the experience of not-knowing almost instantaneously. ‘What am I?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What’s it like not to know?’ One second ago you thought you knew, but now, in a split second, you know that you don’t know. Before you try to know, what’s it like not to know? People push so hard to get an answer- they think they’re in school and this is a test. If they’re sitting in front of me, usually the first thing that happens is their eyes start to roll up in their head. This tells me that they’re thinking. They immediately go into the thought process. Why is it that when we ask ourselves, ‘What am I really, ultimately, essentially?’ most people go into thought? I’m stretching something out that happens in a split second, which is why people miss it. When they look within they don’t find anything. This isn’t what they expected to find. They expected to find the true self, the enlightened self, the better version of me. And they don’t find anything, so the mind instantly concludes, ‘That can’t be right. I looked in to find what I really am and there’s nothing there.’ I find that the first thing you know when you ask the question ‘What am I really?’ is that you don’t know. We don’t have to think about things we know. When you really start to get the hang of it, you understand what inquiry is actually like. You find the questions that naturally fit your experience. They just help you take in the mysteriousness of your own self. But if you don’t know how to use a question, you can’t go into the mysteriousness of your self. Instead you go into your mind or what you read in a book or what someone heard that someone else said, and it has no power……..Andriette Earl
honoring our own truth is harder than it seems….so many mind traps….so many self-doubts…..our originality brings us into the present…..owning our uniqueness helps us to become sensitively aware….and unique does not mean perfect…it is being alive in the flow of the human condition…..
here
on the stone
floor of my
longing
silence…..
every atom
of my being
is an open
door
Come….
….Alex Cowie
