Gazing in the Mirror

March 10 - Cardinal Went A-Courtin'

It is only alone,
truly alone
that one bursts apart,
springs forth.
~ Maria Isabel Barreno

The revelation of the self
to the self; a divine awakening
to the eternal Reality inhabiting
eternity and finding its abiding
place in time, through our own
natures.
~ Ernest Holmes

As I drank my coffee this morning to clear out some of the cobwebs from the seasonal time shift known as Daylight Savings Time in which we lose an hour's sleep to gain a perceived longer amount of daylight into Summer, I saw a bright Red Cardinal in a bush across the driveway while looking out of my kitchen window. I thought perhaps he was looking for the last remaining dried up Autumn Olive seeds. I've long admired their regal, bulky form. Then I noticed a female Cardinal near the window. The wind was ruffling her feathers nicely giving her a mystical aura. I looked back for the male and he was gone and then I looked again for the female and she was gone too. Spring has finally arrived here in Missouri. For several nights we have been hearing loud Spring Peepers at the pond nearby. "Froggie Went A-Courtin' uh-huh, uh-huh" and I suspect the Cardinals did too.

Songbirds are social creatures and humans are too. Yet the paradox is that we often feel very much alone in these bodies. This topic has come up with a friend of mine. Due to that searching on her part and her embrace of the spiritual teacher Adyashanti, I began watching a recording of him speaking about being alone as my friend had described it as "the video that had quite an impact on me when I was feeling very much alone in this sense of being . . ." Curious, I ponder this concept she had given me. I know that she has been attracted to "community", setting up a household that is communal with her grown daughter and one other woman (and there were others filling that space before the most recent roommate – a bit of a revolving door of individuals who have come and gone). I know that she has good friends and social groups including a group that dives deeper into the practice known as Non-Violent Communication (NVC) as taught by Marshall Rosenberg.

Yet she feels alone and I find that curious. Adyashanti describes a need for spiritual companionship and he sees this as rooted in a need to affirm truth by agreement. There is no ultimate truth, he says, and I do agree. Therefore yesterday, I found my own self confused and flummoxed by perspectives on duality. My other friend was communicating a parsing between opposites and the more philosophical/spiritual concepts regarding duality. I found myself humorously illuminating the concept. Showing self doubt and questioning my capabilities of understanding. As humans we do seek companionship and agreement. That vaster state of Being, the One Mind that is the sum total of all minds and thoughts and manifestations, slices off a bit of awareness and inserts it into these individual bodies to experience not wholeness but aspects of discrete expression.

With many teachers there arises this concept of a faulty ego. I have considered it and to my understanding, I think why question this Life that we've been gifted with and think that it should be something other than it is ? A sense of aloneness arises from expanded perspectives that we take as being more true than the perspective we had previously. We begin to separate ourselves in an egoic attempt to rise above the average or damaged. My friend is struggling with the NVC emphasis on needs. I consider this as she says "I received the insight that 'needs' ... are egoic constructs". So my friend is now feeling distanced from the other practitioners because she judges their recognition of needs as also stemming from their own egos. It seems to me that she is marginalizing her individual self in her enthusiastic embrace of larger Beingness as a source of feeling connected. She says "My inability to share their concepts anymore sets up the illusion of being separate from them"; but note that she senses this perception is only an illusion.

At some point it was suggested in my household after too many "psychologically heavy" movies that I ought to focus on selecting comedies. Yesterday from Blockbuster's dvd rental service we received a movie I could not remember choosing called "Elephant Sighs". Without my looking specifically for a comedy I doubt I would have ever selected this movie. I felt as lost during almost the entire movie as does the lead character, Joel, who is newly relocated into this small town. He goes through most of the movie with a completely perplexed look on his face and mostly withdrawn from opening up to this group of men. What is happening in the movie turns out to be a mystical calling to come together to provide comfort for one another. Each has their issues but all find an acceptance of self flawed as it may be. And the lead character is clearly healed as he shifts from a dead, despairing depression to a re-embrace of his wife who seems to understand what has happened in a non-logical kind of way. Healing is what happens throughout life in community with other people though that is not always clearly evident.

My other friend in this discussion of self and being alone says "I suddenly see what folks are talking from and about, and I would rather be talking about other things, or being silent. But so far, I have not dropped any people or groups. I might.....". It is my own experience that insight is a bit like a software upgrade. The new is backwardly compatible with the old. The new capabilities for understanding do not separate themselves away from the more average human understandings but definitely trend towards being more patient and more tolerant as one becomes able see in others a more primitive or less expansive perspective. Once one truly finds meaning within their own self and accepts its validity there is no need to change anyone else's perspective nor is there any desire to move away from any other person simply because they are not able to see whatever it is that we think we are seeing. No man is an island and we are after all social creatures.

~ perspective

Feeling alone can seem very real but
it is always a subjective perception
of separation.
Dismissing the needs which Life imposes
upon us as simply an egoic illusion denies
our own self-worth for in truth we are
worthy of every happiness.
Feelings of superiority are a shield
against the suffering we feel when
we believe our self to be rejected
by other people or left out of
acceptance by some group of people.
Cruelty denies the struggles or
suffering of another person as
some kind a flaw for which they
deserve ridicule and separation
from the more "worthy" which is
generally our own self.
It is good fortune to find comfort
among people whose acceptance
of us is unconditional and with whom
we can trust our deepest evaluations
of self and society.

#acceptance #agreement #communication #community #duality #ego #healing #separation #truth #wholeness