 Afflictions, not just the personal, but especially including the social: is there any greater social affliction today than that of an illiteracy of the heart? Obviously I am not thinking about the ability, or lack thereof, to read the written word in one's language. Instead, I am deep in contemplation of the heart -- and specifically, the heart's ability to read...
Is this a strange thought to you? What is the first book that a human reads? Isn't it a mother's eyes, breast, smile and hands? Reading one's mother opens the entire book of the world to us! Isn't this so? Don't we go from mother to room to family to floor to whirly things to a dog's kiss to green grass to sandy beach? Aren't our eyes fixated on fire on leaves waving to us from trees on birds on the movements of water? Steadily, day-by-day, we learn to read the book of the world in which we live... Nature is the First Book of Religion... What is the the first, and most important, lesson we discover in the Holy Book of Nature? Isn't it that we all live in a web of relationships and in the steady state of inter-being? In remembering this most basic lesson of all, we are left stunned to realize that, collectively, we are merely "existing" in a condition of forgetfulness: we have become accustomed to the social affliction of a general illiteracy of the heart... As we inevitably forget having ever fed at our mother's breast, so too, we have forgotten that we are merely privileged to exist! We have forgotten that we still feed at our Mother's breast: the "breast" of Mother Earth... And so "we" have created systems of exploitation, oppression, profit, and violence. Because we live in the truly radical ("to the root"), steady-state, of conditioned forgetfulness, our hearts have shriveled into caricatures of "heart" in illiteracy... No longer able (wanting) to read the Holy Book of Nature, we write platforms (or dispense with them altogether) in praise of "our" version of "acceptable" exploitation, oppression, profit, and violence... We listen to entertainers extoll the virtues of their "brand" of exploitation, oppression, profit, and violence... and so it goes... As it goes for the Holy Book of Nature, so it follows for the Holy Books of Religion... Every fundamentalism is a caricature of religion. Every dogma that sets one person apart from another is just another angle on exploitation, oppression, profit, and violence. There are simply too many examples to waste words and space in a blog. Suffice to say, an illiteracy of the heart is not a requirement for life (at least not yet!). Read Vandana Shiva, Bill McKibben, Arundhati Roy, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Angela Davis, Bernie Sanders, Matthew Fox, Raimon Panikkar, Cynthia Bourgeault, Andrew Harvey, Amit Goswami, Riane Eisler, and David Hinton for starters... Hell, read my book, Resplendent In Rags... Inform your heart with intelligent designs! Do you want an example? Okay. How about the actual example of the person most commonly called Jesus? Read the Song of Songs from the Hebrew Scriptures as a beginning point. Then go on to the Beatitudes and the 25th Chapter of Matthew's Gospel. After ruminating, go next to John's Gospel... Read the life of St. Francis, St. Teresa of Avila, and Mahatma Gandhi... Now, with a forming literacy, read Ram Dass and Matthew Fox: you are now ready to look into a mirror with the shocking realization that it is you presenting the Face of Jesus to the world! Like Rumi said, you have let yourself become living poetry!
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 For most folks who have given a fair amount of time to reflecting on Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching, they tend to think of it as being about a philosophy of harmony, of "nothing-do", or of "sagely" virtue. Increasingly, though, I am coming to see the Old Master as teaching the Tao of Risk... I mean, so far as any of us can tell, we didn't ask to be born! Billions of years of star-dust movement and evolution -- conscious or not -- and wha-la -- here we are... We live in a constant state of @risK! So we should make it a Tao shouldn't we? We wake up and who the hell knows what's going to happen today! So, we learn to control as much as we can: we go to school (usually out of our control), we get a job (usually at the bottom or near-bottom of a ladder), we find a place to live, we figure out how to get from here to there, we usually pursue a relationship and usually want some sex, coffee, phones, and other stuff... maybe a kid shows up... maybe a pandemic shows up and things turn to various shades of shit, maybe this maybe that: but through it all, we try to control as much as we can... We usually even define victims as people who failed at control, even if we don't use that particular word-thought... How much, in this, is something that you would define as "sagely"? To then infer or conclude that Lao Tzu had it in his mind to teach how to go with the flow and somehow "make harmony" seems silly to me. And, okay, well he wrote, what, three thousand years ago? So maybe (it had to be) way different back then, right? No doubt you are right! So exchange "car" with water buffalo, "watch" with observing the sun, and "pandemic" with, what would you say, small-pox? Starvation? An invading army? Thirteen kids? But still sex...! The Tao is the humble realization that to exist at all is to be conditioned by constant and endless risk. And the Tao is also the learned condition of taking risk for a dance! Lacking both the grace and enthusiasm of Michelle, I have learned (am learning) the Taoist way of virtue: accept the challenge and movement like a leaf in the wind: cling to the "branch" of tranquility regardless of the severity of the storm: and release the fear that inevitably seeks to control and dominate... In short, the Tao is a course in daily risk management! Remember though, risk management is a dance with life: it is not another method for "advancement". Consider, that the atoms that make up your body, the consciousness that in-fills your mind, and the "luck" that brought you into this world did not come with any specific agenda: rather, the you that is reading this, is always, in every second of your life, an exploration into possibility... Precisely this is the Tao, this is the Wisdom Teaching of Yeshua and the Sages of the World: yes, you are @risK every moment of the only-too-brief-life that you have been given... but yes as well to the wonder of your possibilities! So take your life on an adventure! Accept. Cling. And release the fear that would control you! You have been invited to this dance so get the hell up and live extraordinarily! Climb that mountain! Travel the Planet! Pick up that worm on the sidewalk and put it back in soil. Fall in love and rise in bliss! Lao Tzu says that you are going to die anyway. Nothing is riskier than that. So between now and then, everything that you do should matter...  |
AuthorRobert Daniel Smith was privileged to serve the homeless and marginalized for 30 years in California. He is living now almost within shouting distance of the Twin Cities. He is a poet, artist, writer, and long-time Companion of the Way still dreaming... Archives
May 2022
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