It is the hearts task to cross the chasm the mind builds.
— Sri Nisagardatta
It sounds rather cliche, but to state the obvious, the world is changing fast. Day-to-day everything we understand about ourselves and each other is being reconfigured, entrenching the feeling of groundlessness. Everything that was “out there” is now “in here” revealing that in the sphere of the mind, there are no boundaries.
While psychological boundaries are a basic mental health requirement, in reality, it seems that we are not just “selves’ but an inter-being experience through which awakening consciousness is seeing and knowing itself. A glimpse of this understanding shifts everything because eventually it inducts into the only real ground we can find, which is the heart itself with its listening, present, aware, receptive knowing.
As we go through a kind of shamanic dismemberment of the global ego-self, which has been in control over millennia, we are grappling with the loss of control as runaway climate change and environmental destruction threatens our collective survival. While all this is enormously impactful, turning us through an excruciating kaleidoscope of reactions and emotions, it feels there is a deeper evolutionary impulse operating here.
What is Truth? Truth is a dynamic unfolding, not a static thing that someone has written down. While there are undying truths, “hate is never overcome by hate, only by love. This is the eternal law,” as said the Buddha beautifully taught, can we also be agile and tune into the ever-new and present truth of this moment? Because so often we miss it when we filter what is before us through our preconceptions.
Where is freedom? This heart of knowing, as it taps the deeper flow of the living Dharma, the intuitive intelligence of Prajna-paramita, is quantum-like. Freed up and aligned with truth, its impulse is to dissolve the constructs the mind builds while at the same time unveiling the power of the hearts capacity for love.
How is it to Love? The small things, a bee powdering itself in the nectar of the flower, shows us something about love. That it is not a ‘me’ loving a ‘you’ so much (though that is definitely special), but more that love is the currency of life itself. All things ultimately depend on it.
It is our alignment with the deeper listening heart-spirit, with love, with a freed up view, that enables quantum shifts of understanding distilled from truths unfolding. This will guide us through and gift the courage we need to be in service of truth, of freedom, of love, as protectors of the Earth and her myriad beings.
Thanissara 