I want to start this morning with a short piece by Jeff Foster entitled, How Deeply Can We Meet?:
Life gently calls us to come closer, closer, and closer still.
Each breath, each thought, each vibrantly alive sensation, each sound, each intense feeling surging through space is a little messenger of grace, whispering “do not be afraid, know that I am also life, know that I am only yourself.”
The final teaching is not to be found in books or on websites or spoken through the mouths of so-called figures of authority. Our too-clever mind-formulations such as ‘there is no me’ or ‘free will is an illusion”, our certainties and mental abstractions and word games pale in comparison to the continual awe of being witness to this eternal and mysterious dance of being and becoming echoing through eternity.
The final teacher will not be found in classrooms or at satsangs or preaching in pulpits or at conferences. The final teacher is life itself, and this living teaching only begins when we truly meet what is here with open arms. How deeply can we meet?
Stand naked in front of me now, without the protection of your favourite philosophy, without your dusty old books, without quoting what you have read or been told, without even the familiar thought ‘who meets who?’ or ‘it’s all just a story’ to comfort you or separate us.
If you think you have found the answers, if you’re excited because you think you’ve ‘arrived’, even if you believe yourself to be ‘the enlightened one’, that’s okay, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, we’ve all been through it. And if you think you haven’t found the answers yet, if you feel lost and lonely and far from home, that’s okay too. Just stay close.
Bring to me your frustration, your confusion, your joy and your pains, your certainties and your doubts, and let us sit together awhile.
I now want to share with you a chapter (7, pp73-78) from the book, Love and Power, by Lynn V. Andrews about duality:
Duality is what makes us feels alone.
We as humans separate ourselves, and that is our tragedy.
She begins by comparing “the ferocious pace of our lives to the energy of a cyclone. We try to hold our ground in the middle of it, searching for a way to stay in balance while the storms swirls around us. The winds of change blow constantly, alternately bring us tremendous danger and extraordinary beauty. The dual nature of all things – love and hate, health and disease, balance and chaos – expresses itself in this metaphor of standing firm in the center of the cyclone. When you can maintain your balance in the ever-shifting duality of life, you are choosing to live in a masterful way.
Being blindly trapped by duality keeps us from mastery. Duality is what makes us feels alone. It keeps us apart from all other living things. It keeps us from being in true harmony with the earth because we so often do not feel part of nature. We as humans separate ourselves, and that is our tragedy. But duality is a reality of physical existence. In working with how we react to and feel about the sense of separation or duality we have created, our task is not to integrate two seemingly disparate aspects. We cannot merge a man with a woman, for example, and expect to find some sort of androgynous being who is whole and complete. Rather, the task is to divine a new vantage point or perspective in which we can allow two opposite forces to live in harmony. This is mastering the idea of duality, which allows us to take the next step along our path to enlightenment.”
She goes on:
“THE PARADOX OF POWER
A wise old woman taught me the first and last lesson of power. The first lesson is that we are all alone. The last is that we are all one.
Although these ideas appear to be diametrically opposed, in truth they are not. As this woman and I sat at the edge of a precipice, our feet dangling high above a seemingly endless abyss, she pointed to the other side of the great canyon that stretched out before us. “Symbolically,” she said, “we stand on opposite sides of this chasm. I stand on one side in peace and freedom, because I know that we are all one. You sit on the other side trapped by a millstone around your neck. That millstone is created by your self-imposed fears. You think you are alone.
“As you see, we sit together, both all one and all alone. Such is the illusion of life. You must create a bridge from one side of the chasm to the other through your faith and trust, believing that your dreams can be realized. When you drop your fears into the abyss, only then can you merge the seeming duality od life. Then you will become a master.”
There is a great opportunity for experience and growth between the two concepts that old wise woman shared with me. The first lesson of power – that we are all alone – is important to understand fully. Stand within your aloneness and your emptiness so that you absolutely and totally own the idea and the experience.”
She then goes on to give an example of a young woman starting at a new company.
Returning to duality, she goes on:
“in this physical existence called life experience, we see the result of duality every day; when we see war, when we see disease, when we see gang riots and killings, we are seeing the effects of duality.
War comes from the idea and the belief that I am here and you are there, and we are separate. There is a great weakness in this concept. In blindly accepting the concept of duality, you will always lose, because you become lost in a deadly game of social power. The game of social power is very different from the game of personal power. In personal power, you honor a worthy opponent [which she explains a little later]. In the game of social power, you are trying to win over someone else. That immediately puts you in a one-down position, which is an aggressive, confrontational position of separation. If you are trying to live in true power, this one-down position will defeat you at every turn. You are caught before a vast chasm of duality where you are forever distanced from others whom you wish to dominate.
The first step towards bridging the chasm of duality is accepting life as it is. When you understand that complete acceptance of yourself will open your heart, increase your power, and thereby offer you the opportunity to be whole, you will no longer view yourself as separate. In the light of your acceptance, duality disappears, and you become fully committed to love, which really means that you fully love who you are and what you stand for in life. Remember that love is power.
As you choose a different point of view, a point of view centered in personal power yet beyond duality, you will then experience a sense of oneness with everything around you.”
She then describes a teaching from a Nepalese hill woman, named Ani, who uses the mountain, Anapurna, as a teaching example.
“When you experience oneness, you make a place within yourself for the essence of power, the force of power, to live. You become an invincible warrior in the world, because ethere is no vulnerable spot for anything to enter to take your power. Energy-draining thoughts, comments, and individuals can only circle you, looking for a hole, looking for a place of sensitivity and weakness, but never finding one.
A sense of oneness with all living things brings with it a sense of personal power. If you come upon a challenge, you honor it as a worthy opponent if you have personal power. Agnes Whistling Elk explained this to me in a wonderful way. We were sitting on her cabin porch in northern Manitoba, Canada, watching the play of the aurora borealis across the sky in crimson and green pulsating sheets of radiant light.
“In the old way,” Agnes said, “when a warrior from another nation came into camp, we always gave him the best lodge to sleep in, the choicest food to eat, and the fastest pony to ride. When a warrior was challenged by another, and they both had personal power, they each wanted the other to be the best he could be.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Because the stronger your opponent is, the better you have to be. You become more than you ever dreamed you could be. That’s how you grow. You don’t hate someone who is better than you. You learn from them and eventually overtake them with honor. It’s a different way of looking. It is not competition. That’s the way it has always been,” she said.
“If you have a point of view that takes in the entirety of the living universe, then you live in the center of the world circle of power, as do all others who see the world in this way. This is the essence of personal power – the last lesson of power is that we are all one.” Agnes smiled at me and pinched my arm.”
