Everyman's Journal 2011

Everyman's Journal 2011, #22

January 27

Last night I attended a local ongoing Buddhist-orientated meditation group for the second time, the first time being two weeks ago when I went with a Vedantic teacher and friend named Peter. Buddhist practice is a world that I am less familiar with than some other major religions, so I am finding myself curious, wondering where I will find the familiar and where I will find 'new flavors'.

Inside of the understanding that no religion is righter or betterer than another, still something within us causes us to choose to study certain bodies of congruent thought, and not others. A few days ago I was taking a walk with a friend and part of our conversation included that for her, A Course in Miracles was her central spiritual focus.... that she found that it 'just worked' well with the way she saw and understood life. And, she is the ripe fruit of it too, being a wonderfully loving and conscious human who contributes of herself generously to the world she is in.

What I trust, with that friend or any other, is that there are no accidents in the curriculum we choose, and so that I am now choosing to be placed one night a week in a Buddhist circle is clearly for my benefit. But perhaps not so much for learning, as for unlearning....

Have you ever noticed the phenomena that, when in a new surrounding, you are less ego-active, and more open to inquiry? There is both a visible and invisible system of understandings and ways of being and communicating that makes up the language of all groups, and when entering 'a new something', what many times hits us is that 'we don't know'. Of course what our ego immediately does is to begin learning the new language, which is it's way of reestablishing familiar ground for itself. It is unaware of the gift it is throwing away.... the practice of not knowing, or said another way, the practice of being empty of knowing.

Not knowing surrounds us, and is the great stress-generating part of the reality of all egoic-identified beings. Isn't it amazing that when believing we are our egos, we identify with just about anything that will help us hide it (the not knowing) from our awareness. Yet this is a direction guaranteed to bring us.... unprepared... into painful collision with the stark fact of our existence: that we inhabit time-limited body/vehicles subject to entropy. The Buddha recognized this as the primary physical reality, and that all suffering arises from it. His teachings, as I currently understand them, are basically to stay awake and soberly contemplate the nature of this illusionary (temporary) existence, that the wisdom gained may deepen within us the ability to be discerning. Discerning of what? Simply of the experience of the true from the experience of the false. Once that is a well grounded practice, being true to what is now self-obviously true becomes consistently possible. And once consistently possible, the possibility of Mastery of Being can then come into view.

This is the journey we are all called upon.... to set aside our adolescent infatuations with form and learn to see the always present formless Reality, within which all form is only temporary content. I feel this call coming through all religions and faiths, and it is the mission of my Sufi lineage to issue the call for a recognition of our spiritual unity, regardless of which religion/faith is providing our 'current diet'. Ultimately, it is obvious that if we do not experience our Unity with all Life, that we have failed to Know anything.

But conversely, the Great Way also gives us this awesome grace.... it only takes truly knowing any One Thing completely for it to suddenly become possible to Know All Things. Because in Truth, One Thing and All Things are exactly the same. And those who embody this become, in this world, our illumined masters of Being Love.

Namaste,

David

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My partnership request.... Please consider yourself an important gateway this message is passing through on its way to others. Please do 'send it on'. Thank you.

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Rev. David Seacord

Fine Art Painter / Sufi Cherag

david@davidseacord.com

www.davidseacord.com

(my fine art website)

www.davidseacord-everymansjournal.blogspot.com

(archived writings and poetry, circa 2002 to 2004)

www.davidseacord-acimcommentaries.blogspot.com

(archived 2010 writings on the lessons of A Course in Miracles)

www.everymansjournal2011.blogspot.com

(archived entries of this years Everyman's Journal)