Today (Saturday) is my day off, although I don’t imagine it will be so. But I’m quite reflective today, drifting away on one thought or another.
Some time ago the Boss told me about myself – where I was from, how many times I’d been to Earth, what I was to do, and when I could return to my natural environment – not a planet, I suspect, but an inner world.
I asked him why I could remember none of this and he replied, “because that was our agreement.”
The only bleedthrough I’m aware of about any of what he said is a weariness with this round of life I’m embedded in. Lazily watching the offerings on TV this morning, what I see depicted over and over is a pattern of life that centers around the attainment of physical pleasure through romantic love while maintaining life by getting and spending, eating and sleeping, procreating and tending, building and enhancing shelter, maintaining a network of family and friends.
For short, I’d call all this the “outer life.” And none of it calls to me these days. Not even writing calls to me. I feel complete. I have done all I set out to do in life. No more goals lie out in front of me.
No desire even to kick a ball or grab a coffee. No desire to court, flaunt, play dress-up. No desire to celebrate and nothing I can think of worth celebrating.
An Indian guru once called food a medicine to treat the illness of hunger. And even food, which provided me perhaps with my last big draw in life, no longer interests me. Food is indeed a medicine to me these days and I pour it down my throat or munch it disinterestedly.
Someone asked me, “What do you eat these days?” Food. I have no finer distinction than that any more.
The Boss, the other day, when I asked him the meaning of a dream in which I could not get on a bus because I was surrounded in so much luggage, said that it referred to the fact that “you can’t take it with you.” By “with you” I assume he meant Ascension.
And then he paused and said:
“But you do not have deep attachments to things. That is not your nature. In fact, my friend, sometimes I feel that you are more of a monk than anything. … You are already free to fly.”
“Free to fly.” What an interesting way of putting it.
More of a monk, yes. The outer life doesn’t call me. It doesn’t entice or invite me.
I’m not attracted even to the thought of visiting exotic worlds or looking upon wheeling galaxies or the beautiful colors of nebulae. I’m well finished with it.
The call to go inwards is the only evidence I have of what lies underneath the blinkers. It’s almost overpowering these days. I could drop into meditation at the slightest urging. It’s as Krishna said:
“Let him who would climb
In meditation
To heights of the highest
Union with Brahman
Take for his path
The yoga of action:
Then when he nears
That height of oneness
His acts will fall from him,
His path will be tranquil.” (1)
That which St. John of the Cross writes about is more tangible to me now than all this world’s pleasures.
“For all the beauty there may be
Ill never throw away my soul;
only for something I dont know
that one may come on randomly.”
I’ll actually close with his poem because it’s one of my favorite things in life and always has been since I first heard it read. Hearing words like these is comforting to me and almost the sole pleasure I have left, this and walking in nature, reading the Book of Life in the bark of a tree or a flower’s spirals.
Watching the seagulls pirouette on the wind, drinking in the sun, feeling the breeze….
I’m finished with this life and have been for some time, and yet the work must go on. Constantly I feel the tug inward. It grows daily, even as the prospect of the work speeding up grows daily. What a dilemma. If I don’t find a way to combine the two, I’ll be most unhappy.
And I will find a way.
St. John’s poem, perhaps the finest I’ve ever read and very much speaks for my state of mind right now:
For all the beauty there may be
Ill never throw away my soul;
only for something I dont know
that one may come on randomly.
In savoring a finite joy
the very most one can expect
is to enfeeble and destroy our taste,
leaving the palate wrecked;
for all the sweetness there may be
Ill never throw away my soul;
only for something I dont know
that one may come on randomly.
A generous heart will never care
to go part way;
it wont be cowed
if there is passage anywhere,
but set out on the hardest road;
nothing can cause it misery,
and with faith soaring like a cloud
it feeds on something I dont know
that one may come on randomly.
One who suffers the pains of love
from contact with the holy being
will find himself abandoning old tastes
and killing remnants of all taste-
like one who feverishly rejects the food he sees,
although he longs for something I dont know
that he may come on randomly.
Dont be surprised by all of this,
and let your taste remain as dead
for it will lead you to a bed of evil
far from any bliss;
For every living being is seen to be
relentlessly alone
and feeds on something I dont know
that he may come on randomly.
And once the will has felt
the mark of the divinity,
it cannot be repaid by any man;
only the Lord can heal the dark;
His beauty is of such degree
as to be seen through faith alone,
tasted in something I dont know
that one may come on randomly·
With such a lover as the Lord
tell me if you will be in pain,
for His love is devoid of taste
among the things made in this world.
Without a foothold you must seek Him out-
no face nor form, alone –
tasting there something I dont know
that one may come on randomly.
And dont look to your inner eye
(though of a vastly greater worth)
to find among the joys of earth
happiness and ecstasy;
more than all beauty there may be
or may have been or can be now,
one feeds on something I dont know
that one may come on randomly·
Whoever cares to do his best
should look for what may still be gained,
not what already is obtained,
and he will see the higher crest.
And so to reach the utmost peak
I always shall be moved
to go largely to something I dont know
that one may come on randomly.
On earth you never must rely
on what the senses understand
or all the knowledge you command,
although it rises very high.
No grace nor beauty there may be
will make me throw away my soul;
only for something I dont know
that one may come on randomly. (2)
Footnotes
(1) Sri Krishna in Prabhavananda, Swami and Christopher Isherwood, trans., Bhagavad-Gita. The Song of God. New York and Scarborough: New American Library, 1972; c1944, 63.
(2) St. John of the Cross, Barnstone, Willis, trans., The Poems of Saint John of the Cross. New York: New Directions, 1972; c1968, 85-9.