NOEMAYA

To understand is a form of control; it is to have possession of the meaning of something, for it is a way of encompassing a phenomenon in one’s mind, but Reality doesn’t lend itself to any form of control. The flux of life is unfathomable, ungraspable, deeply eerie and blissful at once. To see and live it as it is, one must relinquish the desire to understand it.  

To seek the new, stop anticipating the old, and if you don’t know how to anticipate the new, which is often the case, then practice presence. And if you don’t know how to be present, that’s because you’re still anticipating the old, for presence is the absence of all anticipations. It is only in the painful practice of presence that man realizes how invested and entrenched he is in the compulsion to control reality. In fact, the initial pain of presence is the pain of letting go of control and the subsequent resistance to regain it. And this simple practice is what makes the difference between the one who stays the same and the one who lets himself be radically transformed.  

To express and realize the desire of the heart, one must call the beloved into presence with one’s all being. All organs, subtle and gross, must call on the beloved: the heart by prayer, the tongue by speaking the truth, the eyes by seeing beauty, the ears by active listening, and the body by selfless service. When all of a man’s being calls on the same thing, that’s well-being and harmony; when there’s divergence and each organ wants something different, that’s disease.

There’s an old story, the most ancient one, the narrative of not being enough, of separation. The marketplace of this world thrives on the veins of this narrative, for you can’t sell to a man who is already enough. Oh this centrifugal pull of the world! My ever shining Sun, keep me in orbit by the centripetal pull of thy love. 

You are so beautiful with your ever shining rays! And I, I am so absorbed in this illusory self, in the grip of nothingness and emptiness. But there’s hope, that I may forget myself in your remembrance. Teach me how to remember you in both form and essence, for I know nothing of how to approach thee. 

God, the Sun of this world! Please help me! Please save me from myself! Help me let go and let you in. Help me vacate the premises so that you can enter my soul. I have made a mess of this house.

God, the life of light and the light of life, is always overflowing and ready to enter one’s soul; we need only vacate the heart and let go of control. My friends! Take a leave; go on a vacation; let God sort things out and run your affairs for sometime, and then come back and take back control if things didn’t look better than how you did it.

The quality of a man’s life is the quality of his guests; what you invite into your house, to your attention and consciousness, that gives form and color to your psyche and life.

As for me, I am a poor man with no inheritance of my own. I stole it all; my reign is a consequence of the oldest murder in history, of fratricide, starting with Cain and retold in Hamlet, and silently lived in the life of every man and woman. It’s the story of the false self substituting the true Self. And that’s the unworthy ruler, precisely who I am, and that’s the source of my anxiety and neurosis. I’m always working so hard at so many levels to protect something I don’t even know if it’s in danger. I have spent all my life to form an army to protect an empty carriage! And isn’t that the story of mankind’s soul and the birth of neurosis!