if you want to become truth

There's courage involved if you want

to become truth. There is a broken-open place in a lover.


Where are those qualities of bravery and

sharp compassion in this group? What's the

use of old and frozen thought?


I want a howling hurt. This is not a treasury

where gold is stored; this is for copper.


We alchemists look for talent that

can heat up and change.


Lukewarm won't do. Halfhearted holding back,

well-enough getting by? Not here.

-Rumi

Re: if you want to become truth

Hi Lauren

That poem tears at me, and expresses what I want AND what I'm afraid of.

What was in your mind and heart when you posted it?

Juliee

Re: if you want to become truth

Hi Juliee!

Thank you for your wonderful heartfelt questions.

I'm feeling so strongly, especially in the last three weeks, a call to surrender and surrender and surrender… to truth or Spirit, or perhaps it is that my commitment to do so (to surrender unconditionally) has recently become less conditional. And I feel such a joy and an occasional terror, the way life seems to have consented heartily and everything is reorganizing itself around that central commitment, even though I can feel that I still have these holdouts.

So, this poem speaks to me, encouraging, offering courage, offering the hint of a vision.

And since I feel this community has been and continues to be a catalyst and ground for me, since many of you have inspired in me this same courage and offered such encouragement, I felt moved to share it here. I dunno. I didn't think about it much.

Maybe it's a way of coming out of the spiritual closet, and stating my commitments more publically.

Also, the shift I've felt in this group and some of our other pods since the radical step was taken to support a space where we could show up in more vulnerability and not have the delicacy of the subtle explorations steamrolled and not be always faced with the demand that we fit our nascent unfoldings into the frozen constructs of the conceptual world of the rationality police… I've appreciated the shift, the opening and blossoming. This poem speaks to it so well. “This is not a treasury where gold is stored; this is for copper. We alchemists look for talent that can heat up and change.” Not that I truly think there can be no holding back here, in this pod. No, I wouldn't go so far, and didn't mean the poem as a literal “mission statement” for the pod or something. Nah. But kind of, a little bit… there are relevancies, and inspiration to be had for free!

Love,
Lauren

Re: if you want to become truth

Breathtaking, Lauren. You have a way of rocking my world with posts like that. I was fumbling for words but only came up with “wow”. Better let Rumi speak for now.



Rumi on how to treat emotions:

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.


.

Re: if you want to become truth

Hi Mascha

Every time I read this poem this phrase leaps out at me

Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,

Which is strange because I don't often let sorrow sweep anything anywhere. Or maybe that's not so strange?

Juliee

Re: if you want to become truth

Lauren: I'm feeling so strongly, especially in the last three weeks, a call to surrender and surrender and surrender… to truth or Spirit, or perhaps it is that my commitment to do so (to surrender unconditionally) has recently become less conditional. And I feel such a joy and an occasional terror, the way life seems to have consented heartily and everything is reorganizing itself around that central commitment, even though I can feel that I still have these holdouts.

I can feel this right to my core, thank you for 'wording' it. The words have brought alive again this mischeivious 'hide and seek' feeling within me.
This unconditional surrender hijacked me in the early summer and then left me standing here washed up on a beach wondering what to do next.
You've brought tears to my eyes, thank you.

Juliee

Re: if you want to become truth

 I am also adrift in the sea of surrender.  Playing hide and seek, learning to see and say.  Trying to remember that grasping for solid ground is an exercise in futility; the effort is much better used in practice. A very large part of my practice lately has been to focus on welcoming (with a laugh-haha, heehee) all whom I meet on the path; and resisitng the urge to go back to sleep.  It's intense.
Love,
Chris

Re: if you want to become truth

Trying to remember that grasping for solid ground is an exercise in futility; the effort is much better used in practice.

Yes Chris, exactly. In grasping for the solid ground of a prayer practice to develop a second person relationship with God…poooof off it/she/he went - hiding again.

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
So my soul longs for you, O God
                                                               Psalm 42:1

Where have you hidden,
Beloved, and left me moaning?
You fled like the stag
after wounding me;
I went out calling you, but you were gone.
                                                                       St John of the Cross

Juliee

Re: if you want to become truth

mmm, I am loving this meeting and want to say more about this unconditional surrender thing, but I have to move off into my day shortly, so just quickly for now:

Mascha, that is another of my favorite rumi poems, and it is a great teaching on right relationship with emotions isn't it? One can welcome all of it and never lose the Witness, one can be rocked and scoured and nourished and devastated, broken, mended, torn, tendered, one can open to trust the movement of energies and experience in all their vibratory variety, without becoming lost in the movement itself. Without identity collapsing into the vibration, the wave of the moment, and forgetting its essence as wetness.

It is egoic madness to turn emotions away at the door, just as it is madness to let any of them become permanent guests.

Juliee and Chris, thank you for your beautiful sharings. I feel your hearts.

Love,
Lauren

Re: if you want to become truth

Beautiful, beautiful thread, and deep thanks from me.

Re: if you want to become truth

Hi folks.

This is my first post to the integral pod for many a moon….I've been hanging out, mostly on my own blogging away agentically as a morning ritual and then commenting on the comments in a gesture of appreciation….I was drawn here because the notion of returning home actually caught my breath…as a vasana-cutting sangha, this pod really does meet my relational need and I am henceforth going to hang out here a lot more….my heart aches for integral communion…tomorrow heralds the Integral Salon in North West and I have been looking forward to the occasion all week…..

Lauren, your Rumi quote cut me to the bone…I thought about the relationship of copper to gold….Buckminster Fuller calculated that copper artifacts have a life of 38 years..that is, something made of copper tends to live for 38 years before becoming otiose and melted down into some new artifact….it reincarnates whilst retaining its original nature….beautifully orange, highly conductive, malleable…..on the other hand, gold, to my knowledge, has no such life…it isn't conductive and is rare enough and pretty enough to retain it's incarnation as some ornament or other (if it doesn't rot wistfully in some vault)…

Gold, then, stagnates as some downSpiral static shiny thing…the very vision of static premodern heaven…whilst copper transfers it's value into ever-new-and-interesting evolutionary artifactual forms….

Our telos, our emotivity, our breathing, dancing, vibrant firelife… is coppery; malleable and ever-transforming…whilst retaining the essence of our conductive omegapoint drive…..we are not statically golden…let us celebrate the copper in us….and meld our hearts to cocreate a beneficent Kosmos.

Humbly and shorn of trickiness…you are wonderful folk.

Jon xxooxx

Re: if you want to become truth

Welcome home, Jon.

Re: if you want to become truth

Hot beauty, Jon.

Re: if you want to become truth

See you tonight!

Juliee

Re: if you want to become truth

Hi Liz, Gitanjali…thanx for the rewelcome.

Thank you Liz for explaining that gold's a fab conductor…I got it confused with rubber obviously…I personally wouldn't find you churlish for correcting me….i welcome correction, respectful criticism and challenge….my pathology has hitherto been about mixing with folk and not being challenged by them…so i state this for the record.

Hi Juliee…be good to link up tonight…Tam is working and cannot make it and Ruari's coming in my car. There should be 8 of us at least.

Rumi;

Re: if you want to become truth

Good to have you here, Jon!

Re: if you want to become truth

Hi Lauren. Thanx

Loved your sentiments on Ossification and the Rationality Police.

J x