Number Sixty One

Each Tao has its time, and seekers ready for the path.  And for each seeker there is a time when a Tao is finished.  The discipline that once reaped wisdom lives on the other side of grace.  At some point the narrow corridor of truth leads to knowing death.  While the study of the breath leads to the moment, the study of the breath stopping is the portal of truth.

All around us are souls taking the last breath.  We are afraid of it.  But that is when we know what we are.  Meditate on the breath stopping, or on the place between breaths.  Through that doorway shines the light between lives.

 

Number Sixty

"I love you."  Words carry the idea of love, as if language made truth.  In the idea of love, loss has yet to happen.  In the idea of love, the form, the costume of connection is held up to the mirror -- perfect in every way.  But love lives in the intention, the commitment to reach across vast distances.  Love waits for word when word never comes, writes the letter that has nowhere to go, holds forever what is already gone.

Number Fifty Nine

Doubt is companion to the quest for certainty.  It never leaves because in this place absolute truth is hidden from us.  Mother Theresa spent most of her life with no sense of the presence of god.  And whether the god she thought exists is really there, this dialectic remains: the quest for truth and the uncertainty are inescabably one experience.

Is the struggle to find truth Quixotic, or do we get closer? We can observe the phenomena of consciousness; we can know the outcomes of choices; we can reason; we can collect data from the experiences of others.  And it all points somewhere, to some ineffable knowledge that comes for a moment into focus, and fades again.

We are like short-wave radios, tuned to a frequency of some distant voice, and through the static picking up a word or two.  And all the while we are sewing that into some coherence, knowing we only caught a little of the whole gestalt.  Knowing that, through desire or projection, we could supply the missing words and get most of it wrong.  And still...and still it is our work.  And we continue.

Number Fifty Eight

Let go of time.  It cannot help you: looking forward, looking back -- as if it was real.  The future causes the past as much as the past causes the future.  What you are about to do affects what you have already done.  Your death in each life leads to the day in that life when you were born.

The future is the story you have not yet told yourself, but still know.  The past is the story of what might happen if you choose to reenter this life.  Let go of time.  It carries you only if you believe in it.  The future and the past are here -- now.  They have always been. And they keep changing.