A HAPPY PLACE

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Created on Friday, 06 February 2015 17:20

Written by Marian Moore

Marian @ Krysan

THE WELLBEING CONSULTANCY

Planting Golden Seeds in Northumberland, Tyne & Wear, and Durham

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 “As Martin Luther King said, ‘I think it’s important to keep an eye on the prize’, and the prize is the experience of the one-ness of life."

A HAPPY PLACE

=

A FEATHER ON THE BREATH OF GOD 

• A KRYSAN Wellbeing Newsletter (New)
• 8 February 2015
• Dear Friends 

John Lennon put it in a nutshell:

“When I was five years-old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy'. They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.” – John Lennon 

Welcome to a happy place.

• Happiness =
• Love (Rainer Maria Rilke)

Here, Rilke contemplates - with the beautiful poetic precision for which he is famous - the true meaning of love and the particular blessings and burdens of young love:

"To love is good, too: love being difficult.  For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.  For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.  With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.  

"But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far on into life, is – solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.  Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over, and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate – ?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

"Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives as yet scarcely suffice.  (Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet)

A more complex view.  But certainly worth thinking about as we approach Valentine's Day 2015.

Prepare yourself.

• A Feather on the Breath of God =
• The Jewel Net of Indra (Francis H Cook)

It's a long while since I last told this story about one-ness to a live audience (usually off the top of my head!), so today I could not resist the call of the original translation in Hua-yen Buddhism by Francis H Cook.  The story is, of course, The Jewel Net of Indra.  

But first, in relation to the Hua-yen school of Buddhism, Cook describes this 'as a view of existence which is for the most part alien to Western ways of looking at things, but it is a world view well worth consideration, not only as a beautiful artefact appealing to the aesthetic sense, but perhaps as a viable basis for conduct, no less plausible than the traditional Western basis'.

"We may begin with an image which has always been the favourite  Hua-yen method of exemplifying the manner in which things exist. 

"Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infinitely in all directions. 

"In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a singe glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. 

"There hang the jewels, glittering like stars of the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold.  If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in it polished surface there are reflected al the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. 

"Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring." - Francis H Cook

We learn that the Hua-yen school has been fond of this image, mentioned many times in its literature, because it symbolises a cosmos in which there is an infinitely repeated interrelationship among all the members of the cosmos.  This relationship is said to be one of simultaneous mutual identity and mutual inter-causality.  These are significant in an interconnected world - 'a feather on the breath of God'. 

Beautiful. “As Martin Luther King said, ‘I think it’s important to keep an eye on the prize’, and the prize is the experience of the one-ness of life."

• Quantum Entanglement = 
• 'Spooky Action at a Distance' (Albert Einstein)

I quote:

• The Headless Way =
• Man's Spiritual Quest (Douglas Harding)

I have long-been fascinated by the writings of Douglas Harding, a philosopher who was born in Suffolk in 1909. To cut a long story short ... In London in the early 1930s, Harding was studying and then practising architecture. In his spare time, however, he devoted his energies to philosophy - to trying to understand the nature of the world, and the nature of himself.

Into philosophy at this time were filtering the ideas of Relativity.  Influenced by these ideas, Harding realized that his identity depended on the range of the observer – from several metres he was human, but at closer ranges he was cells, molecules, atoms, particles … and from further away he was absorbed into the rest of society, life, the planet, the star, the galaxy. ... Like an onion he had many layers. Clearly he needed every one of these layers to exist.

But what was at the centre of all these layers? Who was he really?

In the mid-1930s Harding moved to India with his family to work there as an architect. When the Second World War broke out, Harding’s quest to uncover his identity at centre - his True Identity - took on a degree of urgency. Aware of the obvious dangers of war, he wanted to find out who he really was before he died. ...

A Helpful Quotation

"Over the past [sixty] years a truly contemporary and Western way of 'seeing into one's Nature' or 'Enlightenment' has been developing. Though in essence the same as Zen, Sufism, and other spiritual disciplines, this way proceeds in an unusually down-to-earth fashion.  It claims that modern man is more likely to see Who he really is in a minute of active experimentation than in years of reading, lecture-attending, thinking, ritual observances, and passive meditation of the traditional sort.

"Instead of these, it uses a variety of simple, non-verbal, fact-finding tests, all of them asking: how do I look to myself? They direct my attention to my blind spot - to the space I occupy, to what's given right here at the Centre of my universe, to what it's like being 1st-person singular, present tense." (From The Headless Way, a leaflet by Douglas Harding).

Richard Lang - headless.org

My contact is Richard Lang who runs The Headless Way organisation/website in the UK and who recently participated in the SAND conference in California - October 2014.  Whilst there, he was interviewed by Ben Berry of www.consciousvariety.com.  The interview (25 mins) is now on YouTube:

Click on link below for interview:

http://clicks.aweber.com/y/ct/?l=Fe9d_&m=Idy89gptu2lX2P&b=xIZ6EfRDH5Tt60WNgYj1

Go to http://www.headless.org/ to learn more about this useful method of self-inquiry pioneered by the late Douglas Harding and thereafter freely shared with humankind by Richard Lang, his friend.

http://www.headless.org/ 

A happy place

• Marian Moore
• Krysan for Wellbeing
• Sunday, 8 FEBRUARY 2015

THE PRIZE

 “As Martin Luther King said, ‘I think it’s important to keep an eye on the prize’, and the prize is the experience of the one-ness of life."

A happy place = a feather on the breath of God.

ENDS

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