A Story of Lack

‘Melancholy’ (Part) – Odilon Redon, 1876 – WikiArt

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When the ‘I’ is divested of the ‘I’, only ‘I’ remains.”
~ Ramana Maharshi

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Don’t run in the other direction. Don’t take a sense of lack for a need. For this is what we do, when we sense in ourself an insufficiency, we want to fill it up, by all means necessary. We think it important to grant its wanting, its craving. But a lack is never a need. A lack is a fact that needs no repairing and no repairman. By bowing or giving allegiance to it, we submit ourself. We give up all power of understanding. We place ourself at the level of that lack. We become small. We don’t respect it. For this is not to respect it, to obey a random sense of lack. For lack comes as the supreme teacher, and our genuine bowing to it rather takes the form of listening. This is how we bow to a teacher, how we respect it, fulfil its function: by listening to it. So we listen. We stay motionless and invite its teaching. We don’t run away in the other direction.

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A story about how a sense of lack can be the real teacher… (READ MORE…)

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Ripples…

Why do I keep thinking that things happen
That there is drama
All kinds of ups and downs
Desperation between two short-lived chunks of contentment

Why do I keep looking for an escape
Something better, more fulfilling
An adventure for my little self
Lest it would plainly die or disappear

Can I not see the call of steady ground
The unstoppable peace behind it all
The depth of the unfathomable soul
That rise not but stays unshakable 

Can I not see that my worse dramas 
Are but ripples – maybe not even this
That sink into a space so vast 
That nothing – oh nothing! – can move it

Can I not see the blaze of immensity
Running so close, dancing before my very self
Making itself so very obvious and present
That I have to strive to miss it

Can I not see that my blindness, forgetfulness
Is but a futile escape from a release so plain
A readiness to see that just behind my ache 
Stands already revealed my completeness.

 

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Text and photo by Alain Joly

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Suggestion:
Voices from Silence (other poems from the blog)