The Universe Is Smiling: Welcome!

Monika's weekly inner voice drawings:

Q: What is today's wisdom?

A: "A smile is the universal welcome."
- Max Eastman
"If I could choose but one friend, it would be you."
- Anonymous"
Posted by Unknown at Wednesday, January 12, 2011
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5 comments:

  1. Paul LichtenbergJanuary 13, 2011 at 4:58 PM

    I’ve been sitting with this drawing and just delighting in it. My infant son, Teo, has had a fever since last night and I’m looking out of our hotel room overlooking the Atlantic Ocean in South Beach, Florida. And I’m feeling a bit raw and even somewhat restless as I am coming back from a modified retreat, and vacation that I haven’t had in two years. So, I observe this drawing and sit with it, knowing that my psychological state will want to determine how I interpret it. We may say that it can be no other way, because this mind and its projections, called “Paul,” is primarily subjectively determined by its history and experiences, and, persuasively, by the weight of its state of mind right now.

    I can tell you it soothes me, despite the slight chaos of changing whirling around me. A son who’s sick and yet whose body is brilliantly transforming itself into health through this evolutionary mechanism called “fever.” An unfamiliar room overlooking an unfamiliar landscape, the climate of which is ironically uncharacteristically cold. And I’m resting with mind relatively unpreoccupied with the usual rigorous routine of helping others help themselves. It’s all here, the ostensible chaos of change triggering the sense of helplessness of childhood living with a very sick father who died prematurely and the sole responsibility of supporting a family and caring for many people. Mind could take many directions as it contemplates this drawing but the drawing won’t have it.

    The drawing is central to this moment because I am this drawing. My hands are extended outward and upward; my heart is open. I’m bending in such a way that even gravity wants to support my openness. There is a friend climbing me as if I were a tree, and I am. “Baum,” my son says. It’s all he knows. He says, tree is all we really need to know, because everything is dependent upon it; it is life to all things. “Baaauum.” The leaves are burgeoning, billowing even, as if to express gratitude. “Open, tree, open. I smile you. You are my friend. And because you are everything, if I could choose but one friend, it would be you.”

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  2. Paul LichtenbergJanuary 14, 2011 at 10:14 PM

    It’s not a question of whether we get triggered; we all get triggered. It’s mind’s way, its dispositional makeup, if you will. The problem is that we fail to understand mind’s way; we simply lack awareness of mind’s workings. If you think about it, mind is not a paradox, it IS paradox. That’s why I love this drawing; it speaks to mind’s nature as paradox. This central figure, for example, in the very way it leans and bends reflects mind’s balancing act between the need for homeostasis (order) and the need for flexibility, or expression. The other way this drawing speaks to me of mind is the relationship between conscious and unconscious emotions. The main figure balancing is standing on a ground, perhaps even emerging from that ground in its blue and greenness opening up to the world of objects, in such a way, as to embrace it with curiosity. The figure looks like a question, and so, is mind questioning (seeking) itself. It wants, indeed, needs to know. It understands that self-knowledge is knowing, understanding. Look how lovely and skillfully it is opening to both itself and the world, both inseparable. But, it’s that unconscious emotional field she’s balancing herself on that most intrigues her. She, as mind, is paradox. She both conceals and reveals, emotions, that is. If we include the Buddhist notion of ignorance as an emotion, emotions includes that aspect of thinking colored by emotion; in truth, formed by emotion. Current neuroscience research, for example, demonstrates that the cognitive process of rational thought is dependent on emotions! How we feel affects our decision-making. And so, we better understand those emotional triggers. For example, my son’s illness triggered both growing up with a sick father and the loss of a child 10 years ago. Without me understanding 1) that I was being triggered, 2) the historical landscape of that trigger, and 3) curiosity and compassion around mind’s regressive tendencies, I wouldn’t effectively have known whether my caretaking was in my child’s best interest, or determined by my wish to stave off the anxiety engendered in the emotional trigger of illness. As I sit with this very wise drawing, I see so clearly mind mindfully, rigorously, and compassionately questioning, as if saying, “I am a seeker seeking myself.” In this way, the smile of mind, the seeker, is indeed a universal welcome.

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  3. UnknownJanuary 14, 2011 at 10:36 PM

    So good to hear from you again. I missed your comments, but you surely made up for it :) I am very sorry to hear about Teo being sick, but I dare to assume that he is on his way back to his old/new Self.

    I think a smile is disarming and that's why the drawing might be so touching for you. Smiling whole heartedly resembles the sun breaking through the clouds: darkness vanishes in an instant.

    So, making way (=bending backwards of the main figure) to whoever/whatever comes towards us (=the animal in the drawing) and greeting it with a smile, takes the venom/threat/danger out of the encounter.

    Here is the question for you and for all of us: How to greet the challenges we face (such as your son's illness) with a smile?

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  4. Paul LichtenbergJanuary 15, 2011 at 11:33 PM

    If we define smiling in a narrow way, the idea of smiling when someone (especially your child) is suffering is grotesque. However, when we look at smiling from a deep, spiritual perspective—what we may call an “inner” smile-- then this act, or better, response, means something more than just superficial happiness. From a spiritual (nondual) perspective, smiling points more to the response of the heart when it understands the true nature of reality and realizes that within every experience there is a great teaching. From this perspective, smiling still points to happiness, for example, but a true happiness that engenders understanding and gratitude. It’s as if, in this time of sorrow, all the Buddhas of the universe past and present have come before us to help us realize this ultimate happiness. In this brief life, I have experienced some very severe losses, but not one has come to me without a great lesson the essence of which was to guide me to realizing my own true nature. And so, I’m not smiling BECAUSE my son is sick; I’m smiling because his illness teaches me about the nature of suffering. That is, like all phenomena, suffering is empty of independent, permanent existence. By attaching myself to and identifying with suffering, I will never truly know myself and achieve true happiness. Most importantly, when I learn this, I now become a more self-aware parent who, in the long run, can teach my child how to alleviate suffering in all beings, including himself.

    It was the last summer song we heard together
    driving up the sky without road; or sliding down
    Bash Bish, in the Berkshires, high on a joint
    and looking at what once was through a small
    portal between two lives trying to change the history

    of their circumstance. Our worlds gently
    collided like cotton, through tragedy, hardship,
    and grief. What went before was, and couldn't
    change; loss of a child taught me that. Yet, as
    we turned and glanced out the back window,

    we saw rain and what lay ahead. The dream
    we woke into was the same river we stepped
    out of twice. In a way we did change history;
    we learned that we will never again compromise
    who we are, and that intimacy is a poem unfolding.

    We are now both awaiting its last lines, two
    supplicants at an altar of possibility, peering
    down the aisle of God, whose song is that
    of a local 19 year old's declaration that Main
    Street's a last resort as far as I'm concerned.

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  5. UnknownJanuary 16, 2011 at 6:44 PM

    The "inner smile" - that's it. It comes from the knowing that our "reality" is but a veil that clouds the recognition of our true Self. So, the inner smile comes from a place of compassion and a broader perspective beyond this one lifetime. A smile on the "altar of possibility".

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