Monika's weekly inner voice drawings:
Q: What is today's wisdom?
A: "Remember that you don't choose love; love chooses you. All you really can do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing then reach out and give it away."
- Kent Nerburn
"Dare to reach out your hand into the darkness, to pull another hand into the light."
- Norman Rice
Posts
Though I have some difficulty with the first quote-- "Remember that you don't choose love; love chooses you. All you really can do is accept it for all its mystery when it comes into your life. Feel the way it fills you to overflowing then reach out and give it away."—I know who posted it and so have a good sense of her intention. Her Original Face is eternally shining. With the apparent simplicity of a Monika inner gesture of a voice whispering and, at times, hee-hawing through the cracks of mind, we have these two figures figuring each other out, or so that is their intention. And intention is the point. In fact, intention is why we chose love and not the other way around, at least from my perspective. Yes, unstained and unblemished consciousness is there, as it is, but it’s not love. Love is the desire to create joy; or a deep attraction with the idea of goodness (as opposed to shame, which is repulsion with the idea of badness). And, in their utter roundness, these two figures are gazing in glow of love. The desire and want and curiously and playfully seek to know each other’s knowing. This is the basket of love, the gesture of giving and caring in the containment of embodiment. Notice the arms and hands of the figure on the left: one arm extended outward and the other pulled gently back with hand upward toward her heart and the boundless space of sky. Such wisdom in that strong but soft and tender gesture. This is the nature of the psychological containment that love needs to be nourished and evolve from self to selflessness, from only myself to only all things, including myself. And in the drawing the blue intersubjective space of betweenness is the ocean of life of which love evolves; first, as dependent origination (interconnectedness) and then through prehension, the beginning splendor of feeling, which we call experience. And that prehension is spacetime pushing through like a seedling into the burgeoning streams of manifestation in all its glorious multiplicity. Yet, we cannot simply accept it, for we will be fooled by our own misguidedness. There is first some work to do! And it begins with mindfulness which, as the master Soygal Rinpoche reminds us, has the capacity to “defuse our negativity, aggression, and turbulent emotions, which may have been gathering power over many lifetimes.” Mindfulness! Intention! Love! Yes, love is a choice, a choice we all make, moment to moment. Om mani padme hum.
ReplyDeleteIt's fascinating to see, how differently we can interpret a quote, and how we all can be right, depending from what angle we are looking at it.
ReplyDelete"Remember that you don't choose love; love chooses you...". I was intrigued by this sentence because I saw it as the contrast between "conditional" vs. "unconditional" love. Unconditional love to me just IS, a state of being in our true nature, whereas conditional love, by definition, is conditioned by circumstances, comfort zones, personal preferences, etc., so we choose, until, of course, it overcomes us like a tsunami and we don't know what hit us :) And after the initial "being chosen", we'll have to work on it to make it stay. It becomes a daily choice, as you say "there is some work to do", until AND unless we are permanently in the state of unconditional love.
Thanks Monika. I’m happy to hear you emphasize the term “interpretation” and refer to it as a perspective in which many perspectives can be gleaned, each one holding, if you will, a part-truth. This is not a small point, particularly when we are engaging in an inner voice journey of interpretation, where the notion of right/wrong is fundamentally erroneous. Interpretation only has relevance within the context of the relationship between the object of interpretation (eg, inner voice drawings) and the interpreter. This is most exciting because the world in which we “are” is a world of excess meaning, which means that what we make out of the world is integrally connected to what we find in the world, the possibilities of which are infinite and endless. Finding and making are inseparable and the circle they form is a circle of understanding. For example, the very making of an inner voice drawing emerges out of what one unconsciously and consciously finds in her experience of being-in-the-world. And, conversely, what one finds in the making is the potential for new experience, which may translate into a higher awareness and a deepening compassion. But, what is most significant is the dialogue created in the shared meanings of interpretation. Through shared meanings, we widen the circle and gather a kind of mutuality of shared human experience, the aim of which is understanding; and I would say, an ultimate understanding of reality. This is the function and spiritual purpose of art in general, as it is the purpose and function of relationship. In relationship we interpret each other’s meanings, we “look inside each other’s looking.” And this we call intimacy.
ReplyDeleteAMITOFU! :)
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