Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage
Chapter Three
The Inner Point
You have probably seen Japanese paintings largely consisting of a vast sky, mountain, or even a waterfall with really nothing else but a small object such as a person or an animal somewhere in the very lowest region of the painting. A painting of this nature may appear to have little distinction of any sort to an unschooled Western eye. Indeed, we may not be interested at all. But the Japanese artist is making an important statement that we could well take as an aphorism. This particular type of work is called a “one-corner painting.” In this genre, the object is carefully considered and meticulously placed in a space where it will influence the environment contained within the work. This is where we might take notice of the message this style of painting holds. It’s really a question of influence and its source. Who or what is the actor?
There is a ritual in which some of us may engage to instill hope for the future — the New Year’s resolution. We make goals toward such things as better health, smoother relationships, adjusting careers or money matters. Our culture drives objectives and results. If we’re not doing something and getting results we laid out for ourselves — or that others have put in front of us — then something must be wrong with us. At least, this is what we’re told by the voices in our heads, or by family, bosses or friends. Yet, goals and objectives — getting and doing — are merely the surface layer of a much deeper structure existing within us. It also tells the story of our internal processes and how married we are to a state called frenzy.
If we’re plowing the road toward authenticity, we can begin to recognize that something else has begun. The goals and actions are still there, but they’ve loosened. Perhaps we’ve begun to have some confusion about who we are — if anyone, what we’re doing — if anything, and where we’re going — if anywhere. Something seems out of kilter, not quite enough or too much.
At this point, we may tend to throw ourselves into even more activity. Harder and better will surely get us to the place of comfort again, and we find it doesn’t. Life just gets more fragile until the layers become so thin that we have a breakthrough in spite of ourselves.
If we’re wise, we will instead recognize a stirring. Of what we’re not sure, but if we know enough to become silent and still, a resonance will begin to emerge. Rather than thrust aside the discomfort of something unfamiliar, we can gladly go into it. Much as we find that if we immerse ourselves into a physical pain and let go of contraction, we discover an interesting fluidity and the distressful edges dissolve. If we allow the flow to expand, we can make room for what is actually quite familiar, but usually forgotten somehow — true intent.
Dichotomy of Mind
Intent is to intention as expectancy is to expectation. Intention tries. Intent is. We’ve all heard the phrase about a road being paved with good intentions. How many times have we said to ourselves, “That’s not what I intended?” That means we missed the mark somehow, particularly from an expectation we may have had. Expectation is a very tight answer, a very little box. Many opportunities are missed when vision is so narrow as to limit the outcome and the actor is asleep to a wider existence.
Intent is an inner point of light — that coherence of clarity and possibility — that we travel to only by clearing debris obstructing the chamber doorway. Intent is that place that can’t truly be named and can only really be spoken of indirectly in metaphor or drawn through symbolic imagery. But those who have dwelled there know the boundary-less sensation She brings. From intent, we experience unstinting expectancy. Expectancy is the trust that produces increasing instances of right fit, which then are given to right action. Intent is the attractor. Expectancy is the fulfillment.
It’s equally true that intention is the attractor and expectation the fulfillment. It depends on what our focus is. Consider an astronomer. An astronomer must learn how to use a telescope with clear precision for observing deep space. While focusing on the chosen area, any unsteadying of the instrument by the slightest bit of disturbance and the sight piece will be moved. Therefore, the intended target will be missed altogether. The view will be shifted. On the other hand, if the astronomer possesses an inner precision, through a pinpoint in time, a field of endless galaxies may be discovered.
The great traditions speak of intent and expectancy in various ways. In the Tao Te Ching, Tao is Absolute Reality. Te is how Absolute Reality manifests. From the Jewish mystics, the force of Creation is known as Shekinah and the Greeks know this wisdom as Sophia. Sophia beckons and welcomes merging, just as the Hindu tradition teaches Yoga, which means “union.” But this can only happen if we get beyond what we have ingested — on numerous levels.
Dwelling Places
The doorway and ladder are ancient symbols. One is for the threshold we must cross; one for the ascension we must make. What they both hold in their archetypal meaning is opening. Sometimes the door seems so heavy and unmovable, we find it necessary to slip through its cracks. Not so strangely, the rung of a ladder we thought so secure breaks. We find we must step over to the next rung, or find another ladder. As we find more ways than the ones we thought we knew, something opens widely within us. And that freedom takes us to the place we seek.
Sixteenth century mystic Teresa of Avila used the metaphor of the seven dwelling places within a castle to describe the trek through multiple rooms of existence we are proffered. Strangely, there is an uncanny validity to her teaching that parallels present life, perhaps even more so than during the time she lived. Or, it just proves that the essence of our individual challenges essentially stays the same as does human nature. It’s merely a question of complexity.
What follows next is a metaphoric interpretation of the journey through the doorway and into the innermost chamber of the interior castle — a path that is already well known to the Core Self.
The Admission Ticket
Right away there’s the consideration about being inside or outside the castle walls. It’s not only about being outside the walls. There is also a moat to cross and sometime dangerous guardians to confront to gain access through the massive entryway. If there are guardians, then you can just about guarantee that what is hidden behind the walls must be precious. But those who are outside the walls are asleep to what the hidden treasures might be.
Their only level of attention is survival in the basest sense, how to try to manipulate the material plane to ensure their own continuity and derive sensual pleasures in the process. There’s nothing wrong with enjoyment of the senses. In fact, it’s part of being human. It seems true, though, that when it’s done outside the castle walls where the focus is so narrow, the pleasuring is likely trying to feed something devoid of filling. When you awaken to this understanding, you realize that you are living outside an apparently inviolate sanctuary. The protective trenching appears deep, the castle doors thick, the castle walls high and the guardians vicious.
What you must come to realize are the illusions of your own making. The sanctuary is open to all. But there’s a price. You must be willing to brave the piranhas swimming the moat of intention. You must do so even while you continue to hand-feed them with the doubts of your own making that nourish them and allow them to multiply. As you match the task, you then will find the protectors of the castle walls to be gargoyles who merely mirror back to the exterior world the image of their own grotesque mask. You can then recognize the gargoyles for the sweet spirits they are and claim your admission ticket to the castle.
Having gained entry, you can still hear Teresa’s fleeting whispers resonating through time, promising the divine inner chamber where Sophia resides. But it’s not yet evident to your unadjusted eyes. There’s no hall that gives the impression of providing a direct passage. It’s more a series of staggered rooms, perhaps spiraling awkwardly toward the interior. You’re asked to have faith. In this faith, you’re asked to close the castle door to the outside and step into the First Dwelling Place.
The First Dwelling Place
In the middle of the First Dwelling Place, there’s a soft glowing candle sitting on a flat stone, held upright by a pool of its own drippings. You were told by a gargoyle while passing through the the castle’s threshold that each room would contain a practice, as well as other purveyors of focus. The key to each progressive Dwelling Place would be found in the discovery and consistency of right attention. The gargoyle had intimated in a barely audible voice, “It’s not the content. It’s the process.” But the message was then too subtle for your denser nature, being so newly arrived from outside.
You did remember the words about attention, though, and found your eyes drawn to the flame of the candle. The flickering taper and its golden aura mesmerized you until you found yourself being pulled inside your mind, as though the fire had something to do with you — what was resident within. And just for a brief moment you found a still place, a slight glimpse of self-knowledge.
But then an unknown wind nearly extinguished the spark and caused a flare to dance upon the background, allowing it to now proceed to the foreground. Myriad thoughts began clamoring for your notice. There was the car payment to be made, the boss to be appeased and the next sale to be closed. Then to feel good, there was the new outfit to buy for the party on Friday and wondering what was wrong with a friend, which must be your fault because you weren’t there when needed. Or, you weren’t paying attention because your children were shouting in your ears, fragmenting your attention, attempting to encompass all detractors.
The gargoyles did the best they could to ferret out the furor, but you often bring with you inside what was lodged outside, like so many fleas hopping on your shoes for a free ride. Yet there was the flicker of the flame, an invitation mostly ignored but sporadically remembered — in the First Dwelling Place. And when you remember to engage the light more often — at least with your eyes if not your heart — then you can see something . It’s a crack in the stone, almost obscured by the hardening pool of wax spreading out from the candle. You realize then that if you allow your mind to melt into the candle’s fire you can become like so many drippings seeping through the fissure of time leading to the Second Dwelling Place.
The Second Dwelling Place
You then find yourself in an oak-paneled room with plenty of cushy old club chairs drawn companionably around a fireplace so large that you could stand up in it. The walls to either side of the fireplace are comprised of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Lining them are nearly all the words ever written, bound in pages, with attempts toward translation of the nature of existence.
You discover that you are becoming overwhelmed because there is so much there. You observe an inadequacy in your education. You don’t know where to start tutoring yourself. But you detect that direction is given. A book is pulled out slightly so that it would stand apart from the others in their tidy rows. You automatically notice it then and pluck it from its storage place.
Another one strangely falls off the shelf on its own to land at your feet. You bend over to pick it up and carry these treasures over to one of the club chairs where you discover other chronicles magically awaiting you, stacked haphazardly. As you immerse yourself in the written word, you begin to take in countless conjectures and perspectives about reality you heretofore had not considered. And it becomes so confusing, given what you thought was true.
You feel ungrounded and isolated in your new knowledge. You wish there were those who would be willing to explore further with you, and even commiserate on falsehoods by which you may have been living. As you hold this wish in your head, you find people drifting into the room, milling about the shelves, settling into chairs, warming themselves at the vast fireplace. As natural groupings emerge, you notice that some fall into quiet or excited discussion. Others expound from a pulpit of their own invention, while still others sit silently together. You find yourself poking your head into one enclave and then another; sometimes listening, at other times contributing and yet other times just being present.
Indeed, you experience the latter to be the most unfamiliar to you. Just as you realize the quiet comfort of that state, the ringing of a cell phone splits the air and some fools start using remote controls to flip through channels of the televisions lining the back wall, previously unnoticed. Below the televisions, computers boot themselves up by an invisible hand. The din becomes quite noxious amid the pollution emitted from digital screens, pagers and pulpit pounders.
You bear witness to small groups drawing closer to further isolate their circles of quiet inquiry and the meditators building walls of energy to provide separation. But you also notice increasing furrows of irritation on various brows and eyes glancing over shoulders. You somehow know they are being seduced by awaiting e-mail or the next reality series on television, frantic that they might miss some tasteless event, like yesterday’s soap opera. You know this because you find the same distractions yourself as your own critical internal dialogue kicks in — telling you how you’re wasting your time seeking a wider model of the world, what you should be doing instead and exactly how you should be doing it. Until finally you reach a crescendo where you feel buffeted back and forth between two polarities and scream in silent rage: where is sanctity?
Here in the Second Dwelling Place, your real trials are first introduced. You thought you had trials before, but that was the mundane world. The trials resident here are a battle for consciousness, undertaken with equal zest by what you conceive of as dualities. When you’ve stared with intensity at an image composed of opposing hues for a length of time and look away to another space, you will find the after-image still present, now superimposed upon where you else you direct your attention. Thus, it serves as an enticement to revisit the past, even though you want to focus on the desired target ahead.
As true, when you give in to enticement and look back, you still hold the after-image of the place of your desired concentration. You suffer through an unrelenting tension of what you qualify as opposites. As you are jerked and batted about, any gain on your attention being the prize, the stress creates static electricity that pops open a hidden panel inside the fireplace revealing a secret passageway — to the Third Dwelling Place. Even though the fire will graze you, you willingly dart into the darkness beyond, hoping to escape this madness. And you do — for a while.
The Third Dwelling Place
You realize you are descending rapidly as you follow a dank tunnel, until you begin ascending again. You come to the end of the passageway, but look up to see a circle of sky some dozens of feet above through an access hole. You climb the ladder appropriately provided and pop out into a small courtyard containing all manner of flowers, soft grass and a huge tree against which to rest your back. You realize that you have just come through a mock well, fittingly camouflaged. What a sweet relief to be in such a place soaking up some gifts of nature!
You breathe in the heady scent of blossoms, which transmit their smells directly to the limbic brain, accessing pleasing memories. Mesmerized, you fall headlong into a simpler time in childhood when you sank into warm grass, bees circled lazily looking for pollen, butterflies flitted around butterfly weed, and you watched the clouds travel by taking on one animal form and then morphing into another. As you access that time long past, you find you’re there once again.
Lying on the moist ground, gazing at the sky, becoming enveloped by the sounds and smells of nature, you begin to lose yourself. You become boundaryless and merge with everything and nothing at the same time. You have a long-forgotten experience of unity that leads you to remembrance. You know in this moment what is real and what is not; what is important and what is not; who you are and who you are not.
Because you ache from the recollection of your separateness — a perception — you vow to instill practices that will take you frequently to this place of merging. Because you are reminded of your true nature, you promise to spread your gifts. And due to your experience of timelessness, you affirm time in your current material reality.
In the same moment, you become critical of those who do none of these things. Or they do them “unsuccessfully.” Or they don’t do them according to the way you do them. You can direct ill thoughts equally toward yourself. And spiritual egoism is born even while you seek to be without ego or attachments.
Now, to test your commitment to the trek inward, you call tribulations upon yourself — a job loss here, a relationship soured there. Never mind others’ attachments. What about your own? Will you retreat? Will you hang on? Will you cry out with anguish?
Only rarely will you realize that the tests are of your own making, brought on by the niggling doubts in your mind reaching out to fulfill a match. Only if you realize that this is the case, will you be transported up into the clouds and then coughed out like so many raindrops — to the Fourth Dwelling Place.
The Fourth Dwelling Place
You land with a gentle thud. Your eyes pop open. Not being completely conscious for the trip, you don’t know quite how you got here. Get here you did though, and take in your sparse surroundings. You seem to be in an interior room. You sense it as a tower room of some sort, fairly removed with high ceilings.
But you have no evidence since there don’t seem to be any windows or doors. The walls are covered with heavy tapestries, absorbing any outside sound, and the floor is thickly carpeted. Discovering your feet to be bare, you bury your toes into the deep softness, feeling comforted in the silence. There are overstuffed pillows strewn on the floor and a few caftan-like robes folded neatly over a ladder-back chair. The chair sits in front of a scrubbed wooden desk; pen and paper await on its surface. A little distance away stands a set of bookshelves. There are a few books there but not many. More so, there are reminders from your everyday life — photos of family and friends, the cat’s toy, a phone number on a piece of paper, a small calendar with appointments scratched in the appropriate dates.
There are those reminders, but you find more attraction to the idea of donning a robe and sitting upright on a pillow. You follow the attraction. After you adjust your body, stretching the places that need loosening, you follow your breath to an interior space. But this time it’s different. There’s not quite the striving for quietude. Oh, the mind chatter is still there. But you only occasionally find yourself taken off on a rabbit trail by some stray thought. When it happens, you notice it and come back to the breath. There’s not at all the angst with which you sought this vicinity before. You have a kind of patient anticipation.
In this expectancy you find movement, with an ethereal quality that touches you in a way nothing ever has. A vision comes that is beyond anything you could imagine and a disembodied finger reaches out and anoints you with aromatic oil at the Third Eye. You feel its feathering touch even as the warm smell of sandalwood enters your nostrils. Even though you’re not sure of the meaning, you know it’s a transmission of some sort.
In this moment you have a profound learning — the difference between knowledge and experience. And you know that infused prayer, holding yourself from a space of intent, is the offering that takes you there. Your heart stirs and you literally feel a shimmering in the middle of your chest. This new sensation obliges you to raise yourself and walk to the desk, to sit down and to write. As you write of your experiences, you glance over at the reminders of your commonplace life and your heart swells even more for who you are and who travels with you. The penning of your encounters takes you deeper and deeper into an abode you previously didn’t even know existed — the Fifth Dwelling Place.
The Fifth Dwelling Place
It’s an abode of formlessness of a sort. If you look down, you have an occasional glimpse of your feet, hands or torso. Even though you know you exist in physical form, the need to hold onto that container is considerably lessened. You have a sense of its purpose now, as well as that of the words and imagery of your days, thoughts and feelings swirling around you. As with so many artifacts sitting on the altar of your unfolding, you can fondly cherish the return to which they have brought you.
Life is no longer a duality, but more like one of those pictures that tests you to determine if you see either the face or the urn in the same image. Here you encounter the ability to hold both in your awareness at once. From this point, it becomes an almost automatic transition — to the Sixth Dwelling Place.
The Sixth Dwelling Place
And you find yourself splashed like rich red wine into the pineal bowl of the Holy Grail. Swimming in this warming liquid, your palate acquires a taste for what is resident here and you become the willing betrothed awaiting the Divine marriage. The desire to merge is overwhelming even though you know that matrimony will take you into even greater trials.
Upon the eve of wedlock, you undergo opposition from others. Your previous confessors no longer understand you. You see your own humanity and experience aversion. Your fears intensify, telling you that you are following an imposter or that the True One will reject you after all. Suddenly you fall ill and the pain of it all is too much to bear.
But you are sent a mystical vision, a beckoning hand, and you have a joy beyond comprehension. Somehow, any trial no longer matters. These truths allow you to open your throat for the wine to drain down the Grail stem into the holding tank of its foundational heart — the Seventh Dwelling Place.
The Seventh Dwelling Place
You meet Sophia face to face in the innermost chamber of intent. Her love is bottomless — no mock well here. Her vastness is such that your neurology cannot fathom meaning, but you are informed beyond the cellular level. You find this transmission as natural as the very blood circulating in the veins of existence. You are the drop absorbed in the ocean of timelessness. The marriage ceremony is complete and you must now return to your daily life, the container of the body and the limitations of the mind.
But your path is now simply more meaningful, your body is expanded and your mind is stretched. Exaltations are now a calm state of affairs. You bubble back up to the Grail bowl to be poured out and assimilated with expectancy.
Convergence
We won’t find experience through the logical mind. We will find intellectual knowledge “about.” In the First Dwelling Place, we are still so buffeted by our own internal dialogue; we only get momentary silences that alert us to some other possibility. By the time we enter the Second Dwelling Place, we have a genuine hunger that often becomes ravenous. And the bookshelves are filled to overflowing with all the knowledge we don’t have. Many of us literally devour everything of any relevance we can grab, like so much bingeing through some gourmet buffet.
However, in the Fourth Dwelling Place, there are just a few books on a shelf and even fewer objects taking up space. This is because by the Third Dwelling Place, we’ve begun to have some direct experience; enough for us to discern what is real. In the Fourth Dwelling Place, it begins to become a way of life.
The more direct experience we’ve had, the less we need someone else to tell us how things are. We’ve become more and more apt to listen to the essence beyond tangibility. We’ve merged with it in such a way that we understand our own internal authority.
While I can’t speak to others’ process of immersion, I can relate what I witness of my own. There first comes an inner understanding of some core possibility of which I am very aware, but know little or nothing at all. My active embrace of the possibility creates a space, almost like a conduit. Highly kinesthetic, I can only describe the feeling as an inner wavering. But it’s not as though pulling away; it’s more like a wave that I can’t quite surf.
At that point, I usually begin to talk to others about whatever I am being schooled about in that moment. I do this even though I’m not yet able to consciously explain what I’m saying and even wonder why I’m saying it. The uncertainty comes because the logical mind hasn’t yet caught the wave. However, there’s something about expression that creates arising bubbles of truth that engages the everyday part of me, generating relaxation. When that happens, the sea becomes calm. The integration takes place. The immersion is complete.
When we choose to engage with text and dialogue in the Fourth through Seventh Dwelling Places, those are the seeds we use to grow our intelligence. Reading by then has become about spiritual practice, reinforcing alignment rather than filling the seams to bursting with things we thought we didn’t know. In these Places, we recognize that we already know at a certain level. We don’t even need to be reminded. The immersion remains steady.
So if you seek this place of no place — Teresa’s Seventh Dwelling Place, the Tao Te Ching’s Absolute Reality, the Jewish mystics’ Shekinah and what I can only call intent, you will finally be struck by a transmission. You are struck first from within as you offer yourself to something not even consciously known.
The need to send out a signal comes from the existential angst of disconnection, disorientation or discomfort you suffer outside the castle walls. Thus, the offering goes out. You’re readying yourself. And as you continue to hold yourself open, Sophia will come to permeate you. She will send to you what you ask in its purest sense, in the most perfect way, to exactly the places where you dwell, spurring you ever onward. You then cease to do so much as be and let your being shape your existence from within.
All events described in this book are true. Some of the names have been changed to protect the privacy of the people involved.
I will publish chapters every few days until complete. Find links in the Table of Contents below.
Table of Contents
Chapter Three: The Inner Point
Chapter Four: Intentful Existence
Chapter Five: Connecting With the Cosmos
Chapter Seven: The Space of No Need
Chapter Eight: Conflicts on the Path
Chapter Nine: The Edge of Limitation
Chapter Ten: Asking the Answer
Chapter Eleven: Living With Contrast
Chapter Thirteen: Unconditional Being
Standing Stark: The Willingness to Engage
Copyright 2004 by Carla Woody. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Inquiries may be directed to: Kenosis Press, P.O. Box 10441, Prescott, AZ 86304, [email protected].
