CULTIVATING ALCHEMICAL WAY OF BEING

"Tear down this house. [You are the treasure] buried beneath it, and the only way to get to that is to do the work of demolishing and then digging under the foundations. This is a rented house. You don't own the deed. You have a lease, and you've set up a little shop, where you barely make a living sewing patches on torn clothing. Yet only a few feet underneath is [the treasure]. Quick! Take the pickaxe and pry the foundation. You've got to quit this seamstress work." - Rumi

Identity is a structure [house] made of what we identify with.

The seamstress work is our mental activity to try to sew together a small-self made of thoughts.

How precarious, how fragile, how insecure, how futile it is to try to find safety and security in a house made of thoughts (which according to both ancient tantric teachings and modern neurobiology are nothing more than short explosions of energy). And yet we all do it.

No wonder so many people feel tired and insecure! Trying to live in a house made of electrical explosions.

The pickaxe represents whatever does attention-work.

The treasure is your own eternal radiance.

Inner work is not all ecstatic surrender. Rumi says pray for a tough teacher.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern." 

― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

"Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity."
― Pema Chödrön

"Don't look for God," the Master said. "Just look, and all will be revealed."

"But how is one to look?"

"Each time you look at anything, see only what is there and nothing else."

The disciples were bewildered, so the Master made it simpler: "For instance: when you look at the moon, see the moon and nothing else."

"What else could one see except the moon when one looks at the moon?"

"A hungry person could see a ball of cheese. A lover, the face of his beloved.

- Anthony de Mello (1931 - 1987)

You only have to let the soft animal of your body,
love what it loves.
~Mary Oliver