PATIENCE - THEME OF WEEK 50 - 2017
In the coming week no 50, my Instagram posts will reflect on Patience. I do the reflections through quotes and captions, linked to illustrative images. Feel free to follow me on https://www.instagram.com/mostadjon/.
Am I entitled to write about patience?
Patience is a beautiful word. I can sit for a long time listening to what the word tells me, hears almost nothing and at the same time get a deep meaning. If I'm the one to write about patience, I do not know, but I try for the best of my ability.
When we are patient, what are we then?
The patient one operates out of time, and has emptiness as form. Time is a size our best philosophers try to understand. A demanding exercise. If we could understand "time", we would have had a starting point for understanding patience. Usually we understand time as a straight line. Time also behaves like a circle in an old-fashioned clock. Time probably has countless forms. Most of all, time makes room for me. The idea that the Universe is one big bubble of time, where I`m floating around, fascinates me. If I think that I equip myself with fins, I can swim in the space and take my positions in time, as I want. The idea that I can place myself in time gives me boundless opportunities to explore my life. Is it so that the patient , in addition to lifting time as a line, has discovered the form of emptiness? What is then discovered? Here, the old Taoist masters give me great help. Look at these words:
A perfect swimmer becomes part of the river; he is a wave in the river. How can the river destroy the wave?
When you become the river, you have obtained emptiness as form.
I want to understand patience and the first key is emptiness. What am I when I am emptiness? I have listened to many explanations and teachings. So far no one has been sustainable. Therefore, the search has continued. I consider the river. It flows, dances, jumps and moves with the power of itself. The river knows what it means to be river. No one has told how. It just knows. The river also knows that it will be united with other rivers and become a larger river. Finally, it will rest in the water of all rivers. Then I see the valley. It holds "all water" because it is form. It can be shaped in a U or it can be shaped in a V. If you ask the valley if it's a U or a V, it will look strange at you. «Do you ask me if I am an U or a V?" - the valley will say - "I did not even know I was a valley." The valley is only its shape and as a valley it holds what fills in. No questions asked, no answer required. The valley is emptiness as a form and does what it takes, as its shape.
When the key to patience seems to goes through emptiness as a form, where do I find my own emptiness?
Slowly, slowly the understanding came to me. Emptyness is a modality in my physical body. Emptyness is an optional form. My body has an inner cellular intelligence and it can manifest the absence of expectations. This is how I experience my own body. There is a "place" in my body where cells and neurons in a interaction I obviously do not understand, get in touch with the "perfect swimmer" and become the river. Where do I find this point in my body that disables action through force and activates action through source?
I've been in search for many years. At last, one of my masters wondered if I wanted to «learn to breathe»? I responded intuitively to YES. Practices that followed taught me to focus breathe into the centres of my body's wounds. I realized how Prana solved the "impatience" of pain. Then the trees came to me. From the trees, I learned that we do not grow by lifting our selfes from the root. The trees do not use power to travel their height and fill. The trees taught me that we grow from the outermost edge of our outer leaves, where we meet the sun. The tree grows through patience and trust in interaction with the sun as the protective adult. Emptiness as form is motion, while not moving.
Emptiness holds nothing, but accomodates everything. Emptyness moves nothing, but is all movement.
Today, patience is a room in my mind where the power to act from emptiness as a form, opens the space between my thoughts and allows me to meet consciousness in its pure form. Here I am no projections, free from desires and requirements of the environment. Like a good adult who lets the child tie his shoes, even unaffected by bus times, I swim in the time-space and become more and more the room of patience, myself.
Jon
