A COMMUNITY OF THE SPIRIT

There is a community of the spirit.
Join it, and feel the delight
of walking in the noisy street,
and *being* the noise.

Drink *all* your passion, 
and be a disgrace.

Close both eyes
to see with the other eye.

Open your hands,
if you want to be held.

Sit down in this circle.

Quit acting like a wolf, and feel
the shepherd's love filling you.

At night, your beloved wanders.
Don't accept consolations.

Close your mouth against food.
Taste the lover's mouth in yours.

You moan, "She left me." "He left me."
Twenty more will come.

Be empty of worrying.
Think of who created thought!

Why do you stay in prison 
when the door is so wide open?

Move outside the tangle of fear-thinking.
Live in silence.

Flow down and down in always 
widening rings of being.

--------------------------

i love this state of being.  it's inner and outer silence, but out of that
comes a sound and a music that is so powerful and loud that it's hard to
believe that you had never heard it before.  What also strikes me is why was i
being so loud and listening to my own wretched noise when i could have been
listening to something so beautiful all along.  but then i forget and i get
caught up in things again. and that leaves me back to where i was before.  i'm
listening to my moaning and my fear and my hell.  it's not a crushing weight or
an impossible thing to move.  all it takes is a step to the right and then it
all clicks into place.

it's ironic to me that the only way to talk about how to get to this is to say
live in silence.  it's right, but it's not true.  or...it is true but it isn't
literal.  training myself into silence brings in a whole new realm of existence
and beauty that i hadn't been open to before.

this is ecstacy to me.  it's something that i find in myself, but it has to do
with experiencing the world.  i find so much beauty in those around me.  i can
do this with james.  i can see how our love expands until the context for love
reaches such a vast thing that it shatters my mind and breaks my heart and i am
washed over in so many feelings, experiences, knowings....it's sweet pain. 
it's blissful rending.  but it doesn't stop there.  i see how we are archetypal
of life and love everywhere and how our love touches every place in the owrld
and shapes it.  and i see how the world shapes and changes us.  but then i see
how loves changes in the world and in every human being.  then it expands into
all life.  then it goes on to something that i can't describe and can only
know.  but even that gets larger and more incomprehensible.  it's like thinking
with a part of my mind that is outside my head.  it's a larger mind.  when i'm
thinking with my current mind, none of it makes sense.

ideally a sangha can do this.  ideally a soulmate relaitonship can do this. 
ideally a saint loving and experiencing the world can do this.  this is Real
consciousness to me.  it's also the key to compassion and larger love for me. 
the path to get there is becoming open and silent.  then ecstacy happens and it
all unfolds in front of me.  and then a more intense and beautiful life becomes
revealed.



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	 Late, by myself, in the boat of myself
	 no light and no land anywhere,
	 cloudcover thick.  I try to stay
	 just above the surfac, yet I'm already under
	 and living within the ocean.
 	 ............................................
	 The Friend comes into my body
	 looking for the center, unable
	 to find it, draws a blad,
	 strikes anywhere.
	 .............................................
	 There is a way between voice and presence
	 where information flows
                                             
	 In disciplined silence it opens.
	 With wandering talk it closes.
	
	 --Rumi
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