Reflections

28 December, 2013

Light in the Darkness   by Maggadhira

Almost seven months from the day Ayya Phalanyani declared this house a monastic dwelling!  At the time, my heart was parted, hurt, lost and totally disenchanted. I was escaping madness. I didn't know yet that even madness is a good ground for transformation when things are seen in the right perspective.

I sided with what I perceived as "right", blaming and condemning the opposite. I didn't know yet that in doing that I was parting myself, I was disconnecting from my own source of love, I was building walls between me and trust.

I pretended I was ok when in fact I was scared. No belonging anywhere, with all the roles stripped away, my teacher gone back to Thailand and total uncertainty about my future as a monastic, something deep in me was craving for identity, something was faced with the most horrible sense of impending death.

Fully embodying the victim archetype these past months had witnessed the movements of a mind that was relentlessly trying to make meaning so as to justify or hide the own needs, the monumental childish expectations, the extreme need for security, and most of all, the own hidden agendas. I needed to take responsibility of my own personal disaster! I needed to free myself not from other's madness but from my own.

Only then I could see the bigger picture. Only then I could touch the compassion in a heart that can hold opposites with the same love and with the same care. I allowed myself to hate, and I allowed myself to love. Ayya Phalanyani advised me: hold both as true and watch them, and I did.

 

I realised that hate and love, both, are the same trap; just two nouns born from the same root: "wanting"

Wanting was the maker, wanting the creator, but also wanting, the liberator! A paradox!

Here at Vimutti I am finding the most valuable treasure. I am finding the light hidden in the darkness.

 I feel that the world pulsating around me, with all its creatures, its dramas and its entanglements are just echoed reflections of virtual realities already gone, just as the radiance of already dead stars. They seem real, measurable, and yet, they are dust of the past... just dust...

The aggregates grasp at the dust and build stories with it, stories with people that want more people and more stories, and stories that perpetuate and multiply more wanting. And the wanting, consumed by its own fire forgets its real origin and identifies as an "I" in its own puppets.

May be when I see you I still see the remaining dust of the star I was once.