Shot by Giulia in Brighton, UK, 2016
Hi friends,
We have all woken up to a new reality this week.
We can be happy, grieving or all around indifferent but we are in this very moment called to bring our entire awareness on the mystery unfolding in front of our eyes.
In the inimitable, utterly unique manifestation of life that we each bring into the world, we are here called to recognize the collective consciousness that has brought us to where we stand; the wholeness expressing itself through each one of us, and our relationship to one another as the intrinsic movement that feeds it with life.
And as we walk through the mystery with the awareness that all relations in the universe affect and touch on the earthy representations of the whole, we now lead ourselves into the acceptance of its dualistic implications. The split, and the division, can only manifest as part of the nondual paradigm – it is enabled to manifest within it.
“Individuality is only possible if it unfolds from wholeness” – D. Bohm
We come to SAND to inquire into and embody the mystery, exploring the personal and collective. How can we bring our journeys of exploration in the field of social transformation – not only through the mind but at the level of being?
How can we stay into the mystery, moving within and across it, one and all at once, knowing that I am That?
How do we transfer this understanding into practice?
At a personal, intimate level, we may choose to walk through it by cultivating acceptance of its paradoxical yet reconciling nature, open up to our deeper vulnerability, and to the transformation that the process brings with it.
We may feel powerless at this time, and disillusioned, but it is this vulnerability itself that becomes a portal for us to enter the new reality without holding onto the constructs that we already know of. We are invited to step into the unknown at our most essential level of being.
And on the collective level, it is perhaps time to facilitate the letting go of the current constructed image of power and leadership, being ourselves the hosts and makers of such projections.
Leading, simultaneously, to the inner leader residing in each of us, the one that can achieve all at the level of being and so little at the level of thought. It’s life, and the mystery, that are asking us to become leaders in our families, in our communities, in our network of relationships. We are to embrace the servant leader in each of us. Only exponentially this can seed and sprout.
“Thought is a system. That system not only includes thought and feelings, but it includes the state of the body; it includes the whole of society – as thought is passing back and forth between people in a process by which thought evolved from ancient times” – D. Bohm
Again, how do we hold this personally and collectively?
This is the time to acknowledge that the “I” and the “we” can only coexist in the mystery, and the story of separation we are witnessing is here to expose us all to its more fundamental nature. We are actors in the story of separations, and we need to wait no more to step down our marble pedestals from which we are projecting the very division.
The “I” and the “we” are to be harmonized, in the acceptance of the dual nature of this living paradox, harmonized throughout our actions, wholeheartedly.
A little extract from Huxley’s ‘Island’ is shared here with you, on the
Yoga of the Jungle…
“And suddenly you’re in the forest, and another kind of yoga is called for—the yoga of the jungle, the yoga that consists of being totally aware of life at the near-point, jungle life in all its exuberance and its rotting, crawling squalor, all its melodramatic ambivalence of orchids and centipedes, of leeches and sunbirds, of the drinkers of nectar and the drinkers of blood. Life bringing order out of chaos and ugliness, life performing its miracles of birth and growth, but performing them, it seems, for no other purpose than to destroy itself. Beauty and horror, beauty,” he repeated, “and horror. And then suddenly, as you come down from one of your expeditions in the mountains, suddenly you know that there’s a reconciliation. And not merely a reconciliation. A fusion, an identity. Beauty made one with horror in the yoga of the jungle. Life reconciled with the perpetual imminence of death in the yoga of danger. Emptiness identified with selfhood in the Sabbath yoga of the summit.”
