Day 16: Ordinary

Day 16

Umbrella, light, landscape, sky-

There is no language of the holy.

The sacred lies in the ordinary.

-Deng Ming-Dao

Once you stop personalizing your "God" and following the doctrines and dogma of religion, only then you begin your freedom toward the truth and away from the conceptualization of "God" and "Heaven". In most religions the teaching is all metaphor, anyway. It's not about what you're reading, but reading between the lines and acknowledging the symbolic aspects of the teachings.

Jesus is quoted as teaching, "Heaven is here upon the earth, but man does not see it." What he's describing is life without identifying the divinity of self and your connection to all things. Hell is here upon the earth, too and it's exactly the same thing but the opposite. Both exist in a dualilty mode whenever you want to tap into them. The difficulty is practicing being in balance with neither and both simultaneoulsy. Then you learn to flow with moments as they come. I know, it's just so difficult, but that is what spiritual practice is - some days you get the teachings and it's crystal clear, other days not so much.

Walking in the path of least resistance seems to be the best mode to attain such a space/place. It is here that one can begin to understand what William Blake was communicating when her wrote,  "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 through narrow chinks of his cavern."

Deng Ming-Doa writes, "If you constantly regard Tao as extraordinary, then it remains unknown and outside yourself - a myth, a fantasy, an unnameable quantity. But once you know it, it is yours and part of you daily life."

I find that with each passing day the meditations presented in 365 Tao are supporting my journey in seeing the ordinary as spiritual and the spiritual as ordinary. It took me a very long time to get to this simple point of spirituality and insight, considering not all that long ago (4 years ago) I was about to start the process of  100,000 prostrations for the sake of Tibetan Buddhism. Whew! That was a close one. I saw pilgrims doing this practice in Tibet with knee pads and mittens - very committed to their religion while the Chinese soilders stood with guns 10 feet away or pushed through the crowd and practically walked on them. But that's the way it is.

I know that seeking the sacred comes with stopping the search the the extraordinary and just walking in it and through it, allowing it to be and not you straining yourself to fit into a mold of some doctrine/dogma. Tibetan Buddhism - you read and you practice, you chant, you prostrate and some how you get more attached to the teachings, which you're not suppose to do, but it's very human to do so. In the end I just knew it wasnt' right for me. So, here I am at Taoism and it seems to me this has always been more of my innate sense of "spirit", afterall. As simple as a sunset.

Ordinary -

brook flows

 moss grows

wind blows.

-Demor