the awakened eye - living the labyrinth

encounters with nondual awareness

living the labyrinth

getting to the heart of the matter

The Labyrinth is a familiar symbol. Its enigmatic presence has left footprints that fade back into the beginning of the human story. Its origins and its purpose have been rich fodder for speculation. I don't pretend to know the truth of its tale, but see it as apt visual shorthand for the map of a life, and that's how its symbolism is used here.

It seems to me that the many lanes of the Labyrinth are one long path that winds and twists and turns back on itself as it explores all the territory of a life before arriving at its Heart.

(By Heart I mean the utterly natural state of the 'walker' of the labyrinth – the 'original face', the self beyond the stories.)

This is how I see it: one enters – as an impersonal energetic continuum – the Labyrinth called Life again and again, time without end. The journey is always to the Heart, always into remembrance of what one actually is. The process is Life's exploration of the infinity of ways It can experience Itself as form and/or emptiness, and return to home base. (Which of course it never left!)

We are formed and lived by genetic and environmental factors. These are the ingredients that fuel the process. They are the what-is of this life. They will unfold us as we walk the Labyrinth, and like it or not, we will find Heart's song within them and nowhere else.

As a child, what was the activity that you could have done 'forever'? That brought joy and wonderment? That you leapt out of bed to get on with? The key to your path lies right there, in your answer.

The unique, one-off path unlocked by that response is juicy and wholesome. We rise in the morning eager to meet the day's work. We may or may not be successful in the eyes of the world, and it may or may not be a direct hit on the Heart of the Labyrinth, but we'll be conscious of at-one-ment with our via creativa – at least for a while.

If the juice dries up we can be sure a dead-end is looming; we must change course. But which way to go? We explore a dozen scenarios and possibilities, but remain confused.

The solution is simple, but the last thing we wish to hear: we must stop. Sit on a cushion. Breathe in and breathe out. Notice now. Touch this. Hear here. Return to Life. And wait.

Just wait. Waiting withers the ego's will. Waiting opens a chink in the armor of the supposed 'self' with its visions and versions of a glorious personal future.

Waiting welcomes Grace. But Grace isn't always sweetness and light. Grace is innocent and totally amoral. It does whatever it must do in the service of Heart/Life. Perhaps while you wait Grace will come and destroy your lofty cerebral ideals. Perhaps it will make you wait until your will has utterly withered and you think you want to die. Perhaps it will bring you a phone call, a visitor, a letter …

It will always be something unexpected and uninvited - these are its hallmarks. Something that will, if you are aware, point out the way. And it will be so obvious you'll wonder how you missed it.

Grace is commonly thought of as a state, but this isn't correct. It is a non-local phenomenon that acts in response to a decline in the activity of local (me-centered) mind. The state we call Grace is the happiness experienced when we are One with it. To be in a state to receive it, as J Krishnamurti suggested, is to be empty, open, and abiding without expectation. It cannot fail to respond.

The via creativa makes it evident that one step gives birth to the next, and the only exception to this is the apparent dead-end scenario above, when it's seemingly impossible to move. The trick is to keep one's instincts on the step under one's foot and not become over-or-under-whelmed by any imagined version of a 'big picture', a meaning or a purpose. This is hard, unless the waiting cushion has become a good friend. The next step is always forming underfoot – the only crippling leg trap is one's conditioning.

So really the Labyrinth and the via creativa are about de-conditioning.

No sweat, you say, let's get on with it!

It's good to have courage and confidence. It will be needed, because the insidious thing about conditioning is that one is largely unaware of it, and the most deeply hidden beliefs are very touchy about being scrutinized. Especially the one about being an in-dependent 'self' of some kind.

On the positive side, Life (aka Grace) is going to provide ample opportunity for all this to be explored without your shifting so much as a neuron. And meanwhile it will support you and nourish you – for if you are at this place in the Labyrinth, it is because Life put you there. Sorry - this will come as a great shock to the one who presumes to be running the show - fully in control and making all the choices.

But what about the times when one wanders into an alley where there's an apparent absence of support and nourishment? Where one's ideals propel one into exhaustion, or one's lethargy plonks one on the sidewalk? Where one is seduced by ideals or dreams or drugs or lovers?

Well, look at it this way: wherever you are, whatever you are experiencing, you're still on your via creativa. You're still transiting the Labyrinth. There's nowhere else you can be if you're alive, for the Labyrinth is just another word for your Life.

You're in the Labyrinth whether you like it or not, and the severity of your suffering will always be proportional to the insistence of Heart's call. The heat from the core flame at the Labyrinth's Heart is intense. The more pain, the more darkness, the more depression – the closer you are to Heart and Home. And as always, nothing 'you' can do will take you there. Life has its own agenda; a vast and incomprehensible intelligence is working. It will bring you Home.

But. Yes, there's a but. Only, only if every other desire you could possibly entertain has disappeared. For when that happens, 'you' disappear as well.

Home! Home and free! How did it happen?

(How could it ever happen when you never left home,
and have never been unfree?)

It feels like someone has just unshackled you, has awakened you from the sleep of ages.
Yet the shackles were only the claws of conditioning, and the sleep only the drug of indifference.
What happened?
No-thing.

The Labyrinth itself revealed the 'self'-shattering apperception that the entire game was, well – just a mind game. You saw this so completely it rearranged your brain and erased the story of your life.

Life took a spin around the Labyrinth and the 'you' you believed yourself to be was just its taxi.
En route you lost the baggage and the driver, but the taxi travels on.

Only now it's known
- known beyond knowing -
that Life's doing the driving.