“When you see through the eyes of the soul, life becomes a richly sensual experience and an extraordinarily exquisite dream...Dance when you are broken. Dance if you have torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you are perfectly free.” Rumi.
I love everything Rumi. But the reason why I quote the above is because of the first part of the first sentence; “When you see through the eyes of the soul…..” To me, a lot of life’s work is about the struggle to shed the outer shell, the form, the ego, and arrive at a place where we see only from the ‘eyes of the soul.’
It is our carefully constructed ‘personality’, and our perception of who we are and how we define ourselves through our outward allegiances and alliances that keep us distracted from an inner universal spirit. These outer shells and layers are what make us less than we are capable of being. Our make up is our break up. And it is our own undoing.
We create our own prisons. The people we attract- friends and companions, the events that unfold in our lives, our marriages, divorces, our affiliations; everything is designed to learn from, but not to keep dwelling on. I believe the desire to be with one’s own stillness and look from the eyes of the soul (and not the ego) exists within each one of us. And it waits for us to break our behavioral constructs so that it may be allowed its nascence.
And we begin to realize how everything that surrounds us, that we have gathered and carefully selected to define ourselves is taking the shape of shackles. Hand-cuffs we have lovingly wrought with misery and misconceptions of ourselves. So that we may safely stay imprisoned in the business of complaining and fighting our shallow selves and thereby keep feeding the bottom less ego. A cycle perpetuated by ignorance and fed with blindness. All this so we can stay safe in the familiar misery as opposed to drawing on the courage within to ‘break on through to the other side’ as Jim Morrison sang so powerfully; to where the unfamiliar resides. The only side where Truth exists, the rest then seems all noise.
Photogaph credit: Alexandru 1988
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walla It is a sensitive portrayal of the human condition and our yearning to realize our true selves against the daily onslaught of change and its self-contradicting demands on us to conform. After all, how can one conform to change?
Perhaps the way out of the dilemma is to balance our need for free spirit with a certain set of personal convictions which will add restraint embedded with good values so that the dilemma residues to what one holds to be good values.
By themselves, values that one considers good one has to defend time and again. Just like washing your car to a crystalline sheen despite the dust and rain, it takes effort.
Effort comes from willing the spirit to care. Will denotes self-discipline so that freedom must come with self-discipline if one wants to be able to care continuously just like a smart and clean car evocative of mobility and freedom of spirit will attract easy admiration.
Others may have their own axioms on self-discipline. Mine as taught to me are, for this (changing) moment (;P):
- lead a pure life, and
- the moment will pass.