Artist: Melissa Shemanna
Title: Blue Star Prophecy
Medium: Oil on canvas
Contact: melissa@honeybeetemple.com.au
www.honeybeetemple.com.au
FEATURE ARTICLE
Clarity is Naked Awareness
Clarity isn’t something you acquire or gain, because it is already here.
Clarity isn’t something you construct, because it is formless.
Clarity isn’t an idea, although good ideas do arise from it.
Clarity is nowhere outside, but everywhere within.
Clarity is the sun behind the clouds; it is what is left when all the necessary clutter you carry with you at all times is gone. So you never have to worry about never finding clarity, because all you need to do to find it, is look within … with honesty of course. With pure honesty you identify your issues: the things that bug you in life that you are too scared to look at; the things that make you grumpy in the morning and anxious at night. All those things are the clouds that hide the sun within you, the clarity you have always had that you always thought was outside of you somewhere…
It’s OK if you choose to live in the clouds. But sitting pretty near the sun, being able to see everything from above, the majestic view of all creation without any obstacle in the way, that sounds pretty good too.
There is a price of course for finding clarity: the price is true happiness.
Can you afford it?
There’s more: clarity has no expiry date; it was, is and always will be in you, and will always be yours. It’s all more or less buried under all the clutter of unresolved issues you keep on accumulating. Just be aware that the longer you wait, the harder it is to find it, as you will have to dig deeper to find it, even though it is always ready for you.
You can meditate to find clarity, but also be aware that no amount of meditation will enable you to find it if you are not totally, absolutely honest with yourself. If you do not embrace those thoughts flying in and out of your mind, no matter how many Buddha statues you have around and how good your sitting posture is, it will be more difficult. If you do not absolutely surrender – not to the universe, but to YOU – clarity will keep on eluding you.
Watch out for illusions too. Sometimes you can convince yourself that you have found clarity, but all you have found is the uniform background noise of more clutter you are still sitting on; it’s just smaller stuff that bothers you less.
We have to go deeper and deeper within with absolute honesty, before even attempting to find clarity about others and about life itself; we need to find clarity about ourselves in ourselves.
And when we think we have gone deep enough, we need to realise that we are still barely swimming below the surface, and that we need to go deeper a hundred times more.
When you truly find clarity you are not sitting on anything, you are not holding onto anything. You simply look down and you see infinite emptiness; but you do not get dizzy, you are not falling, there is no such thing as ‘falling from grace’, when you have found clarity.
Imagine sitting in the middle of nowhere, and you can hear absolutely nothing at all, not a sound for hours and hours and hours; the silence is truly deafening, and you are totally by yourself. Well, clarity is like when there is as much of that kind of silence inside of you, as there is outside of you.
So be careful when you use the word Clarity, it’s not just a pretty word, true clarity is naked awareness.
Cyrille Lefevre. Certified Life Coach. Phone: 0417 019 887
REGULAR FEATURE
Siddha Story
Drum
Micah loved drums. His small apartment was a storehouse of percussion instruments, congas, bongos, even a small steel drum he had received from a Jamaican fellow in trade for a piece of jewellery. Micah would sit for hours and slap out rhythmic patterns on an old Indian tabla, sometimes singing the beats with a rapid jazz-talk before playing them on the taut skins.
He used to invite me to impromptu concerts with his friends. Everybody would get a drum and someone would start out hammering something or other, while the rest of us waited for just the right moment to leap into the improvisation. I marvelled at the fact that I knew when to jump in as well. I am no musician, yet the rhythm was so obvious and my duty so clear that I could effortlessly play along with the best of them.
“Drums are great teachers,” Micah would say.
“To you, everything is a great teacher,” I replied, smiling.
“Just so. Everything teaches what it knows. That is the duty of all living things, to teach what we know. The drum is a teacher of great mysteries. For the drum articulates the hidden rhythms of life.”
I looked at him without responding, knowing that he was warming up to a topic.
“Where do you think these rhythms come from? Do you think we just invent them? How do we know of beats and measures and timing and such? If rhythm were external to you, you would never get it. It is internal. Each thing has its rhythm, and that allows it to open up to the rhythms of all other things.”
Micah reached for a small bongo and tapped out a rapid, fiery beat. He tossed me another drum and had me imitate him. I couldn’t. Then he took up his drum again and motioned with his head for me to drum along in my own way. This I could do, and our improvisation found its integrity and soul.
“Precisely my point,” he said as I noted this fact aloud. “You cannot copy the beat of another and maintain its original integrity. But you can add to the rhythm with your own and create a greater integrity. Even in a symphony where the musicians are playing someone else’s score, if they do not make the score their own, they cannot play it well. They can imitate, but imitation is not true and it rings false every time.
“Each of us is like a drum, capable of many rhythms. All by itself the drum is mute; only in relation to others does it come alive. It has a great range of sounds and beats, but it always remains true to its nature. You cannot get a drum to sound like a violin.”
“But how do we find our range of rhythms? I asked. “How do we know whether we are remaining true to our nature?”
“You only know by experimenting. There is no knowledge without experience. You cannot say in advance, ‘this is me’ or ‘this is not’. You do, and then you learn. If the beat is clear and powerful then it is true. If it is strained and hesitant then it is false. When your beat is true, it blends in effortlessly with others who are themselves true. When it is not, it blends with nothing and creates only discord.
“But there is no way to know this beforehand. This is the risk of rhythm. To know the truth of who you are you must dare beat out loud the rhythm of your soul.”
Universal Storyteller