Strange Teaching by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
Sometimes when I forget to think
I feel in me eternity, feel big bang
and black hole and spiralling galaxy.
Feel myself as arc of swallow,
bend of river, canyon depth,
feel myself as wind, as branch,
as scent of evergreen,
as slowly spinning earth.
In those moments,
I feel the everything I am
and the everything I’m not—
a self so whole it is lost.
No me, no you, no other,
no here, no there, no when,
no need to name, no need
to understand, no need
to state things just so.
The quietest of teachings:
the erasing of the one
who wants to know.
Speaking in Varanasi in 1962 Krishnamurti said: ‘Why do we ask a question? Is it to find an answer? I can tell you the answer – which is an explanation. But does an explanation really answer the problem?’ … He went on to say ‘Now, when we do question, we are looking for an answer which will be generally satisfactory according to our conditioning. You follow? Therefore, such questioning is really immature. But you have to ask a question and not seek an answer because the answer will invariably be according to your conditioning; and to break down the conditioning, you must ask without seeking an answer.’
And Meister Eckhart wrote: For you to know God in God’s way, your knowing must become a pure unknowing, and a forgetting of yourself and all creatures. It is a radical return to bare being and simple presence: to here and now.
I see it this way – you must let go of your attachment, your clinging to the egoic self that demands to ‘know’ intellectually what can only be known through the heart.
Meditation awakens the heart to experiential knowing – by letting go of all doing and simply being in the present moment. It is the mind that creates the abyss, but only the heart can cross it. In the words of John Main: ‘We have to learn to be content to say our mantra. Forget about all notions of progress, forget about enlightenment, forget about insight, forget about yourself and say your mantra.’
