While looking at what I’d like to write for this issue of “From the Guide,” I thought about the word curious, a quality often missing from adult, conditioned humans. Often, I think I know what a word means, but then I look it up to confirm my understanding and find I don’t know what it means. (A process that has broad application in my life!)
Curious: Eager to know or learn something.
I looked up eager, and rather than being the excited, enthusiastic state I thought, eager is defined as “wanting to do or have something very much.” This lacks the “disinterested” quality I was seeing and also has a grasping feel. So I looked up a synonym of curious, intrigued, which brought me to interested. Okay, let’s try that.
Interested: Showing curiosity or concern.
Well, that’s interesting (!). Curious comes from the Latin care. Care, concern, wanting very much to do or have something, eager to know or learn something....
Hmm. Maybe curious isn’t the word I want at all. Maybe the dictionary isn’t my best resource here. Perhaps presence is the word I need. (We certainly can’t go to the dictionary for that one!) The presence that produces the state I’ve been calling curious would have a definition along the lines of “not interpreted or explained by conditioned mind.”
In that state formerly known as curious, I don’t want to know. I don’t want to grasp or understand. I want to be with, to see, to feel, to be changed by, to sense what “I” am by sensing what “it” is, to be moved by, opened by, to realize the oneness of all Life through.
Perhaps, we can still use curious as a code word for our commitment to the experience of presence William Blake gave us:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
In Gassho,
Cheri