Monthly archive

2. Discovering the Footprints


 
Along the riverbank under the trees, I discover footprints!
Even under the fragrant grass I see prints.
Deep in remote mountains they are found.
These traces no more can be hidden than one's nose, looking heavenward.
 
What is a footprint?
A proof of presence.
Someone or something was Here.
Was here, or is here?
When we encounter footprints, is it absence we are sensing? Isn’t it simply convention to use the past tense for an experience of Is-ness in the present?
 
On the spiritual path, we encounter many footprints. There is ample evidence of the presence of Presence. Many who made the journey left us with reminiscences, reviews, rhymes and writings of what it is to be en-lightened. Encountering such footprints can evoke resonance. A snatch of poetry, a conversation with a Guide, a passage from the sayings of a saint, a haunting melody awaken a vibration of Self-awareness. The veil drops. Seeker and sought meld in a harmonic of joyous recognition. These sparkling moments of clarity are evidence that we are Here. They are proof of my Presence, albeit not in the way the personal possessive is normally used!
 
However, conditioning’s narrative reclassifies this direct experience of Being Consciousness Bliss as an effect, as a consequence, as a by-product, the result of the external input—the poem, the saying, the Guide, the form (footprint)—rather than Presence.  Falling for this shift in attribution, we are once more relegated to seeking; pursuing this feeling of radiant completeness, we search for footprints. What other objects, forms, people, places and experiences can deliver this sense of One-ness?
 
To seek mirrors that recall us to Buddha Nature seems essential at all stages of the spiritual journey. After all, we are so habituated to tune into the frequency of dissonance, to a continuous broadcast of a negation of “What Is,” that it’s just intelligent to surround oneself with mirrors that calibrate receptors to our natural frequency of vibration. And if the mirrors we find are high fidelity, do they not redirect the gaze to the source of all experience? As the attention turns “inwards,” so those footprints tell us, there is a growing ability to rely less and less on an “external” source to produce resonance. Direct awareness replaces a reflected sense of identity.
 
So let’s continue to cultivate an intense listening, to practice receptivity to Grace, to take every opportunity to delight in resonance with Presence. Let’s register every encounter with a footprint as a moment of conscious awareness, of being a vibration of the heartbeat of All That Is. Perhaps then we will arrive at the realization that in being present to Presence, we, too, are footprints in the sands of space-time.
 
A  footprint:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
— T.S. Eliot, from Four Quartets
 
Gasshō
ashwini
 
A note of application:
If “my” experience is an absence of footprints, no evidence anywhere “out there” of Presence, then what we can know is that no one is HERE. The movement to finding footprints everywhere is to direct attention to being present to Presence. Then we have the experience described in the Guide’s current favorite quote: I am not; the apparent universe is My Self.