I wish I could be there with the Sunday River in Newry, Maine until I was ready to be somewhere else. What this image means to me is peace, silence, quiet, solitude, etc. All of which I take to be the solid gold foundation and the essential necessities of life. But. For the most part our lives, our life, consists of noise, complexity, distractions, complications, disruptions… I don’t know how we do it.
I do not remember it happening, or when it happened, or how it happened but. Tao, Psyche, Intuition came to live with me as essential factors to be taken into account, noticed, felt, experienced, embraced, welcomed, perceived, comprehended, understood, etc. as That Which We Cannot Live Without. They are as essential as air and water. And it is our place to know that, realize that, and live with them front and center in our lives.
When did I start writing about them? It has a recent feel about it, as though it were only yesterday. And this image of the Sunday River and the Artist’s Bridge in Newry, Maine would be a good symbol reminding us of their place in our lives. We cannot hope to live well without them, front and center, in our lives. What do we do to give them that place and bestow upon the the devotion the place of the sacred deserves in our lives. For they are sacred. Beyond theology! Without theology! With nothing but experience–the lived experience of the day-to-day to ground and center them in the place of highest honor and devotion in our life day-to-day.
We could start with noticing our intuition at work in our life. Intuition is the most readily available experience of the three (The REAL Holy Trinity!). And is, to my way of thinking the source of all of our imagining about God, the Father, Son and Holy Ghost–All of that came to be out of our early forebearer’s experience with their Intuition. Inner experience is founded upon emptiness, stillness, silence–and that is all there was in the early days, in the earliest days. Ample time to be aware of and in relationship with Intuition and its wonders. And those wonders became stories, became ritual, became religion, as “we” projected our inner experiences outward into the vast imagined world of invisible beings, gods and ghosts and all of the invisible world that we created to comfort and terrify ourselves over the course of history from then to now. It only was Intuition at work in our life.
And Intuition is the interface between ourselves and Psyche. Psyche is the foundational knower/doer/be-er of life. Psyche IS Life. IS the Life Force of every living thing throughout the Cosmos. Connecting all of life. Overseeing all of life. Tending all of life. The vital source and foundation of life. And she has a central role to play in all of life. The more we are able to move our connection to, relationship with, Psyche from Unconscious to Conscious through our interaction with Intuition, the more aware we can be of the place of Psyche in our life, the more fully we can be aligned with, directed by the Intuitive/Psychic connection, the more satisfying and fulfilled, joyful and delightful our experience of life will be.
Which leaves Tao as the flow of time, circumstances, events, experiences, etc. through both physical (material) and spiritual (invisible) strata of existence and experience. When Stella got her grove back, she got back in alignment with Tao. To live at one with, in synch with, in tune with the Tao is to be at “the sweet spot” of life and being, and everything is humming along, on schedule and in balance, harmony and rhythm with the timing and the patterns of the Cosmos. When the Force was with Luke Skywalker, the Tao was strong in him, with him through out time and space, physically and spiritually, visibly and invisibly. We cannot talk about it, define it, explain it, but we can know it, and not know it, and be lost without it. The old Taoist of The Rainmaker is a metaphor for Tao, as is this illustration: A Zen master was walking with a student when they came to a bridge. The student ask the master, “What is Zen?” Whereupon the Master pushed him off the bridge into the water below, saying, “That is water! Wade in it, swim in it, bathe in it, drink it or drown! But DO NOT TALK ABOUT WATER! To talk about water is to not-know water! To talk about Zen is to not-know Zen. To talk about Tao is to not-know Tao. To know when we are in the flow, in the balance, harmony and rhythm of the Tao is to know as much of the Tao as we will ever know. To know how to be in the flow of Tao is not to be told how to know. It is to know without knowing how or what we know. The experience is its own teacher. And we live to know what we can know of Tao, Psyche, Intuition–and our life will be better for knowing, and it will be worse for not-knowing. And that is all that can be said about that.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 