You don’t have to be afraid, nothing bad’s gonna
happen. When you start sitting down quietly and dissecting the “I”, the “Self”
or simply the “mind”, it’s like an onion... except for the tears. (If there are tears, they may be of joy.) The more you
peel it off, the smaller it gets… and it keeps going back and back, or in and
in. When we get to the heart of things, that’s when we have a real “heart-to-heart”
with ourselves, and discover what the “I” really is, if it is anything at all!
You see, depending on your basic makeup,
whether you live more in thought, or feeling, or body, your outer covering is
just a skin – a thought, a feeling or a bodily sensation. In the photo, you can
see this top left, and of course, these onions fresh from the market have been
dug up, washed, almost polished ready for sale. An onion still in the ground, or
fresh out of it, would be covered in dirt, mud or slime, depending on the soil and
the weather at the time it was plucked out.
So your outer layer is the first skin of the
onion, which some cooks even discard as being too hard and green! They want the
tenderer parts of the onion… Which of course are nicer. If you think you’re just
your passing thought, your fixated thought or “opinion” of yourself, or what
others say they think of you, you’re wrong. There are more layers to you than
that.
If you think you’re your feeling, another layer
inside, you’re also not right. And if you think you’re just your body – brainbox,
stomach, genitals or spleen – you still have lots of layers of the onion to
peel back, and see that you’re still “oniony” inside too, not just on the few outer
layers.
Top right you can see the onion cut in two,
faintly showing the number of layers, at least pertaining to this onion. Maybe
there are more or less “you’s” inside you!
Bottom left you can discern the layers better,
because the fingers have separated them in a process of going further in, like our
Awareness does when it starts to observe the supposed “I” and we become quiet
and simply look inside, searching for the heart.
Bottom right you can now see the tiny little
heart separated from the outer layers to get a better look at it. And it’s
tricky, because it keeps getting smaller and smaller, and yet this is the
nuclear section, the tiny part that was once a seed when it was first planted
in the soil…
So no, there is no reason to be afraid of
peeling back the onion of the mind, or the supposed personality, in search of
the tender heart. There are layers upon layers, each of its own size and shape…
And when the onion – let’s say unused by the cook – is overripe and begins to
fade, shrivel and decay… this starts with the outer skins and works its way inward…
until finally the heart is affected by the natural decaying process, or rot, or putrefaction, and it all falls back into the soil
to be recycled.
Will that happen to us, too? Or must we look
inward and search for the heart while it is still tender and capable of growing?
No comments:
Post a Comment