Judging from the comments that got on my previous post, I guess I need to give it more context. I’m not writing about Paul Bunyan, folks, but the Teacher.
I was thinking about how practical people (God love ‘em!) tend to warn how important it is to keep “both feet on the ground.” and not to have your “head in the clouds.” They have good points. Too often I really have had my head in the clouds and my feet weren’t on the ground.
But an enlightened person is “big” enough to have his or her head in the clouds and feet on the ground, and strong enough to blow the clouds away. Thomas Traherne (the 17th-century Anglican priest who has been wonderfully treated in some posts by Akilesh on Graceful Presence”, and by Trev on Diesel Musings) wrote:
It is less that I am in the world, than that the world is within me.
Size matters! The teacher knows that the Kingdom of heaven is within him, and all things are as well. He or she sees the spiritual reality, and knows the physical appearances to be only what they are. When this image came to my mind, I saw the BIG man as being like the angel in Rev. 10, who stands with one foot on sea, and one foot on land, and declares “there shall be no more time.” All potential already is. What will be manifested, though, is up to us in the manifest world. It’s like all the lines for all the scripts are already written. It’s up for us to awaken and choose the parts we will play. What will this world be like tomorrow? Will we stay unconscious, and react instinctively to protecting our belief systems and other mental fictions, or will we live as what we really are?
About six weeks ago, I had the opportunity to hear another teacher, Lono Ho’ala. Lono shared the horrific story of the unbearable pain that forced him to awaken. Lono the asked the group: how much pain do you think the world will need for our political, cultural, and religious leaders to awaken? To realize that God is love, and is everything? He urged us to wake up, before nuclear bombs explode over Tehran and New York. Only awakening beyond the reactive nature can spare us the holocaust we’re threatening ourselves with.
That’s putting it dramatically, but these are dramatic times, and the ego is endangering the world with its lust for drama. “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Get ready! Find a big person who can reach down, pick you up, and show you the clear sky.