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“We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows,” Robert Frost wrote, looking in from the outside.
Self is everywhere, shining forth from all beings, vaster than the vast, subtler than the most subtle, unreachable, yet nearer than breath, than heartbeat. Eye cannot see it, ear cannot hear it nor tongue utter it; only in deep absorption can the mind, grown pure and silent, merge with the formless truth. As soon as you find it, you are free; you have found yourself; you have solved the great riddle; your heart forever is at peace. Whole, you enter the Whole. Your personal self returns to its radiant, intimate, deathless source. Mundaka Upamshad
Most of what we call religious poetry is the poetry of longing: for God, for the mother’s face. But the poems in The Enlightened Heart are poems of fulfillment. They were written by the Secret, who has many aliases.
Looking out from the center, you can talk about the circumference. But really, there is no circumference. Everyone, everything, is joyfully included.
THE UPANISHADS (8TH?–5TH? CENTURY B.C.E) The Golden God, the Self, the immortal Swan leaves the small nest of the body, goes where He wants. He moves through the realm of dreams; makes numberless forms delights in sex; eats, drinks, laughs with His friends; frightens Himself with scenes of heart-chilling terror. But He is not attached to anything that He sees; and after He has wandered in the realms of dream and awakeness, has tasted pleasures and experienced good and evil, He returns to the blissful state from which He began. As a fish swims forward to one riverbank then the other, Self alternates between awakeness and dreaming.
As a man in sexual union with his beloved is unaware of anything outside or inside, so a man in union with Self knows nothing, wants nothing, has found his heart’s fulfillment and is free of sorrow.
Let me always feel you present, in every atom of my life. Let me keep surrendering my self until I am utterly transparent. Let my words be rooted in honesty and my thoughts be lost in your light, Unnamable God, my essence, my origin, my life-blood, my home.
May all selfishness disappear from me, and may you always shine from my heart.
The unnamable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things.
Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
AI Summary
The Enlightened Heart by Stephen Mitchell presents key insights from the Taoism tradition. The 10 passages above capture the essential teachings.
Core Themes:
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Key Passages: Highlights 1, 3, and 10 are particularly representative.
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