What Is Being Looked At Is What Is Looking (Assisi-Frank)

(mid- to late-'80s)
Heart of human being accomodates all longing
and all deviations from longing.
Put aside the literature of ages,
go and feel the pulsation of the heart
transcending all ages
transcending all places
spanning vast ranges of the sane and the grotesque.

Every self is born believing,
every belief a longing to know the Self.
I have tasted a mother's salty tears
watching her child being dragged to the auction block,
herself led helplessly away to be probed and raped.
And the man clutching gut and groin
from kicks administered by smiling guards
watched his wife and oft-held children ushered into
the extermination wagon
while his mother entered a barracks with a crude and leering officer –
I was that man
long ago shattered and alone.

For all this human heart has travailed
yet this mind is free;
like the unnamed unheard-of sisters of faith
who braved every terror and abuse to succor the will-broken
children in the maelstrom,
for the sake of the love they carried in their own wounded bodies.

I have been shown in dream "the balm to heal the suffering masses"...




The Names of God will clear of all fantasy
that mind which seeks refuge in the stillness of the Self
residing in all;
residing even in that one holding the whip and the goad,
even the pimp and the cocaine boss,
the magistrate and the power-broker,
the drinking wife-masher or the barb-tongued wife,
the abuse offender and those in positions who give him cover,
yes, even the landlord,
evenso the child in my arms, as they all once were, reflecting

my Original Innocence.

Free of lust – through hard work;
free of greed and of anger – through hard work;
free of all rambling judgement idiocy by dull self-conscious mind;
free of religious arrogance and the effort of manipulation –
through hard work and through
Surrender's grace-bestowing power.

The heart which harbors layered knots of pain, horror, cheapened existence,
and the heart which holds to childish naive optimism –
both house the Self without even knowing it.
The heart which cares for neither pleasure nor pain
just sings the Beloved Name
is the very temple of that Self.

 
There is no dignity like Original Innocence,
no persuasion so subtle, so sovereign,
no generosity so free, genuine, fair.
One who's found it has a clear and forgiving mind,
a mind which can span the ages
and touch hearts in all times in all worlds –
and clean up any life which has just enough glimmer left
to remember what it once knew.

Practice is remembrance.
Kindness is remembrance.
Sincerity and integrity are remembrance,
all this is certain.
Original Innocence is reborn by turning;
this turning is begun and completed
through an act of surrender.
And with us the Guru has left this Principle for all time.

Original Innocence

To assert a dogma of original sin is to deny our Divine birthright and heritage and foment endless generations of self-loathing which will condemn one to constantly either grovel at the feet or to lunge at the throat of the "Other" of our misinformed duality. To awaken to our original innocence – neither angel nor demon, but human – is to perceive anew what is old from the Beginning, through lovingkindness, through compassion, through sovereign empathy.

Innocence here isn't childish but childlike, not naive but open. It's giving and receiving both, willingly, it is without the cumbersome overlay of ego – either in communication or in act. Right, innocence in this is both receptive and active: and it is original and it is sovereign. It doesn't refer to being good or nice or better, as these are determined by ego – it refers to being in the original state, and therefore without agenda and demands on others. Neither hostage to one's own emotions nor to those of others, one allows oneself to be influenced or guided and moved rather by discriminating wisdom, or even by crazy wisdom.

In original innocence is no aggression and no fear, plenty breathing room to grow, to develop, to create, to evaluate and accept or discard, to trust and to build what is beautiful.

 It is an aspect of Love, it is in Buddhist jargon: one's basic nature.