The Mirror Wisdom

I'm getting together a half dozen or so verses -- I hesitate to call them poems -- that I've written through the years with the intention to publish them as a Kindle booklet in the near future. It's something that may or may not happen -- like all things in the future.  In any case, each little verse would be published with a commentary, which I call a "Contemplation". One of these verses is the one that appears under the title of this blog and which I first published in a meditation manual entitled Breath-centered Consciousness: The Way of Equanimity (Booksurge 2008). [2018 NOTE: It's also published to my Medium.com page under the title: The Way of Silence. Here it is properly formatted and followed by the Contemplation related to it.

No longer seeking to know the truth

nor trying to understand with words,

I only sit

and listen to the sounds of wind in the trees

and watch the shadows of the evening

lengthen into night.

CONTEMPLATION

The truth as something expressed in words is a static unchanging thing. But the truth as a synonym of reality is a dynamic process. And yet there is also in reality a sense of something that does not change. It’s like a mirror. The reflections in the mirror continually change. But the mirror itself does not. Now imagine the mirror is not a physical artifact that exists in the same way as the things it reflects. Imagine the mirror is instead an invisible, intangible capacity or power to reflect things. Now ask yourself: does the mirror change or does it not? Apart from the reflections, the mirror is for all practical purposes not there. But to identify the unchanging capacity with the fleeting ever-changing reflections would be wrong. The Diamond Sutra says, “truth is uncontainable and inexpressible. It neither is nor is it not.” (A. F. Price translation, ch. 7).