Quote from A Flower in the Desert

A Flower in the Desert: Images from the Headless Way

David Lang

Non-Duality Press, Salisbury, United Kingdom, 2012. 130 pages.

I get angry sometimes. SO angry. The feeling ignites and flares across the space as if it were gasoline vapor sparked. In the heat I speak or shout without constraint, and someone as well as I gets hurt.

At other times I am reserved and speak quietly or do not speak at all. I used to think reason and balance were my guides, but beneath these surfaces, burned away by the insistent heat, I have come to see fear, and resentment, and meanness, and mistrust making their home in me like demons worming their way onto my heart

I know all this, or think I do, and yet nothing changes. Thirty years in the desert has not reformed my character. Thus doubt about this seeing enters my heart, also. Is the headless way only a perceptual reconnaissance of what is much deeper than the perceptual? Have I stopped short at the evidence of the senses? Sure, I have explored the emptiness extending without extension to infinity. Sure, I have moved in stillness, and in eternity stood still, gazing at the One. And, sure, I have observed here in this absence of a head capacity enough and more for the universe to flower in. But do I have room enough for another person? Can this way teach my heart to love and be compassionate and kind? Why, after such dedication, do these qualities find so little space in me to grow as I hike this hard journey so straight down the empirical path to zero?

Quote submitted by Oriana Kahn Hurwit

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