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Clouds – Rain

August 2, 2018 General Insights No Comments

An ‘unsui’ (*) was, in ancient Japan, a kind of monk moving around lifelong from monastery to monastery. Time and again he was fully present in the here and now. And time and time again he was ready to depart ‘here and now’.

Not that he was running away from all these places. On the contrary, he rather ran ‘towards something’, or ‘with something’. Where to or whereby?

Maybe you can call it ‘the path’ (Dao), the road as one’s only home. Being on the road.

Probably with the same feeling as someone who actually is on a pilgrimage: not the end is the goal, but the path towards it. The goal is every step you take. A meditative walking.

Nice idea: accompanied with some AURELIS, a multi-day walk through nature around Assisi. Wandering from farm to convent, to any place where we can spend the night… with all the overwhelming beauty of simplicity and with full surrender to that simplicity.

😊

‘The path’ is my only home. I try to walk this road with as much as possible depth and respect for the people close to me, for those who are a bit further away than my immediate environment, and ultimately, if appropriate, for all people of the world.Actually I am a bit of an unsui too, mentally and in the world of medicine and psychology.

Respect. This means: ‘from within’.

AURELIS is my work. So it’s far from perfect. Thank God – otherwise it would be unbearable. On the other hand, I think it’s OK as such: it’s a ‘perfect imperfection’. Its quality depends on the quality of a skill, on ‘putting one’s soul into something’. So not to the extent in which one represents things as certain (but that, as a result, can be stronger). A stream flows along and it’s always other water and it’s always the same stream.

Clouds are rolling by and they are always differently the same clouds. It’s always differently the same rain,

whether that rain falls on a church or a mosque or a towering building or the field of a farmer who, in the meantime, is cozily sitting at a table, reading… perhaps even this text.

Everything flows.

[=‘panta rei’, a saying that was written down +/-2600 ago by Heracleitos, who was called ‘the sinister one’ because he sometimes made statements that could not immediately be understood… like this saying for example]

The balance of always falling.

If you always want to maintain the status quo, you are stopping the flow of life. But then you can be assured that you will meet the power of this flow in a different way, maybe in the form of the force of a dam… OK. That too can be an element on your path.

It’s not about avoiding things, it’s about using them well.

I readily admit that this often requires a lot of art in a lifetime, a lot of inspiration and support of that inspiration. That is precisely the job of a coach: being a support for the inspiration of coachees. Helping them to make a work of art of their own life. So not trying to avoid at all cost that they would fall, but doing everything possible to ensure that they will fall in a good way, that the fall itself becomes a movement that, yes I dare to bring it up, can even be enjoyed.

And that it can hurt? Most of what is really ‘painful’, and perhaps even more what is ‘unnecessarily painful’, is a direct consequence of one’s abstention, of not wanting to fall, of the fear of the unknown. Well, the most important unknown is the ‘unknown within’: the deeper self.

Clouds – rain

Clouds are falling through the sky. And then they are falling down, in the form of rain. And then the water is falling through a stream and perhaps it might even fall from a waterfall, to finally end up in the sea. And then the water goes all the way up to become a cloud again.

The real falling, the falling one can feel in a dream, or sometimes in a daydream, is the falling into the deeper self.

There is no end to this falling. So, actually it is not really a falling but rather a flying. Being able to feel this is a beautiful sign of detachment.

Deeper and ever deeper. Maybe the falling (still in the dream) is accompanied by a sense of ‘having a safety net’. Or not. It does not matter anymore.

Beware: the latter is very difficult to understand! It’s really something for a kind of Heracleitos 😊.

‘As long as you are not there, you’ll never be there.

Once you are there, you have always been there.’

For some people, this is too difficult to ‘have a good feeling about it’. Do not force it. It will come when you’re ready.

What is to come then?

Well, you yourself of course.

(*) un – sui is Japanese and literally means ‘clouds – rain’. You may say that it’s a term with depth.