Sunflower of the Heart
Francis Lucille
Ottawa, Canada
2000
Our silence in meditation is not the silence of the mind.
It is the silence of the heart.
A silent heart is a heart that is turned inwards towards its source and keeps facing that direction, like a sunflower tracking the sun.
Our hearts are tracking the sun of all hearts inside.
How we do it is a mystery.
It is our love for truth that keeps the heart turned towards the right direction, towards the Kaaba.
The true prayer is when the heart is oriented in the right direction.
It doesn’t matter where the truthlover is at any moment as a bodymind, provided the heart is constantly in prayer.
And the prayer isn’t necessarily something religious; it is not at all religious, in fact.
There is no obligation. It expresses itself freely depending upon the circumstances.
It varies from one truthlover to another.
Some pray to God with their intelligence, thinking about the truth.
Others pray to God with their feelings, loving the Absolute.
Others pray to God with their sense perceptions, loving beauty.All of those are guests inside God’s tent, guests at the celebration.
If the sunflower of the heart has tracked the sun once, it will spontaneously go back to the direction of the sun at any moment, provided we leave it alone.
It will go back if we liberate it from concerns, from thoughts, from fear, from desire, from doingness.
True prayer, true meditation cannot be manufactured.
It happens by itself.
All that needs to be done is to relax, to surrender everything which is not the meditation, everything which is not that prayer.
All we have to do is to surrender the useless agitation of the mind and of the body.
Even the word ‘surrender’ is not completely correct because it suggests a loss, it suggests a renunciation. All we have to do is to offer
the tensions in the body, the fear at the level of feelings, the concern or dynamism at the level of thoughts to the Presence in which they arise.
Leave it up to this Presence, at its own pleasure, to maintain all those phenomena or to transform them or to dissolve them.
It’s not up to us as bodyminds.
As bodyminds there is nothing we can do.
We are just moths flying in the night.
Don’t try to figure out what it is.
Just open your heart to it, because it is sharing itself right this moment.
Just open your heart to the Presence. Don’t ask: What is it?
Where does it come from?
We’ll never know.
If you want to get drunk and somebody pours wine in your glass, don’t ask: What kind of wine is this?
Where did it come from?
If you really want to get drunk, you say nothing.
Who cares about the bottle?
If it feels dry to you, it means you haven’t dug the well deep enough to find the source. To dig the well means to let go of the concept of a personal
consciousness, of a personal existence. You don’t have personal existence.
Get rid of this pet thought.
There is only impersonal existence.
Find in you the place from which love originates, love for anything.
Take anything you love, whatever you love the most—it can be an object, it can be a person, whatever—and once you feel the love, try to find the place from which the love originates.
That’s the place.
That’s the Black Stone, invisible.
And then forget everything.
Forget how you got there, forget your thoughts.
When we are in love with love we are mysteriously in contact with all of those who are in love with love, be they still in this world or in other worlds.
This connection knows no time boundaries.
We are in touch with Rumi and Buddha and Christ and Moses.
Copyright
Francis Lucille
2000
Note: The Black Stone
is a Muslim relic, which according to Islamic tradition dates back to the time of Adam and Eve. It is the eastern cornerstone of the Kaaba, the ancient sacred stone building towards which Muslims pray, in the center of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia.
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