Kundalini Splendor

Limitations

Bulldog on a leash, your bald owner defines your universe

how proud on your morning walk

past the Momofuko Milk Bar

aware of your boundary within leather lengths of constraint

what’s your name?

you bear the gait of a celebrity or even a saint

in the firmament of flesh,

someone like LeBron James, Meryl Streep

or my deceased Grandpa Moishe

who sang socialist hymns and preached baseball stats

and must have walked early morning avenues like you dog,

on the way to the steamy loft

where he sewed garments

twelve hours a day


  - Barry Denny

This poem really strikes home when we reflect on it.  All of us--even the Pope or the Dalai Lama, live within restrictions.  Many inhabit a "box" defined primarily by the approved social conventions--they may love baseball and hot dogs, a committed church membership, a steady income at a dull or perhaps dangerous job.  Their lives are circumscribed by daily routine, expected happenings.

Others have transcended such social limitations.  And––when Kundalini strikes, it institutes the beginning of a total revision of attitudes, beliefs, and practices. One sees the world in new colors.  It is as if  one is the famed "visitor from another planet," the observer from without, who both is and is not part of the familiar community.  One is suddenly aware of a "new world" or perhaps the old world seen in new perspective.

But, even with this new found "freedom of seeing," one is still limited.  One has, as it were, "escaped a box only to enter a new box."  We can only know so much.  We can travel only so far.  We can now see beyond and sometimes through, but we know none of our visions is  ultimate––we now have a taste of expanded consciousness, but we know that our new state is itself just that--a taste, a glimpse, a hint of the vast realities lying beyond.  "Man can embody truth but never know it." (Yeats)


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