Guru talks about feeling oneness with the world and that this dissolves the feeling of insecurity. He shows through examples that we need the left arm to enable the right arm to do things just as much as we need our legs support us and our head to carry our brain and our eyes to see etc. We need all the parts of the body to enable one part to do its job. This section is about teamwork and how, if we identify with the team, we can identify with what all the members of the team have achieved and claim that as our own.

I have felt the difference before in my life of the power that is there when I am able to make that identification and that claim. There is a sense of belonging, of connecting with something, with entering an energy field we can say and that energy field feeds us in a way we want or need. This is not just a sense of belonging to a group but an identification with the highest that we are able to experience right now, and this is the way that that is manifesting. If I feel that the Guru is the vehicle for God to manifest on earth then I can say that identifying myself with that is creating my connection to God.

There is a nicely chosen aphorism in the book:

Oneness is the perfect expansion
Of our inner reality.
Let our heart’s oneness only increase
To make us feel
That we belong to a universal world-family,
And this world-family
Is a fulfilled Dream of God.

So then I went back to the beginning of the chapter and saw that it was about insecurity. Guru opens the chapter by defining our ususal conception of security saying that “In the unaspiring life there is no such thing as security… Here on earth when we want to establish security in our own capacities and talents, we come to realise that it is impossible. Then we become a perfect slave to someone else in order to gain security.”

Insecurity for me means a loss of balance and stability in where i anchor my sense of self. I guess we have to have the experience of security before we can know what its like not to have it, rather than the more common or normal state which is insecure. Security means inner joy and confidence and these do not rely on outer material but arise from within and emerge from our aspiration and willingness to grow into our own self-transcendence.

I wondered what else Sri Chinmoy said about the topic and I found this poem on insecurity at Sri Chinmoy Poetry.

You are insecure
Because
Your belief is not sustained
By the inner faith.

You are insecure
Because
Your surrender has not
Breathed the life of oneness supreme.

Sri Chinmoy

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Jelaluddin Rumi

From The Essential Rumi
translation by Coleman Barks
with John Moyne

GIVE reverence, O man, to mystery,
Keep your soul patient, and with closed eye hear.
Know that the Good is in all things, the whole
Being by him pervaded and upheld.
He is the will, the thwarting circumstance,
The two opposing forces equal both—
Birth, Death, are one.
Think not the Lotus flower
Or tulip is more honoured than the grass,
The bindweed, or the thistle. He who kneels
To Cama, kneeleth unto me; the maid
Who sings to Ganga sings to me; I am
Wisdom unto the wise, and cunning lore
Unto the subtle. He who knows his soul,
And from thence looketh unto mine; who sees
All underneath the moon regardlessly,
Living on silent, as a shaded lamp
Burns with steady flame:—he sure shall find me—
He findeth wisdom, greatness, happiness.

Know, further, the Great One delighteth not
In him who works, and strives, and is against
The nature of the present.
Not the lessAnd the despair of impotence that fails.
I am the ultimate, the tendency
Of all things to their nature, which is mine.
Put round thee garments of rich softness, hang
Fine gold about thine ankles, hands, and ears,
Set the rich ruby and rare diamond
Upon thy brow.—I made them, I also
Made them be sought by thee; thou lack’st them not?
Then throw them whence they came, and leave with them
The wish to be aught else than nature forms.

Know that the great Good in the age called First,
Beheld a world of mortals, ’mong whom none
Enquired for Truth, because no falsehood was:
Nature was Truth; man held whate’er he wished:
No will was thwarted, and no deed was termed,
Good, Evil. In much wisdom is much grief.
He who increases knowledge sorrow also
Takes with it, till he rises unto me,
Knowing that I am in all, still the same:
Knowing that I am Peace in the contented.
I, Great, revealed unto the Seer, how man
Had wandered, and he gave a name and form
To my communings and he called it Veda.
To him who understands it is great gain—
Who understandeth not, to him the Sign
And ritual is authority and guide,
A living and expiring confidence.

When the mind is at peace,
the world too is at peace.
Nothing real, nothing absent.
Not holding on to reality,
not getting stuck in the void,
you are neither holy or wise, just
an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.

From “Leaves of Grass”.

There’s a moon in my body,
but I can’t see it!
A moon and a sun.
A drum never touched by hands,
beating, and I can’t hear it!

As long as a human being worries about when he will die,
and what he has that is his,
all of his works are zero.
When affection for the I-creature
and what it owns is dead,
then the work of the Teacher is over.

The purpose of labor is to learn;
when you know it, the labor is over.
The apple blossom exists to create fruit; when that
comes, the petal falls.

The musk is inside the deer,
but the deer does not
look for it:
it wanders around looking for grass.

Kabir

Translated by Robert Bly

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance—
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

I pour a coating of salt on the table
and make a circle in it with my finger.
This is a cycle of life,
I say to no one;
This is the wheel of fortune,
the Arctic Circle.
This is the ring of Kerry
and the White Rose of Tralee.
I say to the ghosts of my family,
the dead fathers,
the aunt who drowned,
my unborn brothers and sisters,
my unborn children.
This is the sun with its glittering spokes
and the bitter moon.
This is the absolute circle of geometry
I say to the crack in the wall,
to the birds who cross the window,
This is the wheel I just invented
to roll through the rest of my life,
I say,
touching my finger to my tongue.

I cannot leave you without saying this:
the past is nothing,
a nonmemory, a phantom,
a soundproof closet in which Johann Strauss
is composing another waltz no one can hear.

It is a fabrication, best forgotten,
a wellspring of sorrow
that waters a field of bitter vegetation.

Leave it behind.
Take your head out of your hands
and arise from the couch of melancholy
where the window-light falls against your face
and the sun rides across the autumn sky,
steely behind the bare trees,
glorious as the high strains of violins.

But forget Strauss.
And forget his younger brother,
the poor bastard who was killed in a fall
from a podium while conducting a symphony.

Forget the past,
forget the stunned audience on its feet,
the absurdity of their formal clothes
in the face of sudden death,
forget their collective gasp,
the murmur and huddle over the body,
the creaking of the lowered curtain.

Forget Strauss
with that encore look in his eye
and his tiresome industry:
more than five hundred finished compositions!
He even wrote a polka for his mother.
That alone is enough to make me flee the past,
evacuate its temples,
and walk alone under the stars
down these dark paths strewn with acorns,
feeling nothing but the crisp October air,
the swing of my arms
and the rhythms of my stepping–
a man of the present who has forgotten
every composer, every great battle,
just me,
a thin reed blowing in the night.

Every day the body works in the fields of the world
Mending a stone wall
Or swinging a sickle through the tall grass-
The grass of civics, the grass of money-
And every night the body curls around itself
And listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
From the body in the middle of the night,
Leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
With its thick, pictureless walls
To sit by herself at the kitchen table
And heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe
And goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,
And opens a book on engineering.
Even the conscience awakens
And roams from room to room in the dark,
Darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof
In her nightdress, straddling the ridge,
Singing a song about the wildness of the sea
Until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.
Then, they all will return to the sleeping body
The way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

Resuming their daily colloquy,
Talking to each other or themselves
Even through the heat of the long afternoons.
Which is why the body-the house of voices-
Sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen
To stare into the distance,

To listen to all its names being called
Before bending again to its labor.

Billy Collins