The Elephant’s child …is the title of both a poem and a story by Rudyard Kipling.
This particular elephant’s child … is full of (in)’satiable curiosity.
The poem begins
‘I keep six honest serving-men (they taught me all I knew);
their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.’

My mother taught me those lines when I was little girl… and I, who knew so little by comparison, believed that employing these honest ‘serving-men’ would give me the true answers to so many important questions….
After all, as you’ll know if you read the story…you can find it on-line …they explain how the Elephant got it’s trunk!

However….in my life, the answers glibly provided by Which, When, How and Where never seemed very satisfying…and for me, most often, ‘Why’ was a problematic rather than honest servant! Coming up with some temporary or superficial non-sense of an answer, the deeper aspects of ‘why’ seemed unanswerable. Why would people do? believe? say? what they do…it was an unfathomable mystery.

So I breathed a huge sigh of relief when James explained how relative reality operates back in 2003 in ‘The view of Dzogchen’. The big question mark above my head began to dissolve… ‘because they are them’ was a surprisingly helpful answer early on! One which deepened and expanded as he expounded!
Discovering that the answers to these questions … offered by dualistic relative truth…may not serve us so well. How our search for the salve of truth within the paradigm of illusion is a fools errand…one which obscures the heart-easing satisfaction of simply being.

In the poem, Kipling goes on to explain how he gave these ‘serving-men’ a lot of rest…. during the day-time and at meal times! That was interesting news to me!
Whether he really did or not we don’t need to know… but we certainly could try ‘giving them a rest’ when faced, as ever, with freshness…in meditation, in daily life.
Maybe, if you were looking at the view above, you would like to see more… beyond knowing ‘where is that’ or ‘what you can see in the distance’?

Given that ‘this is not other than that’ – ‘form is not other than emptiness’– as per the wisdom of the Heart Sutra… rather than throwing our opaque mantle of knowledge, answers to the questions, over the view in our usual way…with a flourish~ swoosh~’There’s the road to …’ ‘You can see…from here’ ‘That’s a buzzard…up there’ ‘They must be growing…maize / wheat/ vines/whatever’ ‘I can see…from here’ we could relax a bit more, and a bit more, and allow this tendency to release as it arises… and look more lightly, just seeing what’s there – in receptive mode.

Our usual egoically driven, rather desperate, determination to identify, locate, and fix in place whatever ‘this’ is – according to the templates and reference points of our conditioning – is an interposition, interrupting the view, distorting it, apparently ‘breaking’ it into bits. Relaxing out of that habit or ‘mantle’ frees us to experience the this-ness of this display…it’s luminous perfection…wherever and however it seems.

So the less we give ‘this’ an illusory solidity via our ‘knowledge’, our labelling , categorising, comparing and contrasting… the more likely we are to rest lightly as awareness, as ‘that’ for which ‘this’ is not other….

‘the ungraspable view…the ungraspable you…nothing to do just free to be’

As a way into this James explained that the essential point is the relationship with yourself. He suggested some different questions which can be usefully employed at all times under all circumstances. These begin with Who and Where and What and What…
So now we have just four serving men, two with the same first name, who are truly honest and can be employed for free, to remind us not to get lost, not to fuse with the transient… but stay present as presence
They are:
Who am I?
Where am I?
What am I doing?
What is occurring?

These new recordings 8, 9, 10, and 11 from Longing for Limitless Light and others in this series, link our practice, our existence, through sound and openness, intention and devotion, with those with the most profound vision who have led the way…with all beings.
After a while, by repeating out-loud these prayers with names which at first, to me anyway, felt ‘out-there’ strange, comes the possibility of softening and relaxing…becoming at at ease, at home with the energy of the arising sounds and feeling the connection through the words…

Photo thanks to Peter Farrie who looks after this web-site.