Mark West and Psalm 23

I live just down the hill from Mark West and for a while I’ve been attending weekly meetings at his apartment. (Mark had the good fortune to spend time with Nisargadatta in the 1970s.) Recently, Mark was quoting energetically from Psalm 23, about sitting in the presence of enemies. (How Mark quotes so much of the scriptures of various traditions from memory continues to baffle me!) Here’s the piece:

You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.

“Why would I sit in the presence of my enemies?” asked Mark. Because that is what we must do, he suggests. Enemies are symbolic of thoughts here, and the Psalm is not saying we shouldn’t have them – rather that we should be able to be in their presence, and hence separate from them. How so? In Nisargadatta’s language, the work is required because we have lost the Natural State, we have the wrong relationship to thought.

In actuality we are not thought, any more than we are the body. So we sit at a table, prepared by the Lord, the Witness, pure Awareness; knowing that thoughts are the respected potential enemies of this Natural State. And in so doing we dwell in the house of the Lord forever. This is a beautiful piece of writing, a statement of pure nonduality (although usurped by a religious tradition that has lost its true meaning), a good reminder for me and possibly also for others.

To dwell in the house of the Lord forever will only be “returning to your own natural condition” (see previous post, Attempted Escapes from Fear).

Tagged as: Mark West, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj