The Blessing in Giving Up a Perfect God

-

     One day I realized with a shock that when I de-realized the existence of something in the name of god (or whatever word you like), for example the ego/personal self, individuation, I was turning away from god/the "absolute" by rejecting its' manifestations, because the manifest world is formlessness enformed! God reveals itself AS this world of form!


    After this, I had to accept that that god/the divine is not purely peaceful, bright and blissful, joyful, or even likeable and that it cannot be relegated to or sanctified in a dimension that is cut off from anything else.  This can be disillusioning to us when we're clinging to a vision/experience of the formless as the untarnished, transcendent/absolute only, separate from suffering. To recognize this is to admit that it is not entirely perfect, at least not in the way that we tend to see perfection as something that can only exist in isolation from the blemishes, flaws, and stains of imperfection. But paradoxically, in seeing this, we open ourselves to the revelation of a kind of perfection that coincides with the bittersweet - flawlessness that is not in opposition to but found in concert with flaws, contentment that walks alongside discontent. This warm embrace of imperfection happens when we hold the aliveness and tension of unified opposites in an inner open palm, allowing for the co-existence in which one does not have to be absent for the other to be present. Silence and noise, peace and turmoil, hunger and satiation, sorrow and ecstacy.  A third thing is created that feels like blazing, heart-flooding vitality infused with equal parts surrender and a poignant urgency to feel fully alive. 

    When you honor that you can't open to all of "god" if you don't open to the full spectrum of human emotion, you may long, as I do at times, to feel radically incarnate, and cherish it when you do. Wanting all of god means wanting all of you.  This can be disappointing on one hand, because it means god isn't going to save us from anything.   But the silver lining is that it unravels the attempt to push parts of ourselves away, for if everything within and without is an expression of god, how can we fully know the divine by pushing parts of it away? To behold god in god's completeness is to slowly embrace a holiness that pervades the profane without erasing it, just as form is suffused with formlessness without being negated. Embracing everything as a sacred expression of god, the practice of self-compassion is infused with new meaning as the act of befriending your pain is softening and opening your heart to unwanted qualities of god, and a profound way to cultivate a connection to the divine in the times we usually feel most cut off from it. In these moments there's truly no difference between caring for your pain and caring for god. From this perspective, self-compassion becomes a beautifully profound non-dual practice of leading transcendence and immanence towards a cathartic, loving recognition of themselves in the other, and in doing so, we can even discover a deeply meaningful way that suffering can serve a higher purpose.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Universe's Past: A Portal to Presence!

-
Image
One of my favorite spiritual practices now, portals to presence and wonder actually involves tuning into the past! looking back to experience the now more deeply, in the light of Beings' journey of  becoming, (be)coming all the way to THIS nowness and right hereness  😱 the ground of Being has a past, and a quite extraordinarily EPIC one at that! S hining a light on it reveals the splendor of this moment it has become... can bring you to feeling astonished and deeply moved by the present... looking back to the beginning of the universe, feeling into, visualizing what it ONCE WAS, those early days of the ground of Being beginning its' journey of becoming... becoming cells, atoms, molecules, water and earth, chickens and eggs, mountains and lakes, becoming....HUMAN...becoming ME...my god, the o ne becoming MANY to see what it has become, what it is right NOW, a dimly lit room, dancing and drumming, strangers drawn together to celebrate the staggering mystery of our coinciding li...
Read more

Spiritualizing Trauma Responses - Rupert Spira - Total Dis-embodiment

-
Image
"I s there something we can do to dissolve the belief that ‘I am a body’? A woman says that during meditation she can sense old beliefs and feelings associated with the body start to dissolve, but the old conditioning of believing and feeling solid, dense and limited quickly comes back. Rupert explains that having recognised the felt sense of the body as just a cloud of sensing, once or twice is not enough. It takes time to erode this very well-born habit. These old habits are deeply conditioned in us — we've been practising them for so long. But every time we do go back there we weaken that habit. So keep questioning it by asking yourself, "Is that true? What is my actual experience?" Every time you go back to your actual experience you erode the power of your old beliefs." -Video description from Dissolving the Belief That "I Am a Body" You could actually say that the core messages of modern non-duality which split the non-physical self from the ...
Read more

Exploring Another Side of Nisargadatta

-
     Like many individuals who have delved into contemporary non-dual spirituality, I was once deeply influenced by Nisargadatta Maharajs' unconventional contemporary Advaita Vedanta-derived teachings on liberation via radical self-effacement. Alongside Ramana Maharshi, he is one of the primary influencers of these self-effacement teachings in our present-day Western world, particularly the extremely powerful, most pitfall-laden "direct path" approaches to "enlightenment" that cut out all preparatory stages/safeguards that existed traditionally before attempting to obliterate your sense of self. This is done in favor of a sort of instant enlightenment approach that is understandably attractive to people in the West. Nisargadattas' influence extends beyond strictly Advaita-derived teachings, encompassing the broad range of modern Western amalgamations of Eastern non-dual teachings, which typically mix and match cherry-picked elements of traditions like Advait...
Read more

No Ground for the Groundless

-
Image
You  climbed a ladder to the sky and for a long time, you marveled while gazing down at the world from so high up.  Now that you're ready to come back to the ground, you discover that the ladder beneath you is gone. You're suspended in the air, so you can't even fall. Now you're stuck up here, looking down from the great heights that afforded you a view you'd like to take with you but not be limited to.  I reached out to Stephen, a well-known psychotherapist and esteemed self-negating nonduality teacher, when I was in the throes of a spiritual emergency catalyzed by my ego dissolution path.  I was dis-oriented, disassociated and de-personalized, struggling to shore up a sense of personal agency, embodiment, and most importantly,  to get back a sense of solid ground beneath my feet.  I was especially terrified by what became a harrowing sense of dis-reality both of my own personal identity and in-solidity of the world, because while I'd experienced depersona...
Read more