January-March, 2005
Understanding spiritual truth within the context of the illusion requires that we embrace a paradox. In the world of form, seeking and finding are directly linked by our actions. For instance, if I feel hunger and I seek out food to satisfy this hunger, my seeking will yield a surcease to my hunger. Temporarily, at least, I feel satisfied. I am no longer hungry.
Things get a bit less simple when we enter the realm of emotion. Let’s take loneliness. If we are feeling lonely it doesn’t necessarily mean that we will feel less lonely if we take action and go to a party. Sometimes we can feel more alone amidst a crowd of people.
And here is where we begin to cross into the spiritual realm, where desire and action do not necessarily translate into success. Our core hunger, that sense of loneliness or separation, is not effectively satisfied in the world. Many a romance has foundered on the shores of disenchantment. Our core loneliness was not fixed by this romantic partnership.
Romance is by nature an impossible proposition. A deep longing for connection, for belonging, is projected onto a special other. This special other is hardly equipped to answer our call for love. He or she is gripped within their own dilemma. We are lost together, the blind leading the blind, with very painful results. For nothing is more lonely then to sleep alongside this supposed soul mate, night after night, month after month, with no true resolution to our core hunger.
Our dilemma is that we are seeking in the world what is truly not of this world. What we hunger for is heaven, our spiritual home. We are homesick for a love, a peace, which is but hinted at in this world. The more we seek, the more distant the object of our longing appears. Our lives become wearisome, adrift in a vast desert of searching. The oasis is always but a mirage.
The paradox is that it is only when we stop seeking that we truly have the opportunity to find what it was all along evading our search. For the answer to the quandary that so mystified us for so many years, perhaps even lifetimes, is inside of us. It was always here, the one place we never looked.
Often we only go within when our outer life has fallen into one form or another of ruin. Some tragedy, a certain disaster, leaves us devastated. There is no outside source of consolation. The sorrow is simply too powerful. We collapse into our grief, perhaps a deep depression. There seems to be no way out of this darkness of this time.
This experience is often named the dark night of the soul. As we venture, not by choice, into this despair, eventually, something strange begins to arise within us. We start to witness a calmness, a peacefulness, an awareness that in spite of the outward appearance of doom we’re ok. We are not really going to die, even though all earlier indicators showed no other option.
In fact, this appearance of death and destruction revealed for us that there is a part of us that couldn’t possibly die. It was beyond annihilation. As we touch this aspect of our being a glow of light begins to manifest itself. It is like a halo enveloping us, radiating not without, but within. The source seems to be somewhere deep within our mind, or perhaps even in our heart.
We are in contact with our soul. This is the aspect of our being that existed before we took on a physical existence, before we became a body. Our soul is that piece of heaven itself, seemingly splintered away from the whole. But as we make conscious contact with our soul, we come to know that this piece of the whole is really our link to the whole.
Heaven is not distant from us when we rest within the knowing of our soul. It is as if each soul is a tiny hologram of heaven, each one containing within it the whole. When we bring our awareness into this stillness, this place beyond time and space, know are touching eternity. We are home.
After having this kind of experience, that which I call an oasis experience, the thought of continuing in the world seems a bit implausible. What could be the point? It is clear now that what I am truly seeking is nowhere to be found outside of me in the world. It is right here, right now, within the stillness.
It becomes clear to us that all of the efforts for self-improvement are ridiculous. Our efforts to earn merit that would somehow pay off later in good fortune, in the guarantee of a spot in heaven, appear absurd. As if Divine Love, that radiant energy which embraces us within the stillness, could shine for one and not another. Impossible.
We come to know something that we could never have learned in the world. We are perfect, just as we are. This is how we were created. What would be to learn? What is it that we could improve? Where is it that we would travel on this journey of awakening?
There is no journey, but only an awakening. We can wait for some disaster, one version of death or another, to give us the opening to this awareness. Or we can choose, willingly, consciously, to die to our illusion that somehow, somewhere, the world is going to give this awareness to me.
We give up seeking so that we will find. We give up self-improvement that we might know, today, that we are perfect. We give up our idea that learning is going to give us what we already know. We give up our game of hide and seek. We are ready for a happier game. If we are but living within a dream, we would choose to make the dream a happy one.
So we stop. We take time out from the rituals and routines that have filled our lives. We need to find others like ourselves as, without companions, without a guide, we will not get far. For the world will always be there to call us back into the dream, the illusion that there is something outside of us to seek.
Stopping the world, or rather our participation in the illusion is an unpopular stance. We slow down and the rest of the world wants to knock us over. We are wise not to point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. This is the reason why we find others with whom we can retreat.
Taking time out to consolidate our learning is essential. Retreats have been an element of authentic awakening since the times of Aristotle and Lao Tzu. Usually a teacher, a discipline, and the companionship of others are the three elements of a retreat environment.
Ultimately the goal is not to stay in seclusion from the rest of the world. As we come to know deeply our true relationship with the Divine, we come to know our proper relationship with the world. The Divine, what Eckhart Tolle describes as the unmanifested, needs us in order to manifest. If the world is but a collective call for Love, and Heaven is the unmanifested Source of Love, what is needed is the bridge or channel between the two.
Here is our highest purpose, our true function fulfilled. In Christian terms, this would be the definition of being the Christ. The Christ is but the bridge or the channel between Heaven and earth. It is but the doorway through which Love moves from the Source to the prayer.
Walking in the world, awakened, becomes a passionate exercise in endless opportunity. Every day, in fact, each moment, arises in gratitude, as we but extend that which exists in infinite supply. In the experience of the flow of Divine energy through our hearts and our minds we know joy and peace beyond anything we could have found in the world.
We have become empty and full in a moment. Herein is our paradox revealed in its fullest glory. And we give thanks.
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