|
Grace Sweet and Fierce November 12, 2020
It is said in many traditions that it is not the calamity or challenge that is grace but rather what arises inside us to meet it. It’s easy to see the hand of grace in the sweetness of life, not so much in the fire. We attempt to rationalize, saying bad things happen for a reason, but do they? We humans have a need to try and make reason in order to stay sane and sometimes we can make lemon aid from lemons but not always. There are unspeakable horrors in the world. Grace is in our response. Grace is seen in how we meet both joy and challenge. Practice aligns us to the downstream of grace, always there, always available. It is the vehicle that enables the location of, and availability to what is our birth right: connection, direct and immediate, to the source of knowledge, insight and creativity. Neelakantha Meditation is natural, effective and simple to learn. And, at the same time, we do not mistake simple for beginner. Life is precious and it is short. We do not wish to linger at beginner levels. We want to proceed in our sādhanā in order to increase our capacity to be more fully human, to live life to the fullest as we make our unique contribution. The Householder Sādhanā, is the sum total of an authentic, coherent set of sequential practices, that each individual chooses to engage with in order to support, inform and enhance life altogether. And yet sādhanā, as it brings both sweetness and fire, is inherently counter egoic. The fire of meditation brings light in the form of knowledge and also purification in order to reassemble limited ego in higher and higher iterations. We are human and humans seek reassurance, a necessity in knowing, am I moving in the direction desired? This countering of the ego, is neither to destroy nor to gluttonize it, but rather to expand freedom. The freedom to respond in the manner we desire as opposed to what is programed via limited ego’s strongly entrenched self-preservation. As we nourish our understanding of what is happening, via study and discussion, we feed and settle the mind. It is then more able to catch up to the truth of our experience in deep meditation. This nourishment also refines the very mechanism that understands and thus not only colors new experiences of every possible sort, but reaches back and pulls forward what was known, sharpening and deepening that too. It is the gift that keeps on giving. As we refresh again and again the what why and how of practice, we make the mind our friend and in the process accelerate practice and our very experience of life altogether. Grace is in the response. Our capacity to draw on her, colors our response. There is the field of karma on the relative and field of grace in the absolute. We have the understanding of the karmaśya, the storehouse of the sum total of every experience every had- positive, negative and neutral- and the metaphor of carefully tip toeing around the herd of sleeping elephants, so we do not wake the negative monsters up! But at a certain moment, we must face what is in there if true healing is to occur and fullness restored. We witness this in the world today. The capacity of grace to move through the relative in increasingly known terms, is what drives the highest responses. Her invisible movement through the fabric of life is hard to discern. Practice increases our experience of the subtle and in this, to discern the mysterious movement of grace in our lives.
0 Comments
Experience Creates Worlds
We can only act like we know ourselves to be. It cannot be otherwise. So we endeavor to know ourselves as more fully realized beings, to expose our awareness to more. We are also continually creating and recreating what we experience. It cannot be otherwise. The question is how does one create what has never been experienced? Is it failure of imagination? I think not. One can imagine, have great capacity to dream and even this is limited by exposure. Or perhaps not just or only exposure but also release. Release of the limitation of individual awareness and its subsequent gross level of experience. Imagination may be free but exposure: travel, education, social and economic resources on the surface of life is not. The riches contained within are open to all regardless of background. In deep states of meditative immersion, individual awareness is released, melted, into its oceanic source. The source of all creation which colors our capacity to create anew. We continually recreate again and again what we experience. In melting than merging individual awareness, we in a very real sense, create the possibility for what was previously unimaginable. In Sanskrit, anakhya, that which is indescribable yet begs for description. Description that can only be authentically articulated via experience. In meditation, individual awareness soaks in the vat of colorless light that contains every possible color. Upon emergence, as the sense of self coalesces, it authentically has a richer deeper palate available from which to create, to color life. Experience creates worlds. What am I creating moment by moment? How can I truly increase imagination and then more, bring it into being? Experience creates worlds and we, as beings living in the world, endeavor to expose ourselves to the best the world has to offer to be sure. For a moment, dare yourself to imagine, what if in addition to increasing knowledge and understanding on the surface of life, all were to expose their individual awareness to experience, just for a few moments a day, the highest, most potent creative source? What worlds might we be able to create? As householders, we want to experience and contribute to life. And at the same time, we are after more than temporary experiences. All beings yearn for deep sustenance, for that which is eternal. And by means of deep absorptive meditation, the Śaiva/Śakti Tantric Tradition tells us, eventually we begin to contact and to even possess the very force of consciousness. The force or strength of consciousness itself. This force, as strong as an elephant, bala, is the potent force that creates on every level, big and small, gross and ultra, ultra subtle. Experience Creates Worlds. What are you creating this very minute? |
Archives
October 2021
Categories |