Having experienced this space of peace for a while now, I’m becoming aware that this space has always been there.
I recognize it. I think we’d all recognize it. It’s existed in the background, just not recognized, until I had a much deeper experience of it. Then it … unfolded, is the best word for it.
Again I attribute the deeper experience to the Porlana C and Tsunami of Love energies, being ramped up prior to the Reval and Disclosure. We’re simmering in the pot.
It’s hard for me to write because I have to leave the space of peace long enough to write the next note down and then hope I can go back into it. When I’m in it, not a thought stirs in the mind.
So far I’ve been able to regain it.
If we were discussing the overburden – the constructed self, vasanas, conditioned behavior, etc. – we’d be talking about digging down into them, having the thought in the back of our minds that eventually we’d reach the bottom and be free of them.
I have the attitude that doing this is work, necessary but not enjoyable,
But when I think about going deeper and deeper into a divine state like love, bliss, or peace, I’m again digging, but this digging, in my mind, will guide and bring us Home at last. I smile at the thought of sinking deeper into these states, which I hardly think of as “work.”
The feelings I have in approaching both are entirely different.
A rush of thoughts is coming up so I’m leaving the experience of peace and just writing. But again I feel it in the background and I sense that I could recapture it again if I wanted to.
Does this dichotomy between drudgery and the divine not illustrate the maxim that the basic spiritual movement is to “Turn from the world to God”? Detach from worldly things like the overburden and attach to godly things like the divine states?
Krishna said that I am all that a man may desire without violating the law of his nature. God is all that we may desire without inviting karma. God and all things divine, including the God in everyone. These desires for God and the divine will not invite karma. (1)
Hanker after any of the sensual pleasures and objects and we crank up the mind and lose our peace. It isn’t bad or wrong. It just doesn’t bring peace.
Buckminster Fuller used to say that we can never deal with the opposition by eliminating it. We need to build new structures that will make it obsolete. Similarly here, the opposition to the mergence of the Natural Self is the constructed self we put in its place and the ego that directs the show.
We can’t escape from it by trying to eliminate it; that just makes it stronger. We have to make it obsolete by coming out of our psychic shells altogether. Transparency deconstructs the constructed self.
Archangel Michael keeps offering us a standard by which to judge the wisdom of behavior we’re about to engage in: “Is it of love?” I’m beginning to get the depth of his suggestion. I find myself more and more these days stopping from saying this and doing that because I see that they’re not of love, but simply self-serving.
I don’t have anything to put in their place and I feel embarrassed catching and exposing myself and leaving myself with nothing to say. But I’m starting to see how much that I say and do is actually not of love. I’m willing to pay the price in awkwardness to make the shift in allegiance.
I’m shifting it from one who wanted to feel self-important to one whose heart belongs to the divine states.
The next step will be to actually put love in place of the unloving, self-serving things I spent my time doing … OK, perfecting … earlier.
Footnotes
(1) They actually do invite karma, but Ramana Maharshi thinks of it as non-binding; it doesn’t stand in the way of our unfoldment.
“Vasanas which do not obstruct Self-Realization remain [after Self-Realization]. In Yoga Vasistha two classes of vasanas are distinguished: those of enjoyment and those of bondage. The former remain even after Mukti [liberation] is attained, but the latter are destroyed by it. Attachment is the cause of binding vasanas, but enjoyment without attachment does not bind and continues even in Sahaja.” (Ramana Maharshi in S.S. Cohen, Guru Ramana. Memories and Notes. 6th edition. Tiruvannamalai: Sri Ramanasramam, 1993, 89.)