I’m reposting this well-spun unravelling of life’s mysteries from the pen of an everyday master.
Chris has a full-life review before breakfast
Chris has a full-life review before breakfast
Embodying Unknowing & Descending Up
Thursday, September 02, 2010
https://feelingthefuture.blogspot.com/
All We Can’t Possibly Know
Perhaps our collective situation at present — of waiting for the new to emerge — is analogous to a kind of planetary Cloud of Unknowing during this apparent planetary Dark Night (of the World Soul).
Many of us can’t help but sense ourselves to be waiting for something to happen that will usher in evidence of a radically new world from the ashes of the old, which otherwise seem to lay in smoking piles everywhere about us.
…and this especially in light of the endless messages received by various visionaries and channeled beings; in light of our individual dreams and visions; nay — in light of our individual and sovereign core knowing of the living truth that we are here to witness and live through!
It may also be (paradoxically enough) part and parcel of the process we are involved in to find ourselves necessarily engaged in the activity of exhausting our ability to wait altogether.
Indeed, waiting, as an activity of time in relation to time, may be our final thing to learn to surrender and let go of.
Lauren Gorgo has recently written in her own inimical way about something similar: learning to surrender hope. Dropping waiting may be a variety of this same kind of activity.
Not that if we stop waiting (or hoping), the new will magically dawn upon us. But rather: whenever the new finally does happen to emerge in whatever form it will take, waiting will no longer be a relevant reality whatsoever — if only because that which we have waited for will have finally arrived.
If so, then why not get started now in synchronizing our experience with a wait-less future?
A Life-Review while Still Alive?
Another way to ask this question might be: If we are no longer waiting for something to arrive — what are we doing instead?
Personally, I find myself occupying myself with the activity of ordinary present living with a certain penetrating engagement I have not quite exercised before. It’s as if I find myself turning from my waiting — which feels largely lifeless and impotent now — to something that I sense to be stirring with life and full of potential…namely, my presently embodied being.
Such standing in present being involves organically immersing myself in creative activity that often has the side-benefit of spontaneous reliving many aspects of my lived life simultaneously. I find myself returning to the site of my past in new ways that feel completely alive, natural and new, allowing me to taste the flavors of decades gone by in startlingly fresh (and re-lived) colors. My purpose in this spontaneous re-living activity is not nostalgia, but re-inhabiting layers of self lost to time in order to allow them to open to the present being I am.
This takes on many flavors and feelings, not all of them pleasant — but every one of them quite fresh and meaningfully real to who I am altogether.
As it happens, the more I engage in this creative re-inhabiting of my many layers of beingness, seemingly the less meaningful waiting for the future becomes. It’s as if the activity of waiting itself wants to give itself over to a simplicity of trust, informed by a more conscious and altogether active way of being in the now.
At the same time, the arrival of the new on the macro-scale that so many of us are attuned to — this does seem to largely remain a sealed mystery, by design if not necessity. What I am noticing is that the more I engage in the business of living out this present moment in its full potential, the more I am able to allow for the new to remain as unknown and unknowable as it needs to be in order to fully, finally, and truly arrive.
Ultimately, I find that this emerging world of the new we attend upon — weather by waiting or trust — is nevertheless fraught with paradoxes, most of them completely counter-intuitive.
Intuition — Its Own Worst Paradox
Somehow the intuitive opening within that allows me to receive dreams and be receptive to visionary messages about our onrushing future is itself strangely useless for helping me actually cross this strange limbo between ‘here’ and ‘there’; between ‘now’ and ‘then’ — very possibly because all there really is anymore is here and now, to increasingly transformed degrees. If so, then wouldn’t it make perfect sense that our job is to put waiting firmly to one side and get on with the work of abiding and being here in our activated fullness?
What I sense is called for — instead of just heaping on more receptive intuition — is deeply activated creativity…at every level of the living being, including, perhaps most especially, our bodies.
The essentially discovery I am continually making now is that I am the one who must figure out what it means to weave a way across these two worlds of old and new, past and present, here and ‘there’: in intuition, feeling, thought and mind, and Body.
Intuition alone may be an excellent faculty for feeling the future and receiving its signal, but it cannot possibly be held solely responsible for engaging that future in present terms. That is a job — I am convinced — for the whole being and all the parts of who we each are. Building that bridge is up to us to find out how to do and thoroughly enact, each in our own unique and divinely human way.
When I ask my intuition to try to carry that burden by its lonesome, and to thereby try to get by on mere “waiting” power, approaching the future suddenly seems entirely counter-intuitive.
Maybe because that’s exactly what it is.
Calling Up the Reserves
After intuition does its thankless job of initiating us into the new — the rest of me is tasked with the unheard of job of learning to embrace that strangely counter-intuitive future in its totality, and go for broke in realizing it wholesale in the here and now.
Through creative thinking, feeling and embodied action, fresh pathways may burst wide open leading directly into the onrushing future in ways I inherently trust with my very cells.
From passive-receptive waiting, I may move into activated engagement in creative relation to the future I may actually have the ability to will into being — not by wishful thinking, but on the scale of my lived life, by shaping each passing moment I actively inhabit.
There is no other pathway forward that I can ascertain. Instead, inhabiting my body in the present — this simple activity becomes my primary alchemical bridging work.
The living body becomes my bridge to heaven, and to all things real and new.
The internet is no substitute for feeling the layers of being alive in my tissues and cells. Because of this, I am online much less than I normally have been the past couple of years. Instead, I have taken up physical movement and exercise with a renewed understanding that my own body is the doorway to the renewal of the world I otherwise seek.
Within the Cloud of Unknowing that seems to be the paradoxical form and shape of the new future we so intuitively feel to be at our doorstep, I learn to inhabit my body as the vehicle to ‘get’ here: and decipher the riddle that Cloud presents in living terms perhaps only my body may be permitted to understand.
By inhabiting my body, I am returned to the present — as the living site of whatever future is likely to alight, right here, deep down in my wiggling toes.
Rising Up by Sinking Down
In this way, even the word ‘Ascension’ seems to contain its own inherently counter-intuitive sign. Whatever Ascended world we may be moving into, the best way I know to get there is through the Creatively Descending work of inhabiting my body and feeling its tissues with my conscious being.
The way ‘up’ may be by none other than by heading down into the roots of matter with the entirety of our consciously feeling being, and anchoring there for the ride up.
The critical understanding and insight here is this: our own body is the sacred site and vessel for the spiritualization of matter. This process involves each of us radically and directly in the here and now, right as we each individually are, regardless of whether a new planetary economy is announced on television next month or not.
The work of feeling down into the cells and tissues of our own human form is always before us as the work needing to be done — and this will always be true, no matter how or when ascension outwardly manifests in the world.
For each of us, this will necessarily be a fingerprint unique individual work. For some of us, it will involve outward physical activity more than others. But having a body is something we each have in common. And in its form, the “meat” of meaning may be found and “consumed” by the living conscious spiritual presence we each are.
Endless Marriage Up Ahead
By working out this sacred marriage between spirit and matter in our own form, whatever future lies up ahead will inevitably meet us right where we are.
The more we attend to this quality of sacred marriage — at times counter-intuitive to a radical extreme — the less we may find ourselves waiting for anything, so engaged are we in the creative work of our present existence, wedded and one in Body and Soul, Self and Other, and One World.
In this kind of way, whenever Heaven finally gets here, we will surely be here to meet Her.