Since peace is the first step in building Nova Earth and since it has to begin at home, with us, inside our hearts, let’s continue to examine peace.
Detachment is the spiritual practice of cutting the cords of attachment to anything that doesn’t lead us to Self-Realization. Detachment is one of the spiritual disciplines that lead to peace.
Anything that increases our vibrational density rather than our vibrational refinement, anything that increases our sense of being a body to the exclusion of our consciousness of being a spirit is something we’ll have to detach from if we wish to soar. In peace.
The One exists – and, by implication, we exist – at a level of existence so refined that we cannot experience it using any of our senses (save love and the imagination). It thus is unknowable and, according to many sages, can only be reached in a state of unknowing. (1)
I’ve fallen into the practice, each morning and night, of taking a pair of imaginary shears and cutting the creepers of attachment from around my body. It’s safe to do that because anything that yields to this imaginary cutting is by definition temporary and changeful and thus not the One. Only that which is eternal and changeless could not be cut.
We’re like a tree that needs pruning to bear fruit, as Jesus said. We’re like an artesian well which needs the removal of overburden to pour forth.
We travel up Jacob’s ladder of consciousness from unconscious awareness to conscious awareness, from doubt to certainty, from fear to confidence.
From the gross to the subtle we move; from darkness to light; from knowing to not knowing to natural knowing.
There’s nothing to attain; only things to remove.
Detachment is from the things that hold us in illusion, not from the things that bring us love.
Free of attachment to things that support the illusion rather than love, we are at peace. Deep inside our hearts, we always were at peace, always are, and always will be.
Footnotes
(1) Anon., The Cloud of Unknowing trans. Clifton Wolters. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978; c1961; Pseudo-Dionysius, Theologica Mystica, contained in Anon., The Cloud of Unknowing, ibid.; and Cohn Luibheid, trans., Pseudo-Dionysus, His Complete Works. New York and Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1989.