Beside the stark and austere reality of the Absolute – where all is One – is the middle ground of Life as it is, Life as it’s unfolding, here and now.
For me as a communicator, that middle ground is composed of morality, completion, and clarity. One word for all three is “integrity.”
Integrity brings with it an increasing experience of wholeness, which at some point becomes exponential, explosive, and we have a realization of who we are in the matter.
As well as being a communicator, I’ll also be a financial steward, so integrity as a path is an obvious choice.
In my line of work, morality, completion, and clarity seem desirable for me to experience and realize – to boost matters from simple intellectual understanding and move into experiencing and realizing them around these three values and the fourth overarching value (integrity).
Let me look at the three.
- Morality is sila, dharma, duty, divine plan, service, mission, doing the Lord’s Will, as I discern it.
- Completion is raising one’s vasanas, records, or sleeping volcanoes to awareness and being with what results until it is fully expressed and complete and the vasana leaves of its own volition.
Vasanas are transitory memories of earlier trauma. They are not who we are. (1) It’s possible to dive underneath them with our awareness and find the Self. I have done this so i know it’s possible. - Clarity is using the most exact words possible in a pleasing manner, knowing that words cannot contain the Truth, to express the truth of the moment. We use our awareness and make distinctions, contemplate, listen to guidance, getting closer and closer to the truth until ever more precise words yield to direct experience.
I think it helps a great deal if we approach all this from inside the experience of love in our hearts. It adds flavor and potency to our work.
Nearer and nearer we circle the situation and approximate the truth. We guide ourselves by whether we’re experiencing increasing relief and release or not. The truth will set us free so, if we’re telling the truth, we should be feeling more and more release. If we’re not, we haven’t told the truth yet. Let’s try again.
Ultimately we move from uncovering the truth of any one situation to discovering the Truth of who we are. The witness of everything we do, whom we constantly are, at last comes under the microscope of our awareness.
Realizing who we are fulfills the quest of all our lifetimes. So let’s stop here.
That’s the way things normally go.
BUT if I realized the Absolute fully I wouldn’t be able to serve.
I’ve seen that I can forget what I’m doing and wander off in the face of too much Light. I can imagine that I wouldn’t want to go further with this line of service.
And that is not attending to the needs of my mission.
Meanwhile, the middle ground of morality, compassion, and clarity – or integrity – provides me with a strong foundation for what comes next.
Kathleen is looking at forgiveness, compassion, and gratitude. Comparing notes is like being at university again.
Non-dualistically, no one will be around to congratulate us when we merge back into the One. “We” will have disappeared.
But I’m very much here in the middle ground of dualism and relativity. And I’ll be here for the foreseeable future. I have no desire at the moment to return to wherever it was I came from, which is the same place you most likely came from too. (“Out there.”)
The work of the middle ground for me answers my need to know what it is I’m doing. Buddha called it the “Middle Way.” Others have called it the Center or the way of the heart. It leads to wholeness and wholeness is what I need to accomplish what’s coming down the pike.
Footnotes
(1) We say, “Joe got mad at me and I got to see who he really is.” No, we got to see his vasana. Joe as an essential being is found underneath the vasanas and is innocent and pure by nature.