Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Love is Freedom




The Anima left me a note which said, “I am nothing.” It was written in bold with a black felt tipped marker on page one of my life instructions.

Her enigmatic words moved me, especially being scrawled on such a personal document. They seemed to indicate affection, and an attempt to clarify our profound relationship. For my life instructions clearly stated she and I were to serve each other in every possible way, even down to cleaning one another’s shoes.

I wondered how to fulfill this task properly. For instance, if I cleaned her shoes with excruciating attention to detail, wouldn’t that effort reflect egotistical pride in doing a job well? Wouldn’t it also indicate emotional attachment to this figure of incandescent femininity that appeared in a thousand different guises and garbs?

It haunted me, this declaration of her insubstantiality. How could someone be “nothing” who had seemed both consolingly present and frustratingly absent always? For whose reflection I had searched every woman’s face and voice throughout the years?

But after awhile I began to perceive how much love was shown in that simple statement. For most people consider themselves important and want their due in some form or another. And relationships are underpinned by a sense of negotiation and compromise, which is another way of saying bondage.

Yet, love is freedom.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Integration


Self judgement shows we have not come to know ourselves truly. The mind sees the incomplete caracature, the imperfect reflection, and reviles it.

"I am not worthy," it proclaims, yet by this very act places itself above God, assuming the right to judge a soul's worth (if only its own) in the eyes of the Creator.

The egoic mind is conceited and arrogant by nature. This is not a condemnation, but an observable fact.

Yet the heart, opening to its fathomless pain, faced with the excruciating awareness of its own conflicted inner currents, encounters the realm of humility.  By stages it is transformed into a spiritually porous and malleable substance, as the scriptures say:


"I will take away the stony heart, and give them a heart of flesh" (Ez. 36:26).


This is an alchemical process in which Death and Life become indistinguishable. The deepest layers of the psyche are summoned into that transitional realm in which the conscious and the unconscious blend, where the individual and the universal comingle, and the inner and outer person unite as a single whole. 

This, no doubt, is integration.

Monday, August 23, 2010

Prayer of the Heart



Prayer begins in the heart, in its opening toward the inner light as would a flower, in wordlessly seeking the warmth of eternal life.

The mind's duty is to attend to the heart in its prayer, to watch over it like a loving mother does a dear child, and to give it full and undivided attention.

The heart, in its pristine state, is already worshiping God. This is its native orientation in which it needs no guidance, even as a plant's roots seek water without instruction.

The "fallen" man, he of the heartless broken mind, seems to require constant guidance - yet is scarcely benefited thereby. It is a fool's task to seek God where He cannot be found - or more precisely, to seek Him in ways by which He cannot be apprehended (for of course God is everywhere).

The heart realizes it has found that Greater Good when the Divine infiltrates all its darkest shadows and most painful wounds. And it realizes it is not alone even in the most poignant suffering - or perhaps especially in the most poignant suffering.

And it seems to the heart that God's wordless voice is saying,

"When all your striving to acquire Me has been abandoned as ineffectual, then - in your acceptance of poverty - you will discover . . .

. . . we have never been apart."

Sunday, August 22, 2010

The Long Climb



We are tired of dead compromises. We ache, in our souls, to close the doors on a story in which there are no winners or victors, only survivors somewhat akin to zombies, creatures so deformed by contact with their darkened surroundings that they have lost all sense of their humanity.

We long to discover the mother-lode of wealth - riches that, though within, remain inaccessible. We yearn to enter the secret trove of treasures which is our natural inheritance and distribute these freely to an impoverished brotherhood of suffering souls.

What a tiring and lonely journey it has been, past wintered scenes of desolation and despair, a seemingly endless trek through shadows immense and threatening. And yet we have trudged on, bolstered by a slender hope enfolded in the heart's recesses.

Until at last, some faint light glimmers, as though through a tear in the very fabric of existence.  Like a stirring breath of spring, a subtle fragrance in the air, it pulls us forward, toward an event horizon where all things change from what they were not into what they are.


Love, Truth, Freedom


A new energy enters our step as we urge our weary selves onward - hoping, hoping, hoping . . .

To enter the real world at last.