just be it It’s about the work involved in establishing a dedicated practice to feelings of a bigger belonging through practices aimed at increasing feelings of compassion, gratitude and forgiveness

Holding a Sense of Wonder

Published on 27/12/15
by randy

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Holding a sense of ‘life as sacred’ seems essential for our well being. I’ve heard this laid out as three sensitivities:

Mystery (of Thou). This essentially holds that life/death is not a problem you’re going to solve.
Overwhelming. Holding the tension of awesome and terrifying.
Fascinating. Sensitive to the beauty of life.

It’s basically saying that an authentic life is one lived in a sense of wonder, within the awareness that any one of us is just four minutes from death. While man creates immortality systems to in effect deny death, the authentic life continually holds awareness to the impermanence of our time in this consciousness. In effect, if we don’t look at terror, we can’t look at wonder. No doubt, if you want to ‘feel’, one thing you’ll feel is fear. The main distinction here is that you know there’s a sacred vein running through life. You know you belong, you always have, and you always will belong. This felt knowing breaks the illusion of our sense of separateness. So the key question today is, “How do I hold and cultivate that felt sense of belonging in the face of today’s terror?”

I recall an elder once saying, “I live my life in expanded circles of belonging.” Where our sense of belonging stops is where our tendency to violence begins. If my belonging is small, holding a strong sense of place in community and family, I may tend to resist diversity and change. The fundamentalist views from the Republican right and various faith groups is evidence to this. They fear change and will do what they can to stop it. This is perhaps most noted in the denial of man’s impact on climate, their difficulty with immigration and a changing culture, and most notably today, their phobia of different religions possibly taking dominance over the traditional Christian immortality system. Yet, the more they resist these changes the more they seem to accelerate. So what’s the non-violent response to this?

We can’t allow our present good to be the enemy of our better. Their can’t be God and something else because God is everything…omnipresent, non-dual. So we can lock into our notions of fixed answers or we can explore the mystery. We can be ‘right’ or we can be rich, happy and free. The extent to which we hold to our ‘rightness’ is what limits our blessings. When we hold the mystery we’re able to touch peace and awe at knowing we’ll never know. We open the circle to collaboration and deeper questions and answers. We let go the notion of ‘fixed answers’, knowing peace is something to aim for, but something that can never be an end result. We bounce in and out of our sense of belonging. We bounce in and out of our experience of the dual and the non-dual. When we can humble ourselves to our ‘not knowing’, we can aim to peace through understanding and to knowledge through experience.

If there’s one thing my experience has taught me, hold silence and wonder and awe. Be very careful about pushing thoughts, opinions and beliefs. Yet, hold to the responsibility of sharing ‘what works’. So if you think you have all the answers, please keep your distance. If you want to take the question deeper, please come closer. We can support one another in the journey, no matter what our faith system is. We can explore together the effectiveness of our life practices, aiming to further awaken to the wonders of what’s given. Periodically smashing the illusion of our separateness we move closer to the light acknowledging the mirror we are of each other. This is what love and compassion looks like. I love the phrase, “If it’s not about love, it’s not about God.” This is how our life practice moves us to further expansion of our circles of belonging in faith to the wonders and workings of the Divine.

The mystery of me bows to the mystery of you.

Common sense is searching for common ground for the common good.

The divided mind want to compete through conflict. The wholesome mind want to “be” at its best.

The beginning of wisdom is to know that we don’t know. The beginning of love is to know we are each other.

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