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

Catching Up

Published on 31/07/10
by randy

The calendar says this is the last day of July, 2010. The journey deepens for us all, and this will be my only July entry. Each day I’m amazed at how Source presents events to humor us, enliven us, and challenge us to grow into deeper territory. This summer has been particularly pleasant for me as I’ve been honored to witness the ‘freshness’ of my one and three year old grandchildren in our house. They live in joy, unencumbered by the weight of the intellect. They receive each moment new, in wonder to what’s coming. They’re in constant movement, stretching their bodies and movements to new levels each day. You can smell their curiosity. And when they hug, they really hug. If we were to wear smile meters, my grand daughter would be off the charts.

I’m not sure where I was before I was some body (manifested in this body). I’m certainly not sure where I’ll be when I’m no body (not manifested in this body). Yet, the longer I live, the deeper I practice living, the more I experience, the deeper I ‘feel’ that nothing ends. My observation and experiential ‘feel’ is that we change, and then discover we’re somebody else. The more I silence my thought, moving from head to belly or heart, the more I experience this moment to arising moment. There it is…poof…and now the next moment…poof…and on it goes. This happens in everything I see. We come into form from formlessness and then surrender form to a new arising, moving from light to heavy to light, from a felt sense of being joined, to ego’s draw to a sense of separate identity, back again to felt sense of being joined. There are a lot of markers along the way. Perhaps the most evident are found in our degrees of greed, fear and ignoring versus our degrees of compassion, gratitude and forgiveness.

If we truly come to experience our connection with all things, we more easily see the folly in trying to accumulate more than we need at the expense of another, of trying to achieve against comparison to another’s loss, of fearing from others that what we have will be taken, or of numbing ourselves to the territory for fear of facing it. Once we know we’re all connected, why would we harm another, harming ourselves. Why would we steal from another, knowing we’re stealing from ourselves? Why would we greedily try to hold our ‘stuff’ at the expense of stewardship to the welfare of those who follow us? Cultivating our felt sense of ‘oneness’ and our courage to face impermanence, we live more meaningfully and prepare to die without regret. While this is a common thread among great spiritual leaders, it’s now carried forward with validity from some of our greatest scientific minds. Albert Einstein, in 1950, wrote the following:

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us Universe. A part limited in time and space, he experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion from his consciousness. Striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion; not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the one obtainable measure to achieve peace of mind.

It seems we all say we want peace of mind, yet all our attempts at control work against peace. My grandchildren meet the moment, here and now. They find joy, heaven in this arising moment. I may try to change things to the way I think they ‘should’ be. The more I push the further I seem to travel from peace. The deeper I listen, the longer I hold silence, and the stronger I love (developing felt sense of oneness), the less I seem to harm. I can lock into my notions of ‘rightness’ or be in joy. I can embrace my restless mind, experience how things change, pause, and then take action that minimizes harm. The pause is big. This is where I can touch Big Hope, where I can ‘feel’ my Being that lives beyond the limits of this body, and where I can raise my vibration (energy) to once again experience the impossibility of separation. This is where I can once again touch what Carlos  Castanada has called ‘the active side of infinity’.

The weight of our cultural mind, the never ending monologue in my mind, and the challenge of relationships forever works me back to the bifurcated experience. Basically, I’m once again caught in the delusion that I’m here and you’re there. I’m once again tempted to convince you that ‘I know that’. I may fight to convince you that I’m right and you’re wrong. Yet, my Divine Self is forever evolving, humored at my missteps. Louis Hay has said:

The Universe waits in smiling repose for you to get your thinking right so it can pour its abundance down upon you. And it waits…and waits…and waits. It may not be this lifetime or the next, but someday.

This is what meaningful living is all about. Waking up to our Bigger Self, cultivating our sense of Oneness, practicing compassion, gratitude and forgiveness, and courageously catching up with our bigger Self, our Divine nature. As we empty we meet a new fullness, an openness that awakens dormant forces not previously accessible. As we experience ‘great fullness’ in this arising moment, we present an ‘allowing’ for new to arrive. We catch up with our Divine when we fully arrive to the ‘feeling’ of the future breathed into the present. There’s no yearning for things different, no restlessness for anything other than deeper love for all, gratitude, and letting go the weight of past events. This is true relativity, when we jump outside of time and space to the paradoxical. In loving feelings of ‘alone’ we feel ‘all one’. Outside of space in ‘nowhere’ we feel ‘now here’. Outside of the fear of ‘beware’ we cultivate ‘be aware’. We can surrender the ‘in form (ation) age’ to the ‘in spirit age’. Surrendering our temptations to ‘have’ and to ‘do’ we drill deeper into our ‘be’ nature. The dis-ease from thinking we’re separate from God (Source, Universe) heals as we nurture the gift of the Divine within and without, beyond notions of in and out.

Your Somebody is your body, given to your stewardship. Please never criticize it. Catch up to your greater Self and honor your body for doing everything it can to catch up to the beauty of response for the gift of your materialization. If you have any sense of lack-ness, stop it. Move from this ‘dis on grace’ to cultivation of gratitude for the grace bestowed upon us to manifest. Move forever from complaint to no complaint. Work forever to be in the sustainable felt experience of ‘joy’ rather than forever seeking the fleeting pleasure of ‘enjoyment’. Surrender attachment to second and third hand information and cultivate first hand experiential knowing from the Laws of the Universe, forever reducing the number of felt moments of separation.

In the process of catching up to our greater Self, we leave the ‘ant in a sugar bowel’ consumptive mentality. We enter the realm of or best creative expression, knowing the results of our actions remain as we return to ‘no form’. Our practice at ‘pause’, deeper in silence, reverently offers our vibration to the song of the Universe as we arrive. The arrival is beautiful, outside of the intellect’s desire to separate. The beauty changes us and deepens our living as we touch the soil that Source served to seed our Divine nature. Life is celebration, not cerebration. Life is feeling, not thought. The real question is whether or not we’re strong enough to surrender our love of thought for our love of the Divine.

So what instrument(s) do you use to deepen your expression? We give birth to the Divine with our creative artist of life. As we remove our thought obstacles, let go our critical mind, we drill deeper. Our emptiness paves the way to our receiving and our fullness. In breath, we’re inspired from silence and emptiness. Breathing out we participate. In affirmation to this very gift, we’re filled with ‘Yes’. In sustaining joy, we scream ‘Thank you’. This is wild work that doesn’t know the peanut gallery. It doesn’t feel the need for approval from others. It just dances in the realm of the creative, touching that experience of joined response in the Divine song of life. This work is grounded from a deeper sense of Being-ness and it knows the gravity of conformity.

So if life is a song, and if it’s all vibration, can’t we assume that all we need to do is open to the harmony and rhythm that’s found throughout all things? And if it’s song, again, what is your instrument? Can you step aside from your mind and ‘feel’ the depth of song spring forth from you belly? Wayne Dyer has famously said, “Don’t die with your music still in you?” I don’t like the word ‘die’ because it implies an ending, a sort of separation. How about, “When you surrender your material form, will you have regrets for holding un-played music?”

Finally, if you’ve traveled with me through these words to this point, please know I’m deeply humbled by this work. It’s a never ending challenge. People may wonder what’s the point? Why cultivate a deeper sense of Just Be It? I don’t have the three minute elevator speech, but in the words of famous bluesman, Otis Spann, “I gotta a feelin’ everything gonna be alright. I gotta a wonderful feelin’ my baby (Divine) coming home tonight.” Sung from the belly, Otis had the present moment feeling of the future in the present. It’s a wonderful feeling. Just let go the things that grow your restlessness (greed, fear, ignoring) and be aware of those things that make your life more meaningful (love, gratitude, and forgiveness). There’s an army of cooperative vibration just waiting to hop your train of creation as we participate in this joyous song. It’s here, now.

Final quote of the day from Reb Anderson on the Second Precept:

In uprightness you see that everything is you. If there is one thing about yourself that is obscure to you or feels separate from you, then you will feel some dent in your wholeness. That one small dent will force you to inevitably try to fill it.

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