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LOTUS OF THE HEART
All is Welcome Here
Living in Love beyond Beliefs
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My "goodbye" visit. He 95, or 96, seems he cannot recall, no family member can, and there are no official records to verify. She is 88 - they are certain of that. Seen the two for almost a year, three times weekly. He usually sits over to himself, but is alert to his wife, such as any attempt for her to try to get up and walk by herself. So, if you notice closely, he is right there with her, as he has been for over seventy years. She does not recognize who he is. He, in a profound sense, has lost his wife, and he lives with her knowing this. He is very much alive, but seems to be in waiting mode - waiting until the invitation to move from and over to the Other side; he would call that heaven. He has preached about heaven since his early 30's, when he says he got right and left all that worldliness behind. He has only a second-grade education, still, as a so-called uneducated preacher, he became known as the Thunder of the East and filled sanctuary after sanctuary in the Southeast. That is all over. And, they sit quietly and day after day, he now beside her in a chair. A daughter tells me, as I mention his new place, "She likes him to be beside her." Their love has prepared them for something even more; possibly they already have it, or it has them. Possibly, more of them has already gone, or what is to be gone has left, and the body simply has not ceased its creative purpose yet. Anyone who has tasted beyond death, knows there is simply no one moment in which anyone can be said to have died. Amazing how almost everyone thinks otherwise.
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Thinking on this kind of scene for days, I was able to see how this kind of love relates to our spiritual deepening in Grace. Through a disciplined, daily contemplative Path - or a like Path -, there slowly emerges this life of Quiet Love. This is where Silent Prayer arises, when there is nothing need be said - being-with is enough, is Prayer. This evolves so slowly, you do not see it - like a plant grows, but you cannot see it grow, even if you watched it grow. We see this subtle emergence only in retrospect. We see, after a time, we are in - even, we are - a Union of Love, one with Grace at the center. Yet, this is a beginning to elsewhere, something more.
This Union of Love, felt intensely as a feeling affair, drops, or emerges, and what is left is no center. Now, we cannot speak of Union. We cannot speak of Oneness. As to the feeling, we cannot speak that, for the sense beyond Oneness cannot be articulated in the prior language and experience. So, this Quiet Love, experienced as Oneness and oft as a sweet sensation of Presence in the center - indeed, in Union becomes a constant sense of Presence -, I cannot say goes into the emergence beyond Oneness of self and Grace in any way like to before. Oneness, or Union, is like two lovers, their togetherness melded from a prior sense of separation, or two, into the Silent Loving that needs no words. Beyond this, Silent Love is totally 'underground' as to prior conscious experience located in the sense of a center, a center to the self; that is, without a center, without Union, there is ongoing Love, but typically, it seems to me, not arising into any expression externally as to feeling of love, or Love. This is because Union is no more, and the center is no more for the feeling to emanate from.
Now, this Quiet Love may express itself - and I am surprised when it does -, but you have been drawn by Grace beyond the experience of Love, which pertains to Union, into Love Itself. This takes time to adjust to, for embedded in the self has been the association of Love with a subject to love and object to be loved, and love as a feeling. In the absence of this paradigm of love, we have Love. This Quiet Love, or Silent Love, is more like what we could call Presence or Being. We cannot, now, go back to what was, but allow Grace to lead into the exploration few in this life would even admit possible. So, be it. Now, Love loves. So, I as one loving am absent. One becomes merely the Sky the Wind moves through, with no beginning or end to be 'seen'. Sometimes, maybe usually or always, one cannot be clear 'where' one is in regard to all this, for there are no conventional, even religious or spiritual, markers adequate to orient to this Stillness that moves, this Love that loves so quietly as to be totally quiet.
Now, you realize you are totally alone in the world, for your orientation is not here in this world - recall Jesus saying, "I am in the world but not of the world." Most of us will have to be broken by the failure of our seeking to find a place in this world, trying to find here the Love we long for, before the longing and seeking can relax and open to Pure Love. Then, Love loves Love in all loving, in a movement of pure Subjectivity. I have no love to give anyone, for in Love loving no I is loving, anyway. All is happening, free of conscious, self-will, for the Sky remains for Presence to move in and through.
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*Move cursor over pictures for photographer and title.
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