Giving Yourself to Life ~ Experience beyond Experience
Jan 16, 2020
Saying For Today: You remain pliable, open to see what happens, and you are willing to act as part of the action of the total space, be part of co-creating there. So, you are devoted, seriously so, but with a sense of not having a tight-grip. You can relax, you can experiment, you can enjoy.
*Brian Wilcox. 'The Heart Speaks'. Flickr.
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Video can be viewed on original site via upper left artist-title below...
Life is present not to be managed by you, but for you to give yourself to Life, which is to say, also, to give yourself to Love.
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A Zen story tells of a Zen student who had the habit of monthly contacting his Teacher about his spiritual progress.
His letters take a mystical turn when he writes, “I am experiencing a oneness with the universe.” The teacher, upon receiving the letter, glances at it and throws it away.
The next month another letter arrives. The student writes, “I have discovered that the divine is present in everything.” The teacher uses the letter to start his fire.
The following letter, revealing an even more ecstatic tone, has, “The mystery of the one and the many has revealed itself to my wonderment!” The teacher yawns.
The next monthly letter has, “There is no self, no one is born, no one dies.” The Teacher throws up his hands in despair.
The Teacher does not get another letter for a year. Concerned, the Teacher writes, asking the student to keep him informed on his spiritual progress. The student writes back, “Who cares?” Upon reading this, the Teacher smiles, saying, “At last! He’s finally got it!”
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The great Christian mystic, John of the Cross, teaches us that in moving toward realized union with the Divine, we go through a passive night of the spirit. Gerald G. May, in The Dark Night of the Soul, defines John of the Cross' teaching on the passive night:
[The passive night of the spirit] is the process of emptying and freeing the spiritual faculties: intellect, memory, and will. It liberates them from attachment to rigidly held beliefs, understandings, dreams, expectations, and habitual, compulsive ways of loving and behaving righteously.
May notes that the most difficult part of the passive night of spirit is the change in a person’s sense of relationship with Spirit:
The deeper, more penetrating—and usually more painful—dimensions of the passive dark night of the spirit have to do with changes in people’s habitual sense of relationship with God. A common experience, often confusing but not too painful, is that the word “God” loses its meaning. … And there seems to be no satisfactory substitute.
