Saying For Today: So, really, any tenderness of Heart is our Heart, the Heart.
LOTUS OF THE HEART
Living in LOVE beyond Beliefs
We Share One Life, We Are One Life
Living in LOVE beyond Beliefs
Blunt the sharpness Untangle the knot Soften the glare Merge with dust
*Tao Te Ching, Chapter 4 Translators, Gia-Fu Feng & Jane English
Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before - more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.
*Charles Dickens. Great Expectations.
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Persons more evolved into transpersonal consciousness, for want of a better reference, may express an apparent contradiction of being unfeeling but, likewise, deeply tenderhearted. Or this may been seen to be a shift back and forth between impersonal callousness and empathic warmth. This may appear, likewise, in meditation or prayer, or other spiritual practice, when the person himself or herself is bewildered by the seeming lack of consistency between stolid coolness and vibrant warmth. How can this be?
As I have been drawn more into experience of nondual, transpersonal Grace, I have seen a major shift from the feeling-thought-body to a natural detachment from personal feelings, even positive personal feelings: this does not mean I am free from such, or would want never to feel them. They do arise, and strong negative emotions to my surprise, at times. And this transpersonal sense does not negate the beauty and grace of tenderness of Heart; this softness of Essence, while embracing the body with its sensations and feelings and thoughts, is arising - and more pure and healthy for doing so - from Subtle Spirit. Spirit manifests all the way from prepersonal to transpersonal, and is more powerful in transpersonal than prior, at any point of development, for being unlimited and untouched by personal.
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Some years ago, I was surprised by my crying copiously, while I listened to lovely music on Compassion. Even after tears flowed and stopped, they returned and began again. The tears did not arise from personal feeling, but they were not impersonal. This is a subtle distinction in spiritual evolution, or consciousness evolution: the lack of personal does not mean im-personal, or un-personal, but trans-personal. This does not mean, either, the feeling is dis-embodied; in a spatial metaphor, the body is taken into the expression of feeling - the feeling is still transpersonal, for the gross, or physical, is permeated with Spirit manifesting as transpersonal. This means, not as before, feeling is not moving into Subtle Spirit, but from Subtle Spirit into body - remembering, however, body is a manifestation of Spirit, just an expression away from Pure Spirit.
Anyway, I rarely feel such tenderness expressing through me as in those tears. I was thankful to be reminded that the tenderness was still there. I was reminded, likewise, to allow such tenderness, as well as other natural senses, to express as Pure Spirit embracing everything I am, we are, in Life and we each as expressions of One Life. So, really, any tenderness of Heart is our Heart, the Heart. We cannot rightly claim such feeling as our own, for such does not arises as belonging to anyone of us.
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Grace is not present to make us less human, but growing into the depths of Life means becoming more human. This includes tenderness and tears, but not my or your tenderness and tears, our tenderness and tears. Grace loves, feels, cries, and laughs - as well as so much more - through us. Wonderful, indeed, to be and become human! As the sage of the Tao Te Ching said many hundreds of years prior, the Way leads us to merge with dust - this being reminiscent of the Gospel of John, in the Christian Bible, having, "And the Word took upon Itself flesh." Taking upon ourselves an appearance of lowliness is a blessing, for in humility alone we find our true Nature.
