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Brian Wilcox 'View from a Bridge'
A major transition has occurred when you realize, not merely in thought but experience, your body and the body of the world is a single body. You become aware that the world is not out there, the world is everywhere. You are the world looking at itself. You cannot get outside the world, for you are it. There is no point at which you can point, saying, "There is the universe, and here I am." Yet, you come to realize you, too, are more than the world, while the world, also, is more than what it appears to you.
* * *
I recall, almost home. I pull the car to the side of the highway. I gaze at a small pine, much shorter than I. Entranced, I gaze in wonder at the green sapling. How alive! Yes, alive! And I feel so alive. That moment speaks worlds. A holy meeting. Nature enfolds and unfolds before me, in sounds and silences, this ubiquitous Voice of God.
* * *
And he to whom worshipping is
a window, to open but also to shut,
has not yet visited the house of his soul
whose windows are from
dawn to dawn.
*Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet.
* * *
Your eyes are windows into your body. If you open your eyes wide in wonder and belief, your body fills up with light. If you live squinty-eyed in greed and distrust, your body is a dank cellar. If you pull the blinds on your windows, what a dark life you will have!
*Matthew 6.22-23 (CEV)
If you want to be one with the cosmos, Ken, instead of one with only a single female body, then don't see the mountain, be it. Like this: Feel my naked body. Now feel the same way about the entire world in front of you. Erotically unite with everything that is arising.
*Ken Wilber. Boomeritis.
* * *
An initial point of awakening spiritually for me, after beginning to live a contemplaitve spirituality in the mid-1990s, including much time alone in prayerful meditation, was a powerful connection to Nature about me. Awareness was being pulled into the world of things, translucent with the Divine.
One of the most telling aspects of this connection with life around me was plants. Plants and trees fascinated me as never before, even though I had been raised on a farm amid garden and forest lives.
I later learned this attraction to Nature was a step in the spiritual emergence of persons on a contemplative path. This was not to last, as it is a somewhat introductory phase, yet it was instrumental in reorienting me to Nature, including my own body as part of Creation.
Before, for many years, due to the puritanical, world-denying religion I was raised in, I was alienated from the world-of-Nature, of others, alone - painfully lonely in time and place to which I felt I did not belong. I was looking out onto the world through the elitist ideology of us-against-them. This hiding was a fleeing from intimacy with Spirit awaiting us in the world of things and people, time and place.
The "God" of my early years had become a hideaway from submersion in earthy affairs. And rightly was I taught it antithetical to the inner Life to be submerged in the world of things. Yet, to include all things in the heart is not the same as submersion, or being taken in, by them.
Included in this dualistic worldview was the separation of the human body from the rest of Nature. Hence, the human body was not seen as the body of Nature, with its many bodies; rather, the body of homo sapiens was somehow superior to the bodies about it. There was a profound fissure between the self and the rest of embodied lives, so embodied Spirit.
Occasionally, I would find a romantic relationship, but such could not contain the inner ache for loving connection. I could not see these false intimacies as false, not for my being insincere or unloving, but for a relationship not being able to provide what our heart most longs for. Over time, through the Spirit in silence, in learning to be quiet inwardly, prayerfully, I was drawn into intimacy with life, and the ache was muted, finally. Then, my relationships with others, too parts of Nature, became a conscious means of Grace to me.
First, I had rejected the world, then found Spirit in the world, then discovered the world in Spirit. I could now enjoy a true solitude, one that included the world, due to the healing of the split between form and Formless. I could write in 2006, ten years after the contemplative path began for me -
The world has become
my Lover
secrets move between
our nakedness
no tongue has spoken
or can speak -
not even the word Mystery
can rightly signify this Intimacy
I breathe and see and touch
making ecstatic Love with life
everyday
* * *
Hence, early in life, I was on a path of transcendence. Metaphorically this an ascending spirituality. This yang rather than yin orientation is "heavenly," again in being ascending, like a ladder to heaven. However, Spirit is both "ascending" and "descending": Heaven and Earth is the wedding of matter - Mother, Earth - and spirit - Father, Heaven - in Unity.
Some persons may take the following way - first a spirituality of Nature, later to discover that the embrace of Life includes the ascending aspect of Spirit. A well-known maxim is, "He is so heavenly, he is of no earthly good." The opposite applies as well, "He is so earthly, he is of no heavenly good." In modern culture, the likelihood is one gets submerged in the world first, and many never embrace the ascending aspect. This is likely, partly, for much of modernized culture, attached to matter, is inimical to Spirit as transcendent Presence and oblivious to spirit as the essence we are. Hence, attachment to matter, exclusive of spirit, means being asleep to Spirit in the world of matter - that which is born and dies, linearity -, while the Eternal is silenced, the heart muted to the inner motions of the Ineffable.
* * *
See, Nature - persons, places, things, feelings, thoughts, bodies - is a means now-and-here to awaken to formless Life, to connect through life to Life. Nature mirrors what is within us. Nature is seen as only stuff, when the self-awareness blocks this mirroring. When the self-awareness opens beyond the self, the self becomes receptive to Spirit, the connection flows, and the self is wedded within-with-outside - the us-versus-them or us-versus-it - is dissolved in pure Love, in the primal Harmony. Then nature is Nature, and the forms in the realm of matter are seen as words of the Word.
* * *
An example of this transmutation of the experience of nature into the experience of Nature is the body and sex. Here, the sensual love felt is coming from and returning to the transsensual Presence. A body becomes the Body of God, for the self - as all creations - is an expression of Spirit in form. The world, then, becomes inspiring, for the world is InSpirited. The world becomes a means of the highest Good.
* * *
Any aspect of Nature, then, is a mirror not only of that within the self, but the One from whom the world takes form in time and place. And we discover that a needed detachment occurs, realizing all in matter is dying, while spirit and Spirit is deathless, our Home.
* * *
I drank from the cup
lips touching cusp
a drink not there and
overjoyed, my heart with freedom,
I returned to the world below
to see Christ
everywhere
* * *
(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2020
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