We Share One Life, We Are One Life
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*"Meditation." Sudjuanda, Flickr.
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One reason we need to set time apart for quiet in Silence is to learn more about trusting in love when we feel no positive feeling. We learn that love is not a feeling, and that love is not the absence of a feeling. We progressively grow to appreciate these moments. We may grow to be more comfortable knowing love in these moments and find ourselves progressively freed from the need to feel love. Then, when we feel love, we can appreciate that feeling. When we do not, that is okay. We are, still, in love. We have come to know the absence of a feeling of love is not the absence of love.
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Huang-po said, "I simply worship Buddha. I ask Buddha for nothing. I ask Dharma for nothing. I ask Sangha for nothing." Someone replied, "You ask Buddha for nothing. You ask Dharma for nothing. You ask Sangha for nothing. What, then, is the use of your worship?" At which remark, Huang-po slapped the man.
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The ultimate worship is to worship to worship. This is to say, to love alone from love alone for love alone. Even here, we have some intent. We cannot get away from intent. In duality, there is a unity between intent and intentless. If I say that we need disinterested love - that is, to love for nothing, to make no use of love -, then, when you set about to do this, you have an intent, an interest. Yet, love can be its own use, without our imposing on grace something foreign in intent to grace.
So, we cannot escape intent, even if intent arises and dissolves in consciousness. We need to give up the apparent ideal of intent-less love and realize that pure love, or disinterested love, is the Ground from which springs the desire to love for love: and we each are a part of that love, we are not foreign to the Ground Itself or the intent itself.
Love itself arises prior to intent, and love can fill intent with itself due to its freedom from intent. Love fills intent with the purity of itself, with or without an intent on our part. In this way, the above story can speak of a resting in grace, a loving untouched by the use of that love. Or, we could say, love seeks itself, in that love fills our will with the desire to meet itself as love communing with love. The greatest joy of worship, as life, is the response of love alone to love alone. In this, life is prayer, is worship, and worship and prayer is life. Lovely unity!
We are each a lovely, pure Rose, in the Garden of Grace.
The Sacred in Me bows to the Sacred in You
BRIAN .
