The Greatest is Often the Simplest
I witnessed a man talking to a woman he was confronting, “Religion;” he said, “That’s surely a direction for failures and people who can’t really cope with facing reality.”
And the woman he was accusing of this inability to face reality said, “You poor man! Is your mind or awareness so tiny that you have never realised the forces and processes of your own body are beyond anything you understand? Can’t you see that your very existence is brought about by things so far beyond your knowledge that it is only a statement of your impoverishment to suggest an awareness of God is an expression of some sort of smallness and failure? Have you never understood that?
Have you not seen that religion is not only an acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It can be an active loving relationship with what gives you life. And such love is an exchange, a sharing, and a way of merging one with another. It is an exchange – a sharing of bodily fluids – the very substance of life.
Imagine that; a glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable. Is that something you are afraid of?”
That nameless woman put simple words to things the most people never come close to understanding. For she described religion as, “An acknowledgement of what we fail to understand and yet depend upon, but it is also an opening to it, a willingness to relate to it? It can also be something far more even than that. It can be an active loving relationship with what gives you life.”
She has said that God is not some far off thing that we may never know, but is known in us now as the mystery of our own life. Perhaps we can begin a relationship with that by using the following for the Kingdom of heaven is within you, said Jesus. Your body is a temple for the Spirit of God.
Try this simple approach to get closer to this. Sit quietly where you will not be disturbed for a minute or so. Close your eyes, become aware of your breathing, and then put your hand under your clothes so you can feel your heart beating and you chest moving by the spontaneous mystery of Life.
There you have it. The conscious you is touching and directly experiencing in a quiet moment how that mystery we call Life is right there in every moment of your being spontaneously giving you existence. You are touching what is usually unconscious. You can feel it moving right under your hand. You know it is not your conscious will, knowledge or beliefs that is pulsing that beautiful movement. Right now, life is breathing you and beating your heart. And that is just the very evident surface signs of what it is doing. Feel it! Do you really fully understand that? Isn’t that an amazing miracle and mystery? Wouldn’t it be wise and wonderful to get to know that mystery directly and more fully?
This amazingly wise woman goes on to say it is, “A glorious love affair with the very spirit of life! A love affair with the invisible and forever indefinable. …. such love is an exchange, a sharing, and a way of merging one with another.”
She says that it is with the invisible and indefinable; so you cannot think about it or use words because that is all acts of defining, yet you can merge with It and know it in silence.
Strangely there is something written by an unnamed monk in the latter half of the 14th century – its title – The Cloud of Unknowing, which has a similar theme. Considering this is a religious classic, it still says in its ancient way that what you seek is ‘invisible and forever indefinable.’ So I quote some passages from this amazing work.
“Look that nothing live in thy working mind, but a naked intent stretching into God.” Any thought of Him is inadequate, and for that reason defeats its own end.”
“Further, there is to be no willful choosing of method: no fussy activity of the surface intelligence. The mystic who seeks the divine Cloud of Unknowing is to be surrendered to the direction of his deeper mind, his transcendental consciousness: that “spark of the soul” which is in touch with eternal realities.”
And here is stated some of the results of this entering the Cloud of Unknowing. “That they shall feel the perfection of this work: the which calling is called ravishing. And some there be that be so subtle in grace and in spirit, and so homely with God in this grace of contemplation, that they may have it when they will in the common state of man’s soul: as it is in sitting, going, standing, or kneeling. And yet in this time they have full deliberation of all their wits bodily or ghostly, and may use them if they desire.”
A modern and simpler summary of this was written by T. S. Elliot –
I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So, the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Yes, it is all in the waiting. You are not waiting for anything, for that would be waiting wrongly with something in mind. I tried doing this for a couple of months, sitting waiting without any goal in mind , without meditating on anything or trying to get somewhere. I felt it was like waiting on a street corner for an invisible friend feeling that if and when they came they would tap me on the shoulder or let me know in some way. At the end I was getting into bed and heard a bodiless voice say, “You asked how God touches the human soul – now watch closely.”
I had never experienced anything like that before, but shortly afterwards I was unmistakably and powerfully ‘touched’. See Life’s Little Secrets
Let your light shine
There is something here I want to emphasise. It is Your Light. It is not from anywhere else. For instance you do not have to earn heaven, that it is already yours but is covered up by all the things we think and try to do to get it. You don’t have to be good or perform certain acts to get it because it is your potential waiting to be uncovered.