~ THE SACRED MOMENT - A NEW AWAKENING A new consciousness of time, space, and reality is coming into being, built on the understanding that each moment is alive with sacred meaning, dependent only on how we interact with it. A corollary of this is the understanding that there is no such thing as an ordinary life. If life looks ordinary, it is only because we are separated from its sacred roots, just as we are separated from the sacred roots of our deeper selves. For it is not the size nor outer importance of the task that we do that define their significance. It is the quality of feeling that we bring to each gesture while doing even the most ordinary things, that imbues the moment with a sense of the sacred. So many things may seem ordinary and everyday to us - our morning rituals, the repetitive tasks we do at work, the ways we maintain order in our households or in our lives, the need to prepare and buy food. The need to sleep. What could be more ordinary? Yet, at some point, the self begins to feel that the dominant relationship is not with the outer circumstances of life, but with the inner. Here is where the growth, the learning, and the beauty lie. In order to discover these inner circumstances, we must go deeper into feeling our own unique response to life, and this response must be engendered not from the experience of being an observer of life, but by participating with life with an I that holds its identity in God. To have an identity in God is to know beyond reason and feeling that the I that we experience was created. That we come from God and contain that Divine imprint within us. That we are not just a bit of chromosomal material strung together in a beautiful lattice of genetic precision. When it dawns on the self that the I was created, a great sigh of relief and even of joy can result, because with creation comes purpose and significance, and with purpose comes an understanding that whoever we are, and whatever we do, we have an important role to play in the interconnected fabric of universal life. The sense of significance having to do with purpose has nothing to do with ego. Rather, it is born out of a sense of wonder, gratitude, and devotion - wonder that a higher purpose exists for us in truth, and devotion expressed as the need to find and fulfill that purpose. The egos sense of purpose is entirely different. It is built out of conditioned thinking and feeling which create a sense of ambition and need, often in order to address or hide the unhealed portions of the self. By contrast, to have a purpose in Gods Creation, is as open as the sky. It is something to be discovered that we do not own. For before we knew it was there, it was there. This awareness of an eternal design belonging to the soul can create awe and humility. It can create a sense of majesty of the One who has created the intertwined purposes which unite our individual and utterly unique self with all others in the entire spiritual universe. And it is our soul that says yes to this involvement with universal life, this taking on of the essential aspects of our creation and of our reason for being. If, at the same time, our human, embodied self accompanies the yes of our soul, then we begin to explore life in a new way. In an open-ended way, expecting miracles, feeling wonder. Then, there is a possibility for a sense of infused purpose which can inform everything we do, from the smallest to the greatest action, including even those things that might otherwise seem uninteresting. For even uninteresting things can be infused with meaning as they participate in the life of the sacred. Even the tiniest task undertaken for just a moment can convey to us a sense of eternity and of the profound joy of our soul. This engagement with sacred reality created by the yes of our soul becomes a marriage when we can say yes with our whole selves to the promise of Creation - yes to the relationship with God which is the underlying reason for Creation and exists in the manner of a Covenant. This Covenant is made with all souls and is founded on a promise - that in exchange for the gift of existence and the possibilities it offers for expanding into the entire spiritual universe, we give in return our hearts, our love, and our determination to be as we are meant to be. We give ourselves to this Covenant – to the deepest meaning and purpose of our own existence. Such a marriage allows us to become more than we have ever dreamt of being. We become, in effect, sacred humans, embodied within physical reality but leading a Divine life. With this vow comes the gift of perceiving the world as sacred, and awakening to the truth that lies at the heart of Creation. This truth is an ever deepening understanding of who we are, and who God is. There is, of course, the possibility of rejecting this arrangement, of choosing to go our own separate way without God and without acknowledgment of a higher purpose. Many have spent lifetimes going down this road toward ego-involved activity, toward power, glamour, and acclaim by others. These paths have taken us into illusion rather than into sacredness. They have catapulted us onto a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs, defined by the flow of external events over which we had no control, and which became the only thing we could see and feel, once the inner flow became more hidden from us. Eventually, no matter what paths we choose, in the end it is discovered that whatever meaning we give to ourselves, whatever reality we create or pursue for ourselves, is far less rich and or joyful than the reality that God would have us share. Once we become aware of that reality, there is no part of life that is not significant. None that is worthy of being thrown away. There is just moment after moment, after moment, of learning more about ourselves and our place in the infinite life of the spiritual cosmos. This is the dance that we do as human beings, and we are both the dancers and the music, bringing our Divine selves into the realm of the human, breathing ourselves into embodied existence.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 11:52:50 +0000
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