SEDUCTIONS TO THE SUPREME

“From mine to Thine” is the summation of the path. “Not my will but Thy Will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Specifics must support and conform to this movement, or they risk being harmful to it. To love the Lord as yours, such that all that is yours is the Lord’s: such is the self-dispossession of ourselves whereby we, in God, possess ourselves most truly.

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Through the Spirit, the Lord dwells in the body, ever accessible in the heart center, energy centers, third eye region, head and above head. When we are soaked in God, the entire flesh and skin feels the light tread of Sophia’s tendernesses.

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Prayers, mantras, songs, readings, scripture, images, uplifting conversation, service, inspired acts – all these supplements to inner devotion exist to remind us of the Lord’s nearness in us and in creation. In truth, anything can serve to remind us of God, if the opening is there with our will and our love. For the Divine is in all. However, things more born of love more readily restore us to love’s reality. Let us therefore strive in all our practices to be reborn in the Spirit of Love.

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Never allow yourself to merely represent an idea, image, message, holy stance, etc., for these are inevitably restrictions on the boundless God, if not outright performances for the eyes of other humans. Make no appearances – no impression management.

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When ‘I’ am the one making all the choices, there is so much arbitrariness that we can actually feel imperiled by this focus on the self. Whereas the primary choice, at times the hardest but ultimately the sweetest, is to surrender one’s will to God. When the intensity of our contact with God lessens, habits threaten. The world-rut sucks us in, the past grabs and slows us down, and the extreme danger of choices becoming only one’s own emerges: arbitrariness. Hence the importance of discipline: to reestablish the contact when it feels weak, so that the movement to God can reassert its priority in us. Time and heartspace must be made, for “God gives Godself abundantly to those who love God” (Nicholas of Cusa).

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God wants nothing more than for each of us to turn to Him and open ourselves to His will and work — to pour His light and force and delight and knowledge and love into us — for His will and work is all for our good in the transformation, all for our betterment and perfection at every level possible of our personal and social being, our cosmic and spiritual being. God wants nothing more than to be allowed to love us; but for that we must make the opening, widen ourselves to receive it, surrender with our whole being to His will and work, trusting in full that He will see to completion His end in us and manifest His love.

Create space for the creator to create.

God narrows your choices down to the only choice for him.

No reward but more space in you for Grace.

Every distraction conquered brings us nearer and makes us clearer to the Lord.

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The first and final habit to break is that of unawareness with regard to every choice we make that bifurcates our life away from the Lord–whatever in us automatically leans and leads to forgetfulness of God. One benefit of spiritual practice and examination is to become aware of this unawareness. This allows it to become more and more a matter of choice between bifurcation and union. To feel the struggle deeply is a great gift. Then we know that even the slightest distraction involves more than just us as individuals, but the whole network of beings As servitors of the divine, unawareness, forgetfulness, and negligence radiate consequences all around us, in ways only a most conscious being could fathom. The stage must be reached where the free movement toward God more and more conquers every tendency to bifurcate the path and so fragment the continuity of love–our consciousness of it and our surrender to it.

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There are no “tricks” in spiritual life. A technique can only assist in preparing, readying the space in us for our being to open to Him and what He wills to give us. Often a great, continued, steadfast effort is needed, and a technique can aide us by focusing us, clearing away impediments, and drawing us in to a spirit of preceptivity. But ultimately we have to open ourselves in self-giving and give our entire self to Him. Self-giving should grow into a total surrender–and for that there is no technique, for it cannot be mechanical, it cannot have any fakery or falsehood in it, it cannot be mere appearance. Surrender is an inner giving, an exchange between our being and the “source and end” of our being, without any intermediaries. A technique can bring us to the edge, but it is the grace-filled will that can alone make the plunge and give itself over to God’s vastness. One sincere leap of total surrender to the Lord is worth a million perfections of technique. Imagine then the perfection of a million leaps!

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Whatever desire for attention one might have must radically die away, so that we are left with only the intention to serve God and lead everyone’s attention to Him: then we leave the unfolding of the fruits of His work also to Him. Whereas the mind yearns to see itself at the helm of the accomplishment–even if it means crashing into the cold wall or churning about the massive emptiness, restless and uncontent–the simple soul is neither seen nor hidden but held in its source: the Spirit of the living God. It participates in God’s moment, God’s manifestation – that is accomplishment enough. Indeed, the mind craves Being’s indelible excess over all that is; but because it dreams it could effectuate this itself, it never reaches it.

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The universe is truly structured so that everything occurs for the best of each. Because bestment is for us an unfolding over time, we never see the fullness of it manifesting; indeed events generally catch us in surprise, for our bestment far exceeds what we think. The majesty is that the bestment of each is in force without detriment to the bestment of any other. This coordination too far exceeds what we expect, for it is all God in bestment of God.

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If anything I tried to make happen was mine and not Thine, Lord, you are sure to root it out. The Godward world is the only real world. All else is consigned to illusion. It is the passing shadow-play of the Ignorance. Self-will is a contradiction in principle; if it is not rooted in the God, its only option is to shipwreck, spin out, burn away. If it has not Thy Being within it, Lord, it has no being at all. Time not sealed by your Eternity, had not time.

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When mind takes the lead and decides what is to be done, the lower energies begin to act for themselves, leading all to confusion and wrong movement, for touch with the Divine Force has been dimmed. One has to want to be free of the mind-play and cultivate an appreciation for mental silence’s power and its other great benefits. Otherwise some mental enticement will continue to drag the consciousness into its whirlpool pit of interminable zigzagzoom cogitation; and in that confusion all the forces of ignorance and reaction rush in to reassert rights of attention with their clamorous rudimentary demands battling to edge out or cloud or suffocate our aspiration and our knowing that silent reliance on the Divine Force alone is the only way.

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Crucial to abide in what is revealed of God’s eternal being-consciousness-bliss. When it is felt in the Heart, when thought is dissolving into Identity, when an understanding of deathlessness has become immanent, undeniable, beyond analysis, – this disclosure of Grace should be honored with all one’s soul and verve, never taken for granted. We jeopardize it, perhaps, only because we know it is permanent and will come back; but this blocks the entry of Grace and its greater work. In deferring the inevitable full realization, there are material and psychic and spiritual consequences that ripple outward. Our “ignoring” – which is not entirely ignorant yet plays lax with the magnitude of the truth – prolongs the reign of Ignorance and slows the full transformation. If our vessel is yet weak and small, we need these falls and lowerings, just as one needs pauses in the course of an education to assimilate what’s been learned; or as an artist sometimes must abandon a work, so its idea can gestate in the ruins and incubate in the artist’s soul. But if your vessel is strong and wide, then our “ignoring” only makes an excuse for indulgence; it attests to a lingering preference or predisposition (vasanas, kleshas) for murky habits and dim sight over the bliss of the One and its light. But we know that this cannot be a true preference, and that abiding in the Self is easily powerful enough to destroy the predispositions that block Its realization. Indulgences of this sort attest both to readiness and unreadiness: the goal and its requirements may be clear, but the will and sincerity are not yet completely surrendered. Some reservation to drown in the Divine leads us to bifurcate down another detour past smaller desires and pleasures. It is right to trust that we will return to the main path, but at crucial stages we must ask: why continue to make allowances for such detours? No matter how minor, no matter if even along the detour our acts remain predominately focused still on God, if we know it is an allowance, we must ask: why this further concession to a law which we know lowers the intensity of consciousness, the fervor of devotion, the clarity of joy, the force of Grace’s work? It can only be that we are still controlled by a drive to separation (ego) and to find pleasure by our own means, at our own discretion, knowing full well such pleasures are a bottomless pit which end only in the misery of empty repetitions or, God willing, in a crisis that forces us to change our ways. As our mentality is subtilized and approaches the living gnosis, the sensitivity to such crises increases until we see every juncture according to the ultimatum: surrender or “die” (continue in sin, unliberated). That is the starkest way to state the reality of the bifurcation which continually faces us: the choice, made possible by the union of reality and the gift of Grace, to go the path of new creation and new being rooted in Immortal Spirit; or the choice to detour into the realms of past habit, the bad infinity of unfulfillment and unease, of vital desire’s addiction and boredom and slow misery.

The bifurcation which cuts along desire and its actuation must be a particularly potent one for the vital beings we are. A craving arises in the mind; it titillates or nags; associated images, tastes, smells, sensations linger about the craving-idea. Likewise, it tugs at the habit and the version of ourselves that can remember it and that is revived with each event of acting on that desire. If more or less consciously one chooses to let the desire take hold, then a chain of steps leading to its fulfillment is inaugurated. There may be frustration and obstacle along the way, but reality has already been shaped and is continually shaped by the choice to pursue and continue in the pursuit. Despite some minor differences of circumstances, these shapes are familiar. There is much repetition in desire, so much it would be easy to convince us that its practical purpose was to keep us in place, to repeat that version of ourselves tied to the given habit. There is comfort in that repetition, safety and certainty, even a sort of shelter from reality that the satisfaction of familiar desires allows. The model may even be going to sleep. If, however, one declines the desire’s call, does not let it take hold but instead lets it dissipate, then another space opens and the union of reality takes place. Now there is no clear first or next step, no program of pursuit to switch on, but rather what comes from the surprise of self-giving. It may be an uncomfortable place, for at the limit we have no version of ourselves to reference and engage but rather an open possibility of self not yet determined by object and goal. What is clear and already impacting reality is the absence of the repetitive chain, and so a forestalling of the consequences of the craving. One can in fact choose to fill a similar time period with nothing at all, no activity; still the union occurs for lack of choosing the bifurcating path. Something else has been activated, its chain of steps and consequences not necessarily known or foreseeable in their fundamental details. In this space of unknowing, we give God the chance to act, so the union of reality can take hold, in ascension to the ever-greater love.

We do not marvel enough at the fact that, even from our limited vantage point, we see and sense Unity, the Whole. How is it that we are born with a taste for the One, a drive toward synthesis and harmony? Such a unity never limits itself to any human group (family, tribe, nation, humanity) nor even to the inhabitants of earth: we seek a oneness with the entire universe and beyond. It is not a numerical one but a Oneness of Essence. The same “Self” is in all, from the atoms up to the gods, and that Self of all is within us and can be realized as our true Self.

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Nothing can possibly be “dead,” though we can experience existence as massively, pervasively dead. Why? Being makes no distinction between the dead and alive; star and plant and dog all are. Life is what we call the consciousness enlivening being. But consciousness is “enlivening” all matter, top to bottom, both animate and inanimate. And if that consciousness is one, and if it is all one large unified movement of evolution into the consciousness that underlies it, that is involved in it (Supermind), then the only thing that can die is an ego: a part separated off from the whole. A life can die, and we are sad because a life is precious, a center of the all. But in another sense, there is not an instant of breakage, for the consciousness that enlivened that life goes on enlivening not just our lives but the life of all being. Realization: to see this all-pervasive and all-enlivening light in all of being, to experience it as one’s Self without ego, as God’s spirit within us, and so to know for absolutely certain that one cannot die, that one is not just this body, that the consciousness one is is that of all being, indivisibly.

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When we wish our work to bring attention to us – as bearer and generator of the effects – we are bound to struggle and claw. But when our work is meant to bring attention only to the Lord – bearer and generator of the Divine Effect as such – then we live in freedom, for we know for certain that the consequences of our actions are seen to by the Ultimate as He sees fit for them to be. The karmayogin needs no “future” for any of its works, for all the service and hope in her is overjoyed to be anonymous and unattached. The one tether to the Lord’s own intention is enough to feed millions of works and efforts. The fruit is only a growing consciousness of God and of our nearness to God. It culminates in a total absorption in the Divine Shakti’s movement, in surrender to Her, so that our being is entirely her instrument, a vanishing mediator whose every exertion is a selfless, free, and uncalculating consecration to the divinization of all.

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When all the parts of our nature are given to the highest priority and the highest Will, then everything is certain. But if some parts hold back, disturbances are inevitable. They arise from some persistent reluctance of some part of us to surrender–or as the consequence of our keeping some priority for our own partial will. Yet even this we can see as part of God’s unfolding, as evidence that our soul will not settle until its greatest purpose is met: the transformation of the nature into an agent vessel of the Mother’s work.

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We underestimate the rippling effects of our thoughts simply because there are no instruments to record and gauge psychic impacts except the soul itself. Usually, other material causes are asserted as the only causes; or if the chain of cause-effect isn’t clear, one says it could technically become clear; or one defaults to chance. Meanwhile synchronicities, chance encounters, sudden intuitions, surprises and fruits, jolts into new modes of being, unforeseen effects – all these are the heart of life. The soul is a “quasi-cause” — because in truth the underlying cause is God’s free self-giving. The soul gives greater force to body and mind the more it is awake and in front and granting its wideness of purpose to descend into the nature touched and righted by grace. On the other hand, obsession with immediately and directly tangible results has the consequence of spoiling and forestalling psychic efforts we might make – and do make once we are convinced of their efficacy. While less tangible, such acts ultimately have the power to override the merely material and to transform it, by uniting us with God’s action in us. For example: when we rewrite a message to someone, amending it to be less reactive, more caring, less chaotically charged, more clear and understanding. This gives the recipient an entirely different ground of reality to work from; entirely different chains of effects for all involved follow from that ground once shared. A well- or poorly-timed or -worded message can change the course of a life. But the power exemplified then is in fact at play with every event of consciousness.

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Whether thing or activity, idea or projection, the multitude of movements, thought-constructs, and reasonings, the network of all changes – all is the energetic expansion and contraction of God’s power and bliss, which each of us knows and is, for the universe is this very appearance of consciousness’s form: a flame Eternal, uncaused, beginningless.

We ought truly to give thanks for our obstacles, for they show us where our knowledge of God-in-us is lacking or occluded. Our distance from God-vision is measured by the degree to which we see things as ‘going wrong’ or our sense that things are off; that place points out exactly where we must call God in to show us the true sense – and to intervene.

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God alone is the Presence-Bliss in everything: “It pleases Him.” We must trust this unconditionally, with absolute faith, by all means to discern God in happenings (their soul-meaning and spirit-raising consequences), ready to accept this vision and knowledge of the One enjoying Its entire cosmic Action.

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I will never cease wondering in deepest gratitude at how each of us, each soul, participates in this evolution-involution, this unfolding of God-reality in our minor happenings, yet always leading to that same major understanding of atma as Paramatma; of the One Lord at work in our One journey to the One, with each Event of Soul absolutely unique in its experience and path, while always reflecting what becomes of the infinity in God. I could never give enough thanks for this chance-blessing; such awe.

Constant remembrance of God brings the joy of dwelling in God. The more one experiences the bliss of one’s own consciousness as it is, the simpler it is to tune in with God. Remembrance can naturally alternate with Satchidananda states, for it is the same Beloved Supreme. Access by any means is the only priority.

On the path, there is great heartbreak in realizing that what one once desired or even yet now desires so much, what one placed stock in as a source of happiness, in fact was never so desirable, never so pleasing as the mind-craving thought, as the body clawed at with its dubious glee. With the deflation of that dream, what sorrow to have wasted a single moment, to have wrapped up in it our half-hearted yeses, our vitality, our meaning! Then the task of dismantling every apparatus that lent credence in mind and enablement to the body for the support of that desire and the removal of all its paraphernalia… All while rejecting the attacks which would spin one right back to the defunct desire and its dead repetitive indulgence, denying its plea to return for one last run. The greatest aide, as ever, is to recall God in the heart, to orient constantly to the Self above, without any of the ego-sense, and to assist by any means the recognition in oneself of the goodness of the integrally-Godward ‘desire’ – which in essence is the will to surrender our will to the Divine will, so as to share in the Divine light and bliss, which is never shakable, never subject to revision, never contradicting of itself or of our highest aim and hope, never breaking our heart but ever healing it before widening its embrace and amplifying beyond all limits its capacity to belove. The sooner one acknowledges – no matter the cost to one’s presently-settled outlook – that the Divine is one’s master desire and alone capable of finally drawing all that one is in the direction of one’s most perfect and fulfilled self, the sooner these processes of restructuring – from heartbreak to conversion – can begin. All the better sooner, no matter what.

The mind can send out waves to get what it wants, just as the vital can, but no true fulfillment comes from these alone, and very often they are disappointing or come with negative aspects as much as positive, or they are entirely regretted outright. Only the psychic voice within can give the true guidance that never fails and brings what is wanted in a deepest sense – the sweetness of God, the dynamic contentment of being there. But we are driven mutliplicitously by the other mental and vital and physical wants, signals, chains of commitment-to-suffering, habits, so the psychic voice is obscured; we mistake the lower wants for our true wants and so see in us only a false and distorted version of our soul-self. Whereas the psychic has nothing habitual about it, no automatic pilot or plot, no want that is not God’s want for us, no Will that is not already the Divine’s.