“Wait,” I gasp. My eyes have filled with tears; my heart has inexplicably, suddenly, filled with gratitude. “I feel such a sweep of blessing in and around me. My life is so, so blessed—by you and O and Omis, and all the others. Every moment in my life is an incalculable blessing! I cannot contain this in my mind or in a thought. It’s just so vast.”
Suddenly the tears have poured out of my eyes onto my cheeks. I’m bawling like a baby. But there is no discomfort or pain. The crying is my body realizing it cannot encompass the field of joy I feel; it can’t hold all the thankfulness that is exploding in me, out of me. This is far beyond thought. My mind tries in vain to gather it in and comprehend it. It fails utterly. I sit and sob and sob in joy, continuously wiping the tears with my hands, blowing my nose, and returning to crying. My body shudders periodically. I weep with an earnestness I’ve never met before. It is Source crying out to Life from within my soul.
Slowly I return to my ‘normal’ senses. I suck in oceans of air, sighing, exhilarated and exhausted. I sob, “V, what is this? I know, and yet words are failing me completely. I must hear your words to describe this now. Please.” I brush away more tears and wait.
My sweet-voiced companion slowly, gently replies, “You have met true wisdom in this moment. You have stepped onto another rung of bliss. It is a long, high ladder you will climb. Don’t look down. Don’t even look within right now. Right now is not the time for ‘within’. Sit in reverence in the midst of wisdom. Joy and bliss attend you. They are waiting to serve you fully, deny you nothing. They are gifting you with eternal, unending presence. A shallow word for this is ‘abundance’. But you know with your heart that it is much more than abundance.
“What you are feeling is felt by me as well, in this moment of your awakening. I feel the resistance in you, too; you say to yourself, ‘I can’t awaken yet. I’m not worthy. I cannot proclaim such a thing for myself.’ Indeed you are correct. It is not for yourself that you proclaim this. Indeed it is not you who proclaim anything. Presence is proclaiming awakening in you, by you, for all creation.
“Awaken, dear heart, dear child of my essence, dear daughter of my loins in an incarnation yet to be—though never-ending for my motherhood. This is not your awakening that you feel. It is presence awake and stirring like a newborn baby in your breast. Crying is the only possible response to such a burst of newness rising.”
I shudder again, but I’ve stopped sobbing; I’m just sitting rather dumbly, wondering what just happened. “V, I don’t know what to say or do here. That was like an ocean wave that just rolled through me, unbidden and unannounced. The only thing I could think when it was surging was ‘I can’t contain this energy.’ Then the energy itself told me not to contain it. It’s not about containment. It’s about explosion, radiation, transmutation reaching out in all directions.”
I take a deep breath and continue, “Even though I was feeling the experience in my body, it wasn’t even really there. It was not radiating out of me. I was just a vehicle for feeling and registering it as it crashed through, out into the world. Strangely, I think if I hadn’t started crying I might not have even felt it at all. It might have just slipped by. Or I might have felt it briefly and then dismissed it as one of those passing emotional flashes. Either that or I might have just exploded!”
She states almost sternly, “But this time you did feel it. You accepted it, whole body, whole soul. You finally accepted your blessing. Do you recall Omis giving you that injunction in the last book?”
“I do indeed. And I see what you’re saying.” I gulp and take a full breath. “This was true acceptance of the blessing coming to me, and around me.” Another wave of joy surges up just now. “V, I am so blessed! It’s so exciting. It’s passionate. There are so many things to feel gratitude for. I could sit here and list them endlessly. I want to, but I know that the list would degenerate into just a mental exercise. How do I appropriately express my thanks? I can’t go around sobbing all the time, or reciting gratitudes to everyone and everything.”
“Ah, my dear one, but you can. And you must! You need not be crying outwardly, though that harms nothing. But cry within, in joy, always. Give gratitude; give blessing inwardly—without ceasing. This is bliss. You must do this because it is now your destiny. You cannot shrink again back from the precipice once you have fallen off its edge!”
I gasp and sigh, laughing, “I have fallen; and I’m still falling. I feel like I’m in free fall. Where am I falling to?”
“Into Love, into Beauty, into Wonder and World Without End. You are falling into the open sea and are ‘already under and living within the ocean’—in the words of Rumi. Now is the time of your destiny! You will not shrink back from it. You cannot, any more than a surfer can reverse course on the crest of his greatest wave.”
“I love those surfing movies, like ‘Step Into Liquid’ and ‘Riding Giants’. I feel like watching one now.”
V laughs, “You do indeed, because that is exactly what you’re doing. You are stepping into the great ocean of awakening, riding a giant wave of spirit into presence. The beauty of this kind of wave is that it does not end at the shore. When it reaches the shore it shatters into a thousand other waves of transformation, sliding sharp and subtle into the flow of human evolution. This wave pulls you out of the water and into the air and the wind and the voices of the millions who are awakening simultaneously in this moment.”
“I realize I know something now, V, something about my old subject, finding death: I know I am dying! I am in that process now and it is joyful. The final passing may not happen for twenty years, but I am now, finally, dying. And I get it. I just know. And I’m finding powerful joy in it. It is presence indeed. By it I have found death. Death is bringing presence to me. What greater gift could there be?”
“Absolutely none. Presence is the highest sensation of all. It is the face of Life. It comes to you in disguise until you awaken and live; it comes to you under the mask of death. As you open your awareness to the conscious center of evolution, you take off the mask; the persona dissolves. Then you have found death without fear. You have found the serene peace and joy of it.
“All creatures must die; all must be born; all must awaken. The joy of this is to be found in its inevitability and irresistibility. Take that also to mean ‘vulnerability’. We must all accept our vulnerability in the face of the inevitable. Accepting vulnerability into our hearts gives us the gift of strength and courage. Without its gift, we never know our true power. Power brings joy, brings bliss; it brings countless, unending blessings.”
I soak in her words and feel moved to say, “Those blessings are a continuous flow, all around us. Unfortunately, it is so easy to overlook them or reject them before we even know that they are blessings. We react and resist. I know from much personal experience. I’ve spent so much time in my life worrying and anxious about things. In this moment, I look back and know that none of those things amounted to any threat to me. They have all passed, long ago; and I am still here.”
Continuing, I say, “When we react in fear to events around us, or to events that may not even happen at all, we’re cutting off the blessings in their tracks. I know so many who have said about ‘bad’ things that happened to them, in retrospect, this was the best thing that could have happened. I’m seeing, for myself, that if I can just accept whatever comes as part of the flow of blessing, the blessings will be made more real. I think Omis said something like that. The more we recognize the blessings, the more the gifts of the universe will increase and flow everywhere; it’s really about recognition, not increase. So, thank you, universe, for whatever happens. I accept.”
V comments, “You know that acceptance of the moment is presence, pure and simple. If you are ever looking for presence, wondering where it is, you need only accept the moment as it is. ‘Make friends with the moment’, as Eckhart said.”
I sigh slowly, content.
Now is a day later. Yesterday had turned difficult after my morning of bliss and tears. I am back to the shelter of the Void, feeling sad and discomfited. “V, I am ashamed of my behavior yesterday. I lost it. I lost the beautiful ‘high’ I had found in the morning. How quickly things can change! You said I was awakening yesterday. Today I feel like I’ve descended back into the depths of unconsciousness. Please help me understand what’s going on.”
“This is not an unusual development. It is testimony to the depth you found in blessing yesterday; your experiences afterward can be seen as a kind of ‘test’ of your resolve. I understand that one of your ‘difficulties’ is a ceiling collapsing under the weight of leaking ice and rainwater. Look at the powerful symbolism: Your fears of awakening are rising up to meet the ‘sky’ of conscious awareness; these fears are creating havoc for you.”
“You can say that again. It is so much a counterpoint to my joy. What can I do?”
“I say, sit with it in your heart. Feel what you’re feeling. Then lift the energies up from below and hold them in the midst of your appreciation. Hold them high, and know from presence that this too is blessing. This ‘breakthrough’ of the ceiling is opening the way for your light to flow in. Do not be worried or ashamed; that would only be detrimental to your acceptance. See, as simply as you can, that this is all a vast blessing. It has some rough edges, yes. But presence is with you. It is behind all the movements, the comings and goings of events. It holds you and them in its infinite generosity and wisdom.
“I say, rejoice in the midst of adversity, as difficult as it may be. If you can find your peaceful, blissful center at such times, you will know the true, full extent of blessing—not just what brings good fortune, but all fortune. It is easy to feel blessed when you’re looking at the happy and pleasant things around you. There is another side, always, to duality—the unhappy, unpleasant and challenging side. When you can accept them both, you have received the full measure of the divine gift.”
“Do bad things always have to happen when we receive good things? Do they always have to come one after the other, or together?”
“No. This is a phase of your awakening that will pass, as you discover the keys to knowing both light and dark simultaneously. There will always be challenges and contrasts in a duality world. However, with awakening you will see them as stepping-stones, not stumbling blocks; you will know this intuitively, instantly, as they arise; and thus you will be free of negation and reaction.”
I sigh, feeling appreciation well up through my adversity. “Thank you, V. That really helps. I am much more centered. So, I heard you say I have a ‘fear of awakening’?”
“The ego is your fear center. It tethers itself to your solar plexus chakra. That is where all your ‘gut feelings’ issue forth, in their attempt to empower you and defend you in a so-called ‘hostile world’. This is the way ego sees it. This plexus is the ancient heart chakra, before our two species had developed a heart center in the chest. Both chakras, working together now, give the awakened persona a firm embrace of all sides of duality. When they are not fused in awakening, there is much disturbance generated between the two. There is often a battle in fact.
“As you contemplate the embrace of dark and light in your experience, likewise see the lifting of the solar plexus into the higher heart. This is a symbolic and dynamic structural therapy. The lifting is the enlightening. As you sincerely desire to accept your total blessing—dark and light, yin and yang, up and down—you open the channel for passage of power within yourself. The definitive power center in the body is the fused solar heart.”
ⓒ 2014 Robert Lee Potter
CLICK HERE and you will find all the chapters posted from Life of Source. I will be updating each week with new chapters till we reach the end of the book. It will then be available for download from this site. Stay Tuned…
Letters From 500 