Already There
“In what
way can a person who is under the impression that they are a separate
individual enclosed in a bag of skin effectively realize that they
are Brahman. This, of course, is a curious question. It proposes a
journey to the place where you already are.”
Alan Watts
( excerpted from “How to Reach Where You Already Are,” Parabola
Magazine, Spring, 2017)
I was raised in the North
Carolina mountains. My family were staunchly Christian, of the
Methodist persuasion. We did go through a brief exotic period during
which we belonged to the Episcopal church, but that's about as far
afield as we got. As such, we were taught, (and, of course, the
apostle Paul reminded us at every opportunity, “while we were yet
sinners, Christ died for us,”) that we, on our own, were incapable
of achieving God's grace. Only the spilled blood of the Lamb of God could redeem our miserable selves from the tortures of hell. What that message sets up in a child, whether little or grown-up, is a continuous cycle
of trying to be good, failing, feeling guilty and ashamed, and then
trying again. We go to church/synagogue/temple, we pray, we do yoga,
we meditate, we strictly govern our thoughts, our words, our
appetites, our passions, and then something happens, and we're right
back to square one. Busted!
I'm not suggesting that
attempts to be decent and civil are not virtuous. They are. We
couldn't live together in one world if at least some of us didn't
practice kindness and civility. What I am suggesting is this: we are
already there. What if we started from the point of view that we are
loved, even cherished, by that which we call Divine. That love is not
predicated upon our being Christian, or Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu. We
aren't desperate serial criminals for having a lusty thought, or
wanting something we don't have. We're humans; we are material
expressions of one Spirit, encapsulated in a bag of skin and bones,
in order to experience the grace of Universal love. We have all these
ungovernable feelings, all these experiences of failure and success,
so that we can grow in insight and compassion during this lifetime,
and therefore, fulfill our soul's task of evolving.
Instead of telling
ourselves, “I'm a hopeless sinner in need of a blood sacrifice to
save my sorry …,” what if we told ourselves, “I made a human
mistake. I can learn from that.” When we are open to life, when we
are awake to all its manifestations, we are already part of the
Universal Soul. Go forth and live. Be civil, and even kind. Celebrate
your goodness.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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