A soul takes human birth in order to
have a series of experiences through which it will awaken out of its illusion
of separateness.
The physical experience of being
incarnated is the curriculum, and the purpose of the course is to awaken us
from the illusion that we are the incarnation.
Spiritual practices are tools to
help us accomplish these goals.
You start from innocence and you
return to innocence.
A sage was asked, “How long have we
been on this journey?”
He replied, “Imagine a mountain
three miles wide, three miles high, and three miles long.
Once every hundred years, a bird
flies over the mountain, holding a silk scarf in its beak, which it brushes
across the surface of the mountain.
The time it would take for the scarf
to wear down the mountain is how long we’ve been doing this.”
We are on an inevitable course of
awakening.
If you understand that message
deeply, it allows you to enter into your spiritual practices from a different
perspective, one of patience and timelessness.
You do your practices not out of a
sense of duty or because you think you should, but because you
know in your soul there really is nothing else you would rather do.
In Sanskrit this is called vairagya,
a state of weariness with worldly desire where only the desire for spiritual
fulfillment is left.
The spiritual pull is the last
desire, one that really grabs you, but that dissolves on its own because you
dissolve in the process.
The Tao says, “In the end you will
be like the valley which is the favorite resort of the
Way.”
You become receptive, become soft,
become open, become attuned, become quiet.
You become the ocean of love.
The soul is made of love, and must
ever strive to return to love.
It can never find rest nor happiness
in other things.
It must lose itself in love. –
Mechthild of Magdeburg
Time is a box formed by thoughts of
the past and future.
When there is only the immediate now
– when you’re not dwelling in the past or anticipating the future, but you are
just right here, right now – you’re outside of time.
Dwelling in the moment is dwelling
in the soul, which is eternal presence.
When we’re outside of time, there’s
no subject or object; it’s all just here.
The thinking mind deals only with
subject and object.
But from within here now,
you watch time go by.
You are not being in time.
You be, and time
goes by, as if you were standing on a bridge and watching it all go by.
Ours is a journey toward simplicity,
toward quietness, toward a kind of joy that is not in time.
In this journey out of time to “Now Here,”
we are leaving behind every model we have had of who we thought we were.
This journey involves a transformation
of our being so that our thinking mind becomes our servant rather than our
master.
It’s a journey that takes us from
primary identification with our psyche to identification with our souls, then
to identification with God, and ultimately beyond any identification at all.
Life is an incredible curriculum in
which we live richly and passionately as a way of awakening to the deepest
truths of our being.
As a soul, I have only one motive:
to merge with God.
As a soul, I live in the moment, in
each rich and precious moment, and I am filled with contentment.
- Ram Dass, excerpt from his
newly released book Polishing the Mirror: How to Live from Your Spiritual Heart
Order the book Here.
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