Let go of yourself completely...
by Richard Harvey on 11/21/15
Come now, noble souls, and take a look at the splendor you are carrying within yourselves! But if you do not let go of yourself completely, if you do not drown yourself in this bottomless sea of the Godhead, you cannot get to know this divine light. - Meister Eckhart
Just for fun, let's begin this week's BLOG with the words that we
ended last week's with! We will come
back to them.
As a small boy I would lie in bed under the covers and feel the
terror of death. I had little in the way of images or guidance other than the
Biblical passages that seem to have introduced so much debilitating dread into
so many childhoods:
The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth... Then the Righteous will shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.
This New Testament description of the torments of the damned in
Hell was clearly meant for me (I thought as a little boy). When the scripture
goes on to reveal the gloating of saints and the chosen over us, the sinners,
as we are cast down into eternal suffering, I couldn't but think I would never
be one of the chosen but rather one of the damned. After all, schooldays were
full of humiliation, punishment, unfairness, injustice, guilt, blame, and
competition. From the sports field to the exam room, wheat and chaff, goats and
sheep, all were weeded, separated, and divided according to some seminal law of
favoritism or perhaps simply innate ability and talent.
Like most of the people who later come to therapy it seemed to me that
I was the outsider, a stranger to the world, some place I had come to which
didn't seem to resonate with my inner consciousness at all. I resigned myself
to what Albert Camus called " the benign
indifference of the world." In The
Stranger, Camus wrote:
It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I'd been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.
Strip aside the thoughts and images, imagined relationships and various forms of so-called relationships here and in the world and what are we left with? For feeling to flow unimpeded without thought or inhibition is to let a great torrent of energy and compassion loose in to the world of both form and formlessness. The beating heart of a single human being contains enough love to feed the world many times over. How can you be so naive to think that this is anything but the Kaliyuga?
The time of great ignorance and darkness besets us now in insidious and blatant ways. I have and I will continue to group the blight under these three headings. They are exhaustive. They help to focus our need to grow and develop. They contain the truth of what Gurdjieff eloquently called "the terror of the situation."
The three veils to authenticity and compassion are thought, relationships, and nature. Let me expand. When you and I think, we create forms. These forms are separative, divisive, and they identify us and, as we identify ourselves, so we fall into "sin," i.e. we miss the mark. We become other than ourselves, for every virtue we expound within ourself and identify with, an enemy must be created to bring balance. Thought is the ego and the ego-processes are a term I use to describe the activity of thought.
Relationships are an extrapolation of the thought "I." They are therefore projections of "I" and not in the true sense relationships at all. Relationships must be between two, right? Wrong. In the relative world of time and space relationships look like that, but what does that make them in the realms of Truth. The teachings of spiritual Truth show us that we are not separate, undivided, and not even in any Real sense identifiable. There is merely a convention, a convenience of labeling, whereby I arrive at the tag "I." Real relationship is, in the true spiritual sense, expressed in the Hindu greeting Namaste: The Divine in me recognizes and bows to the Divine in you.
Namaste is an expression of our unity with each other and by extension our sameness with all beings. Real relationships or spiritual relationships grounded in reality recognize and are based in our unity. Hence what usually passes for relationships in the modern temporal world are merely projective events in which the other is perceived as disowned parts of ourself.
Nature is both beautiful and barbaric. Violence and tenderness abound, as does our awe in witnessing it. Many find that the spiritual coincides with Nature and seek it out as an external manifestation, so fascinating, entrancing, and mysterious that it becomes by default the very thing it symbolizes. But Nature, however close it may get in its impersonal, expansive, aware inspiring-ness is not the numinous, the spiritual, or the Divine domain itself. It may be similar! And when we seek solace and comfort in its welcoming arms to walk quietly in the countryside, to climb a hill and draw breath, to take in a sunset, sit by the lakeside or hear the pounding waves of the ocean we may feel exhilarated and near... and yet. Near is not the same as in or one.
Relinquishing thought, relationship, and nature feels tantamount to a kind of death. As I sat in the darkness contemplating death as a small boy I had yet to grow in wisdom, yet to understand what had to die in me that I might be truly born.
The three veils of illusion—thought, "relationships," and nature—must all be forsaken for Truth. As the mystics, the adepts, and the masters have been telling us for all eternity, everything must be stripped away. "Let go of yourself completely," says Meister Eckhart, "drown yourself in this bottomless sea" for the splendor you carry within you is this divine light.
BLOG entry #19
