I've heard the phrase "to be made perfect in the Lord," but like most religious sayings, I rarely have an experience that informs me in the least about what this might mean, no matter how much reading or intellectual study I do on the matter.
Yet this certainly has to do with a kind of energy. I see that.
I begin with an exact study of how the energy in the body is. It's possible to be precise; it's possible to see what is latent and what is active. That energy could be anywhere; I don't need to limit my experience, conception, or understanding of it to the spine or the
hara. What I need to do is be present to it; and I can be present to it not on my own terms, but on the terms of the energy itself.
I follow this motion and I am exactly present to it. The attention does not direct it, but inhabits it.
Then I see how I am.
This practice connects to a different understanding of love, because it is not conditional. I want to love the Lord; God is within me, and I feel a great love for God, because God, as I can sense within every cell of my organism, is both perfect, infinitely compassionate, and infinitely merciful.
Yet I don't really know what love is; truly, I am none of those things. When this is properly sensed, it's a source of great anguish; unbearable anguish. Yet I have to live with the contradiction of this powerful impulse of love for God, which I don't understand, and my
lack of love for myself and for others, which I could try to understand, but usually can't be bothered with.
I want to make myself perfect, but I am unable. Only the Lord can make me perfect; and it is not my perfection that I seek, it is His. So when I sit in prayer, even though I begin by thinking that I will somehow do this and do that, and make myself more acceptable to God, I don't see that I already begin in the wrong way. God makes me acceptable through and within Himself; everything that comes from myself, but wants to be acceptable, has already misunderstood something.
This misunderstanding seems to lie at the core of existence itself. When I study the energy, when I follow it, there is no fraction of myself left available to meddle with these questions, and I begin to inhabit something quite different than what I think I should be or expect myself to be. I don't inhabit a better self of the future; I don't inhabit a bad self of the past. I just inhabit a self which consists of this relationship between consciousness and the organic energy that creates it.
There isn't any need for theology here, although God is eternally present in this practice. The presence of God does not demand the thought of God. Perhaps my mistake is that I always begin by demanding the thought of God, as though God could not get along without my thinking.
So I begin to see inside myself that to be made perfect in the Lord consists of a different and new kind of relationship. The Lord makes Himself perfect within the Lord; I am neither the architect nor the builder of this mystery. If I allow myself to empty myself of myself, what is left no longer tries to plan or to build. It allows. And to allow is a creative act, an action that opens the generative process within to a different kind of force, a force that isn't force as I understand it. It is an intelligence; an influence.
Perhaps I'll never sort out this contradiction between what I
think love is, and what I know the Love within God is.
The distance between my own manifestation and this perfect Love will always be measured by an anguish, in every instance that I sense it.
And perhaps this anguish is the only real offering I can bring.
I respectfully hope you will take good care.