Another one of my early morning musings. I woke up this morning at 3 AM and have pondered many things.
Recent speculation has suggested that the
implication of quantum theory is that the multiverse is real. But one does not have to go out into the cosmos to discover a
bubble universe. Each human being is a bubble universe.
An inner work is primarily understood to be a work in life; a work that one carries within oneself throughout all the various circumstances in life. Yet the tendency is to wrap oneself up in such work like a sheet of saran wrap, to immerse oneself and surround oneself with it so that it absorbs one, and almost all of the time, one's compass needle points towards the organization, the special events, the meetings, the retreat weekends, and so on.
No one questions this. Are we not zealots? Look closely.
The outer nature and aspects of an inner work can absorb a man or a woman like a sponge. Even the most esoteric organization has this difficulty in front of it; and even the ones that reject the very idea of churches become churches, with people who sit in solemn attendance, listening to scriptures being read. The delusion is always the same one, from work to work: that we know more than the other, that we have a secret advantage over others... and that we aren't like them.
Everything of this is of the ego; yet our noble cause erases that understanding, doesn't it?
Everything is God's thing. There is no thing of man; and yet we cling to the things of man with the very same fanaticism we deny we manifest. If we were truly to go out in life with our inner work as the core of our life, the center of gravity of our understanding would change; we would see that there is no salvation in the cloisters. We can hide there, but we can't run: the space is too short and narrow, no matter how filled it is with beautiful mosaics and paintings.
When the outer work becomes the object of our affection, the inner work suffers.
This is so difficult to see. The inner work can only be inspired from within; the special conditions which supposedly foster it help some, but they become a center of gravity that attracts belief, and belief is the death of objectivity. There must be an inner objectivity, an objectivity born of a new kind of understanding, which is not just intellectual. It must be organic, and it cannot afford to live within special conditions; these may ultimately stifle it, because its requirement is that it live out in life within a wide range of sweet flowers that provide the nourishment it must acquire if it would grow.
And it is this sweetness, this absolute sweetness of relationship within life, which is the absolute special condition. Life is a special condition; look at how short it is. Is this not special? Yet we want an even smaller box to live in, as though the shortness of life was not already enough to remind us of where we are and what we are doing.
I think about this sweetness often, because the entirety of life is what must be offered, not the parts that are artificially constructed to appear sacred. It is all sacred. This is what seeing is
for. If it does not see this, it is not seeing; it is nothing more than documentation for the filing cabinet.
So I go out and I try to offer myself to my life with generosity. I try to remember that I must bring forth the sweetness that the Lord has put in me, rather than the bitterness I put in myself. I try to remember that every man and woman is somehow worthy of my respect, compassion, and support, and I try to remember that I can
only remember that through the sweetness that the Lord has put in me. It's not, after all, me that is sweet; no, I'm a sour thing, myself.
But the Lord has given me responsibility for this sweetness which He owns; and if I do not attend to that, what am I worth?
May your soul be filled with light.