(This is Part 10 of a series. Go back to Part 9.)
In my opinion, the spiritual realm is sometimes confused with getting what we want. There's absolutely nothing wrong with getting what we want, but in my experience it has nothing to do with the absolute. And that's a very good thing. Because one of the greatest qualities of the absolute is that it can't be exploited.
Oh sure—we can talk about God all we want, about how God is on "our side" in our just war, etc., or we can set up religions or dogmas that prescribe what God "wants" from us—as if the absolute wants or needs something—or we can imagine that the absolute will send us a new car if only we ask for it sincerely enough.
All those things are perfectly fine—they had better be, because they're part of reality—but in my opinion they have nothing to do with the spiritual realm. To take one of the above examples just a bit further:
Imagine! We're going to suppose that God is on "our side" in our war, our contest, our competition—as if divine Love could possibly love one "part" of itself over another. An impossibility. That's why Jesus talked about God sending his healing rain "upon the just and the unjust."
Or to take another example from above a little bit further: We can manifest what we want by affirming, imaging, vibrating at the frequency where we receive that thing, etc.—perfectly good.
But in the depths of our inner consciousness, we know that we can't approach the infinite—our truest Self—if we have some motive in mind...if we want to "get" something. The impurity of having a motive in the presence of the Self is too great, and instead of the Self we wind up with mental reverberations in our head, while imagining that we've somehow coerced the Absolute about something or other.
That we can pretend to exploit the spiritual realm in the external world, but cannot truly exploit it is precisely what makes it the spiritual realm. In that realm we want nothing at all except to be exactly where we are—exactly where "we" are. The getting-what-we-want part is different—it's simply exploiting certain laws, like using the laws of physics to power our cars.
In life we often try to exploit things in one way or another. "What's in it for me?" "How can I use this to my advantage?" and so on. Even if we're "doing good" or "saving the world," if we look deeply enough we'll usually find that there's a kicker for us in there somewhere.
Naturally, we try to bring this same attitude to the divine. We're going to get something from the absolute—peace, happiness, heaven, enlightenment, whatever. But one of the essences of the ungraspable is that any sort of grasping blinds us to the absolute. "When a pickpocket walks down the street he sees pockets."
Even if we're meditating but want to get something from it—peace, enlightenment, heaven, name your tune—it's still a commercial transaction. Only when we show up unclothed, unbaggaged, naked of motives, naked of beliefs, naked of even a reason why—does the door begin to open.
In that opening, at some point a willingness arises to be on the refuse pile of life. There's no longer any need to climb the ego's mountain, whatever it might be. "Mountain climbing" may still occur, but if so it occurs without a motive attached. There's nobody around who cares whether the mountain is climbed or not.
instead, a trust is there that everything is turning out exactly how it's supposed to—because it's exactly what it is—whether some mountain is being climbed or some goal attained or not.
Paradoxically, it's when the willingness is there to be just useless...to never accomplish anything...to just cherish existence forevermore exactly as it is...that reality begins to move by itself in strange and mysterious ways.
—jim sloman, 6.26.03 for Nov 17
|
