I will be glad when I am through this season of busyness.
It’s too easy to feel empty when I am chauffeuring teens to appointments, social events, and sports practices. I love providing the service but get lost in the shuffle and my needs have never been met.
I have been rushing, stressed, tired – for decades now it seems. It’s been difficult to experience The Now and to rest or be still.
I’ve been suffering as a mother as I try to assist a child with depression and anxiety. It’s been a hard journey with medications, hospital visits, doctors, therapy. Some helps and some make it worse or no help at all. Some days, it’s hard to see a vision of a better future.
How am I to teach my children to experience connectedness when I myself struggle to observe it?
As a sensitive, empathic introvert, it’s often easy for me to be silent, to be still. Some might consider it daydreaming and there is a bit of that. I’ve always found it easy to be alone and to be quiet in a busy loud world.
Chapter Seven: Portals into the Unmanifested
Favorite quotes:
The Unmanifested is the source of chi. Chi is the inner energy field of your body. It is the bridge between the outer you and the Source. It lies halfway between the manifested, the world of form, and the Unmanifested. Chi can be likened to a river or an energy stream.
Chi is movement; the Unmanifested is stillness.
When your consciousness is directed outward, mind and world arise. When it is directed inward, it realizes its own Source and returns home into the Unmanifested.
As you go about your life, don’t give 100 percent of your attention to the external world and to your mind. Keep some within.
Feel the stillness deep inside it. Keep the portal open. It is quite possible to be conscious of the Unmanifested throughout your life. You feel it as a deep sense of peace somewhere in the background, a stillness that never leaves you, no matter what happens out here. You become a bridge between the Unmanifested and the manifested, between God and the world. This is the state of connectedness with the Source that we call enlightenment.
You take a journey into the Unmanifested every night when you enter the phase of deep dreamless sleep. You merge with the Source. You draw from it the vital energy that sustains you for a while when you return to the manifested, the world of separate forms. This energy is much more vital than food: “Man does not live by bread alone.” But in dreamless sleep, you don’t go into it consciously.
The Unmanifested does not liberate you until you enter it consciously. That’s why Jesus did not say: the truth will make you free, but rather: “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” This is not a conceptual truth.
The Now can be seen as the main portal.
you feel the God-essence in every creature, every flower, every stone, and you realize: “All that is, is holy.” This is why Jesus, speaking entirely from his essence or Christ identity, says in the Gospel of Thomas: “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.”
Another portal into the Unmanifested is created through the cessation of thinking.
Surrender — the letting go of mental-emotional resistance to what is — also becomes a portal into the Unmanifested.
As soon as one of the portals is open, love is present in you as the “feeling-realization” of oneness. Love isn’t a portal; it’s what comes through the portal into this world. As long as you are completely trapped in your form identity, there can be no love. Your task is not to search for love but to find a portal through which love can enter.
The Unmanifested is not separate from the manifested. It pervades this world, but it is so well disguised that almost everybody misses it completely. If you know where to look, you’ll find it everywhere. A portal opens up every moment.
nothing in this world is so like God as silence.
“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” states the Heart Sutra.
Everybody pays attention to the things in space, but who pays attention to space itself?
Space has no “existence.” “To exist” literally means “to stand out.”
You cannot think and be aware of space — or of silence, for that matter.
Most humans are completely unconscious of this dimension. There is no inner space, no stillness. They are out of balance. In other words, they know the world, or think they do, but they don’t know God. They identify exclusively with their own physical and psychological form, unconscious of essence. And because every form is highly unstable, they live in fear. This fear causes a deep misperception of themselves and of other humans, a distortion in their vision of the world.
A Course in Miracles expresses this truth poignantly: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.”
Space comes into being the moment the One becomes two, and as “two” become the “ten thousand things,” as Lao Tse calls the manifested world, space becomes more and more vast.
And the greatest miracle is this: That stillness and vastness that enables the universe to be is not just out there in space — it is also within you.
Even if you have missed all the other opportunities for spiritual realization during your lifetime, one last portal will open up for you immediately after the body has died.
In the Tibetan Book of the Dead, it is described as “the luminous splendor of the colorless light of Emptiness,” which it says is “your own true self.”
Every portal is a portal of death, the death of false self.
I love this idea of portals where we might stand on a threshold of the divine.
I often experienced the miracle of stillness and I long to return to it when the stresses of modern life drag me back to this reality. I keep glimpsing God and try to maintain a semblance of that peace in every moment.
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