Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Evolution of a faith

For some reason I have always been drawn to shoulds -- and guilt.  I want to know what the right thing is, and then I try to do it (a psychologist might say this emerges out of a desperate effort to please an absent or angry parent). And if I fail to do the right thing, whatever that might be, I feel guilty.  So when I was young, religion was all about shoulds: we should love our neighbor as ourselves, we should honor our parents, we should not steal, etc. etc.  And when we broke those rules, we were sinners, and should apologize, repent, feel bad, try to do better next time.

When I became more drawn to mystical wisdom and spirituality, aware of the difference between unitive consciousness and egoic consciousness, I may have left behind the idea of "We are sinful and Jesus came to save us from our sins," but I basically just took on a different should.  Now I was supposed to achieve unitive consciousness, enlightenment, and anything less was a weak approximation; I had somehow failed to "get it." And now the guilt was about saying what I knew to be true but not being able to live up to it.

Now, today, I am beginning to see that we do not need to feel guilty for our inability to achieve unitive consciousness any more than we need to feel guilty for our "sinfulness," our egoic desires and the ways and times we give in to them.  What we really need is to understand that the tension between unitive and egoic consciousness is a gift, and an opportunity for practice, and that we can spend our lives working to achieve presence to/awareness of both.  When you look at it that way, ANY time we can operate out of that space, any time we can actually manage be both fully present to a situation and separate enough from it to perceive -- and separate from -- our own egoic motivations and hear the larger, Divine call/voice that lies beneath ... well, it's an opportunity for celebration!

As Rumi says, "Out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing there is a field.
I'll meet you there."

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