The Divine in Daily Life

Non-dual doesn’t mean half-empty

/ levelprayingfield / 1 Comment

One of the biggest challenges in seeing beyond duality occurs pretty much any time you open your mouth. This is because, from a dual perspective, your failure to opt for the perceived “positive” side quite readily gets interpreted that you must therefore support the “negative” side.

This is understandable, because from within the lens of duality, that’s all one sees — one side or the other side. But from the standpoint of spiritual reality, to see the non-dual perspective as “negative” is inaccurate.

For example, today my heart is breaking for the people of Ukraine. In my every quiet moment for the past two to three weeks, Ukraine has been in my thoughts and prayers. I have strong emotional ties to Eastern Europe. I personally know Ukrainians here in America whose families are there. As this crisis has been building, I did not share President Zelenskyy’s optimism that Putin would back down. This is because I grew up in a household where my father was staunchly suspicious of Russian cunning and expansionism; but, more than that, because I saw the conflict in Ukraine as a classic example of the tension between Individuation and Law which is so fundamental to human spiritual evolution and so core to the human experience. This conflict is what gives us the opportunity to grow as human beings. In Ukraine, right now, this universal conflict is taking place on a national level.

So today I see these events in Ukraine in two ways. On a very personal level, I am aching for the people there who are frightened, fleeing, suffering and putting their lives on the line. I was up in the wee hours last night cringing with sadness as the first rockets created blasts of light over sleepy towns on my television screen. I thought of my hairdresser’s family and wondered how they were doing. I thought of going over to the salon today to give her a hug.

Yet from the perspective of spiritual reality, I know that even this invasion is what we do on Earth. Over and over again, on individual and aggregate levels, life gives us opportunity after opportunity to struggle to individuate against mighty, resistant forces. The mighty forces serve their purpose in helping us to strengthen and purify. Nothing is for naught. All is love, actually. Yes, even Putin (sorry, Dad). All is God.

What?? Maybe you cringe when you read those words. Notice how, from within duality, you may expect any comment on an “atrocity” like the invasion of Ukraine to offer righteous outrage, condemnation, indignation. Yes! Of course! Anything less sounds cold and unsympathetic. Maybe even downright evil.

Consider Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. In this sermon, Jesus offered us The Beatitudes, which contain a highly significant, true and profound esoteric understanding. The Beatitudes articulate the developmental life stages required to fulfill the spiritual mission here on earth and enter God’s Kingdom. The last Beatitude, which describes the pinnacle of spiritual attainment on Earth, says, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven….”

In this statement, Jesus is describing this phenomenon right here – that from within non-duality, if you open your mouth, you will look like you’re supporting the “dark”, unloving side. People will be frightened and hate you for it. But it doesn’t mean you’re espousing evil. It means you’re transcending good and evil entirely.

Take the case of that classic glass which can be seen as either “half full” or “half empty.” The non-dual perspective doesn’t see “half full.” Thus to some, it must seem that the non-dual perspective therefore sees “half-empty.”

Actually, the non-dual perspective chooses neither “half full” nor “half empty.” It understands the strengths and purpose of both, and is simply grateful for the glass.

Gift of Grace

/ levelprayingfield

Anyone interested in seeing what the world looks like through a single lens – i.e., from a non-dual perspective – is also likely inevitably to ask, “How do I get there?”

This is an excellent question. To grow in consciousness and to experience our capacities as spiritual beings in human form–these are basically the tasks we undertake as we live here on Earth. Everything else we do here is secondary. So to ask the question, “How do I get to the point where I see beyond duality, myself?” means that you are in alignment with one of your core reasons for being born on Earth.

You will find your own way. Everyone’s way is different. There are many paths. But I can tell you one very essential thing: the leap in perspective from dual to unified consciousness is always a gift of grace. It comes to you; you can’t choose when it happens to you. Yes, you can take a hallucinogenic drug and have a beautiful experience that feels mystical, and that may be wonderful for you. It can open up new insights. But it’s like seeing the movie of awakening. It is not awakening. At the end of the movie, you still have to get out of your chair, throw away your popcorn and soda containers, and go out into the world as you knew it before you walked into the movie theater. You prepare for true awakening through diligent spiritual preparation which takes hours, months, usually years of concerted inquiry and disciplined practice.

I have a saying, “When brought to our knees, we tend to look up.” It’s true that moments of awakening into unified consciousness can come under duress. The tension of stressful circumstances somehow help us to get out of our own way, help us break through our customary patterns of perception, and see the world newly, differently, truly – without our mental agendas imposed.

But even then, awakening is always a gift. The night before I woke up, my whole world was completely falling apart. I had been a dedicated, but quite unhappy, wife, Mom and housewife. I believed in marriage; I wanted a cohesive family for my daughter who was then only 6. But decades of spiritual inquiry had strengthened me inwardly enough where I was ready, somehow; and suddenly nothing made sense in my life. Nothing made sense except for this hugely powerful love for another man – not my husband – and that love felt like the North Star to me. It seemed to me that NOTHING, nothing in the entire world before, present, or to come was as important as being true to this love. And then of course, everything DID fall apart. My marriage, my home, my extended family (who were all horrified at my behavior.) I felt suddenly completely alone and bereft. I remember going to bed that night absolutely SOBBING and saying to God, “I know that I am following the right path for me. I have never been so certain of it. But I am so unclear. I am so confused. Please, would you just show me the truth. Your Truth. Your highest path for me.” I prayed from the bottom of my heart. It was all I knew to do. That night, each sob was a scream to the heavens: “Show Me.”

I fell asleep, and the following morning, when I awakened, I saw beyond duality. My world really did change from that moment forward. The unified perception was a gift. The answer to my prayer. The inevitable outcome of surrender. It was comfort. It was the experience of the purest, most omnipresent love I’d ever experienced up until that point. So many ineffable things.

Before that day, I had read about the life and experiences of mystics from all the religious traditions. I knew from those readings that every mystic had said the same thing: that the mystical experience of knowing God directly cannot be willed into being: it is a gift from God. My experience showed me the same.

So do not try to will yourself into seeing beyond duality. A willful approach will only set you back. Set yourself upon surrendering, inquiring, and candidly groping your way into it. Be curious and soft. Dedicated and humble. Strong and steadfast in your love of God.

God really does want to bring you home. But God doesn’t want to share you with anything else. All false idols have to be given up… and given the dogged nature of the human personality and the addictive nature of the human realm, well, it just takes awhile.

When in doubt, just ask, “Show me.” I promise, you will be shown faithfully onward to whatever is your next step.

It’s All God

/ levelprayingfield

A few days ago, an acquaintance said to me, “No one smiles any more.”

This woman is 90 years old. She still lives independently. She was featured last year on You Tube and the Huffington Post launching her own business, Happy Canes.

If Grandma Pearl of “Happy Canes” is saying “No one smiles any more,” you know things are intense.

I learned years ago that suffering results from expectation. If there’s a way you “think things ought to be,” when things depart from expectation (as inevitably happens in life), you get disappointed, and you suffer.

It’s like that joke: “How do you make God laugh?” Answer: “Tell God your plans.”

You’re a lot freer when you can accept What Is.

But looking around – at Ebola, fires, beheadings, terrorism, religious conflict, humanitarian cruelties, drought, greed, the increasing division of wealth – I know – it’s awfully hard to accept all that as “What Is.”

But it is What Is. It’s happening.

Now at a certain point on the spiritual path (Stages 2 and 3), the indicated response to atrocity is to stand up and fight like mad against it. And today, you see people doing that.

But for other people, people at Stages 4 and 5, the task is radical acceptance – not to fight with What Is. At that point, the task moment by moment is to accept. More: to trust. Life becomes a walk of faith. On a global scale, I believe that’s our challenge: to have faith in What Is. But how do we come to believe and know that everything – yes, even all those atrocities – too, are God?

I came up with a saying, years ago, when personally I was at the point of deep, perplexed suffering that, on a global level, the world seems to be in, now. My saying was, “When brought to your knees, you tend to look up.” Personal challenge humbled me, cracked my heart wide open, illumined a Bigger Picture that embraced all. Sometimes it just takes what it takes to put your priorities and your understandings straight. “Grace with brass knuckles,” I called it.

I believe humanity is in a Purification phase where we’re being brought to our knees so that we remember to look up. It’s not that we have been “bad.” We simply need to atone. To become “at one” again. At One with All That Is. To remember that there is no separation. That everything is God.

In my experience, “at-one-ment” does not come from self-flaggelation and guilt. At-one-ment comes from seeing things newly. Seeing things as a unified whole where previously there seemed to be division.

So how do we get to the point where we organically, genuinely know that anything that happens – anything – is of God?

When you think about it, how can it be otherwise? God created all. We live in a realm of separation, surely. But it’s separation of consciousness only. Not of reality. Physics tells us that energy and stuff are always energy and stuff, regardless of form, constantly converting form. We know that certain people – mystics – transcend separation, even in this world that seems so separated. They know peace: here, now. They see and breathe and experience God in All. Divisions of up/down, good/bad, right/wrong fade away into the bliss of One. So how do we get from the “here” of separation to the “there” of union?

That’s one of the purposes of this blog – to help guide the way there.

I have just come back to my home after spending nearly four weeks far away with Fred, helping him recover after having been struck with sudden, serious illness. Everything happened so fast. An operation that was supposed to take maybe 2-3 hours and be relatively straightforward went on for 10-1/2 hours. A tumor that was, according to 7 prior biopsies, supposed to be benign turned out to be cancerous – high grade. And actually there wasn’t just one cancer in there, but two. Another cancer entirely was lurking in Fred’s esophageal wall behind the so-called “benign” tumor they’d seen. So many expectations were thwarted, so intensely, so fast!

In that context, it would have been so easy to feel that God was somehow missing from the picture. That there was separation, division, even betrayal.

Sedonaprint_MoffittBut when Fred was moved from Intensive Care into his own room, I walked into his room to see this photo on the wall. I knew the place at once: it’s Cathedral Rock in Sedona, Arizona.

In 1986 when I made the choice to turn my life over to guidance and just follow, Sedona is the first place where guidance lead me. I lived for nine months just a few miles from Cathedral Rock. I passed it every day to go pick up my mail.

I met one of the most significant spiritual mentors of my life in Sedona – a priest who continues to be a mentor today.
I met my first husband there. He and I hiked Cathedral Rock together many times – it was a sacred spot for us. After we divorced – without either of us knowing what the other was doing – we each independenty made a trip to Cathedral Rock to leave our wedding rings there. So today, both of our wedding rings are somewhere up on that formation.

And this was the image that greeted me when I walked into Fred’s hospital room.

That image told me, in the midst of all my overwhelming concern for Fred, that God was with me, with Fred. That God is always there; that All Is God, even when it seems, as Grandma Pearl said earlier this week, that “no one smiles any more.”

To come to know that All is God requires a walk of courage, assertion, then faith and surrender.

Being at 7,000 feet

/ levelprayingfield

Plane_ToParis

I’ve been traveling. A little bit of very welcome vacation.

On the way back home, nearing the completion of our flight, I found myself in the middle seat of a row of three, my husband to my right on the aisle, and a 20-something-year-old woman next to the window to my left.

This fellow passenger had already taken her seat when my husband and had boarded the plane. We nodded hello as we stowed our belongings and got settled. Then she put up the hood of her hoodie, put on her earphones, pulled down the window shade and withdrew into her privacy – where she remained for the next 6 hours.

The crew announced the emergency instructions before takeoff. We barreled down the runway. The flight attendants served drinks, then the meal. Movies shieked and glowed from seat backs in all directions. My husband and I went to the bathroom, then a couple of hours later, made the trip out of our cramped row and down the aisle to the back of the plane again. Then drinks and a snack were served once more. And all this time, our seat mate remained utterly quiet (apparently sleeping), nestled tightly within her hoodie. Occasionally she stirred. But otherwise she was OUT.

She was still gone from the world when the captain announced the final approach to our destination.

Now typically at take off and landing, I press my nose against the window and watch everything I can going by out the window like a dog with a manically wagging tail. I am fascinated to see the perspective on earth from above.

But on this particular day, for I think the first time in my life (or for at least for as long as I could remember), I could do none of that. A little wistfully, I glanced over my husband’s torso to the right to see if I might get a glimpse out of the plane on the other side. But the window shades were drawn on that side of the plane, too. In fact, I noticed as I glanced about, the shades were drawn all around the plane. There was no way I would see outside. Not on this landing.

At one point, I started to reach over across my slumbering seat mate to grab the window shade and toss it open. “What will it matter?” I thought. “She’s sleeping! She won’t notice one way or another… and then I’ll be able to see…”

But I fought back that folly. It was not my place to open her shade. The shade lay in the domain of the passenger seat, not my seat.

I was just going to have to accept that, this time, I wasn’t going to see outside the plane.

“Okay,” I thought. I settled in to observe my inner experience, then, if not the outer one.

The plane was certainly in midst of the drama of landing. I could hear the landing gear grind into position. I saw the flight attendants scurry through their final checks and buckle into their seats. When normally I would be craning out the window to visually embrace the new terrain into which I was heading, this time I could only sit, looking straight ahead at the little glowing map in the seat before me. Everything outside the plane was beyond the reach of my experience.

It suddenly occurred to me: This is like Being. Being is utterly accepting. Being does not seek to influence or strain. Being sits, at peace, with events moving all around. But Being exists within all that movement in a state of neutrality. Everything is simply witnessed. Everything simply just Is.

To sit, accepting and passive, in that plane as it landed – with no straining or intention to influence (or even to assess the outside) – was to be peacefully contained in a trusted world.

To Be, spiritually, in this world, is to ride the plane of Earth with no straining or intention to influence as it glides along in its orbit. To remain peacefully contained in a trusted world.

Without my doing anything but sitting, I could trust that pilot to land me safely. Likewise, I trust a Divine order to guide me and to guide the world. Even and especially when I can’t look out the window.

Sinfidel

/ levelprayingfield

Last weekend I had a reminder in real life about the meaning of the word “sin.”

In my 20’s and 30’s, I struggled with the Judeo-Christian emphasis on sin. I was doing my best to be a thoughtful, conscientious person finding my way in my young life. To go to church and be told to confess “how I’ve been bad” felt just plain strange. Or wrong. Offensive, actually. I had a hard time reconciling my deep love of God and all the things I heard at church that rang true with the recurring emphasis on how much of a “sinner” I was (along with all humankind).

Later in life, after I awakened, I understood the emphasis on “sin.” But I also came to see that there’s a place and a time to worry about sin. The time when sin becomes meaningful is after you’ve declared the “I Am” at Stage 3. Prior to that, as you’re struggling to define who you are, the notion of sin is confusing and demoralizing. It’s not a helpful message when you’re trying to gain confidence, not lose it.

Then enter last weekend, with a gentle reminder in the here-and-now about sin and the persistent benevolence beneath its message.

I was attending the wedding of a friend I have known for (gulp) forty years. Over those many years I had become very close not just with her but with her family – who all attended the wedding, too. The reunion brought a sweet and quiet, ecstatic relief like from drinking water after a long, parched fast.

The weekend started for me on Sunday morning where I was to meet Mary Ann, my friend’s mother, at church. When I’d heard she would be attending the service, I sprang at the chance to worship in communion with her and help her get to the next pre-wedding event. To meet at church seemed perfect, as our relationship was rooted strongly in our shared love of God.

Soon enough, Mary Ann bobbed into the narthex. We rushed to throw our arms around each other for the first time in a decade.

“Oh, my stars!” she sang out, “You are the most beautiful creature! You look just like an angel!”

I couldn’t help but laugh. I remembered hearing those exact words, cried out in just same way upon our very first meeting, forty years before. At the time, I’d been a pimply-faced high school junior and this woman had been a complete stranger to me. I had encountered her in the stairwell of my new dormitory. I was going down to get more boxes from the car; she was coming up with a suitcase, and there in the middle on the landing was her daughter, my new roommate, whom I had only just met in our new room. Seeing us converge on the stairs, her daughter had sought to make an introduction: “Mom, this is my roommate,” she said.

“Oh, my STARS!” As Mary Ann responded, her southern accent rang sharply in the stairwell. “You are the most beautiful CHILE! You look just like an AYNgel!”

At fifteen years old, I had never been greeted in such a way – at all, let alone with such passion by a stranger. My stomach dropped as I figured I was in for a very strange year.

So to hear the same words replayed, yes, I did laugh. I said, “Mary Ann, do you know those were the very first words you ever said to me?” I laughed again. A great big belly laugh, “And I thought you were the weirdest woman I’d ever met!” In making the remark, I was laughing at myself.

But something didn’t feel right. Was it the shyness of a reunion after a long time? The discomfort of being flattered? Why had I reacted the way I had? The service would be starting soon. My husband and I guided Mary Ann up front (where she could hear) and into a pew.

As we knelt our heads to pray, I felt “ew” inside. Here I had just seen my beloved Mary Ann for the first time in a decade, and I’d responded to her compliment with a laugh and a quip about how I thought she was so weird when I first met her. Ha ha ha.

The service continued. The hymns, the readings, the sermon, the chance to reflect. I thought about how, yes, surely, Mary Ann was hyperbolic by nature. Yet her ability to see the best of me clearly and reflect it back had profoundly guided my life. At several forks in my spiritual road I’d found my way only because of her support. From Day 1, she had always seen me as an angel. She’d seen my inner worth and held it up to me like a mirror constantly and faithfully enough for me to finally find it directly within myself.

I thought of Saint Augustine, a 4th century Christian mystic. I had just been reading his writings the week before as I was asking for guidance on next steps in my life. Augustine had written, “Give thanks, then, and embrace what has been given you so that you may be worthy to enjoy what you are called to.” Augustine quoted Psalms (115:11), “Every man is a liar,” and Ephesians (4:25) “laying aside the lie, speak the truth,” to make the point that to be anything less than the best we are capable of being – the likeness of God – is a lie. To be the likeness of God is to fulfill God’s intention for us. It is to be what we are (at Stage 6).

BlackSunglassesThus I realized, right there sitting in the pew at the 10:00 service, the purest, simplest definition of sin. Sin is the disregard and discrediting of God’s creation, and of our place in God’s creation. When I laughed at Mary Ann’s remark, I might as well have been spitting on her love of me, and on the qualities she was seeing in me. Qualities that God had created.

It struck me also that this understanding of sin is very much like how the Koran describes an “infidel”: someone who has forgotten the truth of Allah and become ungrateful. In that moment, yes, I had been an infidel. I had forgotten the truth of Mary Ann’s and God’s love for me. I had been ungrateful to that love. A simple, “Thank you” to Mary Ann, an acknowledgment to God who made it all happen, and offering Mary Ann a hug would have been a much more appropriate response.

When it came time to recite the Confession of Sin from the Book of Common Prayer, I spoke it from a very immediate place. I also apologized to Mary Ann after the service concluded. Then it was her turn to laugh. She said my remark hadn’t bothered her, but she was glad if I felt I had learned something. “You know, we learn so much more from our mistakes than our successes,” she chirped.

Then we went on to enjoy the weekend festivities. Fully. Gratefully.

God bless you, Mary Ann. As always, my teacher, holding up the mirror. Let her be a mirror to you, too. What are the places in your life where God, directly and/or through others, is smiling on you? Are you receiving this grace gratefully?