Walking by Faith, Not Sight

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world.

-      Helen Keller

       

I recently read a number of quotes by Helen Keller and what struck me was the number of references she made to the importance of sight, vision, light, seeing and beholding. Remarkable advice from a woman who had no physical sight. Though deprived of the view of life that we sighted people enjoy, she developed clear perception of the invisible world that sustained her. "What I am looking for is not "out there", it is in me."

I observed this phenomenon in my own mother who lost most of her sight to macular degeneration in her later years. As her perception of her outer world dimmed she became more convinced of the reality of God's presence within her. I found this remarkable and inspiring. Most of us would assume that it is the great miracles of preference, like sight being restored to the blind that would quicken a person's faith. My mother's faith was not diminished but substantially increased through a great loss. Perhaps it is the vision of one world that costs us the vision of another. Without eyesight, there is still insight, perhaps even more keenly, in the case of Helen Keller and Frieda Schellink.

It is human nature to want to see life working out according to our preferences. We seem to know what would be best for us, make us happy, or serve our life purpose. Yet many of us got what we wanted, and happiness remained at large. Or we avoided some awful fate, and never dealt with our deepest fear. When we ask the question, what is best for us, we must be willing to abandon personal will to make room for soul wisdom.  Then we are lead to our growing edge, the current limit to our capacity to understand our true self. This is the place where we can discover the difference between Life and life situations.  This is the place where we can build our faith in the invisible reality of our Being, as the temporary forms of life change before our eyes, leaving us with a sense of unalterable Life within. While eyesight bears witness to the temporal world, insight reveals the eternal.

To some people, the fruits of their faith are in getting what they pray for. That is visualization; using the infinite universal Power to create according to our will. This is a useful tool, but builds a fragile faith, entirely dependent upon circumstances for its strength. A deeper faith comes when we discover a persistent state of well being, through whatever arises. Jesus said, there will be trials and tribulations in this world. Buddha said there will be 10,000 joys, 10,000 sorrows. Notice they did not say there might be, they said, there will be challenges. If my faith in God is predicated on how my life unfolds in a purely outer sense, I am assured of a wobbly faith, built on sand. Yet if I resist the temptation to "judge by appearances" and seek the kingdom of heaven within my own consciousness, I will be sustained by knowing that I am one with the eternal presence power and love of Spirit, whatever may come.  This is why we pray and meditate, so that we can improve our inner vision and come to know that the presence of Spirit is inseparable from who we truly are. Then the fruits of our practice is a sense of equanimity, perhaps even joy, as we encounter and embrace the outrageous winds of change that will surely come to pass in our life.

Hands on or Hands Off?

As I started to picture the trees in the storm, the answer began to dawn on me. The trees in the storm don't try to stand up straight and tall and erect. They allow themselves to bend and be blown with the wind. They understand the power of letting go. Those trees and those branches that try too hard to stand up strong and straight are the ones that break. Now is not the time for you to be strong, Julia, or you, too, will break.

- Julia Butterfly Hill

Most of us will never learn the lesson that Julia learned while spending days living in a tree. However, most of us will face storms on the ground of our daily lives and face the question, How we will respond to the forces that challenge us? 

Spiritual teachings can confound us when they seem to prescribe contradictory instructions for how to respond to life circumstances. The affirmative, co-creative approach prescribes an, I can make it happen attitude. This approach applies the creative power of our minds to the field of infinite possibilities to declare and claim how life should unfold for us.  It is the power of intention brought to bear upon the unset jello of quantum probabilities that can bring a specific outcome into manifestation.  It often works because, as the latest science confirms, reality is not fixed, but alterable, not objective, but shaped in part by our perception of it.  This is an exciting, empowering principle that can be used for greater good in our lives.

The other side of this principle is a passive wisdom approach. The cliché for it is Let go, let God. It is the capacity to take our hands off the wheel of our lives, and trusting that an unseen Guide will steer us to greater good in our life. This can be a most difficult attitude to cop in the midst of a storm that seems sure to break us.  Our survival instincts and spiritual bravado would have us rear up and take a resolute stance to oppose the ill winds of circumstances that surely seem against us.

Understanding when to steer in the direction of our preferences and when to surrender navigation and control to the master Pilot is not necessarily an either/or proposition.  When we understand that our lives depend on a synergistic collaboration between the Infinite Mind of God and our own conscious awareness, we can be as ready to take the wheel as to release it. We can intend for our good and move confidently in the directions of our preferred life, all the while holding a deep pervasive knowing that Spirit is seeking to live our lives through us and as us.  The recognition of an indwelling love and intelligence seeking to express through the vessel of our life experiences grants us a willingness to surrender, accept and adapt to the path unimagined by our mortal minds.   

Every powerful hero's journey takes the hero to unimagined places, forces him/her to confront their deepest fears, and ultimately brings the adventurer home with an inner reward that enriches the soul precisely because they took the road of greatest challenge. As Joseph Campbell noted, We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the life that is waiting for us.

Love Made Audible

"You don't have to go looking for love when it's where you come from." 

-   Werner Erhard

You have heard this wisdom before.  If you believe that you are a chip off the old block, a microcosm of the macrocosm, an emanation of the One Presence and Power we call God, then you may have a concept that your true nature, like God's, is love itself.  There is of course a vast experiential chasm between a concept and an inner knowing; as between seeing your birth certificate and being hugged by your mother.

If love is at hand, closer than our very breath, and unlimited as Infinite Presence, then why do we not know and feel its embrace and hear its soothing voice?  Just as infants do not recognize their parents until their perceptual abilities develop, we as children of God do not recognize the still small voice of Love despite its constant whispers in our hearts.  We have a form of psycho spiritual hearing loss where our faculty to hear the Voice of Love is dependent on our need for certain circumstances that make Love's voice audible.

If our partner does not return our loving advance, if children disobey or don't call, if our employer overlooks our accomplishments we may experience a world with little or no love in it. If we experience difficulty or loss, we can subconsciously believe that we are unworthy, unloved, even unlovable.  In such moments the voice of fear drowns out Love's eternal message.

This is the real life-threatening disease facing us. We confuse form with content, and create false idols that, true to form, always shatter our faith.

Love is formless, an eternal energy that cannot be limited or destroyed.  Like its divine siblings of Truth, Wholeness, Harmony, Peace, and Joy, Love arises in abundance to meet all our needs when the conditions are right.  Paradoxically right conditions for love to arise are no conditions at all.  While we may seem justified in prescribing what love needs to look like for us to hear it voice, Truth beckons a different perspective.  Truth asks us to give up form for content; give up the fickle for the eternal and be willing to exchange the illusion of love for the real thing. As ACIM says, When you want only love you will see nothing else....you will hear nothing else.

I am a student of unconditional love.  Every day I am asked to hear differently in order to be spared the deafness experience that prevents me from hearing that all that is being voiced in this world is the voice of love or a call for love.

So in the final analysis it seems that love, stripped of externals, comes not by listening for it, but by listening from it. Since it is what we come from, it's what we need to come from.  If we welcome love, it will be at our doorstep, whispering its reminder that it lives with us, in us and as us. This can save us an enormous amount of suffering as we seek but not find in the world for the love that waits only on our welcome, not on time.

What Is God Preparing Me For?

From an evolutionary perspective or worldview, development - the emergence of that which is new-is seen as the greatest good. So during the limited time that each of us has here on Earth, we all have the opportunity to develop, to make a difference in this world through applying our God-given capacity for free agency, or freedom of choice, to our own conscious evolution. No matter who we are, we all have some measurable, not insignificant degree of free agency. And learning how to activate that gift, so that which is truly higher and new can emerge through us, is what makes all the difference. -Andrew Cohen

One of the pitfalls of a spiritually focused lifestyle is the tendency to denigrate the world and diminish the significance of what we do here, seeing activity as inferior to being itself.  Because the emphasis and goal of enlightened spiritual practice is to know oneself as formless essence, we might be tempted to believe that it matters little what we do here. Yet a singular focus on the inner life will deny us the privilege, if not the responsibility, to take our place in the evolutionary process in which each of us has a key role.

As Andrew Cohen observes it is allowing that which is "truly higher...to emerge through us..." that empowers us to use our spiritual insight to make a difference in the world.  For despite the relative, temporary nature of the physical world it remains undeniably the ground upon which we are currently assigned to live, move and have our Being. We do not have to be conformed to this world as the apostle Paul admonished, but transformed -- awake and fully functional on this plane of life. A balanced approach transcends and includes the world and the choices it offers, in order to bring an engaged spirituality where, as we say at UCOD, we embrace our humanity while we express our spirituality.

When we see that our spiritual yearnings are connected to the unfoldment of the greater good we can open to a sense of our divine purpose or assignment. This is the recognition that we each have a special gift that only we can share in a particular way that serves the world.  Life is not capricious - it does not on one hand give us the passion and talent for something that would not serve a greater evolutionary purpose.   The world needs our enlightened and engaged action. If we are to our know our authentic self we must be consciously committed to the expression of the beauty, perfection and wholeness revealed by our spiritual practice, not merely sit on it. Our recognition of this unique purpose and willingness to give ourselves fully to its expression is the way we cooperate with the evolutionary impulse while bringing meaning to our lives.

We can inquire more deeply. "What does life want from you?'  How do you fit in the totality?  What is your place in the whole?" When we venture beyond the cave of our personal awakening we are available to be used by Infinite Love and Intelligence for its greatest purpose. We can hear and express our heart song. If we listen deep enough, we can hear the music of our heart that fills us with a purpose and passion and then let that purpose inform our choices and guide our steps.