RELATIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS:
A NEW STEP in the EVOLUTION of CONSCIOUSNESS
You are Welcome to Read my New Article (Below)
BEHIND THE TEARS
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I cried and cried and cried. I have been crying everyday for months. I am still crying.
I told myself many reasons why I could not stop. It is my kids leaving home to go to college; it’s my friend’s illness; it’s the idea of moving to a new home and leaving the protection of the walls I know so well...
Every time I cried, I looked for something that would justify the uncalled tears inundating my eyes, that would make my chest heat up, full of something I could not put into words. And while the departure of my kids or my friend’s disease indeed make me sad, most of my tearing had nothing to do with them.
I cried at home, in the streets, on the phone. I cried watching the sun rise and set, at the sight of a baby, and hearing a bird singing in the distance…I cried watching a movie, listening to the radio news, singing a soft rock song.
I just could not stop crying.
My tears seemed to come and go as they pleased—when I was not sad nor felt like crying either. In a way, they were very impersonal. And yet, at the same time, everything that happened around me somewhere felt deeply intimate. It was as if I had made mine, as if I had taken possession of something—an event, a situation, an encounter—that originally did not belong to me, but whose emotion, the feeling it provoked in me made it mine. I knew it did not belong to me, but I was partaking of the experience of it nonetheless, as if I had been invited to commune with it.
I cried translating my Teacher’s writings, reading a mystic’s life, and wording the prayers of the beguines. I cried while meditating, while watching the plums and apples redden, and while smelling the lavender flowers that grow in my garden. I cried when a child got hurt and when another happily licked a lollipop as big as his face. It is as if I was raw, my skin too thin to stop anything from coming in.
It was not that I was clinging to the emotions that came either. Tears came and went as things and events came and went. Water flooded my eyes in the very moment when the feeling, the emotion of the experience took place…and then they left. I wanted to find an explanation to what was taking place, but all I felt was confusion.
I ended up believing that I was falling into some kind of depression. I thought I needed some medicine…to go to the doctor or to a new therapy. I took on yoga.
But every yoga class ended with me leaving as fast as I could, barely waving my hand good-bye, so that no one would see my tears falling. It felt that the relaxation, the opening of my chest, the stretching of my tight body, was not a remedy but rather a pill which made more acute this already hypersensitive state.
What was really happening to me?
Was I getting too old and weak?
Was I going mad?
Finally I shared my concern with a group of meditation friends…just to put the situation out in the open and get some perspective. A few kind and true observations were given—that after all I am Latina and one that is very emotional. Talking about this brought a few laughs and a few more tears.
Later we fell into silence and we meditated. And it was then that I saw something, which suggested like a kind of answer, something quite vague in the beginning that slowly began to take shape.
Yes I was raw; yes my skin had thinned up to the point of not being able to stop anything from coming in… Everything was too close to me. Everything touched me to my core—the taste, the smell, the touch, the hearing, the sight—of… and this is what surprised me… of life happening… the beauty and the horror, the joy and the pain; I was experiencing everything first hand without any packaging, unveiled, and uncooked.
Like a door opened in that moment and I understood something.
God lives in the myriad expressions of the life I was experiencing so intimately. He was present and I was experiencing Him, in my own body, through my own heart and my own senses. God, Life had been touching me so deeply… and I was able and lucky to feel it. Life and I were interlaced in the sense that I felt it as if whatever was taking place, was happening to me directly even though I was, and I knew I was, just a witness. The main character was life itself happening. But I was so identified with it that it felt like it was happening to me…and it was happening to me, in a sense it was, and in a sense it was not. It was both. A degree of oneness.
So I knew. I know. My crying, the tears in my eyes at this very moment are grace.
By Alex Warden
Coexistence and Essential Oneness
Coexistence is a way to experience our Essential Oneness in
our daily life. It is a beautiful word, a worthy ideal…like an elegant dance
where we live our own life while accepting the ways of others.
Yet coexistence can also be much more difficult to attain
than we think, because our unique way can often feel threatened by the ways of
others. This may lead us to compare ourselves with others and even attempt to
define our way as somehow better.
But it can be done. When I was in Chile over a month ago, I
gave a seminar in a town whose mayor is trying to bring the reality of
coexistence into practice. The town hopes to build temples for the three major
religions of the western world—a synagogue, a church, and a mosque. Two of
them, the church and the mosque, have already been built. And it was
interesting to see that his inspiration actually worked. People from different
religions participate peacefully in their spiritual practices at their
corresponding temples. In addition, the mosque has a library that can be used
by people of different religions and backgrounds to offer talks and
seminars. I had not been in a town
before in Latin America with a conscious intention to practice coexistence, so
I felt hopeful and impressed. I have heard there are other towns and cities
like this one around the world…but not enough yet.
Coexistence is not only about learning to live with other
people, but also with animals and
plants and the land. Life naturally coexists; ecosystems are a form of
coexistence. Plants and animals
share their existence with the land. They are not separate from the universe,
or each other. They are an integral part of everything. In their own way, they
live in paradise.
But as human beings develop the capacity to differentiate
from our environment, when we develop a sense of I and you, we leave the
natural way of being and enter the realm of separation from life. Then we begin
to see ourselves as different from everyone and everything else. We experience
our uniqueness; and frequently in this process we forget our similarity with
all.
In this way coexistence confronts us with the difference
between our idea of essential oneness and the here-and-now reality of living it
with other unique beings. Coexistence demands a quality of tolerance, of
looking at what we have in common rather than stressing our differences. It
means to live with one another in an open and respectful way towards both
ourselves and all.
Coexistence does not mean to give up one’s traditions and
ways, but rather to enjoy the diversity and uniqueness that the whole of life
is, while perceiving the oneness that unites us underneath the variety of forms
of expressions of existence. It means experiencing our essential oneness by
consciously coexisting with the whole of life on this plane of reality—the
plane of the opposites—on our own. We can try it, enjoy it, and encounter its
difficulties.
Coexistence is a way to live our individuality within
diversity. It is an experience of sameness and difference at the same
time. It is an experience of
Reality.
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| Universal Worship Mandala, Art by Amara Karuna |
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