Foundations: Session Six A
Session Summary - Spiritual Laws
Lorna read selected quotations from Emerson's provocative essay "Spiritual Laws" such as:"In hours of clear reason, the minds seems so great. Our life is embosomed in beauty, The weed, the fool, the corpse...the familiar and the terrible have a grace. Nothing can be taken from us that seems much.
"No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might.
"A few strong instincts and a few plain rules suffice us.
"A little consideration would show us that a higher law than that of ours will regulates events.
"Place yourself in the middle of the stream of power and wisdom which animates all whom it floats, and you are without effort impelled to truth, to right and a perfect contentment."
With a representative of us (Cal) standing at the center of our darkened meeting room, we alternately pointed flashlights at him while making Emersonian pronouncements such as "he is a hero", "he is altogether ignorant", he is "old", "he is young", "he is a jejune babe" and "he is wise". The lesson gained was that each of us are these things at different times in different contexts.
Cal said his first response to reading the essay was that it was both muddy and clear, depending on how you read it. Lyle said he felt the reading liberating if he took the advice to suspend his disbelief for a while. What if we all had a distinct purpose with a way clear to an "infinite sea" while all the while participating in the whole of what it means to be human?
Paul reiterated the fact that our inner sight depends on our perspective: whether we are "below the clouds", immersed in life's finiteness, or have found a foothold "above the clouds", in timelessness as it were. From the place beyond contingency all of our suffering seems relativized: less tragic and more beautiful. That's why Emerson could say that our griefs are exaggerated.
Linda said she sometimes swirls in self-pity but when a friend at her work talked about a terminal illness of someone close to him, everything shifted in her perception. She saw how she exaggerated her own claims to grief.
Paul said Emerson was one of the first modern writers to speak of the importance of consciousness. If you are in that place of transcendence, the perspective is self-validating. There is no reason to prove its significance to yourself or others. Life is not grindingly hard here because you see values surprisingly clear. Paul says this place is not about "faking it until you make it", as in recovery jargon, but more like "receive (or take) it to make it".
Lorna said she reflected on the light filtered through the prisms in her house. Each is different and in some way spectacular, and so are we when we reflect "divine light", life from our soul.
Paul said that Emerson believed that shadow and light (or ego and Self) are beyond our conventional concepts of good and evil. Emerson would say that we need to remember that life's dark side is a shadow of the real. Evil is also part of the same process as the real. However, our problems tend to be that we believe the shadow has more reality than light and that they are completely separate entities.
Lyle suggested that Emerson only lived in this place of transcendence while he was enjoying his favourite activity - writing - because biographically we know that he was not often content with his circumstances. Dave said that when we talk from the finite and then hear the voice of the infinite within, there is a dialogue or inner conflict established. We truly live in the "now" in experiencing this tension.
It is often only in retrospect that we can see how this tension between the shadow and the light works itself out. Paul said it is like having an inner switch close by that we can turn on at any moment. However, when we fail to turn on the light for a while, it becomes awfully dark fast and the switch becomes elusively distant. The light switch can't be found merely by remembering "feel good" experiences in the past. Often these memories are distorted anyway and so there's no simple technique to finding the switch. The awareness of the light has to come from experiencing the present moment. Techniques such as spiritual disciplines can put us in the path of receiving "awakeness" but there are no guarantees that if we do this or that activity, we will receive light. Examples of such disciplines included reflective reading (Eldon), listening to tapes while working (Cal) and listening to music while writing (Paul).
Dave related the story of the Grail Castle and Parsifal as a parallel myth to the switch metaphor. To the seeker knight Parsifal, the heavenly Grail Castle was always "just to the left, over the drawbridge" yet it took years to find after he was initially kicked out.
Marty said that from an egocentric perspective the will is foolishly believed to be stronger than the universe. That's why Emerson by implication makes a distinction between choosing or willing to be awake and egocentric willfulness. Willfulness is our attempt to control reality, making it suit our every whim. Will by itself is effortlessly being a channel of the universe. It is often quite hard to distinguish between the two. Love will reveal it to us. This will invite a deep acceptance of what is real. Enlightenment will reveal the foolishness of willfulness in our lives. We will actually be destroyed by our willfulness, something we discover when we get what we think we need.
In other words, ego is something we need but then we need to quickly give it up. Our Deeper Self will laugh at it because we will know how irrelevant the ego perspective is. From the ego perspective we despair at how our particular life is meaningless. In moments from the Infinite, we deeply know that our life is absolutely meaningful because our particularity has been a unique opportunity to reveal the Divine in the world.
Paul suggested that when we act crazily we should take a look and observe ourselves. Then when we see our ego's vanity, don't despair but get over it. After all, we are an open book to others. Why do we individually think we can hide anything from each other?
The key Paul noted is to allow nature to to live in the now. Pay much less attention to our long-held positive or negative images of ourselves, of who we "should" be like. The light switch is always near us. In discussing specific examples in individuals' lives we learned of the pain that we receive in compensation when we become too attached to old, irrelevant images of ourselves.
Until these attachments break our hearts, Paul said, the path to consciousness may not make sense at all. Ultimately, our vocation is to be at home. Contrary to popular opinion, this home is not a particular idyllically described external place but our own inner place of Enlightenment. These seemed like refreshing words when we reflected on our experiences of Christmas!
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