How does the Sacred call to you? Through a deep longing? Through loving? Through the birth of an infant or the death of a beloved friend? Through the silence of a forest or the magnificence of waves crashing at sea? Through a teacher or a teaching? A guru or a God? A scripture or a spiritual tradition? Through art, poetry, music? Playing with your dog, sitting with your cat? Through a meditation practice or a practice of service? Or does the Sacred calling come when you are most desperate, most vulnerable, unable to know what to do, where to go, how to address the pain you are suffering or the suffering you see all around you? Does it call you to your knees when you don’t know where else to turn?
What if the sacred is actually calling us every moment? Come; see! See what you are, what this moment is. Come back Home. Return—again and again and again! See whether there is really any separation anywhere.
Many of us think that a sacred calling is a calling to “do,” but my sense is that the sacred calls us to “be,” calls us to surrender to Being, and in the “being” the doing happens spontaneously. It is Being, rather than a self, that is always becoming. Whether we resonate with the idea of a Supreme Being, or simply Being Itself, surrender is a humbling act of acknowledging that the human mind cannot fathom the Mystery of the universe, cannot “know” its Source as an object, and in innumerable ways each day, does not even know how to accept the moment it finds itself experiencing. The mind does not know how to surrender. Yet over time, and with Grace, it may discover its own limitations in the face of the Unknown and let go of its illusion of control, its illusion of separation, its illusion of a self. It may become so emptied of its false identity, that Truth simply moves itself without anyone to know how or why or when.
It seems to me that the Unnamable is here having a human experience, and yet in the deepest place in our hearts, we may sense that this expression called “human” Being is called by the Sacred to experience the sacred as what we are, what life is. It appears the One enjoys this dance with Itself. In this dance, we are invited to find out what is here when all we have believed about ourselves–the ways we have identified with thought, feeling, body, memory, image—falls away, or is stripped away, or simply melts in its encounter with the Sacred. When all the forms of thought, memory, feeling, etc. have disappeared, what is left?
Being a human expression of life does not mean we have no perception of choice, or of moving toward or away from our experience of the sacred, toward or away from what is most true within. Rather than a calling to be something, perhaps the Sacred is calling to us to be, to see, to respond from what is most sacred within us. Perhaps the Sacred calling calls us to come out of hiding–hiding our true self, hiding our true radiance, hiding the Light that is here shining the moment we let go of the illusion of a separate “self.” Ramana asks, Are there really two selves?
How does the Sacred call to you? What does it beckon you to discover, to sense, to be? Perhaps the Sacred calling is not your life’s work, but discovering who/what is actually living life–your life, to be precise! You may discover there is no moment where we can actually divide life into sacred and secular, holy and unholy. Dream, dreamer and dreamed may disappear into What has no name, no attributes and yet continually calls from itself to itself within our own experience to be, to see, to love.
If you would like to share how the Sacred calls to you, or to describe one moment that seems to exemplify such a calling, we would love to hear from you.
As PDF Here
Beautiful...
ReplyDelete♥♥♥
Delete