Awakening
From The Book of Awakening which I searched for on Amazon after reading a post from a new blog I’ve just added to my list of favorites – Creative Everyday (http://www.creativeeveryday.com/). I was compelled to follow the link to the book because I had just the other night finished the bottom half of my calendar for the BPS class and here’s what it looked like:
See that word there in week 4? Coincidence? Maybe. Maybe not.
As I perused the pages using the Search this Book feature (which I absolutely LOVE), I received another message. This is from the January 3 passage, titled “Unlearning Back to God”:
“Each person is born with an unencumbered spot – free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry – an umbilical spot of grace where we were each first touched by God…To know this spot of Inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it.”
When I first read it, I read the last sentence like this: "To know this spot of Inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface makers of identity…."
It wasn’t until I was retyping the quote for this entry that I realized I had misread it. Isn’t that weird? Maybe that’s how God/the universe/the Infinite communicates? In small whispers that are there one moment and gone the next, easily missed if you are not in the proper state of mind to receive the messages…
That first reading really struck a chord with me. It seemed to resound strongly of the messages in my recent journal entries, encouraging me to yes, get off my butt and find myself – the self that I was when I was born, when I was closest to God, before I fell under the influence of all the “surface makers of identity” like the media, the pressures of society, parental expectations, my own insecurities which stemmed from not knowing who I was. What did I like before I was told what to like? What did I want to do before I was told what I should do? Who was I before I was told who I should want to be by the bombardment of ads, commercials, teen magazines, high school peers, books, all the external, surface influences I subjected myself to?
The passage goes on to read:
“…the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential.…When the film is worn through, we have moments of enlightenment, moments of wholeness…moments of clear living when inner meets outer, moments of full integrity of being, moments of complete Oneness. And whether the film is a veil of culture, of memory, of mental or religious training, of trauma or sophistication, the removal of that film and the restoration of that timeless spot of grace is the goal of all therapy and education….this is the only thing worth teaching: how to uncover that original center and how to live there once it is restored. We call the filming over a deadening of the heart, and the process of return, whether brought about through suffering or love, is how we unlearn our way back to God.”
I like that – “the nature of becoming.” Is that what I’m going through? The process of becoming…[sounds so dramatic (and I’m so not dramatic)]. I started off the year with my stated goal being to learn to do what I love and love what I do, but maybe in order to do that, I need to first find my “original center” and ground myself there. perhaps that's the key to being happy -- finding your way back to that spot and living from there.
You know how they say God made man in his image? Maybe that's why we're all so different -- because God is so complex -- we all reflect different aspects of him, and when we try too hard to be something we're not -- to be like someone else, or worse, everyone else -- we drift away from the part of us that is most like God, most like the person he want us to be.
I think I need to get this book…
