At some point, our appetite for a life that will satisfy or stimulate us can no longer be fulfilled by the life that we see around us. It just doesn’t work anymore. We’ve tried and tried to find ways to feed ourselves, but what we have found (mostly) is that with all we’ve done from ourselves based on how we look at life, we never feel “I don’t need anything more than this right now.” Likely in your own day-to-day relationships you’ve begun to realize that another relationship won’t fix things. More money won’t change it. More food. More travel. Whatever it may be.
Image by Boxed Water Is Better from Unsplash
Eventually it dawns on us that what we’re hungry for, we can’t give ourselves through the things that we see in the world. And it’s at this point that we begin to wonder if there isn’t a different kind of nourishment that doesn’t just stimulate the senses or satisfy the body, but actually works as a form of food to the soul, to our spiritual life.
True food not only nourishes us, but it helps us grow. True food gives us something that doesn’t leave us hungry for more, but by its very presence in us, as we participate in the present moment, produces for us a sense of well-being. When you see something beautiful in nature that you were not looking for but it appears to you – such as the sky set ablaze by the setting sun – you are filled by it, aren’t you? It is the kind of abundant nourishment available to each of us in the present moment, but it only comes to us when we happen to be in the right place at the right time… and present enough to receive what it is that is always right in front of us.
So how do we put our life more and more into this moment of participation in the present moment in which we are nourished by something that we can’t bring ourselves, as opposed to spending our lives the way most of us spend our lives – in a life of acquisition – trying to get something to know ourselves through so that we can feel as though we’re complete?
How do we come to a life, right now, where we’re not looking outside of ourselves to feed ourselves with some idea we have about what we need, but we are actually participating in the present moment which is a kind of cauldron in which all the different super-heated elements interact to form something new. This crucible of the present moment is a set of words that describes what you and I are intended to be living in at all times.
In the crucible of the present moment, we already have everything we need. But you may say, “Wait a minute, sir. You don’t understand. I’m not happy. I don’t have everything I need!” What you don’t understand is that your unhappiness is one of the ingredients required for the creation of something new. Instead, you feed on hatred when you have unhappiness and then resist it. But when you’re aware of yourself and your unhappiness in the crucible of the moment – no matter what the disappointment is in life – the whole mix comes alive, and you’re fed a different order of food from the inside!
The only task before any of us is that we must be willing to enter into the crucible of the present moment, not to give ourselves away in some fear of what may or may not happen to us – but to let what is be what it is and not try to fill ourselves because that moment seems empty or incomplete, or we’re not getting the stimulus we want. The universe itself, all aspects of our lives, are in a continual creative convergence that renews itself. And the center of that renewal and the convergence is in you; in your awareness of it.
Everything can be transformed in a tremendous alchemical process the light of awareness produces when we’re willing to allow that awareness to act as a beautiful crucible into which life, and all its content, pours moment-to-moment. Because when life is always doing that, and that change is always taking place with that sense of real life coming from it, you don’t want to hold onto anything. You have nothing that you’re looking to keep because you’re continually being resupplied with Life itself.
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