Key Lesson: Rushing somewhere, through anything, in the hope of finding some imagined peace of mind is like looking for your heart in someone else’s body!
For Further Study
How many of you wake up in the morning, and no more are your eyes open than suddenly your mind is rushing to tell you everything that didn’t get done, or that needs to get done, and must be handled? That is life on this earth today! It belongs to a mind that is asleep to itself, having produced (in its own image) a world that validates itself through all its suffering.
So, the minute we wake up, we’re tense. And how many of us are tense even while sleeping? It’s true that tension has gone beyond chronic. Part of growing up today is taking drugs so you can deal with life and this constant tension. But freedom in life is found in the facts of life. The facts of life are present all the time right within us, only we’re not present to the presence of that truth… which is why we have the necessity of spiritual work.
One of the facts of life is our innate need to rise above ourselves. For one thing, we can understand that ascending is integration while descending is fragmentation. But also, it’s plain to see that without higher influences, we’re left to our own flu-like influences from which we don’t get well but become sicker from following our own prescriptions!
This understanding must become experiential. It’s possible, using your attention, to be aware, at any given moment, of the natural tension of being in a physical body with the earth working on it, drawing it. It’s possible, at any moment (which is right now), to be aware of tension in yourself. And in that awareness of the tension, it is possible to be conscious of an ascending spirit – a wish to rise above your circumstances, to outgrow your inadequacies, to get above your anger and fear. This ascending spirit is never not in you, but you’re not present to its presence.
Now, how do you open yourself, align yourself, with higher influences? There actually is a spirit of aspiration – to sense and long for a relationship with something that is greater than yourself. You aspire to a new understanding, to a loving heart, to a patient heart. You aspire to an open mind. You aspire to be someone who isn’t rushing all the time. You want to go up, to ascend to something higher.
So you can begin, a thousand times a day, whenever you can, to become aware of tension. Any time you become aware of yourself, if you bring your sensing, your awareness into the whole of that tension, and deliberately relax yourself from it, it’s just like an air balloon. You can sense the ascending spirit when you give your full sensing, your full awareness to releasing yourself from the fixation you have with your tension. The release of the tension opens the door for your awareness of this other movement rising within you.
To release the tension doesn’t mean that in the moment you do it it’s going away. When you release the tension, you release your identification with the sensation of it. You become aware in the moment of this tension, of your identification with it, and of deliberately relaxing from the unconscious identification. If you do that properly, sensing the whole of yourself, you will sense the ascending spirit that had been blocked by your fixation with the descending spirit.
The beauty of what I’m telling you is that you can use this every second of your life. Tension and relaxation are a circle. They’re one thing. And in the middle of them, right through the heart of those opposites, is an ascending spirit. If you ever have a moment when you’re fully in the grip of resistance and the tension it’s producing, but in that split second you actually catch it, you can deliberately relax yourself and release yourself from the identification with that tension. In that same moment when you release yourself from the descending spirit, you’re made aware of a little champagne bubble, a little interior movement inside of you going up.
In the relaxation of the fixation there is not only an integration that takes place, a true healing, but it also becomes possible for you to be aware of the ascending spirit, the little part of you that’s always present, that wants to rise. And the true rising is through the transcending of yourself, not through conquering yourself with one idea over another, but with seeing that a mind set against itself has already lost the battle. Your awareness in the moment of tension is the invitation for an ascension that cannot be brought about any other way.
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