Being with Love in the Present, Part II

Detail of capital from Eglise St. Pierre, Chauvigny

March 1, 2020, Sparkill—continued

…if you have faith in your Lord, if you trust in His promises and His rewards in the Hereafter, if you fear Him and love Him and wish to be with Him, the bitter will turn into sweet…

It is certain that your sustenance is gained through your own actions. According to the Law, the best food is that which is obtained by your own efforts. Even eating it and digesting it is your own work—therefore, it is service.

Thus if you gain your food heedfully and lawfully, prepare it, chew it, taste it, swallow it, digest it-you will serve the One who created you and keeps you alive, and who placed your soul into you from His own soul. 

Excerpt from Ibn Arabi, Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, P. 167. Translated by Shaykh Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti. Fons Vitae, 1997.

It is the taste of our life that helps us eat and digest the food it brings us. When Ibn Arabi advises us that the bitter can turn into sweet he’s reminding us that we are able to transform our past within us. This illustrates without compromise that our understanding of our life is created by our emotional and feeling attitudes, and not by the events that have happened. 

Within time as received and perceived now, in the action of sensation, feeling, and contemplation, it is possible to come immediately to an understanding of the sweetness and goodness of all that has already been received. If I am here with love and understanding, it is only because all of the things that went before this made it possible: and if this moment is whole within goodness and Being, then all the moments that went before it must also have been whole within goodness and Being. If my parts were unable to perceive those things when they happened in the past, it is at least able to perceive the truth of this now. If I do perceive this truth, I become responsible to myself and this moment. This means I cannot cast a line from my feelings backward into time and accuse, or blame. Of course I am forever tempted to: but my attention needs to be focused on this moment and the truth of goodness, which leads me to forgiveness and mercy instead of resentment and retribution.

This is what I mean when I say we should Be with love in the present. It's not our own love that we should be with, because it is weak. The flow of divine love into us, however, is infinitely strong, and if we choose to dwell within that force, the benefits are in measurable. In this way we are not attached to our past and those who betrayed us; we are free to go forth and love from this moment. And to go forth in love from this moment is always better. I may fall down 10,000 times and fail to go forth and love from this moment, but in the next moment, on the 10,001st time, Love can prevail.

I've spoken before of the essential goodness of life and how all of it is good and sweet, even the parts that seem better and reprehensible to me. Feeling anger and anguish towards those who are angry and anguishing serves no one and nothing except myself; and I want to serve God, not so much myself. I need to have faith in goodness and faith in the future, not dwell on the inequities of the present. Hence my feeling is focused first in sensation, the experience of God flowing into Being. Sensation is like a lens that clears up everything that is blurry and sees even the tiniest and most beautiful detail of something that otherwise remains unclear. 

Then my feelings can focus on the beauty of creation, rather than my attitude towards it. My sensation does not have an attitude and I can rely on it to help me perceive things truthfully.

Of course you take this in with your mind as you read this. We can't help that, but you can become responsible for understanding this question much more intimately through the molecular sensation of your Being – the organic sensation. This is a spiritual sensation that is intended, above all, to support a spiritual feeling and create the potential for forgiveness and mercy in us. Without those two new innermost spiritual attitudes, we find ourselves attached to what has already taken place.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.