This morning, the clock quietly marks time in the office.
Despite the irritations and insistences of my ordinary parts—the restlessness of the body, the wandering nature of the associative mind—there's a stillness at the heart of being where things begin.
I receive life.
I often speak of the goodness of life, of how the very action of life flowing into me has a quality of a finer nature regardless of what it is that’s received. The kingdom of heaven involves being present to that finer quality of vibration which flows into Being through life and awareness.
I'm part of that; I can participate. I don’t have to set myself apart from life as a creature that can do things, that is in control of this and that and has to have achievements to validate itself. I can just Be. This is actually more than any achievement; it belongs to the goodness of life, not me, and I just align myself to it.
Thank God this is possible. It changes everything.
After I participate in this at the root of Being, I can then do everything else as I always and naturally do; but it’s already transformed, because it begins by drinking this goodness which is the water of life as it flows into being. It's the water in the desert that Moses found; it comes from the stone, the foundation, of my Being, the bedrock that supports and holds up everything that life is.
As I drink this water of life into me, quite gently and without any effort to do anything else but be there for it, a food flows in from the impressions of Being. This food is the truth of the goodness of heaven, which feeds life. It's the manna that sustains Being in the midst of the desert. I thought I would go hungry; my fears begin there.
But I won't.
It occurs to me how different the world would be if we were all preoccupied (occupied before our actions) with a wish to just be good, ordinary human beings. Not magical, powerful beings, but just beings with an intelligent and active wish to be good towards others and to appreciate the value of this life we’ve been given. If I examine my actions I see that too much of me fails to start in this place, on this level. Whether I'm doing it inwardly or outwardly, too much of me is devoted towards the idea that I should climb mountains and be a king of this or that. I don’t remember to just fulfill my ordinary responsibilities and meet my duty with care and attention. I’m busy dreaming about the great things I can be or the great things I can do.
In the meantime, the great thing that flows into me, life itself, gets ignored.
Can I see that I think I’m more important than life? This is where all the problems begin.
It’s worthwhile to come into relationship with this finer vibration of life itself, and ask myself, what is life? How am I now? I can do this all day long. It changes my relationship to life and I see how I just don’t know and cannot know what will happen next. I have to accept the conditions now, not reject them and try to to direct them.
If I accept the conditions I’m in now, their goodness influences me more directly.
If I'm under the influence of the goodness of what takes place now, I correspond to it; my own Being reflects it. In this way I become good through goodness, instead of trying to be good through myself. In fact, I don’t know what to be good is; I keep thinking I do, but all this is part of that same ego that thinks it knows everything.
If I become good through goodness, I begin to understand what it means when the Lord’s prayer says, Thy will be done.
I begin to see how I resist the goodness that is offered: always thinking I know better. It is strange that we humans are universally and eternally offered a goodness to inhabit, right in front of us at every moment, flowing into our bodies as the water of life and the manna of heaven, and we just say no to it. That’s not good enough. We want something better than heaven. Better than God. Better than goodness.
Even more strangely, we think we know what is better than heaven, better than God, better than goodness. Every day we pose and strut and act like we know more than the great teachers who brought us these messages. We critique them as though we knew more than they do about God and goodness.
This is the reality. When we are faced with things that are better than us, instead of recognizing them, keeping our mouths shut and bowing our head to receive their goodness, we race about shouting them down. This happens in every life as an individual; when we see it happening in the world at large in our society, it is nothing more than the collective, much louder noise of our individual beings.
Ah, then we get upset at how loud and dissonant it is. We don’t realize we are just listening to ourselves at greater amplification.
These are just my thoughts and impressions this morning. I’ll go forth into life and have to suffer some of this behavior myself. It’s not so easy to be free of it. I can’t think my way out of it. But the more I come into relationship with myself and ask myself this question, “what is this life?” the more I may open myself, quite gently and just a little bit, to a better quality of impression, a slightly better sense of goodness and value.
Within that goodness and value of life as it flows in lies all the love of God for his creation.
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