Post 2
Sitting in front of the screen this morning my mind wants to continue the previous post. And yet I know from experience that too much overt planning and figuring will produce words that come out stilted and don’t touch me, let alone anyone else. I must wait on the heart…
Spiritual awakening came for me as a gentle touch on the top of the head. It followed after an insight that my long hours of silent prayer were a transactional endeavor. If I sat only so long as I was infused with the miraculous, wonderful, healing grace of God, and left when this power lifted, I was not loving God with, my “whole heart, soul, strength and mind”, as the Master instructed. I was a kid coming to the candy store and leaving when I gave my nickel for a gumdrop. This time, instead, I heard the instructions, and though the fullness of the presence of God had left me, I sat there like a dumb ox, like a meat sack. There was no thought, but also no inspiration, and I resolved to offer myself with all the poverty of what I did not have.
I don’t know how much time passed as I sat there stupidly, alone in the church, when the most loving and gentle of touches descended upon the crown of my head. It was a sense almost as if my skull had opened and my brain was exposed to the touch of a feather. That feather transmitted all the wisdom I would ever need and I realized it in an instant. The, “God-out-there”, I had been seeking in my quest for truth, now also became the, “God-in-here”. Rather than praying, the prayer and the answer both now lived in me. They would live themselves out as my life in communion with this most intimate, dynamic internal energy that was also the source of everything else.
After this initial experience the mistakes began immediately. Having absorbed too many enlightenment myths I took this ecstatic initial sense of freedom and realization, this new conscious marriage of self and cosmos, to mean that I was thoroughly cooked. No more work remained to be done. I would live out my days in bliss guided by the hand of God. At 21 we can believe such things. And when the ego gets ahold of the story, we can believe them for much longer and cause all kinds of mess. That I did…