Opening Ourselves to Experience the Divine

Understand that what I’m about to say, some people will find quite frightening, but other people will feel relief. And much of that feeling of fear or relief comes from how we see ourselves as human beings. We have to understand that our mind builds things, our mind does not create things. It can influence what has already started, the process of creation, but try to remember that all things that are good, and all things that are true are initiated within God. And as human beings, we become channels of that good and that which is true. But we’re not always a pure channel. We have a tendency as human beings to add to what is coming through. And it is in adding ourselves, in an egoic sense, or adding our anxieties or fears or even our desires to what comes through us, we create layer after layer of karma, layer after layer of impact to our relationships and to the world. And all of these things, if they are left in place over a long period of time become very hardened and calcified in the sense of being hard to remove. You might think of them as layers of karma, but they’re not exactly the same as that. They’re more something that is like a dross or a residue, an impure residue that’s left behind by our thoughts and our actions or the things that we try to create—understanding again, that we’re not the creator, but we build and add to what we’ve been given.

Some teachers might say to you, that “Well that is why we seek our most true or our most authentic self, that part of us that existed before what we think of ourselves now exists. And there’s truth in those statements, but what is also true is that human beings, in their imperfection, cannot build something that is everlasting, so that, within the seeds of what we build are its eventual demise. Eventually, it will fall apart or crumble or weaken in some way that affects us. And the effect is usually a sense of fear, a sense of change that is overwhelming, a sense that our world is crumbling. And for those that I referred to at the start, the idea that this is a fearful thing, it usually is because the person has become so identified with what they have built up in their minds. And you know the things that are built. They are identities that are built. They’re aspects that we’ve linked to our self-esteem. They are things that our behavior feels as if it is an indication of our true selves, but all of these things are constructions. But in the seed of all these constructions is the deconstruction.  

So, when we talk about ignorance, when we talk about perfect knowledge, what we’re really talking about is not adding knowledge to who we are—we’re not adding anything to that deeper wisdom that we already possess, that most essential part of us that is connected to the most essential part of God—what we’re actually doing is removing; removing the different lens that show us a different picture of ourselves, of the people around us, of the world that we’re living in. And even though we live in a subjective reality that never completely goes away in this life, we can have a connection, a clarity that comes through other elements of our experience. Our experience of attempting to live our purpose. Our experience of learning how to love. Our experience of learning to listen and witness another human being. All of these experiences create a clarity within our system that carries no burden. And this is another reason Jesus says, “My burden is easy. My burden is light.” There’s not something to be added to who you are so much as there are things that need to be unloaded, set down, and unburdened.

Most of things have to do with our self-concept, our self-understanding and knowledge of who we are. And the knowledge as it is commonly understood in the way I just used that knowledge, that’s where we think we need to add an understanding, but it is really an uncovering of an existing understanding—an understanding where we are deeply grounded in our identity within God and God within us. And it is true that we are like a drop in the ocean. We might feel that separation and that existence, and then we might see and find comfort that we then return to that ocean of consciousness that is God. But it’s also important to know that that ocean has the capacity to fill every drop so that that drop becomes a lens to see the whole. That we have the capacity to be the eyes and ears or the experience of the multiplicity and diversity found in God.

Almost all fears are based on this constructed idea of who we are that is a false identity. And the fear of death, the fear of that particular kind of death is a sense that everything that we value will be gone or lost to us. But those things that are of real value, those things that, for our experience is an experience of the Divine, are never lost. They are always a part of us. In fact, you could say that they are the process that is us in a certain way so that when we connect or align ourselves with God, that pureness, the purity of God that comes through, the clarity that comes through is that experience of God.

To say that everybody can directly experience God is true, but that doesn’t mean the quality of everybody’s experience is the same. So, this is where the practice of the presence of God is important because this connects our consciousness and our awareness of our everyday thoughts and actions to that higher consciousness. It’s as if we say to ourselves that we’re going to open up this space inside of us that allows all of this love and grace, this forgives, this strength, the truth, we’re going to allow all of that through, and we do. But as I began, we’re not perfect, so it takes time to develop and to hold this awareness, and as we go about the day, we try to bring this awareness to everything we do, knowing that in every moment, in some way, it's possible for us to identify that we are experiencing God and in relationship to God during every second of the life that we are experiencing. This might feel overwhelming on one level, but on a different level, there is no greater love, no more accommodating truth, no more grace that is even possible for us to have that we don’t already have. And so, we are held by that beauty, that grace, that love, that truth. And everything that we’re able to release allows more of that grace and love to come through.

So, the practice of any part of one’s spiritual practice that releases our thoughts, releases the process that’s going on in our mind, the reductionist kind of thinking, the other things that try to explain or build, as we let those go, everything becomes lighter. Everything is clear, and in that space, the emptiness that is so full of potential will actually feel so grounded and so powerful because there is nothing else distracting it, nothing else that it’s trying to hold, so in effect, we are in our wholeness in that space, and true knowledge of what is Divine and what is God comes through.

There are some teachers who would say that we don’t really know anything, which is true in a very important sense, but it’s also true that when we are in this space, the knowledge that is Divine, which by the way, doesn’t feel like knowledge, is also present. And we can come to know, by our alignment, who we are and how we function, what our process is like. We learn how things become attached to us, how we release things, and they will seem so simple, so easy to do over time. What feels hard now to release, eventually will become so easy to let go. Even this life that we experience, we can release, and we can trust that there is a greater experience of life to come because all the limitations of this life that we have gladly accepted are released.