Essay: Remember who you are

[Guest guest]

Dear Tim,

 

Thanks, for your kind feed-back, I'm currently revising,

and editing and this essay.

Your comments is always welcomed. Sorry about the length,

but I'm trying to summarize it in less words...

 

Now, there is indeed a falling away from Godhead, from

Spirit, from the primordial Ground. This falling away is

called involution, the movement whereby all things fall

away from a consciousness of their union with the Divine,

and thus imagine themselves to be separate and isolated

monads, alienated and alienating. And once involution has

occurred--and Spirit becomes unconsciously involved in the

lower and lowest forms of its own manifestation--then evolution

can occur: Spirit unfolds in a great spectrum of consciousness,

from the Big Bang to matter to sensation to perception to

impulse to image to symbol to concept to reason to psychic

to subtle to causal occasions, on the way to its own shocking

self-recognition, Spirit's own self-realization and self-resurrection.

And in each of those stages--from matter to body to mind to soul

to spirit--evolution becomes more and more conscious, more

and more are, more and more realized, more and more awake--

with all the joys, and all the terrors, inherently involved in that

dialectic of awakening.

 

At each stage of this process of Spirit's return to itself, we--you

and I--nonetheless remember, perhaps vaguely, perhaps intensely,

that we were once consciously one with the very Divine itself.

It is there, this memory trace, in the back of our awareness,

pulling and pushing us to realize, to awaken, to remember who

and what we always already are.

 

In fact, all things, we might surmise, intuit to one degree or another

that their very Ground is Spirit itself. All things are driven, urged,

pushed and pulled to manifest this realization. And yet, prior to

that divine awakening, all things seek Spirit in a way that actually

prevents the realization: or else we would be realized right now!

We seek Spirit in ways that prevent it.

 

We seek for Spirit in the world of time; but Spirit is timeless, and

cannot there be found. We seek for Spirit in the world of space;

but Spirit is spaceless, and cannot there be found. We seek for

Spirit in this or that object, shiny and alluring and full of fame or

fortune; but Spirit is not an object, and it cannot be seen or grasped

in the world of commodities and commotion.

 

In other words, we are seeking for Spirit in ways that prevent its

realization, and force us to settle for substitute gratifications,

which propel us through, and lock us into, the wretched world

of time and terror, space and death, sin and separation, loneliness

and consolation.

 

We search for Atman and attempt to find Spirit in ways that prevent

it and force substitute gratifications. The entire structure of the

manifest universe is driven by this project, a project that continues

until we--until you and I--awaken to the Spirit whose substitutes we

seek in the world of space and time and grasping and despair.

The nightmare of history is the nightmare of seeking Atman,

the fruitless search in time for that which is finally timeless, a

search that inherently generates terror and torment, a self

ravaged by repression, paralyzed by guilt, beset with the frost

and fever of wretched alienation--a torture that is only undone

in the radiant Heart when the great search itself uncoils,

when the self-contraction relaxes its attempt to find God,

real or substitute: the movement in time is undone by the great

Unborn, the great Uncreate, the great Emptiness in the Heart

of the Kosmos itself.

 

And so, try to remember: remember the great event when you

breathed out and created this entire cosmos; remember the

great emptying when you threw yourself out as the entire World,

just to see what would happen. Remember the forms and forces

through which you have traveled thus far: from galaxies to planets,

to verdant plants reaching upward for the sun, to animals stalking

day and night, restless with their weary search, through primal men

and women, yearning for the light, remember who and what you

have been, what you have done, what you have seen, who you

actually are in all those guises, the masks of the God and the

Goddess, the masks of your own Original Face.

 

Let the great search wind down; let the self-contraction uncoil

in the immediateness of present awareness; let the entire Kosmos

rush into your being, since you are its very Ground; and then

you will remember that the search for Atman never occurred, and

you have never moved, and it is all exactly as it should be,

when the robin sings on a glorious morning, and rain drops beat

on the temple roof.

 

~dave s