Saturday, April 18, 2015

Knocking on the Door from the Inside




It is natural for human beings to love the Living Presence and Intelligence that we can intuit and sense even when we're not in a state of perfect oneness or wholeness. Bhakti yoga (devotional love-surrender to Grace, upon which "I" utterly depends) is a helpful and genuine path. 

However, bhakti is dualistic—the worship of the Wonderful Other—and unfortunately, nearly everyone stops there (at dualism), because adoring one’s image of the Divine is consoling. Once the ego feels reassured and no longer afraid, that is usually the end of the deepening of awakening: “God is Good. Everything’s okay. I’m done!”

But if one surrenders to the Divine with the understanding that Source is actually NOT other and that one is relaxing into one’s own Being and Identity, then bhakti can be transformative. Indeed, through such increasingly complete devotional worship of God, many a dualistic seeker has inadvertently awakened to the non-dual realization of ONLYNESS (in which both “God” and “I” disappear in unity). If you read the writings of the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics, you’ll see that this awareness of total unity often comes as a complete surprise because, unlike the Vedantic and Buddhist mystics, their seeking does not begin with any notion of non-dualism.

I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door.
It opens.
I have been knocking from the inside!

(Rumi)