My morning ritual usually has a quiet portion where I let things settle and be with myself in contemplative space. I try to set my small, ego self aside while I sit with my higher self, my true essence. It can come quick or slow, skimmingly or in fullness, or not at all. But when contact is made and I fall in, reality opens with a hush. The sky, the window, the table, my body, everything I had assumed to be complete, absorb their own images and become ten times more real.
It can start as a line running down the center of my chest, just under my breastbone, a live current, moving in the same channel as my breathing; cool air coming in, exchanged for the warm breath going out, utterly physical, sensory; then growing to fill my interior, flowing to my arms, hips, legs, my attention merging with my body like water overflowing a cup. I am alive and I know my aliveness. The quiet is unforced, thoughts dropping, drifting as leaves on the surface of water. Sweeping the room, my line of sight stops at the light glinting off a glass vase, shades of gold mirroring the sun rising through the window beyond. The flowers look wild, impossible, as if I am seeing pink and red for the first time.
Alongside this realness comes a sense of rightness, a knowing that the world is sound, doing what it was designed to do, that underneath there is an order, that all will be well. This rightness of the world brings a sense of peace, which is calming to my soul but confusing to my mind.
How can the world be right when children die by violence? How can all be well when war is waged as blood sport? What does rightness mean if goodness seems overwhelmed by malice? Valid questions, but not ones that abide by logic, which by its nature must stay within straight lines and arrive at proofs. Logic leads my thinking to questions that circle themselves: Could there be a world where children do not die? Would I remove from human will the choice for cruelty, and so also banish the choice for mercy? These lead to interesting arguments, but not to answers that satisfy me. I have to seek alternative ways of knowing that are not limited to the lines of logic. The rightness of the world allows that there is something bigger going on, deeper than my opinions and preferences, a basic goodness that outlasts all tragedy, genocide, wars, all suffering, and even death. Because my sense is authentically felt but not provable, it is hard to understand or articulate at the level of the thinking mind.
The rightness of the world contains a promise that the world is good. To the thinking mind, this is an audacious assertion in need of proof. But when I am in contact with my essence, expanded beyond my normal depth, the world revealing itself in multi-colored dimensions, the validity of the promise becomes self-evident. At my core, running directly through my heart, is a fiber that tells me when things are true. I trust the promise because when I tell myself the world is good, the fiber sounds and sustains. If I contemplate a world where we are doomed to cycle through endless swings of power between brutal factions, where we make no progress toward our betterment, where goodness is a fiction, the fiber in my heart recoils.
I also trust the promise because I see sparks of goodness constantly working to show themselves, to break out of the soil and sprout. Perhaps you do too. Each time you give or receive, or even witness, an act of kindness, the fiber in you sounds. When calamity strikes any portion of the globe, whether natural disaster or human catastrophe, people’s desire to rush with aid is irrepressible. The note sustains.
These are more than separate acts of compassion, they are part of a reciprocal drive between Spirit and the world. The Sacred requires our participation to flower, and our participation immerses us in goodness. We are invited into the continuing work of fulfilling the promise. As we each awaken more and more to our essence, I feel the connective tissue of the fiber growing stronger.
Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
