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What is essential for living each day authentically with love, joy, and creativity?
There are Three Essentials:
The First Essential is to know directly your true, unchanging nature; to cease in the illusion that you are merely your body, personality, wants, desires or historical identity, and to know directly, experientially, that you are AWARENESS itself. YOU ARE THAT. Filled with the Infinite Presence, you know your Self to be ONE with ALL.
To understand this truth intellectually makes no difference. To KNOW it directly is to end all enduring and striving in your life, NOW. The fear of death falls away, for you know that who you really are was not born and cannot die. All sense of disconnection and separateness falls away in the face of the truth of the total connectedness of everyone and everything.
As the poet, William Blake so aptly put it,
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
This is the fundamental foundation from which all Wisdom and mystic traditions come, and it is the foundation for Core Wisdom.
Here is a quick test: when you look in the bathroom mirror first thing in the morning, and see your body reflected there, do you think that is "you"? Or do you know it (and everything arising in the physical world) to be a vehicle for your Self's expression? Are you aware of the Infinite Presence that is looking out of your eyes?
In the timeless dimension of I AM, all words fall away. What's present is ineffable. There is no mind "chatter". There is stillness---the silence that gives, "the peace that passes understanding." There is no doing in this realm, only unchanging being. Its name is Unconditional Love. It is the formless ground from which the world unfolds itself into form.
It is our true "home."
In Kabbalah, this is called the First World, the world of Origination. It is the source of Creativity, Gratitude, Joy and Grace. When we are at home there, our identity becomes a vehicle for Divine expression in the world.
How present are you, in each moment of your day, to the presence of the Infinite Self that is living your life?
The Second Essential is your expression in the world - your created Life Principle. A Life Principle is an invisible Field of Being. This is where free will comes in. Your Life Principle is similar to a Strange Attractor in Chaos Theory. It is your life's fundamental organizing principle, organizing and shaping everything that arises or occurs within it---your perception of yourself and the world, your inner states, your thoughts, emotions, feelings and physical sensations.
When we are unaware of our life principle; it usually exists by default--- in reaction to some past decision, belief, family or cultural indoctrination or in response to a traumatic event. It has fear and loss (or fear of loss) as driving forces. Its primary purpose is survival/security. It generates all our automatic, "fight or flight" conditioned responses. It is the hidden source behind all limitations, self-sabotage, and internal questions such as, "why do these things always happen to me?"
When we are unaware of the fundamental field shaping our lives, we put our attention on attempting to change the content of our lives without paying attention to the context that organizes it. This leaves us striving in a never- ending cycle of "self-improvement."
We seldom stop and ask the question, "Who Am I?"
In contrast, a Created Life Principle such as St. Francis of Assisi's, "I Am an instrument of Thy Peace," has enormous power, resonating with love and compassion. It stops the identity's historical reactivation in its tracks, since it consciously and intentionally lines up one's expression in the world to resonate with one's essential nature. When we recover who we are and our own authorship, we have a choice about the design of our lives.
Our Life Principle exists in the Kabbalah Second World---the World of Creation.
That leads us to the Third Essential.
It occurs in the Worlds of Formation and Manifestation. These are the dimensions in which the formless unfolds itself into form.
The Third Essential is the process of Creation itself. Creation is not a making or doing process, as much as an allowing process shaped by intention. The process of creation is the unfolding of the invisible into the visible, of allowing our actions to be used in the service of expressing our essential nature in the world of form.
What is often forgotten is that Creation has two faces. To be rigorous, we could call this dynamic Creating/Dissolving. We can't have one without the other. They arise together, like the back and front of the hand. That is why in the Hindu tradition---where the equivalent of the Kabbalah Four Worlds of Creation is referred to as Atman, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva---Shiva stands for both the creative power and the power of destruction or dissolution. This is the power to dissolve all aspects of our life that no longer resonate with who we are. To be even more rigorous, we could use the terms for creating/dissolving coined by physicist, David Bohm: unfolding and enfolding.
Mastery of this realm begins with being non-attached to any form, including in whatever limited way we have identified ourselves, and living each moment as a constant flow of both dynamics---unfolding the formless into form, and allowing what has taken form to return to the formless realm from which all is received.
Esoteric? Not at all. Practical? Completely! Dissolving our default life principle and creating a new field of being that shapes our world has immediate impact on our physical reality.
Here is part of an email I received this week from a participant in a Core Wisdom 3-Day Course:
"I was able to spend a few days recently thinking about the class. Since Itook the class last September, I have had two of the best months ever in my business. I did not have a quiet time through the holidays this year, although it did slow down a bit. Now things are picking back up, but I'm not "doing" anything to market my business other than working on what I learned in your class� I've actually felt like I've had time to do a better job and am enjoying the work more�Most remarkably, I have far, far less stress. I almost feel as though I'm not working, when in fact I am. At the end of January, I was concerned because I hadn't felt busy. Then it took me a long time to do my invoices --because there were so many. While I did not feel very busy, I had, in fact, [a record number] of billings� for the month!"
That is an example of what the Three Essentials can look like in action.
Mastering these Three Essentials requires a full engagement in the physical world, not a flight from it. Mastery is to be fully in the world, but not of it. It is to have your compass guided by the star of your essential nature, and to give it the form of your own unique expression, while honoring the unique expression of all of life. It is to see life itself as the expression and celebration of the Source of All.
-- Hal Isen
From Core Wisdom On-Line Number 4 - March 7, 2001 541-488-7687 |
