Raj Editorial - from A Way of Life Issue 11.1 | Text View
It is done and it is good. Five years of reading, studying and even teaching Jeshua’s “A Way of Life, Way of Transformation and Way of Knowing” have never managed to bring me to the personal experience of feeling the transformation that is required and that is occurring in me right now as a result of Jayem’s one year JEWELS OF THE CHRIST MIND on-line course.
For me each lesson has represented one of my stepping stones, each one appearing in perfection as I was ready to make the shift to embrace the next unveiling of the Truth leading right up to this final lesson where I realize there were no stepping stones and all that was occurring was the “Free fall into God”.
How do you get to experience the Divine without someone to take you by the hand and lead you through the stages of feeling and doubts, shadows and fear? I honestly don’t think it’s possible to ‘get anywhere/move through’ unless a gift of this nature is offered and accepted.
Thank You Jayem for being the One with the willingness, the tenacity and the love to extend your hand and reach out to me. And I am truly grateful to MySelf that I found the courage to persist even when time and other distractions dealt their cards.
I guess I knew from the outset that this time in Bali was to be no simple escape period from the work for even on the first day that Jayem arrived to join us, we found ourselves introduced to three snakes in our garden. Snakes are defined beautifully by Osho as representing ‘Rejuvenation’, ‘Sexuality’, ‘Totality’, ‘Self sufficiency’, ‘The end is the beginning’. In just the past couple of weeks I have engaged in the full practical application of the final Jewels lessons. Through them I have found the true depth of my life, the Truth. While it is one thing to say “The Truth will set you Free”, it is another thing to fully grasp the full implications of what is required to embody this Truth.
Sure, while I have yet to discover all of who I am; I am starting to know some of who I am not. I live to be Awake in every moment and already I know when I shut down in the instant that it occurs and I understand it as just that – shutdown, my resistance to God, insistence that I am right and therefore back in the persona.
Because I can now discern, it doesn’t feel good when I see the projection that results from this, I can feel it in the core of my being, I can see the expression of it playing on the screen of my ‘world’. I experience it reflected back to me in people and circumstances. Everything is crystal clear – there are no fuzzy edges here. Either Love or Fear, Chaos or Truth just as we were told in the beginning – there is nothing else.
While it may occur for each of us in different aspects of relationship with this life in physicality, for me right now it is this issue of Sexuality in my relationship with Suzanne that is providing the key, the platform for growth and freedom. It is obviously no coincidence then that this theme was chosen for the next issue for as I have often shared we seem to be pulled into the energy vortex of whatever theme ‘we’ choose to nominate. Now I realize that I am being asked to create a spaciousness in my life – a field of infinite potential in which creativity can appear. This is quite different from the life where I have create a structure of relationships and experiences and in many cases safe and known outcomes that will provide me with the means to support my identity, my persona.
As I write this, I am literally a work in progress. As of this moment I cannot see what this new spacious me looks like, I do know and feel, painfully at times as the ego is confronted, the alchemical changes occurring, rewiring, if you like of the circuitry which will provide the outcome.
Still vague, so let’s get down to brass tacks. Like many men I have issues around my self worth relative to my partnership with another. Suz makes me feel good about myself! So like most, I covet my one ‘special’ relationship and my partner. Like most, I place such importance on the relationship that I seek at all times to protect it, to nurture and to defend it. And I don’t like idea of anyone else messing about with it. Sounds reasonable? Unfortunately, like so many I have fallen into the trap of identifying myself with the relationship and in that moment I am no longer a sovereign being. Somebody or something owns me. Not only that – into this relationship I have snared and trapped the very thing I say I love. Now fearful of the potential loss of this thing I value I project that fear into the relationship and then I wonder why it withers. No matter whether I lavish it or starve it, it will die. For how can anything flourish unless it can be free to breath of itself?
As I begin to realize what it was that I was ‘getting from’ Suz to make me whole, I realize how much I trap her and suck her freedom, all in fear that I have something to lose. Yet it is not her prison I create, it is my own. I am the one in the trap. I have secured the bars to my own cage.
Suz of course, has her own fears which until now have dovetailed (making the relationship that much more attractive) into mine and we have danced together for nearly ten years in apparent harmony yet in truth, in adjacent cages both terrified of our own projections and inadequacies.
This week I have set her free. In the moment that it dawned on me what was going on, I let go. In letting go of her – and that meant verbally releasing her with unconditional love to express and do whatever she wants with no hooks from me, no attachments, no reservations, and totally feeling my love for her, I discovered I had freed myself. Sounds easy doesn’t it?
Getting real here – this was and still is not an easy step to pass through - the ego showed me then and continues to provide graphic visions of the implications of this ‘letting go’. What I realize is that the issue, my issue here is that it is not about the possibility of love making with another, it’s about allowing the spaciousness in which love can be expressed without constraint of convention and social implication, whether by me or a partner. It’s about giving - no withholding for any reason – whether it be a few coins to a beggar on the street, buying an unsuspecting kid an ice cream or yes, even making love to another because you really want to share yourself. It must be possible to be spontaneous and be love extending itself whatever that looks like in the moment.
The moment there is any ‘clench’ around this allowance, whether in me or in my partner because of some prearranged contract or concept holding or binding her to me, literally any restriction then know that, like I have found, I am withholding love and that means I am in fear. If I am honest about my desire to be the presence of Love, that doing this work is my choice, then how real am I being?
As I go through this process which brings up so many fears of inadequacy and unworthiness I am struck by the degree of pain my ego wants me to feel. Yet in my worse moments during this process, I hear an inner voice that says, “You do not have to do this alone, your part was the Allowance for the truth to occur within you, the rest is done for you.”
Our fears show up in many aspects of life – wherever and whatever I have chosen to identify myself with, wherever that ‘outside’ thing has a hook into me and I cannot let it go. Whether it be a son or daughter, parent, grandchild, house, car, business, the body or even spirituality and particularly beliefs, whatever I identify with, place value on, don’t want to let go off, owns me and imprisons me.
I remember P’taah teaching years ago that one day we will be called upon to leave our house, to walk away leaving the front door open and never look back. At that time I had no idea of the immense reality of doing just that. For while we are attached to anything in this world we are separate from God.
If you are still reading this as an observer and have yet to engage with me, you may like to try asking yourself this question. Then sit with each of these potentialities for a moment and see what fear, if any arises. You will instantly know the extent of the identification and attachment. The simple question asked of us in the Jewels Course is, “What remains unacceptable to me" – for example…finding my partner having sex with another man or woman, discovering my son is on drugs, that my daughter running off with an older man, the death of my grandchild, my business going bankrupt, the loss of a bodily function, the loss of my savings, finding that my spiritual ‘hero’ is not who or what I had trusted him or her to be.
Whatever is unacceptable to me, whenever the tightness is felt, is where my edge is and that is the edge of my limitation, the bars of my cage. Freedom extends only beyond that edge, not within it. And now we have found the “Choice Point”.
No matter what the identity has fused with, for example being ‘in love’, letting go will cause a direct confrontation with the world of form. The very act of “Letting Go” opposes every parental, social, structural and religious framework that we have been led to believe, it goes against ‘common sense’ and I doubt anyone in their ‘right’ mind is going to support your decision to even engage.
When nothing is unacceptable to you, for you shall
have chosen to wrap all things in the allowing embrace of Love,
and you will know you are the freedom you have been seeking.”
Quoting directly from Jewels,
“Love is the not a sentimental affection, Love is the choice for spaciousness, here is the heart and soul of all genuine spirituality. It is the very Essence of the Christ Path; to cultivate the choice for Love as the Door through which we honestly enter into our own directly felt experience…especially into the seat of our Fear”.
Why would I do it then? Because as long as I identify myself with any one thing because I fear I am not enough.
“When we see through the Door of Fear we see nothing, understand nothing, and thus do not grow in our capacity to embody Christ. We suffer, because in the depth of our being we know we have resisted and denied our True Self, and slapped God in the face”.
How does that feel? “Slapping God in the face”. As I am writing this in the present I cannot know the outcome, I can only trust. Perhaps once I crack the core foundation on which this unstable persona is built and identifies with, it will crumble the entire edifice - the ego personality that is hiding the True Me. I am doing this only for me yet if I stay open and honest my personal experience moment to moment maybe a doorway that others may be encouraged to step through. I do not yet know if I can open the bars of my cage wide enough to escape, or worse if my fear will be so great that I do not want to try. Have I left it too late in this lifetime?
Releasing this woman I love is my biggest step into vulnerability – I have opened myself wide open to loss and hurt yet having done so I am instantly experiencing her in a new ‘Light’. When I consider her now I am overwhelmed by the spaciousness in my heart and I know that it is my own spaciousness I am feeling, not the loving of her. Imagine the glory of two unbounded spirits in flight together versus two spirits trapped in cages side by side.
Through all this I am discovering my “Essence” and how to find It (capital I for It is God). Now I know what It feels like, I know what It tastes like, I know what It brings me, most important I know how to bring It to awareness in the moment and I know how to allow myself to extend from It. For as it is in me I now also know how to see ‘It’ in others.
On the completion of this Jewels Course I send this message of Gratitude to my brothers and sisters who have shared this year long journey with me.
‘Thank You’ to each of you for holding me in your heart that I might have the courage to see Myself and my Essence for what It is, I Am. For without each of you holding the space for me, how might I ever have know even of It’s existence and I would forever have wandered in the darkness wasting yet another lifetime. This lifetime is It, there is no other purpose to my life than to see with the fully awakened eyes of Christ and to be the Servant of God.
And if someone asks “how does it feel” I’ll say, “bloody fantastic!”
Thank You Lord, Thank You Lord, Thank You Lord.
Raj
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