Doubt and Devotion

I have always encountered doubt. I just wanted you to know this. This journey has brought me face to face with a lot of egoic insecurities. Over time, they have all needed to be exposed. And due to this highly exposed life, doubt was a constant for me. The ego highly doubted the success of life...spiritual or material. Oh, it maybe had little glimpses, that came with incredible spiritual experiences, but the tendency after those experiences was always towards doubt.

And with the doubt came despair. The wiring in my being took doubt and turned into a dark despair. The future looked bleak, there was no hope in it. And doubt and despair took this and turned into giving up, and jumping off a cliff. And mind imagined the cliff...and going off of it. The end. Kaput.

I am not going to sugar-coat here. This is what I lived with for about 10 years. TEN! And then it didn't disappear entirely- rather it has been a very slow and gradual transformation into something else. The despairing wiring was very morbid and dark. But I also had something else going for this life- and that was Love. I loved God with all my soul...and my entire Being experienced this Love through and through. And because I had already opened up significantly to the Divine, when all this despairing kind of stuff began showing up, the Love began using it to go deeper.

Despair has an energy to it. It goes in...and descends into our Being. It is dark, and unknowing. It turns all hopes into impossibilities. It negates the future. And the ego has no place to land. It simply wants to die.

Yet, Love was here always underneath. When despair hit the bottom, Love was the only option for this Life. And it turned towards Love again and again. Over and over...becoming more and more open each time. Open to itself...Love within opening to Love as God.

The transformation has been so gradual that for many years it was undetectable- especially since despair would still come visiting whenever doubt showed up. The ego has used this disguise for itself. But Love never judges this...it uses it to open up to itself. To find itself...to know itself. And doubt is now becoming a beacon to Love. "Over here!" doubt cries. "I don't know Love!" And Love comes rushing in, with its deep compassion and potential for Grace, bringing doubt into it's ever encompassing, infinite Field. 

Steady on, my friends. There is something tremendously potent about perseverance, as Devotion matures and becomes pure in its intention. Doubt is a natural response for the ego- can we access our clarity- to see it for what it is? Can we open to this Divine Field, and offer our souls? Can we fall in love so deeply, allowing doubt to find room for itself to relax and be acknowledged? 

We offer ourselves to God with all of our Being. That is how it is.

I Am the Door

I was one of those spiritual people that was afraid of Life. Most people are afraid of either life or death. For me, there was a great resistance to life- simply because of all the beliefs I had- what living a successful life meant, and all the imagined scary things that might happen.

So, since I was afraid- I blocked life. My fears kept the real potential of Life from happening. Yet, through Grace- I found myself loving God with all my being. My ideas about enlightenment were that I would merge with God, and God would take me away. There would be no more me- and no more fears- and all would be well.

I guess it was a good place to start. Fortunately, since I loved God- or Truth- with all my being, my spiritual evolution kept me on track. I found my devotion to this process becoming stronger than my fears about life. My devotion took me through my fears, thus dissolving them. My being began opening up to the realm of absolute not-knowing, and the potential within that realm. And even though the mind still tried to figure stuff out, my inner being began opening to the pure flow of potential.

There is now an intelligence that has awakened within my Being that IS the pure potential. My Being senses what it feels like to keep the doors open to Life. Fear is a product of mind these days- and only mind. The deep-seated fears of Life are no longer governing my nervous system. And if mind goes out- trying to figure out stuff- my Being simply pulls it back into its inner realm-where the doors are open to Life, and all that may come. My Being is the doorway, and it knows how to keep itself open to Life. 

Life is still an unknown- yet that is the adventure of it. While nothing is certain, Love and devotion to Life strengthens with each moment of alignment to Life. This is real faith. And It is not outside my being. It is through it.

Like Amma says, "Pure Love removes all fears." This opens the door- continuously wider and wider...

No me= No imagined outcomes

When we are in an authentic process of embodiment, there occurs a rather strange phenomenon- we begin to lose our projected future.

You see, all future is imagined. And it is imagined by a "me"- an individual that imagines a nice future, or imagines a possible scary future. This "me" holds onto hopes, and fears like a sailor holds onto the ship that is going down. And if that drive within the "me" is still strong enough, it will do whatever it takes to keep that ship afloat.

Because when we are living a life for Truth, our "me" is the ship. And all the "me's" hopes and imagined outcomes belong on the ship. And the ship is all we have ever known. On that ship, we've imagined all kinds of outcomes, and then thought that we needed to do something to make those outcomes a reality. We've believed we were the captain of that ship, and even though the ship is going down, we still believe only in that ship.

This is how all those old functions within our belief systems relate to this life. We still think it is our life- and that it needs to turn out a certain way, according to what we imagine. These are outcomes. And they are going away.

Everyone is going to go through this process differently, but it is essential that we begin to recognize what imagination is doing, and how the "me" is holding out for its hopes, or is afraid of Life because of its fears. It will continue to do so, until- through our devotion to Truth, we sense in ourselves the falseness of it. Anywhere the "me" is trying to land is only imagination at work.

Truth is pure potential, and by remaining in the fire of not-knowing- all those outcomes are being removed. We- as consciousness- are accessing the fertile ground of that potential. And our minds can never imagine what that can look like. This is a big clue. But we can sense when we are in that fertile ground, because we have let the ship go down, and felt ourselves as the vast sea. No-where to land, because the "person" that needs a place has simply gone away.