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Blessings for YOU Ezine This Week's Quotations The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everybody should follow one path. Listen to your own truth. ~ Ram Dass Seek spiritual riches within. What you are is much greater than anyone or anything else you have ever yearned for. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda Spirituality…is to be found and nurtured in the smallest of daily activities…The spirituality that feeds the soul and ultimately heals our psychological wounds may be found in those sacred objects that dress themselves in the accoutrements of the ordinary. ~ Thomas Moore The Blessing of Sanctuary In Corrogue I am All One. It is Sunday morning, the time when I write the Irish Blessings ezine. Of late, I have been engaged with writing stories and learning these for various festivals. So please bear with me if at times the content of this ezine seems fragmented. I want to continue to expand on the deeper meaning of the story “We are All One.” Later I will pull all the writing on this story together and produce it as a single book. In this week’s part of the story the Old Candy Peddler has reached deep into the dark wood and has come to a place that appears to be in ruins. The roof has fallen in and weeds are growing through the cracks in the stones. We can look at this run down place as a forgotten sanctuary. Sanctuary comes from the Latin sanctus meaning holy. It is a place of health and wholeness. This is a place that we make holy. We can make it our intention to engage with sanctuary and allow it to be a movement towards wholeness. With this practice of sanctuary there is no arriving at wholeness. It simply goes deeper and deeper into the experience of the holy and the knowing of the One and All. In this 21st century of noise and haste we each need to create our individual sanctuary. This is a place where we can then go for re-creation and renewal. The sanctuary you create is an in dwelling place. It helps tremendously to create a place within your home that you imbue with a sense of the sacred, a sense of intention toward wholeness. This can be as large or as small a place as you wish or you are able to provide. Engaging with this outer space then represents movement toward building the sanctuary within. This place of sanctuary is not just thought about. It is felt. Indeed it is better that thought be put aside. It is better to trust in the intuition. This is allowing knowing and the new to arise within the silence between thought. This place of sanctuary is not so much a place where you go as a state that you are already in and learn to trust. This state of the holy is not something you have to make as to rediscover. The closest you come to it is in pure silence. As Meister Eckhart beautifully states, “The nearest thing to God (give it your own name which will never say what it is) is silence.” The ego does not really like this state of the holy. In the experience of deep silence ‘little me’ has nothing to cling to. ‘Little me’ wants to be whole but it is the very thing that gets in the way of wholeness and health. Your mind will keep you from the knowing of no mind, which is beyond words and beyond description but not beyond the feeling and knowing that We Are All One. You, beyond the illusion of the separate sense of self are this place of sanctuary. You are this holy silence that allows the healing of your separate sense of self. To know that you are this sanctuary, to feel it within you, requires commitment. This is a heartfelt desire for the knowing of the All One that you practice each day and in each moment. You have to do the practice knowing that you cannot enter the state of We are All One by doing it. However, you cannot enter the state of All One by not doing. The paradox is that you have to seek until you realise that the one who is doing the seeking is the one who still thinks that there is something to be gained, something that is missing, something that they are attached to such as the idea of God or the idea of enlightenment, particularly the idea that they are separate. The real place of sanctuary is the place of the watcher. Whatever crises in the mind is watched and simply let go of. After a time the mind quiets and you enter a state of peace of mind. The simple act of observation of thinking stops the thinking. If you are attentive enough you begin to see that you are not your thoughts. These arise and fall away. Behind the thoughts is the Observer who is the still centre of the sanctuary that you long for. . This place of sanctuary that you cross into requires
that you practice non-attachment. They are not held onto nor do they become destructive leading to pain, suffering and disease in the body. With practice you begin to see all the ways in which you judge your separate sense of self. You see how the house is divided against itself. You see that you are the one doing the dividing. The only intelligent response to this seeing is to stop the judging and allow it to be as it is. This is acceptance of what is in the moment. This is the essence of non-attachment.. There is no requirement for you to fix it. There is no requirement that you make it better. You observe and the very act of observing brings light to the darkness of judging, which is always a form of ego attachment and derived from the illusion of a separate sense of self that is at the core of all suffering. The ego wants to fix it. It wants to make you a better person. It wants to rearrange the mask of persona. This might be by way of a new job, a new home, a new relationship, a new this or that. The ego loves time. There is always hope for the future and so there is the avoidance of the present moment, which is the only time there is and ever will be. The ego does not want presence because then it is no more. This present moment fully lived, lived with full consciousness is the holy place. In living this moment, which is not something you do but is what you are, there is no separation from the All One. This is the only holy place worth entering. This is the only real place of re-creation. This is a state that is always new and in which you know what it means to enter renewal. All holy places such as cathedrals, mosques, and cloisters are reminders of this inner sanctuary. Dwelling in this sanctuary then manifests in the outer world as compassion, which is love in action. If you only ever go to the outer sanctuary and continue to live the illusion of separateness then there will be no arising of Love in action. There will be no movement of compassion in the world of form that is one of the true delights. . The ego likes the idea of this holy place of Oneness and so will make it its goal. The ego will make sanctuary another thing to acquire so that finally there will be happiness. Watch the mind! Watch the way it moves, it grasps. This grasping is the beginning of separation. This is the root of the Buddha’s saying “ The root of suffering is desire.” Watch your mind. Make it a game to watch the way your mind, your ‘little me’ clings to an idea, any idea that it thinks will give it salvation, success or meaning. Watch how the mind will try to save your life and thus lose it. When you observe then the observer and that which is observed can be as One. This is the meaning of the biblical saying. “Let your eye be single and the body will be full of light.” This is not the physical eye but the eye of attention, the eye of awareness, the eye of consciousness. This is the beginning of sanctuary. This is the beginning of the holy and of health. When you know that all that arises within consciousness is not who you are but that you are consciousness aware of itself there is deep silence. There, abiding within this moment of silence is deep peace. This is the deep peace referred to in the Irish Blessing
Within the experience of deep peace you enter a paradox. You are and you are not at the same time. You know that you are in form but you also know that you are the forever becoming All One. You know that you are the birthless/deathless one. This is not an intellectual knowing which would simply be more information. This is knowing where the knower and the known are All One. In this knowing there is certainty. It is not something you debate. Nothing that has been said or ever will be said can describe the wonder of knowing who you are. Would this not be enough? Would knowing that you live as the dance of forever, beyond the wheel of birth and death, not bring you deep peace? What would compensate for not knowing this? If you gained the whole world and never knew who you truly are then you will have made a poor bargain. You will have bought into the illusion of separateness over that which is whole and holy. That which is you.
Copyright © Tony Cuckson Go to 'We Are All One - Part One
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Tony Cuckson is a Storyteller, Writer, Workshop leader and Anam cara (Soul Friend) . © Tony Cuckson 2004-2006
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