Living from the Marrow of Life
February 20, 2019
One of the great hallmarks of spiritual unfoldment is the ever increasing proclivity to drink from the very marrow of life, to be fully present and flowing, and to have the capacity to gather joyful rosebuds from depths of experience that one didn’t even know existed.
A simple explanation of how some karma is created in the first place is that it is life experience which we resisted. Something at some time seemed all too much. We ran away and we repressed. We checked out and pushed it away only for it to come back some other day. And this resistance isn't limited to tragedy. Would it surprise you to know that Love, Joy, Genius, and the experience of our own Higher Awareness are some of the great repressed denizens of the Shadow Self?
Here, resistance to “life experience” is really meant a pushing down of “Life.” Life describes a state in which the whole Universe, with all of its seemingly separate bits, is only one thing, a great ocean dancing through its waves and currents. At the fundamental level, we are the whole Ocean, we aren’t fundamentally these little separate characters, trapped in a vast play. You are the Transcendental Actor animating all the other characters. You are the Director, the Writer, the Script, and the Stage. You are the whole Ocean, with all of its waves, currents, and life. The mask of tension, the dominant sense of being a limited person, perhaps sitting somewhere behind a pair of eyes, is only a temporary game, a set up for a profound maturation of the Soul, and a vehicle for greater evolutionary movement of the whole Cosmos.
When we are identified as the little character, sometimes we seem to have a reasonably pleasant role, sometimes we have a wholly unpleasant part, and most of us have something of a mixed bag. Whatever the case, if we are committed to the narrow confines of the mask, there are invariably lines in the script that we fight, avoid, alter, and deliver half-heartedly. Instead of living from the marrow of life, we push ourselves to the periphery of our possible experience of life. We become like King Pellinore from Arthurian mythology, wandering around our own kingdom in a daze, wholly forgetful of our true role and purpose. We are the prodigal sons and daughters of God, temporarily forgetful that the Kingdom of Heaven is Here, There, and Everywhere.
Effective spiritual practice brings us from the peripheral branches of life down to the very roots of our own Being- Pure Consciousness, the Source, the Dao. The more we make the journey, the more the context of our life becomes centered there. As this process of attunement deepens and expands, that extra-curricular existential resistance to life fades, for we begin to grok the greater Life underlying and infusing our “life situation.” While before we might have felt a seemingly reasonable need to hang on at all costs (to anything at all!), as life becomes infused by Presence, relaxing into a place of deep Flow presents itself as the natural and more pleasurable option. There may continue to be Iago’s in our respective plays, with whom boundaries continue to be wise on the earthly plane, but even they can be seen and felt to be none other than the Self. This life is a game of hide and seek, with Infinite Consciousness hidden everywhere, looking for itself through itself!
Life can be ever so short! Wherever you happen to be in your spiritual life, go for it with gusto! Make a start! Do Yoga everyday, do Qi Gong. Learn a meditation practice and stick to it, do it for hours on end or do it every day for 40 minutes with total dedication. Remember that this day may very well be the last in this particular body. As Patanjali writes in the Yoga Sutras, “to the intensely vehement, soon.” To paraphrase Campbell, if you wholly commit to your North Star, if you dive into each moment with all your heart, mind, body, and soul, doors will open where before there were none, and gardens of experience will bloom where before there was only barren desert.
