Seeds of Grace
Saturday, April 30th, 2005Longing is vital to spiritual growth. Longing is an expression of Shakti in her movement to return to Shiva. Another way of saying this is: we have a capacity for dualistic experience, and within that, no matter how contracted we are, we can find the seed of the capacity for nondual experience manifested as longing.
As with everything in the Tantrik cosmos, there are more and less contracted, more and less expanded expressions of longing. The bijas or seeds of virtues such as innocence and generosity often manifest in our lives as a kind of suffering longing to “find” these things in people and situations around us. We often complain: Why can’t people be more generous to each other? Why isn’t this situation/person more fulfilling? We feel anger and hurt when virtues, such as compassion or honesty, seem to be scarce.
The beauty of this world is that these complaints would not be possible if we did not have at least a faint memory of the thing for which we are longing in ourselves or others. And this memory is a beacon, helping us to find our way home to the natural state: that foundational, essence state we call nonduality, but which is truly beyond any notions of duality or nonduality.
In our moments of greatest hunger, anger, or despair, we are actually given the opportunity to find and express the virtues of the essence state. This is a natural law, not hopefulness or new agey-namby pambism.
EVERY VIRTUE THAT WE LONG FOR IS AN EXPRESSION OF WHO WE ALREADY ARE. WHAT WE LONG FOR MOST DEEPLY IS OUR GREATEST CAPACITY.
If you long most for kindness from others, then you have a capacity for kindness: it is your strongest memory, your strongest link to essence.
If you long most for generosity, then you have the ability to express great generosity: you remember generosity most strongly.
If you are always seeking evidence of loyalty and courage in the world, then loyalty and courage are yours to manifest for others.
Learn to recognize that these memories of virtues, no matter how tortured, are evidence of the abundance of the world manifesting through you. Allow these virtues to flow into you from the divine Self, which is none other than you, and you will be fulfilled and filled to the brim, beaming those virtues out to everyone around you.
OM Shanti, Shambhavi
Firefly Multimedia