Grace (anugraha)

Importance of the Lotus Flower in Chinese Culture 

Ishvara is a superior source of consciousness that resides in each human.

 

If we surrender our personal will to a higher will, if we offer ourselves to Ishvara with special devotion, then the divine will bend down to meet us halfway.

Gitte Beschgaard

 

While Ishvara is sometimes personified as Lord or God, Gitte Beschgaard (The Gift of Consciousness) translates Ishvara as a “superior source of consciousness.”  I think of this consciousness as the one that is more open and spacious than my ego consciousness. This is the awareness that can hold paradox and mystery, unending stories, unresolved emotions, with patience.  This is the consciousness like a shaft of light in the darkness that I cannot make happen but can turn towards for comfort. 

 

Ishvara pranidana shows me a way to let go of the irritation, resentment, and jealousy which keeps me from joy.  My deepest longing to not lose any more of my life to these self-made prisons.  In surrendering to a higher consciousness, I see more clearly the impermanent, changing, ungraspable nature of life.  That is doesn’t really matter that the day is not going as I had hoped or planned – what day does? The day is unfolding like a river moment to moment, just as I am unfolding to myself.    

 

And when the threshold of loss opens up beneath me, the grace of Ishvara pranidana pulls me into the tenderness that only grows in the greatest darkness and which offers understanding in the not understanding, shelter in the unsheltering, love in the unloving.


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