Parinama

  The night of sense is a period of weaning from the consolations that characterized the beginning of our relationships with the divine. The solid nourishment of pure faith is an acquired taste, like solid food for the weaned child…… God begins to offer us a more intimate relationship Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love In most people’s lives, the moment of ‘awakening’ is one of the most powerful moments that brings them back home again, out of the winter of exile where their minds would have been foraging for nourishment in the famine-fields of image. John O’Donohue, Walking on the Pastures of Wonder A long period of grief and the pandemic is coaxing me away from the “famine-fields of image” towards the more nourishing and evanescent fields of the real, the infinite, and the divine.  Grief has a way of purifying us of our attachments if we can withstand the emptiness and sadness.   When we face a loss, we have two options, to grow into more depth...

    I believe your death was there at your birth with you. It was the unknown presence. Every step of the road of your life that you take, your death is beside you. Death often works through the vehicle of fear, so as you begin to transfigure your own fear, you are actually transfiguring the presence of your own death. At the end of your life when death comes..it can actually be a friend who hides the most truthful image of your own soul. Each day, hoever, you have to work at transfiguring the fear. John O'Donohue A spiritual practice that does not integrate death cannot be complete.   If we keep God on one side and death on the other, there is no way to come closer to God because we walk beside death throughout our whole life. That death accompanies us from our birth and through our life makes sense to me on many levels. We do not die just once at the end of our lives, but each loss along the way can feel like a death, a death to the self that had hoped things worked out...

Because of our fixations on particular programs for happiness, we treat survival/security, affection/esteem, and power/control symbols as absolutes, that is, as substitutes for God. The abundant life is divine union which includes the capacity to use all things as stepping stones to God rather than as ends in themselves. Thomas Keating, Invitation to Love Avidya or ignorance in yoga philosophy is presented to us as the primary obstacle on the spiritual path.   It is a specific form of ignorance, our forgetting of our connection to God, the divine source of life. All the other obstacles including the pushing away of pain, grasping for pleasures, and fear of loss and death are manifested from this forgetting. In the contemplative Christian tradition, this is also how sin is defined.   While many Christian’s are taught and come to believe that sin is a moral failing, in the oldest Christian writing, in the teachings of Jesus, sin is not a matter of morali...