In
Religious Science we say that the way that we speak our word -- with feeling
and intention -- creates our experience.
This happens on two levels, first, just by being willing to see things
as they are rather than through the veil of emotions, we allow
ourselves to develop a feeling for the good in each and every situation, and
second, we believe our word has creative power. “As a man thinketh, so is he.” So the idea
of celebrating what you want to see more of is a spiritual practice.
I guess you could say we are throwing the party in honor of that which
we wish to multiply. We know it is already there, we throw the party to, in
effect, call the good out of hiding. What
causes the good to hide? Negative
attitudes, unexamined ideas such as the old bumper sticker, “Life is hard
and then you die.” How about
putting on a celebration for Joy? Peace? Happiness? We could just march outside, put up some
barricades and have a big block party in honor of Love or for Justice and
Harmony in our cities. What keeps
us from doing this? What’s the deal that we are out here looking for
what’s wrong rather than celebrating what’s so good about living?
“What’s up with that?” we could all well ask!
Ralph
Waldo Emerson said:
“These
roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones;
they are for what they are; they exist with God today. There is no
time for them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment
of its existence. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in
the present, but with reverted
eye laments the past, or heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on
tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he
lives with nature in the present, above time.”
We
measure everything against everything else and the further away it gets from
us in our measure of time, the better it seems than the present, and we all
know that one day we’ll have enough money, status, success and the right
friends, and then we will be happy. This
reminds me of “round tuits,” the lame excuse that we will accomplish some
dreamed of goal if only we could get around to it. Somehow the day never
comes.
Attachment
is the great fabricator of illusions; reality can be attained only by
someone who is detached.
Simone
Weil
We
have to let go of the past, whether it be good, bad or moderately neato.
We cannot take our finest experiences and put them in a silver box so
that we can take them out and compare all else against them -- if we are to be
happy. The moment we avert our
eyes from the present moment, we lose contact and then nothing will ever
compare, simply because we have failed to experience our experience.
It is as if our body is present, but we are not there, we are somewhere
in “memory lane.” absent from our own lives.
This may be one of the conditions that is being described when people
say the lights are on but nobody is home.
We
all want to be happy with our lives. The Dalai Lama has suggested that being
happy is the goal of life. But
what does that mean? The Buddha taught that it was natural to life to suffer,
and he said that there was an eightfold path that would lead us out of
suffering. This path is not so
different than the 10 Commandments. All
of these teaching tell us to love one another, to honor those who have gone
before us, to be true to ourselves, to know ourselves and to realize that we
will cause ourselves overwhelming difficulty, pain and suffering when we
identify our being or our satisfaction with life with anything or anyone
outside of ourselves.
People
say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I think that what we're
really seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences
on the purely physical plane will have resonance within our innermost being
and reality, so that we can actually feel the rapture of being alive.
Joseph
Campbell
We
learn from the mystic path that whatever our eyes falls upon is God as well as
ourselves. All that we can
imagine, all that we know and don’t know, all that we don’t realize that
we don’t know, as far as we can begin to comprehend, stretching out
infinitely from the heart of our being, this is all God.
So why not throw a party? This is something to celebrate, even if the
celebration is to remind ourselves that we would like to know that more of the
time and we recognize that it is divinely possible!
God,
the source of life, calls us all to live fully. God, the source of love,
calls us all to love wastefully. God, the Ground of Being, calls us all
to have the courage to be ourselves. So when we live, love, and have the
courage to be, we are engaged in worship, we are expanding our humanity, we
are breaking out of our barriers.
John
Shelby Spong
Kabir
says:
Path
presupposes distance; if he be near, thou needest no path at all.
Verily,
it makes one smile to hear of a fish in water needing a drink.
Our
good is not out there somewhere, it is within us, in the heart of our Being
looking for an opportunity to radiate all around us.
We have to ask ourselves, “Who’s put the lid on?” The same person
whose picture is on your Driver’s License can also take the lid off.
The Zen patriach, Master Dogen, in his zippy Zen way said “If you cannot find the truth right where you are, where do
you expect to find it? We
look for an easy answer. We wish
to avoid struggle, for smooth waters and gentle winds.
Who said good was made of confectioner’s sugar?
Good is all of it! All of
it.
To
this day, God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my
willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective
views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or
worse.
C.
G. Jung
Now
there is a healthy attitude. Bring
it on God! This, all of this, is how I draw closer to Spirit!
"There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go
through the intellect” Said G. K. Chesterton
This
is what Ken Wilber calls the Eye of Spirit and is called the still small voice
in the Bible. It is the voice for
God within us, our birthright, our immediate access to Wisdom and Joy.
Imagine living a life of unadulterated Love and Joy.
There is no need to smooth things over.
Simply by being willing for this to be the Truth, even if we do not yet
fully accept this possibility as true, just as an experiment, we will begin to
see Joy popping up all around us like wildflowers in Spring.
Growing up in California,
where the Summer turns the hills golden brown, and all looks dead and dry and
impossible, it is equally amazing that in the very early Spring when the earth
begins to warm that such an amazing and harmonious symphony of color, form and
fragrance seems to leap up from the same tender green place that had not so
very long ago appeared to be dry, dead and uninhabitable.
We need only make a small place within us, take only small steps.
It is not required of us that we take some gigantic leap of faith.
We need only move tentatively toward God and Joy arises naturally just
as the wildflowers do in the Spring.
Writer
and Presbyterian minister, Frederick Buechner, reminds us of how precious we
are to one another in the following:
Your
life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless
there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or
joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it
is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each
other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be
life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.
There
is a Unity of all life and we can begin by celebrating this Unity, by
dedicating ourselves to the good of the whole, leaving out no one, including
that which makes us uncomfortable, which pushes us to grow and to express and
to know the full meaning of the word “good.”
It
is not good enough for things to be planned -- they still have to be done;
for the intention to become a reality, energy has to be launched into
operation.
Pir
Vilayat Khan
We
can’t just wish for good, we must mean it and we must act as if we mean it.
This is one way that God knows the Truth that is in our hearts.
Ever see someone say they wanted to save money for something important,
and you always run into them overloaded with shopping bags?
“Our
goal is” as author Aldous Huxley wrote, “ to discover that we have always
been where we ought to be.” This
can be a kind of commitment to wanting.
The
present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the
original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in these days
illusion only is sacred, truth profane.
Ludwig
Feuerbach, German Philosopher
When
we are unhappy it is because we look away from the Truth of our being and
settle for an appearance. You
know, going to Paris in Las Vegas is not the same as going to Paris, France.
In the same way, relating to yourself as something less than Divine is like
going to any Paris other than Paris, France and pretending like you really did
fly for 10 hours. Who are we
fooling and at what cost? Is
it not written in your law, “I have said, you are gods?” John 10:34 Later, in John 14:20,the Bible says “On that day, you will
know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” With
that being said, why shouldn’t we celebrate?
We are the children of a most generous Deity, we are made of the very
same stuff as God. And don’t we
want to see more of this? Yes!
I
have often been asked what I thought was the secret of Buddha’s smile.
It is – it can only be – that he smiles at himself for searching all
those years for what he already possessed.
Paul
Brunton
This
is the Truth that we know in our hearts, this is the reason for us to
celebrate.
In the Gospel of Thomas we read: “If
you bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you don’t bring forth what is inside you, what you bring forth will
destroy you.”
That stuff “out there somewhere” is not Divine, what we are born
with is, if we celebrate it, if we take the initiative to express it, this is
where we will find the true meaning of the word salvation.
This takes imagination, Our imagination equips us to perceive reality
when it is not fully materialized. We move forward confidentally in the
direction of our dreams and they naturally unfold before us. “I
celebrate myself, and sing myself.” Walt
Whitman’s idea is a very lovely one. And
the self that we seek is already here, inside, always was, always will be.
Truth
is exact correspondence with reality says
Paramahansa
Yogananda. So is the point here to celebrate what we want to see more of?
All the mystics tell us that we are already in the presence of that
which we seek. That which you are
looking for you are looking with. Consciousness
is the key to Joy. This takes
courage, the strength of the heart.
Courage
is an everyday thing. “Consent to the
presence of Spirit.”
Treya
Killam Wilber advised us --
this was her advice, shared by her husband, Ken Wilber in the book they wrote
together, Grace and Grit, when she was dying as a young woman. When
we look reality squarely in the eye and refuse to back away from our
awareness, we are living courage. This
is another cause for celebration. We
call up in ourselves the very things we celebrate.
If you want more courage celebrate.
By celebrating you get the stuff you seek all over, in and through who
you are and it becomes YOU. It
takes the quality that seemed “out there somewhere” and moves it from
imagination into existence and it does so within the heart of your being, the
Self you truly are.
Thank you for
being here with us today!
Emerson
Center for
