You Can't Wait for It
You dream of becoming one with the body of god
You dream of becoming one with the body of god.
Maybe that isn’t the language you’d use for it — you might say flowing with the tao, or awakening to Reality; embodying Shiva, or joining the Stream; you might talk about Christ consciousness or the Dharmakaya or True Will — but whatever language shapes your impulse, something in you longs to be patterned by the Sacred, to feel in your cells the will of the cosmic order.
It’s a very human desire, a very divine desire, a very understandable and admirable desire. And you can’t just wait for it to be fulfilled.
There’s a fantasy of how this path might go — an idea that if you meditate enough, if you pray enough, if you take the right trainings and work with the right teachers and read the right texts, something will happen to you; some flash that rearranges your personality structure into a shape better suited to the divine pattern. A fantasy that whether by hard work or clear seeing or simple grace, you’ll be transformed — enlightenment, kundalini awakening, revelation — and from that moment on, you’ll have the Pattern inside you. You’ll feel the will of the cosmos in your marrow. You’ll have joined the body of god.
But you can’t wait around for that.
As soon as you can perceive the Pattern, you have a duty to start living by it. Which is impossible, of course. That’s why you have to do it.
It means very little to live the Pattern if your entire being has already been rearranged to conform to it. If you’ve waited around until it flows naturally.
It means much more to step forward with all your knots and shortcomings, all your pettiness and resentment, all your clumsiness and short-sightedness, and to do everything you can to live the Pattern anyway, to join the body of god anyway.
You can already sense it, can’t you? At least sometimes, at least a little bit? You sense the Pattern, you recognize what it wants from you, how you could step into it.
You have all sorts of objections — what about your job? your comfort? your status?; what about your woman, your dignity, your prospects? — and so you excuse yourself. It’s a job for saints, this work of embodying divine will. You can do it later, when lightning strikes, when your saintliness comes in the mail. You can pick it back up after your 100,000th hour of meditation, after your chakras open.
Until then, it’s not your job; until then, it’s perfectly understandable to step back from the Pattern when it asks too much of you. You can just wait.
But you can’t just wait.
Coincidentally, I read this today and also came across this quote:
Of all things that are, nothing is forbidden and nothing is contrary to God but one thing only: that is, self-will, or to will otherwise than as the Eternal Will would have it.
If it only were so easy to become the ideal version of ourselves. How do we discover and stomp out that which holds us back? This embodies the "Just Do It" attitude that I try to embed in my life, but, only if it were that easy. Perhaps, it is?