Do you see the continuous movement inward being produced in our practice? and, do you want to be more direct?
JS;
You are continuing inward. This direction is our way to the Lord. Here is a question for you: Do you see the continuous movement inward being produced in our practice? and, do you want to be more direct? If you answer yes to both, then let's agree to see where you are actually engaging these points in real time (through your posts) where I will meet you in the space we are learning to dwell in. If the answer to either question is no, then let's practice with the concept some more.
October 30, 2009 at 13:05 | sensei
Yes! Now you are tracking the point within.
Phew! Thank heavens for that! :-)
The faculty you mention is Appreciation and Gratitude. Why not call it by the principles that are giving the faculty?
As an educator, I am aware of a teaching approach known as Constructivism. When a teacher introduces a new topic, s/he allows learners to express, from first principles, based on their own experience, their understanding of the topic. After that has been explored, s/he may then introduce more formal definitions and terminology.
What I did was the mirror image of that. I already have your definitions and terminology, but I expressed my understanding starting from first principles, based on my own experience, using my own terms. I wanted to find out whether my own understanding of your terms was correct, and that I wasn’t just parroting them.
The terms “gratitude” and “appreciation” are perhaps the two I find most slippery, which is why I asked you at last week’s class to provide an example based on biology. You gave the example of a tree, which helped, and my approach in my post was another way to refine my understanding.
Your understanding of grace needs to be connected directly with Gratitude, otherwise you will be lacking respect for the truer understanding of how grace occurs. While, we do not need to name our study principles in everything we do, we are here to study them and see how they are present in the naming of KEY moments in time…and to see how they truly lead to the Lord.
Your writing is very close to point. You are doing really well. See the pathway into understanding! Remember why we are here…
Thank you for saying so; I think positive feedback where due is very valuable, not merely pleasing. I will now try my best to use “standard terminology”, and try to discover how grace is directly connected to gratitude.
As I see it, Abel is aware of the values of Adam and Eve when they are balanced at the Christ point. Appreciating these when he comes to make his offering to the Lord, the outer value of his offering is in favorable balance with its inner value, gratitude, which is the main driver, in fact.
As an example, suppose I want to perform an action (make an offering, give of something truly valuable) in line with my deepest reasons for being, which will, at the Christ point, be consonant with the Lord’s purpose for me in creation. The main driver is to honor and respect the Lord, to show him my gratitude for His creating and loving me. But there will inevitably be an appreciative component because I am currently incarnated in the world.
Let’s suppose I want to act generously. The focus has to be inwards in gratitude, but I also have to express my way of being generous outwards, through appreciation, to the object of my generosity. Then the outer value of my action will be in suitable balance with its inner value as an offering to the Lord.
As a concrete example, perhaps I want to help a poor person. Focusing on gratitude, on my reasons for being as determined by the Lord, I want to do that because in helping this person, I will be helping him realize his own reasons for being.
What I mustn’t do is focus on my own appreciative values – for instance, the ego trip I will get if I pat myself on the back for being good. As soon as I do something like that, the coin flips and I become Cain, off in the land of Nod. Abel lies slain and Adam and Eve have lost their progeny.
I think this is why the Sufis always emphasize that charity should be anonymous. One should never be ostentatious in giving. However, whilst anonymous giving guarantees that we can’t grow fat on the praise of others for our generosity, it still doesn’t guarantee that our ego won’t grow fat in our own minds; so there must be integrity and sincerity, and we mustn’t dwell on our own feeling of goodness and piety. This ensures that we remain focused on gratitude.
Like the Sufis also say, you only get paid once. If you choose to get paid in the currency of the ego (i.e. in terms of appreciative values), you can’t also get paid in the currency of Essence (i.e. in terms of the values of gratitude). Thinking about it, that’s another way of saying that either Cain kills Abel and gets exiled, or Abel makes an offering that is accepted by the Lord.
So what is this “getting paid”? In terms of an offering that is accepted by the Lord? I don’t think it’s a mere commercial exchange. It’s not that the Lord wants to reward us for being goody-two-shoes, and so gives us his blessing and grace.
No: I think it’s more that a successful offering is something that connects the offerer with the Lord, enabling the grace and blessing that has always been freely available to flow. It’s as if it opens a one-way valve – say, clockwise. Cain stubbornly tries to turn it anti-clockwise, having no idea what clockwise means. Nothing ever comes through. But Abel, he has come to understand the meaning of clockwise, which is a sincere offering made by respecting the Lord, and living/giving focused on gratitude. It’s simply the way an evolving universe has to work. If it didn’t work that way, no evolution would be possible.
Transposing it to the example of the tree you provided, first, it has to respect the things that conduce to its germination and growth: the soil and its nutrients, water, oxygen and carbon dioxide, and so on. It will get nowhere if it says to itself it’d prefer to live in outer space in a substrate of candy floss. It appreciates its nutrients by growing roots, a trunk, branches and leaves. Pointless to try to grow into anything else: this is how the Lord wants it to grow.
But it also needs gratitude: it needs to put something back – its leaves fall and form fertiliser; it outputs a surplus of oxygen which keeps non-photosynthetic organisms alive; it binds the soil to prevent erosion; it provides dwelling places for birds and other animals; it produces flowers for the bees, and fruits for many other organisms. It can’t say that it won’t do these things; that it will just keep on growing and giving nothing back. If it does, that will spell its own death, because in the cycle of nature, if organisms don’t give, then they become extinct. So actually, giving is the most important thing. A tree that tried to hog everything for itself would be a Cain tree, not an Abel tree. But it can only legitimately hang on to what it needs to live.
Look at the trees, all the other organisms, the stars and planets, the atoms and electrons. They know how to give whilst receiving only what they need. And out of their giving, look how much can arise, as well as sustain itself appreciatively. A universe of Cains is an impossibility. But because so many things are Abel, the infinite bounty of the Lord can flow. The universe is full of His blessing and grace.
All the human Abel is doing is connecting himself to it through his conscious giving. And when he receives grace, it shifts the balance of his values even closer to the Lord, and respecting that allows him to appreciate and show gratitude even better. He becomes engaged in a virtuous circle whose evolutionary limits we can only guess at. I see it as just a continuation of the unconscious virtuous circle in beings that preceded him in evolution.
October 30, 2009 at 18:56 | ML
ML,
You are showing even more understanding of the generalized forms and your descriptions are becoming still more focused on the space we are studying. Every example is being well presented and an overall appreciation is developing.
We want to take this further inward, so let's choose a paragraph from your post and just work to go more inward on that. You can choose any one.
October 30, 2009 at 21:05 | sensei