Painted Perfection
The paint-by-numbers image says, “Your life, a Divine Masterpiece.” It's depicting Consciousness (Śiva) and energy (Śakti) as the very powers that paint life, expressing you as the embodiment of Life Itself.
What's being conveyed on the canvas is that as we're each walking through the terrain of our own life—with all its valleys, mountains, and sunshine—and every element is part of the perfect life that has been given to us so that we may come to realize we are the Divine made flesh.
The very Life that Consciousness is expressing as you is creating within Itself the perfection of Its own fullness. Yet we often lose sight of that fullness when we insist that finishing the painting means that it should look exactly how we envision it to be. When we try to mold life to fit our image of the ideal, we forget that we are the expression of Consciousness, which is already displaying Its own perfection and joy.
The Path Through Life
The miracle of life is that it has chosen to express that perfection as you and me, plus all those other people that we somehow believe are not also the expression of the Divine, simply because we don’t like how they act. In our sādhana, we come to realize that everything in our life is for the purpose of recognizing that life if perfect as it is.
We each have a path to walk through the terrain of life, and we must learn how to navigate the trail, instead of thinking some obstacle on the path shouldn’t be there.
Why does that obstacle have to be there? Not to make life seem hard, but because our own spiritual journey requires that we get bigger than whatever block we encounter. One of the most important insights that we only learn when we inquire deeply is that every one of those pieces of the puzzle of our life are perfectly designed to fill out the complete picture.
Sometimes, when hiking, there are streams to cross that might threaten to carry us away, or perilous ledges that we have to traverse carefully to keep moving, and we accept that as part of the route. Like that, every one of the challenges in life can be what strengthen our resolve to grow spiritually if we don’t lose sight of the fact that our life is Divinely offered to us as our own pathway to knowing God. Viewed from that perspective, life is always a perfect masterpiece.
The Perfect Contraction
There is a gift in seeing how our own awareness has been bound within its limited self. One of my students described what he called the perfect contraction, the one in which we recognize that it is simply our own consciousness that's contracting. When we see that it is not the conditions that we're facing that are the problem, we stop believing something shouldn't be the way it is.
The perfect contraction is the one that creates the willingness to recognize that it is our own mind and ego that contracts from life. And then the discipline, the commitment, and devotion to growth is the energy we use to stay open in the face of any difficulty and keep walking the path.
It is absolutely essential that we recognize that the very dynamics of our life are happening within our own consciousness, not somewhere else. And as Divine Grace draws us to Itself, It will also miraculously reveal to us all the tensions, patterns, contractions, and karma that we have saved up in our piggy banks. That all plays out as the need to control, due to our demand that life be exactly as we wish.
So we learn to move through the contraction, recognizing it as a gift. This is never a rejection of our misunderstanding. It is actually the revelation that we do misunderstand— and that we therefore miss seeing the reality that our life is perfect in its singular dynamic of revealing that we are not separate from the Consciousness within us. We must move through all our tensions, patterns, and misunderstanding (though all the “un-joy”) to find the innate joy in within that is not created or diminished by any condition, either in our minds or in that which shows up in our lives.
Perfection is Here and Now
This is the miracle of Grace whispering to us, “Come on home, know Me as your Self.” And when it gets hard, remember to bring your attention within. Take a breath; do some double-breaths. Hold on to the very resolve that fuels your practice.
Nondual tantric tradition tells us that perfection isn’t somewhere in heaven or in an alternative life: perfection is in yourself and in the very life that you're walking through. One of the greatest miracles of our sādhana is that we can recognize our contracted state and then choose to walk through that terrain, and even through the debris we’ve created by walking unconsciously in the past.
Do not get caught in contraction or in proclaiming that there’s something wrong with your life. Every one of us has the tendency to project that our life is too difficult, or more difficult than that of another person. And it becomes our reason, our excuse, to stop walking. When you find yourself struggling, when you find yourself hanging off the side of a cliff with one finger, lift your hand up. Be amazed at how that Divine hand will reach down and pull you up.
Never turn and go the other way because it gets difficult. Your life is the gift of Grace, hand-painted by the Divine. The absolute miracle of spiritual practice is that you can know this for yourself: that your own consciousness is the perfect expression of Divine Consciousness.