Revealing Divine Brilliance
There is always the natural pulsation of life, which is expanding and contracting, arising and subsiding. This is described in Tantric texts as the Fivefold Acts of the Divine: the ongoing cycles of creation, maintenance, and dissolution, along with concealment and revelation.
God has chosen to hide Himself within creation, and it is Grace that allows us to see through to the Source of all manifestation. We are all born, we live for a while, and we die. That is the cycle of rebirth, repeated over and over again. What changes are the acts of concealing and revealing. Which of those dominates our awareness is the key to whether we achieve liberation in a particular lifetime.
When individuals contract, they are, in effect, concealing their true Self. Although human contraction is essentially the same process as God hiding Himself, it happens from an already limited place within us and therefore has a different effect: suffering. When Consciousness expands and contracts, It expands, unfolds, and becomes the universe, never losing contact with Itself. It can deal with Its day-to-day activities without getting all screwed up, as we are prone to do!
Be Aware of Your State
We all expand and contract. The question is whether we lose our center as that happens. A person focused on spiritual growth is conscious of their state and will use that awareness to move back to center if it is lost. When we’re contracting and we’re not really aware of it, then we’re caught in the contraction and begin to project out from there. We engage the world through the filter of our own tension, and we thereby attach our internal contraction to something, somebody, or some other.
When we see that it’s our contraction, we can extract ourselves from it, keep the energy inside, and use that energy to expand ourselves. We are part of this ongoing, universal expansion and contraction, but problems arise as soon as we mistakenly believe we are separate from God and that our life is about us.
There is a critical difference between thinking that we as individuals are in control of life and understanding that we are an expression of the unfoldment. It is only when we surrender our personal will to Divine will that our awareness rises to the Divine level— and then we know life is not about us but about God expressing Himself through us.
Choosing to Align with God’s Will
The whole discussion of will boils down to the fact that we have free will to choose within the context of a higher will. And what does the higher will desire for us? That we reconnect to God and experience our freedom. That’s all God wants, and He doesn’t give a damn about the details.
We make it about beating life into whatever form we believe will give us happiness. We compile a list of demands about what we must have or do, and we get very attached to these things. In reality, we can do anything, want anything, and have anything—as long as we don’t need any of it. Mostly, we can’t be attached to wanting or needing something, because it may not happen. What we want and need may not be part of the higher will that is trying to bring us freedom.
The only thing we can do is surrender and trust that there is an intelligence greater than ours at work in our lives. How could it be that the power that is capable of creating and sustaining the universe is not just a bit smarter than we are?
Our individual will is always bucking against what God has given us. We are like a drop of water in the ocean that thinks, “I’m not part of this ocean, and I’m in control.” It’s silly business, yet somehow, we are convinced that we are in control, so we’re out there with a sledgehammer trying to mold our life. We firmly believe, “My freedom is about my (fill in the blank!), and I’m going to beat on life until it has no life in it . . . to make sure I get what I want.”
We are so busy being ambitious, pushing to construct “the perfect life,” that we miss what life is offering us at every moment: the experience of freedom. All of us know how often we miss that possibility because we’re so busy forging our life. We think we know better than God, we don’t trust God, and we don’t live in surrender. The amazing thing is that the life we can imagine for ourselves is miniscule compared to the life that is available to us.
Getting Past Ourselves
It’s really surprising that we think whatever we’re clinging to will make us whole, even though time after time we are disappointed when we do actually get what we want. Not to mention that we get tied up in knots just trying to get it!
The arising and subsiding of limited experience is what brings us suffering. We want something; we feel must have it. We complain because we don’t have it. Once we get it, we definitely don’t want it—and then we suffer because we have it and can’t get rid of it. This is how the mantra, “What’s going to happen to me?” plays out in our lives. This is what we do over and over again, thinking, “Next time it will be different.”
All the things we don’t have, all the things we think we need, all the things we do have but don’t want, are God showing us our life. Even the difficult and challenging moments have been given to us for the purpose of revealing our freedom. God doesn’t have a return policy. Live the life you’ve been given from the deepest place within you, trust, and be willing to be changed. This is how you will recognize and experience the Divine brilliance in all its diversity.