As Angela Trainer says, “Nothing terribly wrong with seeking something more or new; but it’s often futile when what we are often really seeking is a sense of Connection. We crave a sense of Awe. A sense of the SACRED in our lives. And that is an inside job; it will never be sustained by the externals in our lives in any truly satisfying way.”
Peter Pilley says, “Tremendous, terribly, too true. It was a choice, a series of choices since 2013, after the year I call The Year of my Life, to get to know what non-attachment means to me. It has been a self-imposed discipline of learning for me to embrace non-attached Love. This is “the unembraceable”. A concept.
I know only about my personal journey into the unchartered unknown of non-attached love. For me, at the beginning, those two words together mutually cancelled each other out. I could not see the least grain of logic there.
I was in state of confusion and of desperation – I was at that time trapped in my own unattainable seeking. I was in severe disconnect, yearning for connection, and only able to thunder against hard rock.
I do not know what the journeys of others are like. Perhaps it may be that some are the compliant students of masters of non-dual thought.
I was lucky to have friends to help point me towards understanding. It became clear to me my redemption, my emotional, spiritual, and even my financial salvation, my restoration to myself lay in getting my head round this obscure and novel area of enquiry.
And eventually, I did. I have compared the process to crawling through fires.
Thus empowered, I began to engage in the most meaningful part of my little life. Permanently in surrender, satisfied by anything and everything, seeking neither good nor bad outcomes, flooded by awe, joyful at the micro and the macro, unshakeably and beyond reason” đŸŒˆ
A friend may answer the question like this, “By being more present – for others – and in the course of this, for myself.”
I say a life more heart-centered in the terms described, “for others”, may derive from an imposed, expected, socially acceptable requirement.
I didn’t seek to live my life from the heart. It happened that my heart was revealed to me, in a sudden and shocking way. This was mediated through the extraordinarily powerful joining of prolonged eye-contact one-to-one, during wordless partnering in Biodanza.
I was briefly invited to share with another person our most sacred innermost spaces where the heart dwells. This can elicit a response in both people. I saw the shining integrity (non-judgemental, undifferentiated wholeness) in the soul of another. I saw the purity of the shine which the soul emits.
During those same shared moments, I felt my identity melt away. It became airy, then transparent. I felt dizzy, as when there is a sudden absence of old familiar coordinates to rely on. I teared up, because what I was seeing clear as daylight for the first time were these fine human characteristics. Integrity, honesty, and trust.
The greatest of these is trust. So much of the foundations, scaffolding and structures of functional society and of the wholesome individual are based on trust. Where there is trust, hope, growth and love can flourish.
I felt the avalanche of an emotion which was not love for another person. It was non-attached love. Love not disembodied at all, but grounded, real, rooted deeply and from time immemorial. I did not fully recognise it at that time (early 2013).
What I later grasped was that I had touched into, or received, a taste of the original life-force which keeps my life alive and guards both itself and myself with the power that comes from the place where I was born, and to which you, I and we all are returning, yes, each at our own pace, but as one human Tribe of sentient beings.
It has a well-known effect, this shared time of eye-gazing. Only it so happens that I was at a threshold when my heart, which I had been cloaking from even my own view for 66 years, shone reflected back to me from the heart of another. I was not “blown away”. I was literally blown open.
Firstly, I’m lucky that this awakening occured at all. Many may live and end life without this sort of revelation of the one-ness of all existence. This vision of one-ness is too powerful to frame in words. It is to be experienced, to be lived. It’s like electric current present in a copper wire. I know it’s there. Once my hand touches the wire, the shock through my body transmutes my knowledge into pure experience.
Secondly, my heart remained and remains open. My personal impression is that a heart opened can never fully close again. Some may arrive in a space which is heart-centric, abide there for a while, and then in some way or other they deny, discount or disregard their experience, simply because they lack sufficient first-hand knowledge of the life of the living heart of life.
I am incredibly lucky on two counts.
After all, when living is and always has been plain sailing from day to day, what useful purpose can be served, disturbing the expectation of the routine, by placing a hand on a live wire? I thought I knew what ecstacy is. It is like a cause and effect, isn’t it? And when the cause is absent, ecstacy vanishes.
My ecstatic experience of being alive does not depend on an external cause. For a long, long time I had been seeking to understand what causes ecstatic experience. I made strenuous and continual efforts to get under the skin, to get into the mind, to attempt to MELD with the living aliveness I see is present in every other life form around me. This process of enquiry resolves itself by reforming itself into a process of self-enquiry.
How is it possible that I am both alive and life is living me?
I am alive and life is living through me as well as in me. This is sufficient cause to be swirling, pulsing with the ecstacy of life lived all of the time, day and night, in fullest possible awareness.
I am alive and not dead. This alone warrants lusty songs of gratitude. Yes, I am grateful I am not dead!
My heart is beating. It is beating like every heart that is, was, and will be. This force that keeps the beat from embryo to this very moment is not mine alone. Mine is a share of the same life force whose origins are traceable along the whole route through scientific investigation (and common sense) to the Big Bang
The View at 72+ 