Sandra, you speak of infants and newborns expressing pure love. You ask, “Do they know on some level love is what they are?” It seems to me we are all created and born in the Garden of Eden, where we have the essential qualities of the heart. We appear to lose these essential qualities of the heart by falling away from our awareness and presence. It is like we fall away from our inner Essence and into the trance of our personality. For me personally, my parents nurtured me erratically and I did not feel a dependable source of love and assurance. When I realized my value was“nothingness” I felt holes in my soul and I even look at my body to see if I had holes. This sense of having holes and a vacuum from within made my human nature fight, as human nature abhors a vacuum.
We all experience this “nothingness,” the vacuum and this inner void to some degree in childhood. It feels like the sky is falling to a small child. This creates anxiety, the fear of separation, and how we respond to this inner anxiety is different for each of us. There are also patterns that are common to all of us, because fear is insecurity, this inner doubt. We all experience the fear of abandonment. There seems to be a point fear creates faithlessness and this appears to make us lose our inner Essence. It is the point where self-possession and self-surrender are taken away, deep painful anxiety.
Pride seems to be the most common response to this anxiety and this inner void. Pride is denial and it is the ability to endure whatever is happening by tuning out. It is like our feelings become fatalistic, as we may feel nothing can be done to change things and in any event whatever is the problem, it is not much a problem after all. Pride can also become vainglory, satisfaction in what I am good at and satisfaction in my virtue. Pride, though, is a fundamental denial of my loss of contact with Essence and is particularly the loss of contact with qualities of real love.
We never really lose our inner Essence if we all could be really present and awake, where our identity and self-worth do not arise. Our Beingness does not depend on sustaining our identity in activity. And yet to have no purpose and this place of no accomplishment, God or Essence, creates feelings of this Being is a dirty rat. Faith becomes mean, complex and exhausting, nothing true ore valuable to believe in. The fall is into self-consciousness and alienation. The fall can also paradoxically allow us to fall into our deeper self, this inner Essence. It feels like falling back into faith, this inner Essence where there is union which appears to create enormous dignity and self-respect without the faintest whiff of egocentricity. It feels like just a place to begin.
Unity is before the Fall and unity comes back to us in the Fall. The Fall is part of nature’s ways and it seems we all have to find our peacefulness or faith in this natural order of things. Faith is created in the Fall, as we learn to not be defiant and learning to yield ourselves to it. Falling back into this Garden of Eden, our inner Essence, is mean because there is no clinging to any ideas. Faith seems to discover this ability to keep an open mind, falling into a higher state and making all our experiences, even the pain, into something beautiful: faith hope and love.
Maybe one word is too much, even the word God, because my mind ricochets from one psychological state to another from this word. So it seems faith becomes its own value and literally has no reference to anyone, as our identity IS.
On Sep 17, 2014 Syd wrote :
Sandra, you speak of infants and newborns expressing pure love. You ask, “Do they know on some level love is what they are?” It seems to me we are all created and born in the Garden of Eden, where we have the essential qualities of the heart. We appear to lose these essential qualities of the heart by falling away from our awareness and presence. It is like we fall away from our inner Essence and into the trance of our personality. For me personally, my parents nurtured me erratically and I did not feel a dependable source of love and assurance. When I realized my value was“nothingness” I felt holes in my soul and I even look at my body to see if I had holes. This sense of having holes and a vacuum from within made my human nature fight, as human nature abhors a vacuum.
We all experience this “nothingness,” the vacuum and this inner void to some degree in childhood. It feels like the sky is falling to a small child. This creates anxiety, the fear of separation, and how we respond to this inner anxiety is different for each of us. There are also patterns that are common to all of us, because fear is insecurity, this inner doubt. We all experience the fear of abandonment. There seems to be a point fear creates faithlessness and this appears to make us lose our inner Essence. It is the point where self-possession and self-surrender are taken away, deep painful anxiety.
Pride seems to be the most common response to this anxiety and this inner void. Pride is denial and it is the ability to endure whatever is happening by tuning out. It is like our feelings become fatalistic, as we may feel nothing can be done to change things and in any event whatever is the problem, it is not much a problem after all. Pride can also become vainglory, satisfaction in what I am good at and satisfaction in my virtue. Pride, though, is a fundamental denial of my loss of contact with Essence and is particularly the loss of contact with qualities of real love.
We never really lose our inner Essence if we all could be really present and awake, where our identity and self-worth do not arise. Our Beingness does not depend on sustaining our identity in activity. And yet to have no purpose and this place of no accomplishment, God or Essence, creates feelings of this Being is a dirty rat. Faith becomes mean, complex and exhausting, nothing true ore valuable to believe in. The fall is into self-consciousness and alienation. The fall can also paradoxically allow us to fall into our deeper self, this inner Essence. It feels like falling back into faith, this inner Essence where there is union which appears to create enormous dignity and self-respect without the faintest whiff of egocentricity. It feels like just a place to begin.
Unity is before the Fall and unity comes back to us in the Fall. The Fall is part of nature’s ways and it seems we all have to find our peacefulness or faith in this natural order of things. Faith is created in the Fall, as we learn to not be defiant and learning to yield ourselves to it. Falling back into this Garden of Eden, our inner Essence, is mean because there is no clinging to any ideas. Faith seems to discover this ability to keep an open mind, falling into a higher state and making all our experiences, even the pain, into something beautiful: faith hope and love.
Maybe one word is too much, even the word God, because my mind ricochets from one psychological state to another from this word. So it seems faith becomes its own value and literally has no reference to anyone, as our identity IS.