Reaffirming our Intention

We gathered this week with the news of three women liberated from a 10 year imprisonment by a male abductor; it brought to mind all of the women and children around the planet who share the same suffering and our desire to help them.  How beautiful to also see the courage, compassion and love in the hearts of so many, bringing light and healing to this world.  So many lessons in right action on the part of first responders, former victims who work to help those in similar situations and the people (including policy makers) who simply care enough to find ways to help.  More challenging for us may be trying to understand why such cruelty exists and to extend that same compassion to the perpetrators of those acts.  We were inspired by all of the stories that affirm the power each of us has to forgive and bring light to this world.

Here are a few of the things that we shared at sangha...  

From Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change by Pema Chodron (click for more info)

"Fortunately, when we break the commitment to take care of one another, it's easy to mend. We start by acknowledging that we broke it, that we hardened our heart and closed our mind, that we shut someone out. And then we can retake our vow. On the spot—or as a daily practice—we can reaffirm our intention to keep the door open to all sentient beings for the rest of our life. That's the training of the spiritual warrior, the training of cultivating courage and empathy, the training of cultivating love. It would be impossible to count the number of beings in the world who are hurting, but still we aspire to not give up on any of them and to do whatever we can to alleviate their pain."

From Proof of Heaven: a Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife by Eben Alexander (click for info)

"Pitch black as it was, it was also brimming over with light: a light that seemed to come from a brilliant orb that I now sensed near me. An orb that was living and almost solid, as the songs of the angel beings had been.  My situation was, strangely enough, something akin to that of a fetus in a womb. The fetus floats in the womb with the silent partner of the placenta, which nourishes it and mediates its relationship to the everywhere present yet at the same time invisible mother. In this case, the "mother" was God, the Creator, the Source who is responsible for making the universe and all in it. This Being was so close that there seemed to be no distance at all between God and myself.  Yet at the same time, I could sense the infinite vastness of the Creator, could see how completely minuscule I was by comparison.  I will occasionally use Om as the pronoun for God because I originally used that name in my writings after my coma. "Om" was the sound I remembered hearing associated with that omniscient, omnipotent, and unconditionally loving God, but any descriptive word falls short. The pure vastness separating Om and me was, I realized, why I had the Orb as my companion. In some manner I couldn't completely comprehend but was sure of nonetheless, the Orb was a kind of "interpreter" between me and this extraordinary presence surrounding me.  It was as if I were being born into a larger world, and the universe itself was like a giant cosmic womb, and the Orb (who remained in some way connected to the Girl on the Butterfly 

Wing, who in fact was she) was guiding me through this process.  Later, when I was back here in the world, I found a quotation by the seventeenth-century Christian poet Henry Vaughan that came close to describing this place—this vast, inky-black core that was the home of the Divine itself. "There is, some say, in God a deep but dazzling darkness..." That was it, exactly: an inky darkness that was also full to brimming with light.  The questions, and the answers, continued. Though they still didn't come in the form of language as we know it, the "voice" of this Being was warm and—odd as I know this may sound—personal. It understood humans, and it possessed the qualities we possess, only in infinitely greater measure. It knew me deeply and overflowed with qualities that all my life I've always associated with human beings, and human beings alone: warmth, compassion, pathos .. . even irony and humor. 

Through the Orb, Om told me that there is not one universe but many—in fact, more than I could conceive—but that love lay at the center of them all.  Evil was present in all the other universes as well, but only in the tiniest trace amounts. Evil was necessary because without it free will was impossible, and without free will there could be no growth—no forward movement, no chance for us to become what God longed for us to be. Horrible and all-powerful as evil sometimes seemed to be in a world like ours, in the larger picture love was overwhelmingly dominant, and it would ultimately be triumphant.

I saw the abundance of life throughout the countless universes, including some whose intelligence was advanced far beyond that of humanity. I saw that there are countless higher dimensions, but that the only way to know these dimensions is to enter and experience them directly."

More on a story we shared: Aesha's progress: the healing journey of an Afghan woman whose nose was cut off by attackers and the community that supported her

The lovely song that started off our evening:

Think of all the ways you bring light into this world in the moments you offer courage, compassion or awareness to whatever life brings your way.  We are the ones we've been waiting for!

Have a beautiful day. :)

~Marykaye