Appreciation and Gratitude

For all of my adult life, I’ve had an antipathy toward God, or “The Divine”, as people now tend to call it.

It started some time in elementary school, a Catholic institution, with what I considered the irrational notion that an “all loving” god would send someone to burn eternally in “hell” for a single transgression.

We were told that this was the end result of committing a “mortal sin” that we did not repent before death.

I’ll not go into the whole “divine rant” as to how this antipathy developed over the years, but eventually I ended up with the idea that in the grand scheme of things we are points of consciousness in a particular type of manifestation “downstream”, and within, eons of somehow intentional creative choices. We are a collection of those choices and the perspectives that they have transformed into. Those collections of perspectives can be experienced both as a collective – a WE – and also as a unified singular consciousness – an I – anywhere in that stream where some particular collection of perspectives coheres in a particular instant and then looks out upon “its” current chosen terrain.

The notion of “The Divine” infers that we are not part of that eternal continuum of consciousness, that we are distinct from it, and thus somehow not divine. From that perspective only our distinctness is acknowledged and not our unity with the entire stream – the ecosystem of consciousness, if you will.  Energetically, I see no evidence that there is a demarcation line between this entity, currently named Justin, and anything. Thus the notion of some “higher” and separate god is, in a way, an impediment to the experience of Unity that is sought by so many. A belief that we are not divine will inhibit us from crossing that imaginary line into a Unity state since we have declared “it” as separate from “us”. It is all one flow so either everything is divine or nothing is. At some point, I’m saying, that declared barrier must be discarded. This will allow for the continuing flow of a particular “I” to commune with some vaster collective, a new WE, and then a transition will occur into its broader collective unity, our next momentary I.  Each experience of WE or I is an aspect of divinity, if one wants to use that term for consciousness. It’s all arising in the same inescapable ecosystem. Now I do recognize that a star-sized WE would certainly feel like it was divine due to its size, but it’s really just a more inclusive I/WE. The entirety of all possible perspectives could be considered The Divine, but if that ultimate Unity were fully experienced, there would be no remaining distinct perspective to call it that.

I will now relay a recent experience that I had, which altered my antipathy and has allowed for the word divine to reenter my lexicon in a different way.  I was sitting on a bench beside a lake during a recent meditation retreat. I was present to the beauty surrounding me and a simple feeling of soft and gentle joy. I looked down at the grass and grassy plants growing around my feet and found myself saying aloud “Yes, you are beautiful.” This opening was followed by a number of revelations. Firstly, it felt as though I was a conduit for appreciation, not the source of it. It felt like it was transiting from the sunshine through me “out” upon whatever I rested my eyes on. I felt that I was the recipient of appreciation and was passing it along as I gazed at my surroundings. It seemed that I had a choice to focus and direct that appreciation, and that every living thing in my environment was gently calling out to be the focus of  that attention, calling for me to appreciate its particular beauty. And it felt like each plant, each tree, the lily pads and the birds were grateful for being enjoyed. I found myself being grateful for the Sun, that divine-feeling light coursing through me, and it seemed that the gratitude itself amplified the rate of this flow. Some aspect of this self then stepped aside and allowed this interpenetrating flow of love and gratitude to run away in its own delight. It seemed to know the pathway to full resonance between living things and the source of their joy. Those living things had gently beckoned me to full-fill us all. I was grateful to the Sun, and the many living things, as they were grateful for the opening provided for this joyful dance with and through me. In a moment of crescendo, we all gave up the ghost of our distinctness and became a merged flow of love and gratitude. And for a moment, this self simply dissolved and seemed to become an experience of the Sun’s joy.  That solar eminence seemed grateful that I was available to be its experience. In a way, I was its eyes, its ears, its sensory access to the pure thought-less pleasure of its experience of Beauty in that place, in a that moment.

In this experience it seemed to me that we are able to be intercessors, who can both appreciate the beauty around us, to “their” delight and appreciation, as well as somehow be appreciated by, and grateful to, our star. We are both the appreciators and the appreciated and this bidirectional mechanism seems pervasive through many layers of consciousness, at least it did that day. And this experience was initiated by a simple impulse to notice beauty and to acknowledge it. The little ones beckoned to be seen and appreciated and I happened to be open at that moment to hear their call.

At one level, at least, we are being invited to love and it appears that it only takes one opening to begin that flow.

Love, appreciation and gratitude may simply be linguistic terms that initiate particular energetic flows but since they do appear to be of value, we might as well make use of them……along with the notion of the Divine.

“I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.” – Lennon/McCartney