This week we’re entering a new 18-month cycle of eclipses in the signs of Taurus and Scorpio, where our values and deeper morality are emphasised, so now is a good time to explore how our relationship to who we are what we value motivates and guides us through life.
Our values and ethics are a natural result of our relationship to the divine and our understanding of love. To the extent that these might be limited, our values and ethics might seem like something that needs to be imposed from the outside. Yet even young children know when they have harmed someone in some way, without ever being explicitly taught.
Understanding that our inherent nature – what could be called our divinity – is interwoven with all of life leads us spontaneously to value all life forms and behave lovingly and ethically. So we avoid causing harm knowing that we are inevitably also harmed when others suffer. We avoid taking what is not freely offered because in an abundant and indivisible world where all needs are provided for, greed and hoarding make no sense! Depriving others of what they need to live happily harms all of us.
Practicing acceptance
But by not accepting ourselves as we are, we think there’s something better OUTSIDE of ourselves, so we adhere to the mandate of some higher force that seems to know more than we do . When we know who we are, we don’t follow rules out of guilt and shame, or to be righteous and judgmental: when we understand the value of all life, we are guided by our values and naturally abide by our ethical and loving nature.
Realizing that we all share the same nature, and knowing our thoughts and actions affect ourselves and therefore others as well, we don’t need to be told what is right and wrong. Our compassion grows through our connection to the love we already (always) are. We value all expressions of life equally – and see the divine nature of animals, plants, and minerals as inseparable from us. Ethical behavior arises spontaneously as a logical consequence of this understanding – indeed, it is the meaning of the ancient Sanskrit mantra Satyam Shivam Sundaram: Truth, Divinity, Beauty.
Nonetheless, sometimes social rules have to be broken to redress or prevent some other injustice – and our own understanding of Dharma will help us choose wisely how and when this should be done. Just as the epic Mahabharata showed, as long as we’re living in society there are always going to be exceptions to ethical rules. Krishna himself broke the rules! Society runs on such exceptions.
Just as we add salt to our food, society can tolerate a small amount of Ādharma, or going against the rules. When there is just a little salt, it improves the taste and helps us digest. But if there is too much salt, our food becomes inedible, and if there are too many exceptions, the entire system will collapse.
There is a voice that doesn’t use words.
Jalāl ad-Dīn Rūmī
Listen!
There isn’t some other or better place to be than here right now. This next breath is the gift of life. Call it love; call it divine. It is life itself sustaining you – freely offered to you in every breath. The same force beating your heart is causing my heart to beat. Inhaling, we’re taking in what the trees exhale; exhaling, we’re circulating life energy back to the trees, grass, and flowers. Trust in the life force that grows flowers, much like your own hair grows without any effort on your part.
Knowing that love is the frequency of life itself, we can trust this next inhalation is our proof of that. We don’t need to noisily, forcefully, pull the breath in. Only the striving mind wants that, grasping for what it believes is separate from itself. Even while you sleep, the life force keeps you breathing – so why struggle with it when you’re awake?!
Calmly, quietly, take this next breath as an offering.
Let the love that you already are circulate freely within you. In this space of awareness there is no anxiety. You can trust in your divine nature – trust in that life force that has always kept you alive and thriving.
Our body thrives in the energy of love and breaks down in the vibration of fear and guilt. Realize in this moment that you are alive right now. Live in love and know that fear and guilt are the opposite of love. You are a divine being.
We can’t find peace because we’re looking for divinity in a separate time, place, and form from ourselves, as if it were a material object. We seek it apart from this moment – or rather what we’re experiencing in this moment – which we judge as insufficient or bad. But there is never anything more than this moment – there is no future moment that will be better than now, because how you feel right now creates the next moment!
I know, I know!
We say “I” know because language juxtaposes us from objects. But there is only knowing – pure awareness. Opinions, judgements, and measures are products of the mind which is observed through consciousness. It is paradoxical to have to speak about the Divine because words turn things into objects the Divine is the subject itself. Only our thinking of it prevents us from knowing that we already are it. There is nowhere else to go and no one to go there.
Ultimately, life is perfect as it is expressed because it cannot be any other way, despite what the mind prefers. Life is impersonal, happening through us, not because of us. From the limited point of view of our human mind, life is unbearable. In the pure awareness that we are – an expression of love, or what could be called divinity – there is only perfection.
Only by quietening the mind can we become aware of our true nature, and whatever else the mind might imagine or fear or remember, this next breath is the most important thing in your life right now. Experience it fully.
Breathe and smile, soften your heart, and know that you are a perfectly divine expression of life in every moment.
With much love and light,
Susan
