The Power to Allow

“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.” – Rene Damaul

The main reason I stepped away from pulpit ministry this past year was the nagging sense that I was losing a grip on the Truth. There had been a feeling for some time that I was going through a growth spurt, that actually felt like devolution of spiritual understanding, a sort of metamorphosis in which my grasp of reality had become mostly amorphous and ungraspable. Holding resolutely to the need to remain authentic in my ministry left me no choice but to step away from a platform that called me to stand and deliver a Truth message when internally there were mostly swirling thoughts and feelings that left me primarily unsettled, uncertain, and seemingly unstable. I wasn’t able to fake it, nor did I want to. (I had done enough of that in my prior career, at considerable detriment to my soul sense.)

Now again it feels like I’m going through a similar process. Although I have access to a lexicon of spiritual ideas and profound words, they feel slightly off-point to my current state of consciousness. To share a message right now feels a bit like fitting the proverbial round peg into a square hole. So rather than feign spiritual authority “as one who knows” I will share this experience of not knowing as my contribution to vast and wildly swinging states of awareness that make up the whole of spiritual experiences.

Of course, I would like to remain on the mountaintop, with a clear, exalted view of life, in which I know who and what I am, and live in complete equanimity with all that arises. But that’s not what’s happening right now. And if I’ve held on to one platitude during these fallow times, it is to embrace what is. Perhaps more powerful than any transcendent insight or profound discernment is the simple practice of allowing and acceptance. I said simple, not easy. The power is in the paradoxical reversal that comes with the acceptance of what normally would offend us and what we would naturally reject.

I struggled with this notion for a very long time until I realized that the kind of acceptance this refers to is not based on preference or any kind of judgment. In other words, acceptance does not mean I approve or I give up or I become a “doormat” to circumstances or any such ordinary interpretations of the term. Acceptance or allowing means simply acknowledging what is, seeing it as what’s arising at the moment, and giving it the space to be present in your life without pushing it away, denying it, or otherwise going to battle with it. Author Byron Katie said it succinctly, “the only time I suffer is when I argue with what is.”

So even though my personal preference would be to feel much more resolute in my spiritual understanding right now, the apparent fact of these current uncertainties, will only increase in their unpleasantness and become a bigger problem if I reject or judge these feelings as bad or unacceptable. (And don’t you know that after decades on this path and my history as a spiritual leader there are a host of critical voices seeking to indict this seeming failing of my faith) But no, to do so would only deepen the pain, and in fact, make them more real. Like all feelings, these current doubts, are part of the fleeting, discursive nature of mind. They will have their season. They have come. I will allow them to be here. They will go. Just like clouds in the sky. If the sky became identified with the clouds it would be faulty perception. It never forgets its spaciousness, its clarity. Nor does the sun become occluded by clouds that form. It remains illuminated, self-illuminating, in fact. In like manner, my true Self, bears witness to these disruptive thoughts and feelings, and never loses its identity in what it observes but remains the ever-present clear seeing, self-aware, self-evident, self-illuminating. I intuit this to be true, even though at the moment I can’t quite feel it.

So the clouds come and I allow them to be. That’s all that is necessary in this moment. The weather is constantly changing. But as the observer, as the "sky" that witnesses and bears all changefulness, there is perceptible invulnerability. I will rest here, and safely wait out the disturbance.

Namaste,

Rev. Larry