Longing & The Divine Experience 12/16/07

"When the Divine experience is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for that experience that does all the work. Look at me, and you will see a slave of that intensity" -Kabir ______________________________________________
Dear Friends,

I have come to recognize, over the years, that the greatest gifts I have been given are this body and this life. I first entertained this understanding through the words of the great meditation Master, my teacher, Swami Muktananda. He always taught that only in this body, only in a human incarnation, can we attain final Liberation, total Freedom.

Over time, my experience of those words has deepened, especially as I see more and more clearly that this body and life of mine are relentlessly changing and growing older each day. As I continually watch my body change, as I relentlessly assess my ever-evolving status in this life, I have come to the absolute realization that no matter what I do, or how well I take care of myself, or how much I hold on to my existence, my life is moving to an inevitable conclusion.

The questions that come up for me now, as I contemplate this situation are: "What is it that I really want from this life? How do I use these wonderful Divine gifts, this body and this life, to get there?

It is now very apparent to me that whenever my focus becomes totally identified with this world around me, whenever I get lost in my thoughts, whenever I wander in the continual streams of connsciousness that flow relentlessly through my mind, something inevitably happens to jar me and bring me back to the moment. Each time this occurs, no matter how much pleasure I have had, how much success has come my way, it is replaced by the realization that it all happened, it's finished, gone forever and nothing really important has happened.

Immediately, I am thrown back to my Self, to my spiritual practices, to meditation, and to an even deeper longing for the Divine experience. In that moment, I feel a renewed longing for the eternal treasure lying inside me, just waiting for me to come home--where life is forever.

So instead of using this body and this life for the temporary outer pleasures, I can use it to meditate, to contemplate the Truth, to focus on God.

Every moment is precious. Every day is an opportunity to come closer to The Self. We have this body and this life on lease, then we have to give them back. We have to take great care of them, that is true, so we can use them as the vehicle to take us to Freedom.

Kabir told us, we must cultivate that intensity of the longing for the Divine, otherwise we will pass through this life without attaining the greatest prize of all--total freedom, eternal life, and ecstasy without end.

So let our New Year's resolution for 2008 be: To focus our hearts and minds on developing the longing for total Liberation, the experience of an unbroken state of the Divine.

My Love and Blessings,

Alan