Journey of The Great Circle - Spring Volume

Imagine walking through an art museum that displays many exquisite masterpieces of paintings and sculpture. Now visualize that it’s late at night when all of the lights are turned off - and every room is completely dark. In this moment you would not be able to see anything in the museum. All of the magnificent works of art would be right in front of you, but without any light to illuminate them, you couldn’t enjoy them. Now imagine that you light a match. The sudden light from the match would allow you to get a glimpse of some of the artistic majesty around you. Yet if you turned on a strong flashlight, it would provide even more illumination for you to enjoy a bigger spectrum of the art collection. And, of course, if the main lights in the museum were suddenly turned on, you would be able to appreciate the total experience of beauty and grace from all the masterpieces around you. Certainly before the overhead lights were turned on, the art and sculpture were right there close to you the entire time, but were veiled and hidden in the dark. But with the aid of the light, you were able to observe what was always present. Similar to the lit match, the flashlight, or the main lights in the museum, ever-greater spiritual awareness (ever-larger perspectives of what our life is truly about and what really matters) is like a powerful light that comes into “the mansion of our heart and mind” to illuminate the reality we perceive. More expansive perspectives of reality transform “the darkness of our mind”, so we can easily see the truth, goodness, and beauty that is always there. What is always present within us, and what the Essence of Life yearns for us to fully experience, is the radiant magnificence of who we really are. We are constantly being invited by Life to rediscover our ever-present magnificence - by turning on the light of our conscious awareness. Every one of us is a living masterpiece that is ever-evolving, a creative work in progress. Our life is the outer creative expression of our inner development. We are continually learning to unveil the exquisite beauty and majesty of who we truly are. Each day we fashion the blank canvas of our life to create the next version of our masterpiece. Every day we’re embarked on a journey of learning to artfully live our lives in a way that expresses the natural states of peace, happiness, joy, and harmony. Remember that you already are, and have always been, a supremely gifted artist of life. There is no one else who can create the exquisite masterpieces which only you can create. So while you enjoy your daily practice as you read and contemplate each day’s theme within this book of narratives, you are practicing the art of life. And remember that your daily practice is not only for your personal benefit. We are all intimately connected as one global family as we ascend the infinite ladder of awareness. Our daily practice benefits all the men, women, children, and myriad creatures of the world. Practice well. April 11 PAIN VERSUS SUFFERING The experience of pain, as well as its opposite, the experience of pleasure, are natural and essential aspects of a dualistic world, and are foundational to life in ways that are similar to all other fundamental polarities, such as light and darkness, expansion and contraction, attraction and repulsion, male and female, etc. Pain is an unpleasant experience that we’re all familiar with and everyone on the planet, most of the time begrudgingly, has no choice but to, on occasion, be subjected to this aspect of reality. A majority of people also undergo suffering as an ordinary, recurrent experience of their lives, yet this isn’t true for everyone, especially those leading-edge pioneers of consciousness who have gained an expansive spiritual perspective of what their lives are truly about and who have awakened to a higher, more enlightened awareness. There is a distinct difference between pain and suffering that must be clarified as we attempt to make sense of this world, and as we continue to cultivate our journey of awakening. Suffering comes from our attachment of wanting some painful aspect of our life to be different than it is, whereas pain is the acceptance of an experience of discomfort as “what is”. Suffering comes from resisting our experiences of pain that arise in our life and fighting against the obvious fact that reality “is as it is”, rather than embracing our life which has encounters of discomfort and anguish. Suffering can also come from our thoughts of self-imposed fears, from clinging to the regrets and resentments of the past, or the apprehensive expectations and anxieties of the future. It comes from defending false ideas about ourselves (e.g. we’re unworthy or not good enough) which creates “an illusion within our mind”, instead of seeing reality the way it is. Experiencing an epiphany of awareness, or a glimpse of our True Nature, helps make us more conscious of the constant magnetic pull of our spiritual journey, and can remind us that, ultimately, suffering comes from the confusion of not knowing who we really are (not knowing our Eternal Self). When pain appears in our life, suffering is like an attempt to swim upstream and struggle against the natural direction of the river’s flow (what is actually occurring) in order to fulfill our personal desires and habitual needs to have life be the way we think it should be. Acceptance that our life is unfolding perfectly just as it is, including when pain arises, is like effortlessly flowing downstream with the natural current of “the River of Life”.