Daniel shared a verse (whose origin I do not know) with me last week. He had heard it from his church pastor;
“Within each of us there is a “God shaped Emptiness”.
I love the image those words bring. When I reflect on them I envision a room within each of us … a masterpiece of architecture, lovingly handcrafted in rich detail. This is our birthright. We all have within us this royal space designed to house the Infinite.
For most however, this room is cluttered with mind “stuff”. Like any space stuffed full of old furnishings and junk the view gets blocked. The mental stuff so distracts and obstructs our visibility of Authentic Life that we cannot see Reality. We've become so obstructed by the clutter of ideas and stories about who we are and what life is that we've lost our connection to the Royal Emptiness. Meanwhile, as Silence, It waits patiently for us to re-discover this sacred, fertile space.
We live in a world that believes in the need to be continually adding more. This idea about what success is keeps us piling on more and more stories and concepts to the already cluttered space. We tend to think that when we get (know/have) enough we will finally “arrive”. Then, we tell ourselves, we will be enlightened! (Now, there's a story for you!) What happens instead is that there is less and less space left within until finally we cannot even enter this sacred space ourselves. We lose access to our inner room.
Rather than adding to the jumble of precepts and made-up notions about life that we've accumulated, we must instead begin to empty the space. It must be cleared of the concepts and stories we've accrued so that only Essence remains. One concept after another, we make our way through these stored beliefs and stories until we have “freed the space”, thus making way for the One and Only True Thing. To hold onto one single story we are believing about some limited self is to obstruct the Way of That.
Blessings, Lynne