The Eternal, The Changing, and Being Content

I moved to Los Angeles this past week. After twenty years of visits and numerous friendships in this big city, I packed up my belongings for storage, rented out my home in Phoenix, and headed south to Los Angeles.

Getting up this morning, like every morning, I begin my spiritual practice with sacred reading. Today I read Emerson’s essay on The Oversoul. The following jumps off the page and enters into my contemplation:

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE.

And from his essay Compensation he says:

I contrast this to a grouping of articles written in this month’s issue of Vanity Fair reviewing the culture of the past hundred years by decade. In essence, each contributing writer mentioned the good and the bad of the ten year span. Bill Maher said of the 2000’s “We gained Facebook. Like. We lost the fifth amendment.” Lorne Michaels said of the 1970s we had a president who resigned in disgrace, Vietnam ended, New York City was broke, and the backdrop was ripe for the new comedy Saturday Night Live. Each decade had both evolution and destruction; loss and creativity, light and dark.

In the world of form, in the world of our senses, we see and experience life through duality. I can make a list with a line down the middle and put on one side what I like and on the other what I don’t like. I can list what was a success to my way of seeing and what failed. I can list what gains I perceive and what losses. Duality.

However, the world of the Soul, as Emerson says, is different than this. The Soul is within and beyond operating from the Field of Oneness; without separation and judgment. It is the revelatory factory aligned with and as The Eternal Unified Presence. It speaks not in words, yet in knowings. It interprets the experience of the world as a witness, awake to what is, and yet not tossed, trammeled and beaten down by it. In the Christian Scripture it reads The dark and the light are the same to you (Psalm 139.12) Meaning light and dark are transient states of judgment. They are interpretations which come, go, and change. The Soul, The Presence, That Which is Eternal, Divine Love, is changeless and knows only Itself which is Pure Love.

It is my commitment to live from this Changeless realm within. To learn to be content, as Emerson states. This doesn’t mean I ignore the world and what is happening. It means I am Sourced from The Eternal and bring it into the world. Thus, my daily spiritual practice. Learning to be content, regardless of circumstances, I believe is a powerful practice in itself.

In Love,