Agape – Universal Love. The call To Be in Immediate Presence.

Following in the path of a Blue Whale – the largest creature that has ever lived on Earth – as she exhales, and then breathes in for the last time before diving into the depths of the sea to feed. To feel the sound of the breath resonating through me from this beautiful and magnificent creature brought me into Immediate Presence, stilling the mind. In that shared communion I know that all life is sacred – all an expression of the One – Logos.

The whole Cosmos, the whole of existence, is a manifestation of the conscious breath; the continual creative unfolding of Logos.

Logos, Conscious Breath and Agape – Universal Love are all ways of expressing the same Knowledge, Wisdom and Understanding of Life – which is beyond the comprehension of intellect and the thinking mind.

This is the initiation into Genesis (Bereshith in Hebrew), the continual creation of life in all its diversity and magnificent abundance. Such awakened moments may only be fleeting at first. Often we find them too much, become fearful and shut down. But the Ruach Elohim, the Creative Spirit of Being – Absolute Life, is a continual pressure, continually seeking to be known within the heart of every human who chooses to awaken to it. Every living thing is an expression of this continual, abundant, creative outpouring.

Our spiritual responsibility is to awaken to the whole of life – to meet with all life forms consciously as a human Being. All life is an expression of Being.

This can be understood in 1 Cor 13:11–12, where the metaphor of leaving childhood and becoming an adult is used. In the Greek nepios, the child is the untaught, and unskilled unconscious state, without the inner knowledge and  understanding that requires no words or mental interpreting. This emerges out of deep inner silence when we allow ourselves To Be. The adult, aner,  is a term used to mean psychological maturity, and spiritual comprehension that comes from being Present with all our attention within the continual unfolding of Life. I have written the following translation in such a way to bring out the nuances in the Greek text.

“When I was a child, I spoke without knowledge, I lacked understanding, I reasoned without knowledge or wisdom; when I became an adult, I deprived those childish ways of their power and influence over me. For now we discern as in a darkened mirror, but then in immediate presence (face to face). Now my Gnosis is partial, but then I will know, as I Am known.” 1Cor 13:11–12.

When we are psychologically infantile we see the rest of life as there for me or us to exploit and take regardless of the suicidal destruction and inevitable life negating consequences. This extreme egocentric behaviour, in which our inner emptiness and pollution manifest as greed and outer pollution, is poisoning the air, the rivers and seas, and the very soil and ground rock that gives us life on this Earth. This pollution affects how we structure our financial systems, causing extreme forms of  poverty, and gives us a rapacious consumerism and the perpetual illusion of the need to go to war.

“Shama: Listen with your full attention. Awaken the Soul (Israel) now, all you peoples of the Earth. Yahveh, To Be – Being is our Elohim; Yahveh, To Be – Being, the intense stillness of Immediate Presence, the Source of continual creative outpouring into life in all its forms, is One. The One is the peace of Eternal Presence.”  (My translation of the Shama Yisrael.) 

To take up the plough of spiritual awakening is to become an Adult in the spiritual sense: a Human Being. This is to take responsibility; there is no looking back, we keep our hand to the plough through all the pain and difficulties. Then as we take each step as consciously as we can, the Peace of the immediate presence grows stronger in us, dissolving all separation and all the needless pain and suffering we inflict upon each other, our fellow creatures, and the Earth itself. And in our awakening we can begin to take our consciousness deeper into the unfolding life of the Cosmos, deeper into the formless creative Spirit that animates and sustains everything in existence.