On My Own

"There is an indefinable mysterious power that pervades everything,

I feel it though I do not see it. It is this unseen power which makes itself 

felt and yet defies all proof, because it is so unlike all that I perceive through

my senses. It transcends the senses."

-Mohandas Gandhi, radio speech, 1931

I'm back. I did not "go into the West," not yet. I am alive. The Source is my refuge.

I am, so far as I am aware, the only one of my kind. Of course in a sense this is not so unusual, everyone even people belonging to religious institutions all experience their gods to some degree uniquely and have their own differences even from others of their own creed. But there is a template for their landscape, there is a template from which they have their own individual variations. I am completely out on my own, there is no template for this path, and yet the road that I travel seems as old as the stars. There is a trail here, overgrown with weeds and trash it may be, long forgotten by men, but there is a trail. If there are others who walk this path, I do not know them, and perhaps practicality forbids such rare and shy creatures as us from recognizing each other on the road. As far as I know, I alone walk it: the sole human attendant of the ancient gods.

As 1 John 4 says, someone who says they love the god they cannot see and yet does not love their brothers that they can see is a liar. I would take that one step further: one who says they love the god they cannot see and yet does not love the world they can see is a liar. 

Now I am going to take that and reverse it: if you want to find and revere the invisible and indescribable, logically incomprehensible One God, you must first revere the things that you know that immediately, physically, allow you to exist at all. Love Water, love the Sun, love the Earth, put yourself beneath them as you should be. Mother Water, Father Sun, Mother Earth. Humble yourself to the dirt beneath you, humble yourself to the puddle in the rain, revere them. Only if you begin to learn to love the Earth as your own self will you ever find the one behind them all. She cannot be found any other way to my knowledge. And once you begin to find her, still revere Mother Water in the puddle and Mother Earth in the dirt. Because if you do not love them, how will you love her?

Previously I was never much concerned about any absolute gods. My focus was on what was directly with me and what gave me life in any given moment. The warmth and light from the Sun, the life-feeding decay of the Earth, the life-giving Water. I still pay my attention to these. I had no concern for any other gods, I felt that a god so abstract could be no proper concern of mine. 

I began to see things in meditation. Actually I had periodically seen them before. An energy, for lack of a better word, pervading the world. I did not see this with my eyes, I saw it with my center. It was quite as Gandhiji described in the quote above, an indefinable power that pervades all things.

I could say more but this would be beside the point now. The point being, if I did not revere Father Sun or Mother Water or Mother Earth or any of the innumerable other lights of the earthly constellation I respect, I cannot see that I would have found the Source. Maintaining as always my principles that either with my own sight or with inward sight I must see the gods I revere, and I did see her with inward sight. I saw her filling everything. 
If you are living in your head, you will not see her. You are not your rational intellect, you are a human BEing not a human THINKing. You must live from your center, what some traditions call the "heart" but that is not the word I prefer. You must love the "mortal gods" of the world, the transitory Earth, just like you love her. If you do not love the world you can see, how can you love the Source you cannot see?

And so, here I am, on my own. But not alone.