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MONDAY’S POEM: Devotion
Last week I wrote about our experience with Sri Karunamayi, Amma, and the Guru Purnima celebration we participated in during the July Full Moon, July 21. Her charge for the coming months is offered in her 2013 Guru Purnima message. She urges us to Bhakti, or true devotion to our Guru and the Truth. She suggests that rather than ask our Guru for favors, boons and blessings, we are to offer our Guru bhakti and seek our own Truth within, to seek the Self. With this energy in my heart I wrote the following:
Devotion
In India it is Bhakti,
Another word for worship.
What is this Heart-swell,
This sense of surrender?
Amma calls all to Bhakti!
The Holy Mother awaits response.
Hearts open out to Her,
Compel feet a step closer.
Her Lotus Feet walk a thousand.
Her surrender is complete.
What is one more step for now and
One more lesson to be learned?
There is no there to step beyond.
The path leads all within.
There is no outer self to worship.
Devotion to the Self is All.
©2013 Richard W. Bredeson. All rights reserved.
PS: You can watch Amma deliver her Guru Purnima message for 2013 here!
Guru Purnima 2013
Rosemary and I spent a wonderful 20 hours in Trenton, NJ this past Sunday. We drove up from Annapolis that morning to join our friends from Colorado to celebrate the Guru, and in particular, Sri Karunamayi Vijayeshwari Devi. We have been followers of Sri Karunamayi, Amma, for years and visit her as often as we can as she travels the US on an annual tour.
The July full moon is the occasion of the celebration of the Guru and is known as Guru Purnima. It is an incredible festival in honor of all Gurus through time and our individual Gurus through our spiritual lives. We have been to several of these now and each celebration, held in a different city each year, seems grander than the last.
The Guru Purnima this year included a rare, once-in-a-life-time puja, or special honoring and offering for deities. This year Amma offered the Sahastra Linga Maha Puja as part of the Guru Purnima celebration. This Puja is conducted only once every 60 years and we were privileged enough to be in Trenton to experience it. This Puja is an offering to Shiva; 1,116 clay Shiva Lingas were used in the ritual. Words cannot describe the experience. But imagine a ritual that can clear away all karma, not only of this life-time but of all life-times!
Am I now clean, clear and ready for Enlightenment? Well, all I know is something happened in that honoring and celebration of Shiva and the Gurus. It was a magical time and the transformation energy was at a peak at the conclusion of the Puja and as we then entered the honoring ceremony. As we honored beloved Amma I also conjured all of my spiritual teachers and gurus that have helped me on my way, my path to spiritual awakening. I have been blessed by many. And they all seemed to join me during this event and were there with the 400 gathered souls to recognize and honor all Teachers.
Why is any of this important? Yesterday my comment on Rosemary’s Exploration on Self-Protection included a suggestion that we protect ourselves from misguided choices. The prescription to avoid these choices is to rely on our intuitive powers to make the choices that lead us onward and upward, on our paths to awakening. Intuition, from the Latin ‘intueri’, means “to look inside.” To use our intuition is to seek a priori knowledge to inform our choices. And this brings me to the key teaching of Amma, repeated yet again in her “Guru Purnima Message”. I have included some of her words here because they are beautiful and they are highly instructive:
Your body is not the external body, the mental body, or the intellectual body. It is the fourth body, which is the eternal Self, ultimate pure spiritual consciousness. You have to connect with your Self to unleash the light within you. Self-realization should be the ultimate goal of every human birth. How can you make progress towards that goal? Meditate.
The Holy rishis and even the gods are seen often in meditative posture. What are they meditating on? They are meditating on their own Self, the Atman, the soul. All the divine souls are merged into one. There is no discrimination for the divine soul.
Meditation is the only path to connect with the Self and attain eternal bliss. That is the path Amma wants all of Her children to follow. Once you start meditating, pride with give way to liberality; I-ness, Me-ness will give way to We-ness; selfishness will give way to selflessness. You will love everyone and hate no one. You will not criticize others but accept everyone for who they are. You will start developing faith in all religions. You will come out of your small boundaries and will be on your way to ultimate spiritual consciousness.
Meditate. Look inside. Access intuition. From that place you are completely protected from poor choice. And you step on the path to eternal bliss!
Jai Karunamayi!
MONDAY’S POEM: The Heart of Perfection
Following up on my musings of late last week I wrote this:
The Heart of Perfection
If all the little mistakes
Are lessons,
And all the little lessons
Add up to a whole
Are the mistakes
At the Heart of Perfection?
If there is a plan to the Universe,
And that Plan
Is a Plan of Perfection,
Then all the little mistakes
Add up to a whole
At the Heart of Perfection.
Let the Plan of Love and Light
Work out!
Every error, every mistake, every sin
Is a lesson;
Learned lessons add up
To the Heart of Perfection!
©2013 Richard W. Bredeson. All rights reserved.
PS: Happy 30th Anniversary, Rosemary! I love you!
Perfection in the Imperfect
In yesterday’s post I told the story of my misplaced sunglasses and my frustration/anger/lesson/awareness/self-love/love development. I am still processing this as a real opportunity for insight and growth. The day after I found the glasses I wrote this in my pages:
It is a better day today because I found my sunglasses. I know, it’s silly to have spent so much emotional energy on this little thing. And when did they turn up? After I had let them go, let go of all that emotional energy, accepted the loss and the lesson and put a good face on the rest of the day. And there is even a deeper lesson in the outcome: accept the lessons as soon as they arise with their teachings! Don’t spend the emotional capital on these small things. Save it, store it. This is true awareness.
Practice Awareness! This leads to perfection. Above all stay in the energy of Love as much and as often as possible. This is the true perspective and the true path to the Tao.
Whether the sunglasses turned up or were gone forever is immaterial. The lesson is the true and best outcome here. The first priority is Practice->Love. This is the Ultimate Way. And the Penultimate is Awareness->Perfection. The first leads to the second. Of course there is a tight feedback loop through all of this. Practice goes to awareness and perfection and Love – the end of it all. But the persistence in the practice comes from Love too. And the awareness comes from Love and practice. It is all tightly woven and I have much to continue to learn and bring to Perfection.
This whole notion of Perfection is a sticky one, especially for an Enneagram Type 1! OK, the Universe is already perfect. It is a whirling mass of delightful energy with an incredible force of Consciousness driving it. Call it Qi, call it the Tao, the Collective Consciousness of the All, Source, God/Goddess. It is perfect in its creation and its evolution. This is a key understanding. This does not mean that I am perfect, that everything I do is perfect. It does mean that there is no imperfection in Creation. It means that all the imperfections somehow blend into a perfect set of lessons for us all and we learn them to lead to the Ultimate Perfection of the Plan for the Universe. Somehow our mistakes are correcting over the long haul. They are necessary to spur and guide the evolution of consciousness.
The secret here is acceptance. It’s one thing to realize this at some level, to write about it intellectually, to think it through and see the logic of it. It is quite another thing to live by the rule: All imperfections are necessary to form the Perfect Whole. There is an implicit acceptance here that is required to the fulfillment of the Perfection – Prajna Paramita!
This is the Heart of Perfection. Acceptance: acceptance of the form and formlessness, the empty limitlessness, the mistakes, illness, old age, death – all part of the Heart of Perfect Wisdom – Prajna Paramita!
Is this the Buddha’s real meaning in the Heart Sutra, that all the imperfections in the world, all the suffering, all the strife are all part of a greater Perfect Whole? Acceptance, surrender, is the pivot point of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. And how can there be anything left after that surrender but pure Love?
Peace and blessings!