God is my life. I have no life but His.
The Name of God is an experience, not a word, and the experience is what you and I are in truth. There is nothing else to learn, and nothing else to get.
And God said unto Moses, I Am That I Am: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I Am hath sent me unto you (Exodus 3:7–8, 13–14).
Or this from another spiritual tradition.
Hold on to the “I am” to the exclusion of everything else. The “I am” in movement creates the world; the “I am” at peace becomes the Absolute (Nisargadatta).
A Course in Miracles teaches us in this way:
I was mistaken when I thought I lived apart from God, a separate entity that moved in isolation, unattached, and housed in a body. Now I know my life is God’s, I have no other home, and I do not exist apart from Him (W-pII.223.1:1-2).
Hence the cosmic import of our prayer this morning, when we say with gratitude and joy “Our Name is Yours, and we acknowledge that we are Your Sons and Daughters” (W-pII.223.2:7).
When we sit in stillness today – when we open our mind to remembering its Source – let us refuse any addition to “I am.” That we are is given; what we are is a question with many answers.
Set that question aside and instead rest in the simple fact of “I am.” Let the name “Sean” or “Anthony” or “Sophia” go. Let your profession go; let your family nomenclature (father, mother, aunt, cousin) go. Be present only to what is already present: this. This this.
Most critically, when you judge yourself for not understanding or failing to see or not getting it the way Tara Singh or Ramana Maharshi or Thomas Merton got it, smile.
I mean this in the most literal sense: when in your meditation and prayer you feel desolate and unworthy, a spiritual derelict, bring a smile to your lips.
The smile – regardless of whether it reaches your heart and mind – will be a light reminding you that your oneness with God, with the Absolute, the Source of all Creation is given regardless of whether you perceive it. What is true is true; it is not true only when we are aware of it.
Are you conscious of every breath you take? Do you have to remind yourself moment by moment to breathe? No. And yet breath happens, and by it you live.
It is that way – it is that way and then some – with God.
Thus, let us remember God’s Name as our own, not as a word to distinguish this from that, or one from another, but rather as an experience in which distinction and separation end, and what remains is whole, and holy, and beyond the reach of question altogether.
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