Awakening You to The Freshness In One Moment
As you extricate yourself from patterns of thought, you begin to look at everything freshly. It’s as if it’s all just emerging, it’s all very precious and beautiful, very fresh and new. I think that as a society, we have not invested enough in rituals that allow us to affirm the beauty of what is natural to us all of the time.
Rituals around stages of life, rituals around changes in nature, like solstices. Rituals around fertility, harvest and eating. And rituals around resting, the planets, around gathering together. We don’t invest in making it all sacred, instead we keep profaning it into our own greed of, ‘I want this; I desire that.’
When a group of people comes together and gets very quiet inside, they naturally start to be interested in creating rituals. The predicament with rituals is that what is a technique for awakening you to the freshness in one moment. A moment later is an institution that puts you to sleep and has lost its juice.
A Time for Reverence
As Gurdjieff said, “An alarm clock that wakes you at one moment, you can sleep through later on.” Most of the rituals that we find abhorrent were rituals that at one time awakened people. So what’s really required, is that you keep recreating them, which involves slowing down. This is why we appreciate poetry and art, because it is somebody reminding us of the appreciation of the simplest things. A bowl of fruit, the light coming in through a window pane, something like that. What a Matisse or Gauguin can do to remind us is quite incredible.
I have this feeling that on the spiritual path people tend to get caught in treating the Earth plane as trivial. Until they continue to evolve and begin seeing that the Earth plane is the manifestation of God and The Mother. Then they begin to treat it with reverence. For example, when you’re around American Indians who are steeped in their own tradition, they walk on the Earth with reverence. You can feel it, that the way they walk on the Earth is reverent. When you experience that, it reminds you of what’s happening, and it’s a gift to be reminded. We remind each other and we help each other find it.
-Ram Dass
Photo by Elly Johnson on Unsplash
