Beloved Students:

With scarcely more than a month to wait, I greet you in anticipatory joy of our physical coming together in early June for the 2004 Peace Convocation. Know that I so look forward to our sharing not only the time we have dedicated, but also the opportunity to see you through physical eyes, hear you through physical ears, and appreciate you both as individual spiritual aspirants and a collective spiritual family. Such is a small way of enjoying a measure of the Oneness that brought each of us forth into a physically manifest creation.

How precious are these times! How beautiful the acts of coming together at a time when the conventional reality is caught up in the illusion of war. Each of you who has made a personal commitment to peace in your life, your relationships, and your creative expressions, has now the interesting responsibility of keeping “a foot in two worlds.” Clearly, in order to bring love, wisdom, peace and clarity into this conventional reality, you must stay connected to it. However, the transcendent process encoded deeply within you asks your presence in another, transcendent reality. Consequently, you may feel yourselves pulled a bit between these two functional realities.

When such arises along the spiritual path, it is helpful to understand just what is going on. On the one hand, you experience the physical horrors of war, wherein individuals are compromised, sometimes in excruciating manners. Yet at another level, if you are honest with yourself, you probably must confess that something is going on, but in all likelihood, it is not as it appears. Know this: the power of appearances is very strong. Like everyone else, you have witnessed the impact of war from many lifetimes; many historical periods; many ways of waging it. The very fact that war has arisen in so many experiential flows makes its deceptive nature surprisingly difficult to cut through. When the notion of power is recognized only as something that is worked out on or against another, it too becomes dense and difficult to penetrate. At points such as the time before you, many may simply relapse into some internal cave and wait for the battles to be over.

Of course, when you are dealing with conventional reality, you likely know by now that the battles are never over. Thus, you are called to be your very best self, rising out of the mud of collective perception and finding within your own sparkling consciousness the eternal lotus. The problem is that often when you look for the lotus, you look for it in the conventional reality—as if the divine bud should magically appear before you, reassuring you as it opens that all is well in the world.

The conventional reality, however, is not the reality wherein the spiritual lotus grows. Thus, your task is to have your feet firmly planted in the conventional reality, but your wisdom firmly rooted in the lotus reality. If this seems a difficult, perhaps even treacherous path to tread, simply know that those before you who have contributed the most to the spiritual evolution of the planet noted the same precarious nature of “the path.” If you are awake to these things, you are in good company, spiritually speaking. Awareness to the apparent pull of the opposites means you have already begun to challenge your mental perceptions, and that you are allowing the “stretching beyond the obvious” to occur that marks the transformational path.

These are worthy accomplishments that indicate your spiritual growth and internal movement toward your potential Self. What you must now learn to do to be effective in your life is to hold the tension of the opposites. As you ponder this proposition, you may wonder just what such may mean. How can you “hold” the tension of the opposites? To understand this principle, you must first recognize that the conventional reality and the lotus reality do exert a kind of continual pull in opposite directions. Further, what those poles are “pulling” on is your awareness; your creative process, and your literal sense of reality. This is why at some point you experience yourself in the “lotus reality,” if we may call it that; and at other times you find yourself being literally consumed by the conventional reality. When you feel yourself “flip-flopping” back and forth between the two, it simply means that you are not yet able to successfully hold the tension of these two opposite ways of seeing and experiencing what is termed “reality.”

While you may recognize that there can be no exact prescription for how to successfully hold this creative tension, you should easily see the importance of at least understanding what is going on for you. Indeed, knowing and understanding the process you are working with can be of great support to you in this creative endeavor. From a conceptual perspective, this is somewhat like the process you go through to heal any emotional affliction. If you are trying to heal anger for instance, you must first learn to hold the tension of the opposites in order to make your way to any kind of a healed state. That means you recognize that you have an angry self and a non-angry self, and that these two selves are pulling on each other all the time. Until you are wise enough to recognize that healing is needed, you simply vacillate between these two selves. However, when you recognize that the tension between the two selves can actually support the creative energy for healing, then your personal internal investigation leads you to the experience of holding the two selves within you and coming from a much vaster place than is contained by either one. You are aware of both, but governed by neither. Whereas the one self might take you into anger, the other self might take you into denial. For attaining a “healed state,” you need to discover the internal spaciousness to accommodate both, but surrender to neither.

Clearly, holding the poles of the conventional reality and the “lotus reality” within you will facilitate remarkable expansion of your awareness! And practicing this “holding” will not only make you strong and instill confidence in your path, it will also significantly enhance your creative abilities. You will find that in the very center of chaos and turbulence, you will be able to create peace, generosity, compassion and infinite wisdom. You will come to view the pressures in your life with gentleness and a sense of purpose. You will notice that even in the most demanding of times, you will not forget nor ignore the important things that make for respite and refuge even in the face of the very presence of war. You see, as in the case with anger, in every person there are two creative streams that pull against each other: a warring self and a peaceful self. When you discover them (i.e., when you come out of denial that you even have a warring self), you then have the opportunity to contain them both (which will instill great compassion), but be controlled by neither. Rather, you will touch vastness and come to see with new, unjaded, clear and fresh eyes - the eyes of a bodhisattva!

Please join me this month in listening to a recent teaching I gave to the Denver group, Squirrelly Wisdom. Discover how Lord Rama, at a very demanding and painful time in his life, was able to stay focused on the important elements of compassion and generosity. Recognize that like he, you have within you the capacity for infinite goodness; and that capacity emerges into the light of consciousness (or can) with every conscious act of kindness you put forth. Learn the wise and powerful skills of holding the tension of the opposites within you. In so doing, allow yourself to be transformed by the strong pull of these “opposites” at work within you for the liberation of all sentient beings.

Please continue the meditation practices I have given you. Establish yourself in gratitude for all the experiences that come to awaken you to your own enlightenment. Be unshakably aware that a precious life is hard to come by, and quite easily lost through sloth or lack of appreciation. Rest in the knowledge that as you now create your path, others have so created before you, and they stand as high witness to what you now create. Walk in the gracious light of kindness.