Monday, October 19, 2015

Exploring Grace

A higher power can be an interior dimension of psyche, transcendent it's beyond what ego can muster or master. The transcendent is the more that cannot be grasped by intelligence, only by experience. It can be felt truly, but not fully understood intellectually.  It is like the love of favor, like the awe felt in nature.p. xv *

Recently my father gracefully passed away. Grace touches us when we allow our higher self to surrender from our ego-centric ways. It alters us taking us out of the ordinary and allowing us to behold the extra-ordinary.  It unites the opposites or moderates the extremes by its very example. Grace evolves us by its wise and seamless quality that bands together- separate parts become unified as one.

Grace is about being not about becoming: beholding rather than holding; responding not reacting; and being light not dense.  Rather than human doings, we are human beings.  It brings out the profound possibility within each of our souls.  A sense of liberation comes upon us as we accept the mystery with equanimity.  

Beyond description, grace is a phenomenon that happens beyond the ordinary.  A blessing outside our individual selves.  This amazing form of virtue fosters awe, wonder and flow. However, grace is like art in that it defies simple language and words. Such things as poetry and direct experience best conveys this graceful spirit of possibility. 

This mystical quality brings a spaciousness as if you looking at the milky way or Northern lights. Cultivated through good will, appreciation, mindfulness and other illuminating things, grace is resilient, sincere and heart felt.  Complimented by coincidence, grace stimulates a freshness.  It entertains something new in each moment resulting in a form of divine higher presence. 

This phenomena inspires others and benefits us by its nature. This divine power that magically flows. It awakens, and transforms. Grace happens in special conditions.  When there is compassion, calmness, kindness, generosity, respect, and other virtuous states grace tends to be close by.

Grace allows us to tap the larger spiritual possibilities.  It transmutes us from the ordinary ego self to a higher place of unconditional and unlimited opportunities filled with positive transformation. 

Imperfection and inadequacy no longer are curses yet are transformed into a sense of loving kindness.  It frees our inner chains that we have imprison ourselves with.  Short-comings become reversed into strengths.  Grace is synthesis of the positive with negative. It is like the rainbow that happens after a intense storm.  It combines the sum of the parts into an integrated whole.   Grace provides a peak experience to celebrate there is heaven right now on earth.

It is conceivable that by intense effort a person may catch a fleeting glimpse of his own wholeness accompanied by the feeling of grace, which characterizes this experience. - Carl Jung

* The Power of Grace- David Richo, Shamabhala Press,  2014

       

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