Human life runs its course in the metamorphosis

between receiving and giving.        

Goethe

 

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  The Seventh Gift ~ Reality

Oh, what a wonderful gift -- the profound reality of spirit and profound reality of the earthly.  As incarnated spirits, you and I, need both realities to be married and fruitful.

Reality can be terrifying.  

Just think how real you would feel, be, if you knew your spirit was married to all that lives in your earthly life?

Just think how real you would be, feel, if you knew the marriage of your spirit and your earthly self, bore fruit, not just for yourself, but for the future?

Two images get in the way of the reality, the marriage, and the fruit -- the ideal image and the dramatic image.

The ideal is so seductive.  You and I should just be beings of spirit: noble, true, oh, so beautiful and good.  No shadows, no struggles, just bliss. But bliss isn't very real, very earthly or very incarnated. If you reach bliss, where is your motivation to evolve? to find new truth in your thoughts? new beauty in your feelings? and new goodness in your deeds?

Ideals need shadows, dilemmas, difficulties, and weight to become real.

The dramatic is so colored with disturbance, crisis, sensation, imbalance and story. The dramatic sucks your attention into the shadows, the doubts, the angers, the fears, the victimhood of your life.  The stories seem real. The trauma feels like real pain, even agony.  

But what is real are the painful lessons, the confusing paradoxes, and the dynamic, ever-uncertain balance.

Through reality, karma is resolved and destiny is fulfilled.

Reality is the true marriage of spirit and matter.  You are this marriage. Know yourself.

To bear fruit is to live in the mood of transitions between life and death and new life.  You cannot bear fruit when you are attached to your identities, collapsing in drama and fantasizing in ideals.  Fruit comes from those who sacrifice the status quo, the definable and the given and the addiction of potential, if only and soothing dreams.

Live in the impossible. That spirit could manifest matter is impossible.  That matter could  reveal spirit is impossible.  But you, you! can say I am being human and in that declaration spirit becomes matter and matter becomes spirit. There is no ideal in that declaration, and no drama.

As we leap into 2012, let go of ideals, release dramas, reach into the spirit, ground yourself in the earthly, and be real!!!

Take the time to write down your ideals and your dramas. Don't resist either, but don't surrender to either, either. Just pay attention.  Just ask "What is my reality?"

And then in your sacred conversations with others, ask "What is reality, here and now?" If you take away your ideals and you take away your dramas, what is left. Trust it.