On Monday we focused our practice on the passage below.
Matthew 7:13-14
So go in by the direct path, through the narrow gate, for the road that leads to ruin is a broad way, and the gate stands wide open, and many are taking it. But the way that leads directly to Life has been compressed down to a single entry point, and few have been able to discover it.
It is easy to read this as elitist. Only a few are smart enough, privileged enough to find the entry point. The rest us are just dolts!!
But what if we look at this from the point of view of our practice of presence. Some questions arise immediately. What is the entry point and why do we miss it? What is it? What makes it compressed? Why when we know it do we turn away?
In our practice we have discovered that the embodied now is the opening to presence. We have all felt the opening into sweetness, stillness, peace, love... once we bring our gaze, our attention inward, into the felt sense of our experience in the body. This is the single entry point!! It is available to everyone, not some special elite. We have to remember to return to this present moment and let ourselves feel.
We miss it because we forget. But also because the familiar ego gaze is always outward. You are looking outwards or even heavenward for the answers, the bliss, the wisdom, the goodies, the guidance, the consolations. Our outer orientation is deeply hard wired neurologically. So in a sense when we come back to our inner experience we are going against the grain of deep habit and conditioning. And the superego is right there to attack you for doing it wrong, for wasting your time, for being incapable and on and on. This is why we have to practice. Over and over we come back when we are meditating and also in life. When we wake up that we have left our inner or direct experience for moments, for hours, days, weeks :) and we come back to the embodied now we are returning to the "narrow gate". You have to wonder who and what is that remembers when you are lost in your thoughts, in your self judgements, your distractions. Is this not your consciousness, your presence waking us up out the sleep that we live in our so called normal lives. It is quite a miracle when you ponder this.
So what makes the narrow gate compressed down to a single point. I don't know what the theologians might say about this, but when we first begin to find and enter the narrow gate it feels very compressed, tight, reactive, agitated. This compression is caused by all the layers of defense, beliefs, conditioning, superego judgements which are designed to keep us away from the entry way.
What we encounter right away is what we have been calling the gap. This is the sense of disconnection, alienation, dullness, emptiness. No wonder we turn away. This the gap between me and my experience, me and the outside world, me and presence. In short this is the sense of separation inherent in the ego self. There is no presence here, or so it seems. As we have been exploring, we need to allow and feel this experience of profound disconnection otherwise we will move away from the narrow gate and so miss the possibility of opening into the spaciousness of presence and life.
So far in our journey into the Sermon on the Mount we have discovered that we need to close the door to practice (ie turn inward); we need to let go of the religious and pious (ie the spiritual superego; and we need to discover the direct path through the narrow gate, (ie our direct experience, embodied and in the present moment).
Exercises from Monday night:
Journal: first impressions.
Tell me a way you feel the gap between yourself and your experience.
What happens when you open to the emptiness.
Follow your direct experience, Notice what happens when you allow your direct experience. Do you experience the gap? Does it open up into spaciousness? How is this different from the experience of the gap?
I look forward to seeing you all soon. Peace, Alison
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