The secret of life is in allowing life.
So as we open this book, and moment by moment, we open The Book of Life, what is the most important movement?
If we knew what life is, there would be no need to open.
The magic is in the opening. The evolution is in the receptivity, in the allowance of impressions and in the surrender to the unknown.
As we read a text, impressions are happening. These are impressions on the mind, feeling and body which can lead us to new patterns of identification, thoughts or contemplation. These include energetic impressions, in which even beyond our thinking mind, feelings and emotions are in movement, responsive to a deeper tone or subliminal transmission within the text.
For example, the resonance of a scientific text book is often “truth, fact, reality”. It tempts the reader into believing in the existence of objective, dependable facts. The same applies to the resonance of newspapers. This is the resonance of authority and consensus, and we can respond to that either in conformity, resistance, entanglement or disentanglement. None of these responses say anything about the truth. The truth of what we are exists unconditionally to any response in form. The core of who we are is unconditional to form. If it wasn’t, how would change be possible?
The opening of The Book of Life begins with the allowance of effects through our own living responsiveness. The opening of a book, more than anything else, involves opening. If there is no opening, there is no book, it book of life is here through us.
The more we allow ourselves to open, the deeper the impression on form and the more authentically form responds through expression.
This can be framed as positive or negative. We tend to favour the good impressions, while resisting the uncomfortable. Yet also the areas where we feel discomfort, are impressions showing where we are not yet free. Signs of resistance or discomfort are golden tickets to reveal where we are identified with effects or impressions, rather than opening to the deeper source behind them. They show us where we are caught.
What happens if we are slightly irritated and we immediately close the book we are reading and do something fun instead like shopping? The book that closes on our own irritation, will re-emerge over time in many, many little frustrations. We become an irritable person, resisting life itself. We get depressed.
It is worthwhile to take some time in allowing such impressions, even negative ones.
For example, the irritation. If it is allowed to be, to live and to take form, then it is also allowed to be part of the living stream of transformation. It can be startling how just an initial impression like irritation has the possibility to lead to a depth of release in an area such as anger (and our attitude or fear of anger), vitality and freedom. Irritation has the potential to reconnect us with our passion for being here, which is our passion for life.
Every impression appearing in what is happening here and now has the potential to lead us to a wider and more unconditional space beyond form. This is what The Book of Life is about.
The beauty is that we don’t need to “take” space for impressions, thoughts or feelings. It is enough just to allow them. Impressions appear in infinite space. We don’t need to grasp at them or resist them in aversion, all we need to do is to let them be, let them live, and to let them be part of The Book of Life.
Impressions don’t define us. They only signal our evolution, the process of our liberation, and the wondrous, beautiful becoming of life itself – a life which is here prior, during, after and irrespective of every impression on form.
In opening The Book of Life, both author and reader move with surrender, surrender to the living, palpable, changing rhythms that lead us into greater harmony.
For a writer, or anyone expressing their qualities, what would seem like an active movement of writing is actually a movement of receptivity. The quality of writing is a direct reflection of the writer’s ability to open, surrender and take in the impressions from beyond their own identity and personal attachments. In this, there is an opening of a channel, a surrender to form, and an allowance of the expression of the form through the writer.
In order to write, the author has to get out of the way of any ideas he or she might have about personal authority.
In a way, the writer is the just the first one, by a whisper, to open the book, (or to allow the writing) through the physical putting down of the words. Creation is a function of receptivity.
Inspiration, whether in the arts or sciences, is about a willingness to open to a source beyond the grasping and rejecting patterns of the individual mind. Expression is about a surrender to the form which emerges through you. But the words, the composition, the spirit, never belong exclusively to any one of individual and never will.
The subtle rhythms of the Book of Life, as reflected through a myriad unique impressions, are happening in the here and now. The opening to life is found in the present moment, where impressions are made and feelings are felt. They reflect a happening in time from a space beyond time. They form a resonance in space from a dimension where space as a concept disappears. This is a ubiquitous source where infinity and zero distance are one. It has infinite possibility as well as profound intimacy.
The opening to life is found here, within us and in the core of us, with no need to exclude anything. Life is here, not in another place, not in another person, and not in the authority of any text. It is here, in the familiar, intimate layers of form we carry, the pulsating responsiveness of that form, and in the transformation we sharing. It is here, in the allowance of that unspeakable, ubiquitous, infinite depth on which all impressions depend.
