HOW I ATTAINED THE PRESENCE OF GOD AFTER FIVE YEARS OF CLIMBING PRAYER MOUNTAIN
How to use suffering and traumatic change to awaken to our higher purpose and attain active communion with the Divine.
This is THE WEEKEND EDITION of THE DAWNING LIGHT # 1111
Our PREMIUM version of our “Daily Journal of Transformational Writing”
SPIRITUAL SOUP KITCHEN Section # 194 Stories lovingly written by Chinmayan about embracing and using everything happening in your daily life…your relationships, work, challenges, changes and rewards as vital aspects of your spiritual training and destined dharma
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HOW I ATTAINED THE PRESENCE OF GOD AFTER FIVE YEARS OF CLIMBING PRAYER MOUNTAIN:
How to use suffering and traumatic change to awaken to our higher purpose and attain active communion with God.
Tonight I am enjoying the tranquil serenity of the coolness of a perfect mid summer evening.
The evening is flowing along in the peaceful aftermath of a major heat wave that has been roasting our mountain home area with 100 degree plus temperatures for the past few days.
I am at my big desk in the back of our mediation hall, tuning myself to slow down and be just right here now so that I can see and feel the lush beauty which lives and breathes all around me.
After passing through another day of being in a fiery furnace anytime we left the cool comfort of this vast Meditation Center building, the cool night air is pleasurable and comforting.
I have been using every night to mount a sustained major prayer effort which is creating waves of clarity and higher consciousness.
There is a sense of expectation in the air, as if I am on the edge of a great revelation, awakening or shift which will lead us directly into the new life we both long for and know is being born right now.
I have been asking God to bring this new life into full flower and to not allow me to fail in accomplishing the work of service and divine mission I was born to do.
The Lord knows that in my true heart all I have ever wanted to be is a servant of the divine, helping to relieve the suffering in this world anyway that I can.
I am singing bhajans as I write, for this is how I tune the instruments of my mind, heart and spirit up into higher and finer states of consciousness in which active God communion is achieved.
All of the many thousands of nights across many years of my life spent crying out to attain the sweet living presence of the Lord, and then listening to the gentle loving voice of the inner guidance has born the fruit of deeper and deeper divine relationship and inner peace.
This is only possible because the divine loves each of us unconditionally and is actively helping everyone who calls for help on their path of awakening.
Anyone can attain the living presence of God through prayer, meditation and spiritual practices through sustained effort and faith.
One of the most beautiful things that I have learned through the rough gauntlet which has been my life, is that anyone who sincerely longs for and seeks communion with the living presence of God can certainly attain it within this lifetime.
And that the path is actually very simple if we learn how to consciously use our longing and our Love for the divine as powerful forces to make the journey to freedom.
God is immanent with us all the time, but due to our being focused on outer things and swept away by our negative thoughts and emotions, we are just not able to recognize this great truth.
The moment we are able to calm and still our minds…and then consciously choose to come into the present moment while focusing on the divine, we will begin to feel the edges of this immanence.
The peace that “passes all understanding” and a direct knowing and feeling of ultimate safety
When we attain the presence of God, there is a peace that passes all understanding, a direct knowing and feeling of ultimate safety and sanctuary which reorients our minds.
We feel known for who we really are and loved and totally cared for.
We realize then that we have been longing for and missing this essential ingredient of active God contact everyday since we were born…that it is actually is the most important foundation for a productive and happy life.
To achieve this state of what I call AGC, Active God Contact we need to stop trying to get rid of our suffering with external coping mechanisms (which offer only temporary relief at best)…but to actually use our suffering as the motivation to pray through, and work our inner process through our spiritual practices to become free of all suffering AND the sources of suffering.
In other words, to use our suffering to drive us back to God.
MAKING YOUR SUFFERING USEFUL ON YOUR PATH TO FREEDOM
“Your suffering will be either useful or useless,
Depending upon how you respond to it.
You can either be motivated to become very serious
About progressing on your spiritual path,
The path to freedom from all suffering
And developing real compassion for the suffering
Of all beings…
Or you can close down and harden your heart,
And not learn anything, hoping it will pass…
Which will only result in more and more suffering
in the future in an endless inescapable cycle.”
—Kalu Rinpoche
How I learned these principles while going through periods of great suffering
I learned these principles through going through several periods of overwhelming and persistent great suffering, heartbreak and despair.
I discovered that no one, no thing or any situation on earth could possibly help me release myself from the overwhelming and devastating suffering which was burning out of control through my heart and soul.
This level of suffering, which raged intensely over a long period of time, made me highly motivated to find release from it.
I am certain that I would have died from the unrelenting pain if I had not used it in a way that eventually did lead to major breakthroughs, empowerment’s and developing higher abilities.
I used the suffering to drive me to focus on one single thing…attaining the presence of God at all costs.
For five years, every evening after work, I would drive out of the city and into the hills to the base of a mountain, which had a rough trail leading up through the trees, rocks and brush on the westward facing slope.
There, as the sun gradually sank into the sea far below, I would climb this trail, praying and calling on the divine until reaching a high ledge.
This ledge was just big enough to sit on and faced west, with a commanding view of the ocean far below. I had made my asana (one’s personal seat for spiritual practice) by placing a large flat rock in place to be my meditation cushion.
At the end of the daily climb up the mountain, I would sit here as as the sun was setting in spectacular display, in intensely focused prayer through the first hours of the night.
As I prayed, and meditated and chanted my mantra songs, my soul cried out to the Lord to bless me with release from my overwhelming suffering through raising my consciousness and opening my heart to experience attaining refuge in the the living Presence of God.
After five years on the mountain, I had the breakthrough I longed and prayed for.
Finally, after five years of nights on the mountain, I had the breakthrough that I longed and prayed for.
I suddenly felt “the peace which passes all understanding” come over me as I was lifted up into higher and higher states of conscious communion with God.
In a moment, all the years of suffering and pain dissolved in direct, personal divine connection.
I understood that God is ever with us, calling us to awaken to who we really are as God’s beloved children…that God loves each one of us personally and unconditionally…that God has never abandoned us, but that it is us who got lost in the lure and maya of the world so much that we forgot our vital connection and communication that we so desperately need.
I know that it is eternally true that “for every step we take towards God, God takes a hundred steps towards us…”
I am grateful now for all the periods of tortuous travail which pushed me into seeking and finding deeper relationship with the divine. As painful and terrifying and unwanted as they were, I would not have gained the greatest blessings, grace and faith without the incessant need to become free.
I now know with absolute certainty that, if I take the time and make the effort to tune up into conscious communion with the divine through prayer, meditation and kirtan that God will respond to the deep yearning of my heart and always lift me up into the living loving Presence of my sweet Lord.
Calligraphy by Chinmayan
A HEART MELTING AND BEAUTIFUL LOVE SONG TO GOD FOR YOU!
MYGOD IS REAL by Krishna Das, with music and back up vocals by Baird Hersey & Prana
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“Your greatest service to humanity is to attain your own Self Realization!” Ramana Maharshi
“When you change the way you think about things, and the things you think about change”
—Wayne Dyer
“I see my life as an unfolding set of opportunities to awaken.” —Ram Das
“When God is the center and focus of my life, everything else falls into it’s rightful place.”
—Chinmayan
New ideas and insights for this heathen