Thoughts
Wonder is the absence of any thoughts about the other.
Awe is the presence of ever new thoughts about the other.
Reverence is feeling: deep, profound, vulnerable, sacred feeling for the other.
Our souls are filled with perceptions, thoughts, feelings and intentions. Loving moves from perception which is the gift of wonder to the thoughts of awe and into the pure feeling of reverence. Oh, to imagine your soul filled with reverence for all others. Can you imagine the sense of grace and freedom if you revered all others, all things, everything that is not self. This feeling of universal reverence then makes all things self! The feeling of reverence in honoring otherness dissolves otherness - a spiritual paradox.
Reverence is not an automatic feeling response. It is intentional. We will ourselves to revere. Otherwise reverence is unconscious, based on easy sympathy, not on the acute and lasting conscious and awake awareness of the other.
We revere in awareness of difference and in presence of antipathy. Even what we don’t easily like in the other, we honor. This is very challenging when we are looking at feeling. Feeling tends to be dreamy, semi-conscious. The will in reverence brings feeling to the same level of wakefulness we find in thinking. To revere we must wake up our feeling life. When our feelings wake up, they are liberated from patterns of sympathy and antipathy.
Reverence brings us close to the other. With awe we maintain a distance. With reverence we are intimate without confining or manipulating gesture.
With wonder and awe, we find light. Reverence stimulates warmth. There is nothing cool about reverence. Honor embraces warmly. The cooling presence of dread living in awe, evolves into true warming of our whole being and the being of the other in reverence.
I find there are two moments of reverence that are particularly touching: when we tenderly witness the other waking up and when we witness the other falling asleep. This can be the literal sleeping and waking moments, or we can see this in other moments. We revere birth and death. We revere the calming of agitation. We revere the stimulation of enthusiasm. We revere the completion of a deed. We revere the initiation of a new deed. We revere the loss of a familiar perspective. We revere the discovery of a new perspective. And so forth.
To revere is the third intention of love in our souls. It is pure feeling. Let’s look at this from the receiving perspective.
You are revered. What does that do to your sense of self? Does it change anything?
To me when I am revered: I discover a freedom to express my truth. I feel my feelings are beautiful in a moral sense. I wake up to the commitment to act in ways that are good and noble. My heart sings. I feel I can and do bless the universe.
1
Tonight, experience revering and being revered.
2
Feel reverence for and from the whole world. Feel reverence for and from every rock, plant and animal. Feel reverence for and from every other human being that ever was and ever will be. Feel reverence for every birth and every death. Feel reverence for every cell in your body.
3
Revere all that your resist connecting with.
When you revere all is forgiven. When you revere your feeling life finds new forces of joy.
Revere. Rejoice.
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This post brings a warmth to my chest and a strength to my bones. Thank You and Blessings XXX
ReplyDeleteDear Lynn,
ReplyDeleteThank you for these innerly nourishing and deepening thoughts and exercises. During these Holy Nights I have looked forward to and enjoyed reading and contemplating the theme before going to bed.
Tonight as I contemplate wonder, awe and reverence, I am listening to the weather here in the southern hemisphere summer which at present is wild, windy and wet! A storm is passing over our small islands which are quite alone in the vast Pacific Ocean.
I am often filled with wonder and awe and yet until tonight I didn't see that there is a progression through these states and that they can lead to reverence. This is such an insight for me. I think at times I let awe keep me separate from others and often felt quite cool and distant inside which distressed me greatly. Now I understand a little of why that might be - without realising it I wasn't developing my feelings of reverence and hence I felt distant from what I was in awe of. It all makes so much sense now!
Thank you for your thoughts and musings. Wishing you blessed days and nights.
This thought reminds me of the Sanskrit salutation, Namaste. It is translated as some variation of "The divinity or light within me honors the light within you. We are One." In its purest form it is offerd to all who we encounter, friend or stranger or adversary. It requires that we witness the other as soul first, regardless of how that being might think or find expression in life. For our friends and those who think and act like us this comes easy. The transformative gift is to inhabit the presence and the space to offer this reverence to
ReplyDeletethose differ from us in thinking, who act in ways that we might deem wrong or misguided. WOW, what presence it takes to enter the space of this "different" other in the state of awe that allows reverence to arise. How do we hold this soul perspective even as we work in the world for what we see as goodness, justice, peace and lovingkindness, sometimes in the face of opposition. Amazing questons, amazing possibilities for the awake soul, amazing possibilities for healing on many levels..... Thanks Lynn, as always you inspire me, you challenge me and cause me to question......