The Secrets of the Universe Are In You, As You: Guest Post by Rosalind Atkinson
Founder's note: I met Rosalind many years ago, at a gathering of yoga teachers on the California coast. We were engaged in many days of conversations and every time she spoke, I was more impressed. One day, she gave a talk on the mystic poet William Blake, and I was hooked on her mind and spirit. Last month, she co-authored a wonderful book addressing inherited attitudes that would separate the "holy" and the "human" parts of us- segregate "god" and "sex" as if they weren't the same thing. It was written with Mark Whitwell, a long-time scholar of ancient traditions. What they are talking about in the book is so in line with our thinking, that we are sharing a guest post from this lovely book.- Christine
The Secrets of the Universe are In You, As You
In our natural state, humans have a wonderful circumstance. We have these upright, soft bodies with the ability to feel deeply, especially through the frontal line. We have a very evolved nervous system and spine that culminates in a massive brain core. It is capable of many delicious functions, including self-expression, art, music, logic, feeling, sex, and creative pleasures of all kinds. With our soft bodies and huge brain cores, we can feel and enjoy our reality. We empower each other. The whole body is a feeling mechanism built entirely for relationship, especially intimate sexual union.
But relationship is not something that we have to search for. Rather, we enter into this world already and always in relationship, utterly connected to and made up of the nurturing flow of life, in union with each other and all tangible and intangible aspects of the cosmos. In the close observations of science, we see the poles of negative and positive energy functioning at the atomic level, attracted and attached to one another in precise form. In our most expansive view, we see the grand orchestration of suns and planets moving in the same attraction of opposite poles holding one another in the mystery patterns of known and unknown stars. An intelligence, function, and beauty is operating in the world we know that is beyond comprehension. That same intelligence is also present in our human life in each beautiful person, in heartbeat and in breath. This attraction of opposites, the yin-yang equation of life, is how we all got here. It continues to move as the absolute power of life that sustains us all and renews and nourishes us. This is the nurturing flow of the universe. We can completely trust and participate in it. We already are it!
We are alive in this vast process, so we may as well relax. Our present body and all its relatedness is the current expression of that process. We do not have to find anything. We do not have to go crazy trying to realize it or get enlightened. Once you admit that you are the power of the cosmos, you don’t need to re-realize it; you simply understand it. We don’t need to worry about forgetting it or whether we’re feeling it all the time. Relationship does not have to be achieved, it just is. This is not poetry or spiritual language. It is simply the fact of our given situation, a description of the ecologies of Mother Nature. Ecology is relationship. There are no steps to be taken. We can move through life understanding that it’s about participation in the given reality, not an arduous project of self-improvement. We do not have to struggle to attain a relationship with nature, life, or God, relate in a particular way, or achieve any kind of ‘higher’ or better state, as if we are somehow not in relatedness already!
Life is only about relationship. Only. The mind is for relationship only. It is not made to look for higher states or to constantly improve upon itself or the body. These thought structures have been put into our mind by centuries of life-denying philosophy that said our reality was not enough and we must deny it in the search for higher states. We must leave our families, stop having sex, and get to the monastery or nunnery as fast as possible. For centuries, sex and the body have been denied and seen as an obstruction to religious or spiritual life—something less than sacred. But sex is how the force of creation functions here on earth, the sacred portal through which each one of us enters this world. Flowers are the sex of plants; the sounds of animals are the sex of nature. Here in the natural movement of life there is peace, wisdom, and fullness. Not in dissociation from life. We are in a position now to discard the life-denying thought structures that told us women were less, sex was less, the earth was less, and the body was less.
empower yourself
This cultural habit of misdirecting attention away from the wonder of embodied life and towards the abstract and intangible has made a mess of our lives, because it has led everyone to believe that the embodied and the earthly is less than scared, and treat it as such. Even if we are not from a religious family, this psychology has gone into us, leaving us always searching for the better self, the better life, and obliterating our ability to notice that we are already a part of the divine unfolding of nature. Life is to be in our own bodies, with the head/mind returned to its beautiful place as a function of the heart, not bullying the body in the search for future possibilities.
The first human right is to be intimate with our own life: the power of this universe that is arising as the whole body in pristine intrinsic harmony with the whole cosmos. Through intimacy with the profundity of our tangible reality, our system throws out the thought structures that distract us from the given situation. When we are intimate with life as it currently stands, in all the joy and pain that we hold, thought structures of a future reality are felt to be no longer relevant and fall away. We need only to sweep our bodies with breath or enter honest sexual embrace to have a direct experience of our wholeness and perfection, already completely established in us, as us.
The thought structures of lack that have been imposed on us have gone in deeply, and so we do often need some remedial practices of conscious moving and breathing to reestablish ourselves in this reality. As we reconnect with our bodies, we realize they are the power of the cosmos already and therefore we don’t have to perpetually work on ourselves to become ‘something’ as if we are not already something. You, the reader, are already something truly extraordinary. We stop insulting nature by assuming she is not doing a good enough job already in our own case.
The life current arises from the heart and now flows through the spine; it is in every cell of the body. We don’t have to do anything about that. It is made abundantly available all the time. You have been graced to have received a human birth. What are the chances of that? You are unfolding in the perfect radiance of life, just like every plant is grace unfolding in the perfect radiance of life. We are not separate from nature. We are nature. And nothing is required: no meditating, no stillness of mind, no philosophy, no places to get to, not beyond, not higher, not deeper. That is all distracting us from the fact that life is utterly given and comes perfectly delivered. You don’t even need to read these sentences; it is all already true of you. The truth of life is already established. Everything worth knowing is known already by the intelligence of the whole body. Sure, you might like to learn Chinese or how to play the guitar like Jimi Hendrix, that’s okay. But no necessity. This living organism has its own perfection, along with everything else in nature. Happiness arises as we relax into the reality of our natural condition. The secrets of the universe are already in us as us. Stop looking, start living, start participating in the given reality as it is. Your own sacred form is already established. No one can give it to you, and no one can take it away. You are here to enjoy yourself and abide in this great mystery that we are.
****
Related Articles
