Chaos and Ego IV: Reunion

I can ask, Why did God create ego if ego is that which makes us feel separate from God and from one another?  Why was the fall from Grace allowed? You know, the whole fallen angel story? And the whole Garden of Eden fork in the road. Why?

Is it that we wanted the experience of what we are not so we could better relish the experience of what we are? Separation for the joy of reunion?

Ah, but the mere act of dividing things into ego and True Self, good and bad, enlightenment and unconsciousness is itself work of the ego. Judging, categorizing, labelling. As Rick and Human Being pointed out after the last post, the only answer to that weasily voice who tries to sell me those stories about how to be safe in what he sees to be as a terrifying universe is…to…well, LOVE him.

Without darkness, there can be no light. All things are part of a perfect whole.

No need to ramble on more about this, this thing not worth pondering. But I would like to share with you a beautiful passage from Breakfast at the Victory: the Mysticism of Ordinary Experience by James P. Carse.  This chapter describes a time when he had to go out to the foot of the hill behind the house to check the spring, as the water had turned foul. Some friends had come to help him dig layers of rotting birch leaves out, but he was the one best suited to climb down into the spring for a closer look.

As I began cleaning slime off the walls with a broom, I noticed that the spring did not bubble up from the bottom as I had expected but oozed through the stones in a dozen or more places. All around me thin, vigorous rivulets of water were making clean streaks down the walls.

…I ran my fingers along the seams between the stones until I found the most vigorous flow of water. While its quantity was impressive, I was still a little disappointed. I think I wanted jets, hissing showers of stinging force, something showier than this. But I noticed when I jammed my finger into the outlet the flow immediately appeared somewhere else. This suggested a different kind of power. It was not a matter of pounds per square inch but of patient indifference to its path. Because it did not care where it went, it always had somewhere to go. We could have filled the well with earth and stone or capped it with concrete; we could have put an entire mountain on it and it would have continued to flow–somewhere. In fact, it had an entire mountain on it already.This is the deepest secret to its living water: it transforms every obstruction into a new expression of itself. It accepts as channel what is presented as barrier. The mountain does not stand in the way of the spring; it is the way of the spring.

Not in a long time have I heard it put so eloquently. It transforms every obstruction into a new expression of itself.

Every obstruction.