Learning to Hold the Sky

Awareness and Transformation

Here we are, you and I. Struggling to hold each other, just for a moment, before the glistening wings of darkness take us. How we struggle. Why do we fail?

If you tell me to be more loving, I will be angry and guilty. And in my anger I will be even less capable of love.

If you show me how to be more loving, I will feel inferior, ashamed, and in my hurt I will be even less likely to love.

If you stop being loving, in retaliation, then an eye for an eye has caused us both to go blind.

We are at an impasse. Sometimes we call this impasse a breakup, an ending, a change. But this impasse does not just define our relationships and careers. It defines the failing state of our societies, too.

The mountains of anger and shame seem impassable. Dark and forbidding. How are we to cross them?

I cannot tell you, show you, or pressure you to be more loving. I cannot change you. All this is the opposite of love to begin with, isn’t it? Beginning from a place of force will only produce guilt, shame, fear, anxiety. We have cut down love at the root and now we ask why it won’t grow.

Love is awareness. If I see you purely, without any confusion, distraction, idealisation, as you truly are, I accept you, embrace you, hold you. Now there is love.

But I cannot see you clearly until I can see me. Maybe I cannot see myself as I truly am. Maybe it hurts too much. Maybe, like many people, I want to tear my broken wings off, instead of letting them be held. Because being broken while being held is the truest and most beautiful pain of all. The ache of healing.

I must go inside. And learn an awareness of awareness. I must see myself seeing myself. As I see how I see myself, then maybe I can see myself condemning, tearing at, hating, forcing myself. Then maybe I see that love is not in me yet. Who can I hold this way?

What I do to myself I do to the world.

An awareness of awareness is seeing the truth of this law of action, which is karma. The western mind sees it backwards: what I do to myself the world will do to me. It will. But only because I have been doing it to myself all along. Now I have set the stage, defined the frequency.

If I give love, I can receive love. If I give anger, I can only receive anger. There’s no need for magic here. It’s a simple reality of psychological attunement. What you can hold.

That is what is meant by awareness of awareness. Not just telling the world what you think, imagine, wish, hope you are giving. But really seeing what you are giving and receiving, and understanding why, how they are the same thing. Because that is what you can hold.

Now you see that receiving precedes giving. The whole sky is the seed. The whole ocean is in the smallest teardrop. What is received is already contained in what is given. It is what you can hold.

Now you know the greatest and humblest truth of love. It is letting go of clinging to the world, so you can begin holding the sky.

Umair

Philadelphia

September 2016