Inner Work

For the week of: June 14, 2004

Emptying Yourself

Emptying, surrendering, and letting go. All three are facets of a unique act of will, an act essential to our path. If God’s will penetrates every corner of the universe, every point of spacetime, and if humans are endowed at birth as a particle of God’s free and independent will, and if we insist on our personal independence, fearing a loss of identity in rejoining the Great Whole, then we remain divorced from God.

But we have nothing to fear. Our independence is both true and an illusion: it depends on the level. In our ordinary world we are indeed individual, independent actors. In the higher worlds we paradoxically become both more individual and more united with each other and with the Whole. In emptying ourselves, we give up the illusion of complete independence and we open to the reality of having deep roots that connect us with the Whole.

Meditation and prayer present excellent opportunities for the practice of emptying. We empty ourselves of believing that all the thoughts and self-centered emotions coursing through us are who we are, or even represent who we are. We let go of our personality and all that drives it. We leave aside our impatient ambitions, our insistent demands, our stories and dramas. We let go of all our doing and acting, and enter into the peace of non-doing. At least temporarily, we give up our small self to taste the Great Self that unites us. And then we return, not as our fears would have it a spineless blob, but rather in renewed contact with the source of clarity and wisdom that informs our actions in this world of space and time.

For this week, practice emptying yourself, utterly and completely.

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