The Energy of Our Spark

Thanks so much for the photo and the passage.

After a weekend of strenuous hiking and sleeping outside, I feel restored in a way I haven't in many months.

To Kai's point: I think so much of the personal guilt and blame is precisely what happens when we are separate from our own personal joy and vitality and this fall into anxiety/depression. Our culture and our individual minds tend to harp on the (real or invented or distorted) problems in an attempt to solve them, but, as you've said before, "if you concentrate on your problems all you have is concentrated problems". And said differently, Light eclipses darkness in an instant. In this case, personal joy can tip the balance away from rumination. We lose the serendipitous joy as we age for many reasons, but finding that joy a necessary skill to develop or else we are left in the doldrums.

Following from that, I think a pitfall on the modern spiritual path (for me) is to ignore your own personalized light in hopes that you are "getting spirituality correct" objective truth or light, resulting in following a subtle, ambiguous, not-quite-articulated dogma. We escape institutional literalism but are left insecure because we haven't fully found our inner compass and so we go so far as to slowing or stopping the sinning but are stuck on "trying to be good" which is actually an obsessive and ruminatory counterpart in the guilt/blame cycle.

What we lose by trying so hard is the feeling of naturalness (flow, grace, listening, right action) and thus risk becoming a sort of non-denominational neutered lay-clergy whose spark is repressed because it is conflated/confused with egoic willfullness (lusts, greeds, self-insistences). We mustn't throw the baby of our personality out with the bathwater! We are all beautiful in our uniqueness and our spark was there from the beginning. The energy of our spark was our joy but without proper training the energy gets out of hand and becomes chaotic. The solution isn't to lower the energy (and thus feel guilt or ruminate), but rather to remember the golden core of the energy and pursue it's unique joy of us.

You've said it best: "Love God and do as you please"

What I think I took time to parse out was that the "you" means the you that is loving God, and the "as you please" means what makes you happy, not what satisfies the lower self.

It's not "love God and eat fast food every day or sleep around" it's "Love God and go hiking with your best friend" :)