COMMITMENT
“You will always have highs and lows in life, and you will have them in your spiritual life. Don’t think you will always be riding the crest of the wave. When you do that, spiritual life is easy. But when you are down in a valley and you think the big wave is coming down to crush you, that’s when you have to stand up and look at your commitment and remind yourself. Put yourself into the Light. Bring Light into your life and into your dark corners of selfishness and self-importance. What you are committing yourself to is eternal life. The choice to do that is yours.” (Swami Sivananda Radha, Time to be Holy)
As with most mornings, I started today’s centering practice outside in our pai pai, just before sunrise. The palm trees across from me cut dark silhouettes against the weak early light. Now, only an hour later, I note the greening of my surroundings; everything taking on its usual colour and vibrancy as my mind takes on a hopeful approach to the day. I take the scene unfolding in front of me and explore its symbolic meanings. I move away from the black and white thinking with which I sometimes wake into a more open and receptive mental space. Today I reflect on how appearances shift with the presence or absence of light, and what that suggests about my own positive or negative states of mind. What would it mean to shine the light of insight and understanding on issues and problems? What part does intuition play in my approach to people and situations? It is this line of thinking that brings to mind Swami Radha’s comments in her chapter on Commitment: “Bring Light into your dark corners of selfishness and self importance. What you are committing yourself to is eternal life.”
Am I?
Swami Radha’s teachings intentionally raise as many questions as answers. If not more. It’s also ironic that I have, in reading Time to be Holy, encountered the metaphor of big waves two weeks in a row, especially since we’ve been having bigger than usual waves here in Hawaïi. Is it possible to be figuratively crushed by the weight of too many opinions? Too much talk about what is right and what is not?
Later this morning, as I swam lengths to mobilize my stiff hips, I reflected on how lucky I am to have access to a pool at a time when walking is challenging. (A new hip is in my future). I thought of the now-homeless people in Maui. Of the families suffering in Ukraine, and the Middle East. Sadness for all the things I cannot change slowed my stroke to a snail’s pace, (or whichever aquatic creature hardly moves — perhaps a sea cucumber!) as other questions presented themselves:
“How does my sadness serve the world? How do depression or discouragement, regarding what I see and read, help anybody?”
The answer came immediately: “They do not serve. Not at all.” Nor does “playing it small”.
As Marianne Williamson (now running for president of the US) writes in A Return to Love. “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.”
Williamson’s reference to it being our light, not our darkness that frightens us, stimulates a shift in perspective once again. Rather than wallow in survivor guilt, in worry for the bleak state of the world, another possibility is open to me. I can light my surroundings with an example of gratitude and generosity. Of patience and tolerance, compassion and positivity. I can emanate joy and happiness. Might I, as Paramahansa Yogananda writes: “take only the good from my life experiences, and preserve only the good in my memory”?
And, by thus shining my light, am I making a commitment to eternal life?
Are you?