There is a simplicity about resting in spirit, it has a satisfying quality about it, in that it needs no embellishment and nothing taken away.
A desire-less state. Content in its own awareness.
Perhaps, also, it is a death-less state? For death only arises as a natural conclusion to the birth of a desire.
And so, resting in spirit can seem to be the opposite of human living. And desire can appear to be an un-welcome activity, and something to be suppressed or destroyed in the interests of being more spiritual.
This negative attitude to desire has some value as unbridled desire is not a pretty sight, but it is also a limited one, as it fails to acknowledge desire’s role in an ever growing consciousness.
Resting in spirit is more akin to being at the heart of the wheel of living, at the centre of the storm of desires which drive the ever unfolding growth of consciousness. And, as such, resting in spirit has a dynamic quality to it, a dynamic stillness that can be characterised by moving meditation activities, such as Tai Chi. Like a flow we embrace as a surfer riding a wave. Symbolically we can see this represented in the Ying-Yang diagram: with the active element embedded in the passive, and visa-versa.
Consciously resting in spirit gives us a breather, a pause which allows us to observe and evaluate our current state of being. It is not meant to be an escape or a solution or a superior state.
Resting in spirit is a temporary pause, before we dive once again into the second-by-second arising of multiple desire cycles, that weave the rich fabric of our human life. This pause also allows us to experience ourselves as the co-creators of our human drama.
And this is why, learning just to sit in pure stillness during meditation is so important to us: simply being without expectation; without judgement as to how we’re doing; without the craving to understand or to experience something else; without trying to modify whatever is arising.
There is a simplicity about resting in spirit.
© David R. Durham
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