Theos-Talk Archives (October 1994 Message tl00030)

This is by Eldon Tucker

Liesel:

       When you mention that "Most of us aren't to the
point yet where holiness just comes out of us
*naturally*" you got me thinking about what holiness is.
Following are some thoughts on it.

---- On Holiness

       When we hear of "holiness," there are a number of
negative associations. These come from our media,
and from a general misunderstanding of what holiness is.
Lacking an experience of it, or failing to properly
identify the holy experiences in our lives, we may fall
prey to the misinformation about what it is, and react
negatively to mention of it.
       The holy does not happen merely on Sunday mornings
when we visit some grand church, and listen
uncomfortably to someone preach at us to be good
according to the Bible, as we wait anxiously for the
closing hymn and stare at the stained glass windows. The
holy is not something that we experience by going on a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem or Tibet and visiting places
where special things are said to have happened. And the
holy is not something that is only seen upon visiting a
guru, something reserved for special people only,
something that is to be observed but not experienced.
       Spotless purity is not required. It is not
necessary to rigidly follow someone's arbitrary rules
for goodness. Say that we want to do something that is
wrong, according to our beliefs. If we are motivated to
be good out of a sense of guilt, or a sense of "carrot
and stick," we may find ourselves blocking out what we
think is the good, to not think of it so that we can
enjoy our guilty pleasure. We might say "I'd don't want
to think of that good stuff right now, it'll spoil my
fun."
       The *real* spiritual, and the holy does not have to
be blocked out, even when we do things that may seem
wrong at the time. When we feel that we have to block
out our sense of the good for a while, in order to enjoy
some activity, we're blocking out *an artificial mental
construct.* The genuine, holy spiritual does not "spoil"
anything that we do. It contains a sense of compassion,
patience, and understanding that accepts the good and
the bad in us.
       With holiness, we have a feeling of the sacred, a
specialness, a natural excitement regarding life that is
alike that had by a newborn babe. Again, picture the
feeling of being in love: there is a sense of
anticipation regarding the next time that we meet our
beloved. We perceive the inner divinity as a tangible
presence, and not merely an intellectual abstraction.
       The impurity, dross, imperfection, and mistake-
making is all part of the nature of life, and not a
barrier to this presence. We have a sense of the wonder
and magic of our teenage years, a great time of
exploration. This feeling is now from inner exploration.
We have an inner teacher to learn from, a living
presence that is experienced as part of our personal
lives. This teacher is a source of learning, and it has
come from an established *inner relationship*--not from
having an external membership in any particular church,
lodge, or theosophical society.
       The holy is a sense of the spiritual-divine within
ourselves. It is totally unrelated to astral projection,
psychical powers, or the occult. It represents the
awakening of an inner faculty of consciousness, and not
extended powers of sensory perception nor extended
control over the forces of nature.
       The divine represents our highest nature. We feel a
sense of it being missing from life. This leads to a
desire to return to a feeling of wholeness, of
completion, which arises from a reunion with that divine
nature. The passionate feeling of needing this quality
back in our lives manifests itself as devotion, as
Bakti, as worship, as an intense feeling of longing for
the return to the pure, unconditioned perfection that we
left behind ages ago.
       We are not denied this perfection, though, even
when alive and manifest here on this sad, imperfect,
physical world of limitation and suffering. This
perfection comes from adding the divine to our lives. It
is not necessary to subtract away the entire manifest,
imperfect, outer part of ourselves, the ray from the
Monad, in order to enjoy our essential nature, in order
to dwell again in the divine. We can achieve the same by
*addition,* by allowing a clear sense of the quality and
type of consciousness that the Monad has, the divine or
holy consciousness, to participate as an integral part
of life.
       It is possible to achieve wholeness in life, as
well as wholeness in "absolute death" or nirvana. The
periodic nature of manifestation and withdrawal into the
silence, of Manvantara and Pralaya, of life and death,
is ultimately illusory. There is an ultimate sense of
perfection that transcends both states, an underlying
sense of completeness that does not depend upon us being
out of life, upon us not-existing, in order to be
experienced. It is the truly divine, the naturally holy,
and it *is a part of life.* It is only our choice to
exclude it by our mental constructs, by false but
sincere beliefs, that keeps us from enjoying it.