reverence

This post is an expanded version of a comment I made on Serenity’s blog, on a post called Reverence. It is an addition to the Art of Giving series on this blog.

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Hopefully we can each look in our lives and find examples of reverence, some deeper and others less profound. How do we develop deeper reverence? How does our deepest reverence manifest? In what way(s) should we be living deeper reverence?

Years ago my teacher said to a group of us (and he has continued to say this over the years, but fairly infrequently because most people dislike hearing it and find ways within themselves to be offended by it), “If you want to develop a deeper relationship to the Source, you need to have a practical way of doing that.” This makes sense and is not the part that is offensive.

He went on to explain that the way we do this is by looking for the thing or person in our life who is most representative of Source, and we learn to serve that thing or person. This is the area that people start becoming offended by. We act concerned that we are giving away our power, etc.

Unacknowledged selfishness lies at the root of our attitude: we don’t want to give, we want to get. People who consider themselves to not be selfish, which is all of us, are very much about “what’s in it for me. It is through the act of service, and through learning how to unconditionally serve, that our reverence grows, and more importantly, our relationship to Source grows.

One way to develop reverence is by respectful thinking, mentally and emotionally positioning ourselves to be more considerate. But that doesn’t mean much unless we put it into action. Unfortunately we are so selfish that we are unwilling to give ourselves in a way that our life becomes focused on unconditional service. We prefer receiving over giving… gimme, gimme, gimme.

To develop the deepest reverence and the ability to be unconditional givers, we need to have someone give to us unconditionally first. It is only after endless repetitions of receiving that we begin to allow a crack in our facade of selfishness, a crack that allows us to begin at least some modest giving of our own.

The best place to learn deepest reverence and Giving is from an unconditional Giver. We can see this in spiritual traditions where we love the Giver because the Giver first loved us. But we become squeamish with this, because an unconditional Giver exposes our selfishness. At every opportunity, we quickly line up before God with our hands out and our long wish lists hidden behind our backs. “I’m not selfish!” we exclaim with superiority, as we transfer our list to the other hand.

Look into your life at what it is that is giving you the deepest, most unconditional giving, and learn to serve that. Sensei says, “If you want to serve the Ideal, you must first learn to serve the Ideal.”

This does not mean giving up our individuality or unthinkingly following someone or something. What it does mean, however, is that as we learn from a deeper source of Giving how to give, we begin to give up our deeply rooted selfishness so that true and deeper Giving can come through.

Deeper reverence is the action of putting respect and value on something greater than we are, on something that deserves our consideration. It is bowing before that, but more importantly, reverence is the act of learning to put our respect into action, learning to serve the Ideal in the way the Ideal serves us: unconditionally.

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Once there were two brothers. The older brother had inherited his father’s estate. He was wealthy and entertained generously. Food and drink were in abundance, and as food was passed around the table sometimes a chunk of meat or ladle of rice would fall on the floor, to be quickly devoured by the dogs. The older brother gave lavishly to his church and commanded respect in his community.

The younger brother had long ago fallen on hard times. Clothing, even food, was sparse. A ladle of rice was valuable, and each night he led his family in a humble prayer of thanks. Each spoonful of food was viewed with satisfaction, and each bite was savored. His family, though modest in worldly wealth, was gentle and kind, always appreciative of the smallest kindness.

One brother commanded respect and bought reverence, and the other brother gave respect and served reverence.

Communication and the Art of Giving

Take a jump over to Transforming Communication where James Souttar applies the concepts and principles of The Art of Giving to the process of communication, discussed in his post Communication and Giving.

We have been discussing these principles here for the last month or so. The best way to learn deeper principles is to both study them and to also apply them to our everyday life situations. The principles discussed on this site are universal principles that have enormous power to transform lives and life. The more ways we find to apply and integrate principles, the quicker we learn and the deeper and more comprehensively we can become aligned to their power. Application is the key.

The Art of Giving Series

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James Souttar is a communications consultant and designer based in Great Britain. For over twenty years he has worked with organisations ranging from government departments to entrepreneurial start-ups, banks to charities, universities to trades unions, integrating new thinking from the sciences as well as ideas from traditional psychologies.

lessons on giving back to the source

Following my last post. I had a series of lessons with my teacher. There are several things I have harvested out of those lessons, including:

- when we return a portion of the appreciated value to the source, the loop keeps running, but more importantly it has an opportunity to grow in value;

- it is wise to find and give back to a source that can return compound value, because an accelerated effect can occur;

- having someone truly appreciate your value, and do that over and over and over, can become very uncomfortable, because we are not used to unconditional giving; unconditional giving eventually forces us to confront our selfishness, biases and insecurities;

- there is an aspect of going back to the source that can give us a feeling of admonishment when we approach and interact with the source, but that is because of our biases and our position of not being centered in the moment.

This post began as a draft post, which I asked my teacher to review. Following his review, there were several other lessons that took place before I finally felt ready to make a final pass at the post.

Note: This is a publicly posted lesson between student and teacher, a continuation of lessons on a series called The Art of Giving.

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About a week ago, Gretchen and I were with Sensei for a few hours. We had just left a community meeting, in which a lot of negativity was being thrown about. Negativity has powerful effects on our thinking, on how we interact with each other and with our problems, and on our personal growth. It can also distort and affect the messages and instructions from a teacher, because it grounds out the circuit of conductivity by introducing a greater amount of resistance due to the prominence we give to our personal biases. We can see this in our lives very easily, for example, when one negative person can often ground out an entire group of people.

During the lesson, we were talking about how using the Principles of Giving in that negative meeting had brought about improved results. As our lesson continued, Sensei kept building the source value so that I could better understand how gratitude should be working. There were many other elements to that lesson, and I came out of it with a determination to write a post. This time, however, after I wrote my draft post I asked my teacher to review it.

When his written comments came back, there were some things I saw as valuable, there were also some inner reactions I had, and there were some other things that weren’t apparent. Those unapparent things came out in further discussions and also when a few nights later we discussed the same concepts with a group of Great River Jiu Jitsu students following an evening marital arts class. The more often we met or talked, the deeper the insights I received into how to effectively return a portion of the appreciated value back to the source.

This brings out an important point: we tend to read or hear deeper lessons and go, “Okay, I get it.” I do this too often. But the fact is we don’t get it, because we are typically in too big a hurry to show that we are ‘getting it’, or we are too caught up in our biases to realize there is something beyond our biases.

In the first instance, we like to demonstrate all we know, or we enjoy talking about our understandings on the topic, instead of shutting up and listening. Even when we shut up and listen, and actually harvest a piece of deeper value, we sometimes make that piece the quintessential point. That can often be a good thing, but many times we walk away with our new piece of information, never realizing that the teacher had a far deeper point for us to obtain. Fortunately, I have a teacher who understands this, and he graciously keeps plugging away, giving students ample opportunities to learn.

In the case of our biases, we can get the whole ‘deer in the headlights’ look when we are brought to a certain tripping point. We can too easily get stuck in our conditioned behavior, sometimes to the point where everyone else can see an obvious thing about us, but viewed through the constant lenses of our biases nothing appears abnormal whatsoever. But that is not always the case. There are times when we are able to ovecome our biases and transcend our normal lives as we center and immerse ourselves inside the field of superconductivity. That’s when things can really sizzle.