Sarah’s blog – Week 7, 1st March 2016
As always, it was nice to see the faces at the development circle. I was getting to know a few people and hear their stories. We were all on our very distinct spiritual paths, yet we could now all come and sit in the silence together comfortably. Energetic chemistry was arising. And yet, this week, I sensed an emptiness in myself. Doreen, who was due to lead the circle, had been ill with a cold, so we had the lovely Anne, who led us calmly and quietly into the meditation. I couldn’t tell you what happened after that, I just went deep into silence, time no longer existed and there was nothing. Zero point.
‘Nothing’ is something we fear. We always want ‘something’, even in our spiritual experiences. And yet in many spiritual traditions, for example in Buddhism, they talk about the void, before creation, as that which we all are. It’s another way of saying we are ultimately not a ‘thing’, or a body, but spirit. But most of us fear this void. In fact to say you feel ‘empty’ is to say something is wrong, or it is often understood that way. People rush around trying to fill this strange hole they secretly feel. Some even assume they are depressed or that they are not like other people. And yet I think many a person has quietly sensed this emptiness within. It hadn’t taken the development circle for me to realise this but it had certainly deepened my ability to sink into it, and sense my own spirit.
In fact, I was realising you had to purposely go into the emptiness, sit with it, because it was the way ‘in’. It was a doorway, a portal to another dimension, but most of us were too busy thinking and fidgeting to ever cross its threshold. To be empty was to expand your energetic body, until you started to dissolve into the spiritual frequency, like the mesmeric images of the Zen masters and their rainbow bodies, who seemed to be disappearing, until they were practically ‘no thing’, just a dazzle of light and colour. In fact, Gordon had repeatedly told us that you also had to be empty ‘to receive’ from spirit, otherwise there was no space for it to come in, or get a word in edgeways for that matter.
And so I felt so calm and light after the circle this week. The joys of a blank mind. There was a gentle song of spring in the air (if not in the temperature!) and the blossom tree by the church was beyond beautiful, a haze of pink.
“Be the empty cup that receives”, I thought to myself. And then thought disappeared…