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This issue resumes selections from the new
book Relentless Love, by Edwin Carl Smith.
http://sentientpublications.com/catalog/relentless_love.php
© Copyright Edwin Carl Smith, 2003
Excerpts From
Relentless Love
The Power of A Transformative Life
About the Book
This book is about personal and global transformation. It is therefore
mythic in scope and language You can become aware of, and so
overcome, the mythic archetypes of thought, feeling, and
experience that create your identity and organize your life by
connecting the ideas in this book to personal life experiences.
Otherwise, you can spend lifetimes overcoming the limitations of
one unconscious archetypal thought before you are free of it
enough to experience the ordinary enchantment of life.
Read this book for perception, not information. Feel
what you read. Notice how you respond. Strong reactions are part
of your liberation from archetypal patterns that create the drama
of your life. Since the book is mythic and metaphoric, your
experience of it will change as your life changes. Keep at it.
This book is about life when it is lived simply. Repeated
reference to this book undermines the complexity of your life.
What emerges is your natural genius and power to create and
sustain an enchanted life in an enchanted land. So feel free
to turn to pages at random. You may find deeper levels of
meaning and possibilities for change when you do. Resort to it as
you would any personal oracle.
Let all you read here turn all that you trust and believe into
doubt and confusion. Why? Confusion signifies freedom and
precedes all transformation. Freedom is the core of intelligence.
Until your life trembles, you have no reason to trust anything
but your present beliefs, experiences, and habits. Thus,
enchantment eludes you. If you are already confused and in doubt,
good! You will find here a reason and a way to reach out beyond
confusion, to trust in the power and presence of your best
intention, your most secret dream. When and if you begin to
trust, your evolutionary journey will also begin.
To enchant your life, you will need an infinitely wise guide,
more than this book certainly. That is the bad news. The good
news is that such a guide is available to you in the form of your
own life. You do not need spiritual practices, books, or great
intellect. Your life is your guide and teacher. You need no
other.
Enchantment means to live your life as a spiritual and mythic
journey. Embrace life fully in all its dimensions. Do this and
you will receive the full power and intelligence of life as a
gift. You will awaken to a world enchanted by the presence and
power of love.
~ ~ ~
Enlightenment is a Political Event
Enlightenment changes your inner life, but not your outer
life. So, traditions offer a culturally defined outer life or
role as a solution. But that contains, rather than expresses, the
intelligence of life that only enlightenment can liberate. Your
liberation is then a personal and private attribute with no
impact on the community or tradition. That is why they offer such
a role, to avoid the impact of intelligence, the demand for love.
Enlightenment has political and social consequences on a global
scale, unless we prevent it by succumbing to the traditional
promises of social acceptance. But to succumb to the intelligence
of life that enlightenment liberates, you must have the courage
to live in the moment before any wisdom appears. And you must
embrace life outside the context of socially defined roles.
Enlightenment is the Way to Life
Enlightenment is not the pinnacle of spirituality. It is an
important beginning in a much larger process. First, you must
transcend reality in all its dimensions. Then you must embrace it
in all its dimensions. Finally, you must transform it in all its
dimensions. Transcend your self, embrace your life, transform
your world and ultimately, human experience. If you do not pursue
this possibility, you prevent the world from evolving.
Freedom Without Power is a Waste
Freedom from limits of life and wisdom about this life must
have power, or what is it for? Until we are free of who we have
been individually, we cannot create who we can be collectively.
We cannot know who we can be. The purpose of freedom and
enlightenment is not to be free of the past, but to be free to
create a future in this life that is not rooted in the past.
Thus, there cannot be a traditional identity or role to express
enlightenment. Any such thing is a fraud, a benighted response to
the opportunity of enlightenment. There can be no traditional
response to the power and intelligence of life. The only
legitimate and honest response is personal creativity. But what
do you create? Who shall you be, now that you are nothing?
Enlightenment has no answer. It opens the door in silence to an
opportunity ahead of itself. If you take that opportunity, you
leap ahead of the traditions. Then you must find and create a
path back to ordinary life that does not capitulate to its
history. But how, and for what purpose?
Ordinary Life Is Not Small
Freedom is a waste if you only talk about
it. Freedom has no meaning or purpose when you retreat into the
literal smallness of life. The ability to live ordinary life on
an infinite scale is available only in the moment before
enlightenment (but after the event), when
ordinary and mythic mean the same thing.
Freedom is the context of all intelligent change. But the
purpose of freedom is not personal. Rather, personal freedom must
be sacrificed in the fires of an ordinary infinite life, which
will, to be sure, demand more of you than washing dishes and
mowing the lawn. In the moment before enlightenment, the body's
intent to love interacts with others on a global scale -- a
direct transformation of life on a global scale. This is the
possibility of enchantment. It is not and cannot be the result of
traditional enlightenment.
Enlightenment is a Creation, Not a Tradition
That there has been no global transformation during the
centuries that people have experienced enlightenment says
something about the traditions and their practitioners. Their
agenda is to avoid personal power. Those people whom we agree
really did change the world did not avoid power; they embraced
it. They were not exceptional people; they just made an
exceptional choice and the result of that choice was exceptional.
Imagine a world of such people. Traditional enlightenment reveals
an inherent bias: freedom from this world and life, freedom from
the power to live creatively in all dimensions. The
traditions resist the possibility that only enlightenment makes
possible.
~ ~ ~
What is Enlightenment?
Enlightenment is the reorganization of awareness around a
single purpose. This means that enlightenment varies with
purpose. When awareness is organized around a single purpose you
have a natural inclination to insight and wisdom that we call
genius. Enlightenment occurs when your purpose is spiritual, when
attention is focused on whatever that means to you. Enchantment
-- the final expression and fulfillment of evolution before it
moves beyond individuality into community -- requires that
your personal purpose be congruent with the body's intent or
habit of love.
The power of personal purpose and intent is well known to
shamans, but you find little or no reference to it in the wisdom
literature. Why? Because if purpose controls experience and
enlightenment (which it does), then we live in a much different
world than we thought, and enlightenment is less than we hoped.
We live in a world of wizards. To be embodied is to have magical
powers. That power is managed by purpose, not wisdom. The scope
of your freedom exceeds the scope of any enlightenment. The
difference is managed by personal purpose. Purpose is the root of
enlightenment, not meditation.
~ ~ ~
The Heart of Life
At the moment of enlightenment, the thinking self falls into
(merges with) the original self. The world of ordinary experience
loses its boundaries. All experience collapses into a vast
singularity that is prior to the thinking self. In that moment,
there is no subject or object, nothing to experience, no one to
experience it. Only when you return to the world of ordinary
experience do you notice what happened. You realize that you, the
thinking self, just died -- ceased its separateness. You
dissolved in the energetic realm. You ceased to exist as an
individual and merged with the Infinite.
You might think you could induce this self-unification by
focusing attention on the original self. The traditions do. But
the thinking self can only observe. It cannot merge unless it
stops observing (dies).
We all have lots of things we want to do, achive, etc. But
love is a unique purpose because it is inherently without
boundaries, radically inclusive. So it serves well as a unifying
strategy for living. But love is also unique because it is the
only and inherent activity of the original self. Only love has
the power to unify and enlighten our inner life while it enchants
our outer life. When love is the organizing purpose of our life,
all other concerns are secondary and subject to its influence.
If love is the organizing purpose of our inner life in the
moment of conversion, it becomes a stable influence in our inner
life with enlightenment. Love is then the organizing purpose of
our personal outer life in realization. Finally, love is the
context for our public life, the organizing purpose and intent of
our relationships, and a stable healing influence on our bodies
in the moment of enchantment.
http://sentientpublications.com/catalog/relentless_love.php