On Allowance, Surrender and the Nature of Experience

Stillness Nailed

At the heart of all Experience; its essential nature shines

As Stillness

nailed to The Cross

Holding in its Heart: all time and impermanence, all change and all circumstances; good or bad, beautiful or ugly

In, and To

Love’s embrace...healing and releasing All from the Human Grip on Duality

Both gracefully and painfully

it Allows, in perfect surrender

Self-emptying Love,

to Flow Eternally

Contemplation on the Poem

This poem is an adaptation of a shorter poem written by an anonymous English nun. She pictures Jesus Christ in the last moments of his human life:

In stillness nailed.

To hold all time, all change, all circumstance in and

to Love's embrace.

This captures the mystical or non-dual understanding that many Christian mystics have had about the death of Christ and why this event had such a global impact on the human collective consciousness. Christ being in a state of pure openness and allowance, his magnificently accepting heart in the face of deeply inhumane torture remained open; not judging but forgiving all the lowliest of human behaviour that he was on receiving end of. Where even the most ‘saintly’ of us would be so hurt that we would not be able to help but disconnect, resort to anger and mercilessly wish the worst upon our enemies, Jesus does the opposite.

What the mystical understanding invites us to ponder, is that maybe it was not Jesus’ virtue or predefined divine status that made him be able to do this, but the willing vulnerability of his heart to let his being be a vessel for the accepting and forgiving power of true Love. It was his decision to yield to the flow of Grace, to consciously participate with the divine action within, that ‘saved the world’. This conscious participation in and with the divine flow is something we are all free to partake in whenever we like.

The amount of surrender, allowance, acceptance and openness in his heart was equal to - or maybe even greater than - the natural resistance, refusal, rejection and closing of heart that any human would go through, as it experiences such a horrific injustice like that of the cruxifixction.

Just think about that for a second.

How spacious and allowing must have been the inner world of Jesus such that "Father forgive them for they know not what they do" would be his only response to the experience? Can you imagine just how much Grace must have filled every corner of consciousness in that moment? My guess is that it was an amount that shook the planet and left an imprint on the collective human heart that is felt still to this day.

This decision to allow what is to be in continuously deeper and more wholesome surrender, is the same as each and everyone of us surrendering our limitations and resting in the unconditional I Am presence; thereby allowing our true nature to shine on our pain through deeper allowance of what is.

Also, and this is my favourite part of this poem, such an interpretation of the Jesus story symbolically portrays a caricature of the very nature of consciousness itself: as the sole entity present in any experience it is intimately connected to all experiences and so takes all experiences in without exception; as the constant element in all experience it is never limited to or conditioned by any experience and is therefore forever unshaken or changed by any experience. In other words, consciousness itself can never not allow what is to be; its nature is allowance and no experience, no matter how terrible, can ever change that.

This analogy might be helpful! Just like in a horror movie, no matter how horrific the images on the screen may be, the movie screen always just allows whatever to play on it and it is never once touched or changed by any of the events on the movie. We may mistaken the screen to be changing as the contents that play on it change, but when the movie ends we remember that all we were ever really looking at was the screen, and that fact never changed! So just like all there is to the horror movie is the same unchanging screen, all there is to any experience is the same unchanging consciousness!

The point is that Grace is always to be found at the intimate heart of every experience - pleasant or painful - and, Grace is never diminished or increased by any experience and is thus as pure awareness, freely shining as Supreme Love on and in all experiences.

As such, one could think of the dimensionless screen of awareness upon which all of reality plays its movie, as being in a state of all powerful and all vulnerable surrender all the time; pure awareness or the simple ever present background experience of ‘I Am’, is always nailed to the cross with its heart open allowing all to come and go and be eternally sanctified in its Loving embrace.

Call to Action: Prayer or Meditation Intention

Next time you sit in prayer or meditation and you become aware of being aware, when you relax into the disentangled witnessing presence of awareness:

1. See if you can recognise its - your - inherently surrendered and open nature.

2. Connect to the feeling or image that this poem evoke for you.

And if your heart happens to uniquely resonate with Christianity or Jesus, connect to the image of his being "stillness nailed" to the cross, and then let yourself become that.

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