The Practice of Living Awareness

Both Easter and Passover mark beginnings, beginnings that include processes of death. During the days held significant by their religions, one must wonder why Life-Death is that which signals their sacredness?

In both stories, death is represented by mundane authorities (Pharaoh in one, Pilate and the leaders of the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the other). The worldly king is imposing death through slavery or Roman rule or through the rigidity of the letter of the Law. When we give our authority to materiality or are imprisoned by a dominant focus on materiality, then we are dead to life. Materiality is not bad unto itself, but when out of balance with the inner truths then negation (death) and negativity (violence and cruelty) result. Imbalance emphasizing materiality is equivalent to being crucified on the cross of matter for no redeeming reason. In the cases of both Passover and Easter, a different option is given. Manifesting this option requires work.

First we have to escape the bondage of materialism (Exodus). The immediate response to that is confusion, like a junky or alcoholic without a fix. This is represented in the allegory of Wandering in the Wilderness after freeing oneself from the blatant level of bondage. One still doesn’t know how to be real, how to be free, or how to make wise choices.

With the Christ’s story, this is portrayed through the hard work of torture and death in a tortured way. But, like Christ lifted up on the cross, a certain vantage point is experienced. “Forgive them, they know not what they do.” One begins to perceive how thick the delusion has been, how completely addicted to materiality, to me and mine, to taking and keeping and violence one has gotten used to. With that recognition, one is willing to live more harmoniously. This is a partial meaning behind Christ descending into Hell to release the prisoners there. He, like the person who has effected freedom from Plato’s cave, goes back to the cave to rouse others.

Resurrection is to have recognized the sleep-walk and to have woken. But awakeness is not a single separate state – never. The recognition is of wholeness, whole suffering, whole reasons and rubrics for its continuation, whole life echelons that could easily be set free, freed from death on the cross of materiality. The heart is the prison key.

The image chosen for this meditation is of a crown. It represents the crowning glory of the realizations mentioned thus far. The crown also is a reminder that giving away one’s power to the wanton and wanting existence of materiality is a life of death, disappointment, suffering, and loss. However, to align with the crowning glory of the inner spirit, to live in a way that harmonizes the inner and the outer, then each moment expresses resurrection, a newness, a beginning for all of Life.

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