In a dream last night, I am talking in a town marketplace with a friend of mine about enlightenment, a woman with a deep understanding of Goddess spirituality.
It seems unremarkable that this is somewhere in a city of the Holy Lands from thousands of years ago. Possibly Jerusalem.
Our conversation veers into the nuances of enlightenment-speak in discourse philosophical and intellectual. A passerby, a simple man in the street with a dirty face, asks me to speak in a language he can understand.
“I’m a simple man,” he says, with a devilish glint in his eye.
I reply, “What I have to say is very simple.”
A small crowd has gathered around.
“There is only one teaching that you need to take away, only one teaching you need to remember, not many. And that is ACCEPTANCE. Practice radical acceptance of everything that arises. Accept that which seems good and bad alike. Accept yourself in all circumstances, in all ways, and accept others as you accept yourself. Acceptance makes all things possible. There is nothing acceptance cannot reveal. You don’t accept? Then accept your lack of acceptance. You want to change yourself, make the world a better place? Then start by accepting yourself and everything else. There is nothing more complicated you need to know or do than this. Only in this way is the veil of this world lifted and the Divine nature of Yourself and All Things revealed.”
The dream goes on, shifting to a different world.
* * *
(This message about acceptance, by the way, is also the message of the book I wrote several years back, Soulfully Gay, which gives a different name to the principle of acceptance: Homophilia. The story it tells gets a little more complicated.)
Upon waking, I look up the word “Acceptance” in the Lexicon of Lingua-U, the Language of Subtle Energy that I have been developing for several years. It’s not in there, so I add it. It is the Yin station of Unitive Self-force. The Unitive station of Unitive Self-force is Revelation. The Yang Station of Unitive Self-force is Devil.
I think of the man in the dream who pretended to be a simple man. To me, he was the devil in disguise.
About Joe Perez
Love this. As part of a class I’m taking at my Unity church, I’m working on greeting everything in my life with a spirit of openness and gratitude and asking what might be the gift in it. This is a great reminder.