You "Rote" It?

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
-Rumi

In alignment with the concept of spiritual bypass I covered yesterday, there is another detrimental aspect of the spiritual life that can begin to take hold… if we are not paying attention.

I have been in spiritual centers and around many people who seem to forget sometimes that it is feeling that is the fuel for creation. What happens when we have adopted a particular way of phrasing something out loud and it becomes rote? The answer is pretty simple, the power of that thing is diminished in our life experience.

I have a friend who is steeped in the Unity tradition. One of his practices every time he would get behind the wheel of a car was to invoke the Unity prayer for protection. This prayer is written by James Dillet Freeman

The light of God surrounds us;
The love of God enfolds us;
The power of God protects us;
The presence of God watches over us;
Wherever we are, God is!

It’s a wonderful and easy prayer to memorize and utilize. It’s effectiveness, however, is diminished when there is a lack of feeling connection to it. This is what seemed to be the case with my friend. He would get in the car, fumble with his keys to get them in the ignition, start the car, and put the car in gear while he rattled off the prayer. It was almost as though the invocation of the prayer had become a superstitious reaction to entering a car. I didn’t get the sense that he felt the power of feeling behind the words, or payed attention to the power in any way to let it inform his soul.

I would never want to let that become the case with my spiritual practice. To get to that place, requires constant attention. To stay away from rote recitations and behaviors we must constantly look upon the world with fresh eyes and an open mind.

The world is in a constant state of change. The nature of God is not to be unfolding creation in a rote way, the nature of God (and therefore the nature of each of us) is to evolve through creation. We can either participate actively in the practice of evolution, or we can detract through our disinterest. When we participate we can set the tone and direction, when disinterested we are subject to expressions and experiences we might not want to have in our lives.

So the question today is, what have we begun to take for granted? In this are we settling on habitual behaviors that are no longer connected to our soul? If we are settled in that place have we given up our freedom to choose the lives we would like?

Go deeper into practice. Chew on the meaning of the things we claim out loud. Let your heart and soul space be informed deeply by the feeling behind what you claim. Let your voice be spontaneous and allow your life to follow suit. Let anything unlike the magnificence of your own divinity melt away and be left with your true essence.

You are. That’s that!