“The greatest romance is with the Infinite. You have no idea how beautiful life can be. When you suddenly find that everywhere God comes and talks to you and guides you, the romance of Divine Love has begun.” Paramahansa Yogananda
The Intelligence that knows all is within each one of us. It is always present. It is the True ‘I Am’ that you call yourself, it is God’s Omniscience and therefore is the True Intelligence of every one of us. It is the Intelligence of Love. It is always available to guide you through life in the most harmonious of ways. It is your guiding Light. It is your intuition, your inner promptings. It may be the words that come out of your mouth that surprise you, your excitement or an uncomfortable feeling that comes over you. The first step one needs to take if one is to experience the level of harmony and grace Divine guidance can bring to your life is to turn toward the guidance, to listen for it, to ask that it guide you. Commit to hearing what Divinity is saying and follow that guidance. Developing communication with God and trusting the response you are receiving is a practice, but then everything about the spiritual path is. Much like learning to play the piano, it is essential to show up for it consistently. Over the years I have practiced paying attention to my inner promptings and this has evolved into a well-developed practice of listening to the Stillness, the Silence. As soon as one makes the commitment to access the Divine ‘I Am’ communication happens and continues to develop.
This Intelligence is the All, the infinite, the ‘I Am’, God. The nature of God is Love and Grace, therefore the promptings that come from Divine Intelligence can only be Love and Grace. We live in what can be a very unsafe world/dream but if we dwell in the place of the most high, so to speak, of Divine guidance, Grace and Love, we are guided into a place of Peace and Stillness and all else follows. In fact, I am of the opinion that it is now absolutely essential that we listen very carefully in order to navigate this crazy time in the dream. Maybe this dream of chaos has a purpose and that is to Awaken us to our True identity. Only turning to God, Awareness, the Silence can accomplish this.
So, how is this relationship built and how do we recognize it? The relationship is between the self and the Self, the ‘I Am’ God Self. This duality doesn’t, in Truth, exist. If God is Omnipresence and infinite there can be no-thing that isn’t God. Access to the God Self can be developed through bringing one’s attention to That which is aware, for the Divine is Awareness itself. Listen to the stillness or the silence, the still quiet voice within. God knows what you have need of before you ask. That being said, I sometimes set my intention or ask my question before going into a state of awareness/meditation/prayer so I can more easily leave my needs, my desires, the mind, behind. Going into awareness/ stillness/the silence entails leaving attachment to the mind behind. I ask the question ‘am I aware?’ to direct me in the right direction. If the mind wants to come in, which it will, I become aware of the mind’s machinations. Watching it rather than indulging it. I have found nothing quiets the mind faster. If you try to quiet the mind forget it, the mind already has the upper hand by having your focus. Get back to Awareness, Silence, to the Stillness. As Eckhart Tolle says Stillness speaks. Listen, be patient and trust that the answer will come. Let go of how it will look.
Recognizing guidance needs developing. To discern between desires and intuition can be tricky business. Sometimes they are the same, sometimes not. The mind loves to confuse and doubt and following one’s intuition is fertile territory for just that. Catch yourself when confusion and doubt arise, bring yourself back to Awareness and trust your inclinations not your mind or desires. Consciously knowing that if your inclinations are in alignment with Divine guidance nothing can stop the right thing from happening, if it is wrong nothing can make it happen is very helpful. I can’t tell you how many times I have said that to myself. You are then surrendering to God’s Omnipotent Grace and Love. We have been given free will and can move as we choose but unless we actively choose to follow the path of the power of Love we are on our own in the dream.
The more you commit to the practice of listening for guidance, the stronger your sense of it becomes. Also my experience has been that the newer you are to this practice the stronger it shows up for you. At the beginning the hair on my arms would stick straight up when I said or thought something that was intuitively right on. When I surrender my needs to God and listen, what I am needing often, to my amazement, just shows up or something reveals to me why I don’t need what I thought I needed because something else is going to take place which makes that need/desire obsolete. I have a silly little example. I wanted to buy a 64 oz. maple syrup from my co-op. I have been making jam and have been using maple syrup, so I have been using it up at a ridiculous rate for how expensive it is. I was guided not to buy it. Because I was afraid I would run out I bought a small jar. I didn’t ask, I asserted my will and just ordered it. When my order came in I saw that next month the 64 oz. jar will be on sale. I am done with the jam for now and I still have some left in my last jar and have not opened the new jar. I should have listened, not because I did something wrong, but rather because I stepped out of the harmony of listening for guidance on the smallest decisions, the smallest needs. As it turns out there was some perfection to it as it provided this example.
It is difficult for me to speak about how I recognize my guidance. It is subtle and yet powerful at the same time. It is inner, but the inner extends to the limitless. If I don’t plug in an appliance it is powerless but once I plug it in the appliance is now connected to electricity that can be followed all the way back to the dam that produces the electricity. It doesn’t have to know that or think about it. It just operates. That is a little like what recognizing guidance is for me. I plug in to my source and operate from there. I am wide open when listening and if I follow the electricity of the experience I see that I have no boundaries, I am that I Am as Nisargadatta states it. From this place I just know. The answer may simply be that it will be revealed. As I go about my business in the day do I sometimes doubt the guidance? Heck yeah, but then I call myself back. If following guidance entails a risk that produces fear in me I hand over the fear to God. Because I am a tarot reader from way back I may pull a card. I can’t tell you how many times I have pulled the card for harmony or the ace of cups which is the card of Divine Love for me. Then I am reassured and the fear is gone. I can relax into surrendering to my guidance. Really all I need to know is that if what I see as my guidance is wrong God can get through. All is well.
I want to emphasize that guidance is not always aligned with what you want or what you think you need. The last 4 years I have been guided into a rather monastic life. I quit creating art, my counseling practice diminished and friends fell away. It has been a challenge, not at all what I would have necessarily chosen for myself. The friends I am in closest contact with live a somewhat a monastic life also. Would I have chosen this lifestyle? Most definitely not, I would have gone another direction altogether. However, I am stunned by the change in me, in a very good way. I am right in the center of my being. I have never been as healthy as I am right now. I live in Stillness. I know what is going on in the world/dream on a level most don’t care to know. It has made me strong facing this down. God always knows what is best. Always.
Writing this has been interesting because I know those who are reading this have a wide range of development in relation to their communication with God/Awareness and everyone has different ways of accessing guidance and recognizing it. For those of you who don’t have a well-developed relationship to guidance I recommend that you ask God to make it strong and clear so you will know for certain what you are to do. And God please be gentle, I will listen. If you are just starting, start now, navigational tools that are rooted in Divine Harmony are essential at this time. Repeating the old will not suffice. There is only one lifeboat and it is the one steered by Divine Love. This is one beautiful lifeboat. All we need do is turn to it and listen.
Art by Katherine Treffinger www.katherinetreffinger.com www.ourlivingdream.com