Reflection 218

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Never-Failing Inspiration

In The Kingdom Of Heaven, Already You Are Inspired
In Heaven, where do your flashes of insight and bright ideas and hunches come from? What operates your red and green and amber lights? Who makes what people call ‘your’ decisions, whether momentous or petty? Here, search as I may, I can find no decision making or maker, no ideas or feelings or impressions of my own – bright or dull – no mind at all: but only this bare Consciousness or Awakeness that reads as absolutely clueless, useless, incompetent, idiotic. (No, I’m not playing modest, cross my heart.) Yet what’s needed is coming up from the depths, just when it should. In Heaven you discover this quiet upsurge from the Abyss. Try it out, learn to trust it, and go on relying on it more and more. Here is never-failing inspiration for non-persons.

On Earth, by contrast, you draw – or think you draw or try to draw – on your own private resources, on those of one person, with the results that might be expected. In Heaven you haven’t a clue or a resource you can claim, and you get all the clues you can use. It’s like standing at the footlights of the world smitten with amnesia, but marvellously prompted from the dark depths of the orchestra. (Douglas Harding. The Little Book of Life and Death.)