melt into the mystery

[AUDIO AND TEXT]

Recently, I was perusing a book titled, The Way of Grace: The Transforming Power of Ego Relaxation, written by a spiritual teacher named Miranda Macpherson (Sounds True, 2018). I ran across this book in the home of a really good friend; I read a few pages and then bought a copy for myself. I haven’t gotten very far into it yet, but it’s there waiting for me to savor it. Maybe, when I get permission from the author and publisher, I’ll bring you some of Miranda’s material.

Right now, though, I do want to lift a quotation she uses as an epigraph near the beginning of the book. She quotes from Sri Ramana Maharshi, the Indian master whose legacy of nondual wisdom endures to this day. Ramana Maharshi, who lived from 1879 to 1950, had a life-changing realization experience when he was only a teen. Over time, he attracted many followers with whom he shared his experience and the wisdom he developed as a result of that event. You can, of course, find the record of his experience and his teachings in the many books that have been written about him.

Here’s the quotation cited by Miranda Macpherson:

Grace is always present. You imagine it is something somewhere high in the sky, far away, and has to descend. It is really inside you, in your Heart, and the moment you merge the mind into its Source, Grace rushes forth, sprouting as from a spring within you.

–Ramana Maharshi, The Essential Teachings of Ramana Maharshi, by Matthew Greenblatt

Miranda goes on to present her understanding of what Grace is and how it works. For me, though, the notion of Grace is more a mystery than a thing to be defined or understood. But that’s okay, I think, because this whole experience of living and being is – for me and for most of us – a quite delectable mystery anyway. Call it what we may, it seems to come back to the act of surrender – what I once called “the last (final) act that we can perform.”

Now, I don’t propose to talk about surrender and how to get to that point, if it even is a point to be gotten to (which I mostly doubt). I think surrender is more a way of being than something we can accomplish or achieve. A phrase that came to me as I read in Miranda’s pages was, “melt into the Mystery.” That’s what we seek to do when we sit in meditation and, hopefully, develop the ability to do as we go about our daily rounds. We surrender our fixation on ourselves, our sense of “I,” and just let life live us as it will. We respond to life’s “preaching,” and we live in accordance, in harmony, with what comes. (This language is from a koan, Hekiganroku Case 14.)

Miranda calls this kind of surrender “ego relaxation,” which is to me an appealing term that carries with it a certain softness and approachability. It’s an ease-of-use notion, “ego relaxation.” We don’t have to destroy the ego, but we can relax its hold on our need to define and identify ourselves as this kind of person or that. And in that relaxed state, we can allow ourselves to melt into the Mystery of our being – of Being, itself – and more readily live in peace, with ourselves and with others.

So, as Ramana Maharshi suggests, we can realize that Grace isn’t somewhere far away and doesn’t exist as something bestowed upon us from on high. Rather, Grace is intrinsic to us and to all being. And as we “merge the mind into its Source, Grace rushes forth, sprouting as from a spring within.” This is what “melting into the Mystery” sounds like to me.

And what can this realization mean for us and for this world  of forms? Following is a quotation from a different treatment of Ramana Maharshi’s teaching (The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi, with a Foreword by C. G. Jung, Shambhala, 1972).

A disciple asked the master, “Does my Realization help others?” And the master answered thus:

Yes, and it is the best help that you can possibly render to others. Those who have discovered great truths have done so in the still depths of the Self [that is, of our Essential Nature, of God]. But really there are no “others” to be helped. For the Realized Being sees only the Self, just as the goldsmith sees only the gold while valuing it in various jewels made of gold. When you identify yourself with the body, name and form are there. But when you transcend the body-consciousness, the “others” disappear. The Realized One does not see the world as different from himself.

So, let the melting proceed. Let us experience Grace, the unworked gold. Let us continue our practice.

Thank you.