Hello,
I am Don Joseph Gowie,
And the track that you are about to hear that is set between two chimes,
Is taken from Part 1 of the Grandeur Within,
Which is a course that is now available at Insight Timer.
This track is called,
The Woman at the Wedding.
Nasargadatta,
The humble shopkeeper from India,
Became one of the most revered spiritual masters of the 20th century.
Even after his awakening,
He continued tending his corner shop,
Using his ordinary life as a living example,
Proof that enlightenment is available to anyone right in the midst of earning a living.
Spiritual seekers from every persuasion and walk of life,
From saints to criminals and everyone in between,
Made their way to his modest home in Mumbai.
One such visitor asked,
What is the basic difference between you and me?
Nasargadatta replied,
There is no difference.
You only imagine differences.
I see what you too could see,
Here and now,
But your attention is elsewhere.
Sometimes grace brings it into focus for you.
I once coached a woman who experienced an awakening at the reception party of a wedding out in the countryside.
She described it to me in vivid detail,
And I will never forget it.
It illuminated for me the fear people can feel when they glimpse the grandeur of what we truly are,
A fear I have seen in other clients and one I have felt myself.
Since she was not a drinker,
She soon grew weary of the din of voices and the loud music.
She quietly slipped out the back door for some fresh air and a little peace,
And in the big,
Lovely garden behind the reception hall,
The only sound was crickets.
The cricket song along with the fragrance of the night-blooming jasmine tree lifted her into a state of bliss.
It was a warm,
Clear night,
Moonless,
The sky brimming with stars,
And the Milky Way was visible.
She felt deeply connected to it all,
And her heart filled with a childlike wonder.
Then came an exquisite realization.
The beauty surrounding her was joined to something beautiful within her.
Just then the back door slammed open,
And the noise spilled out,
And two friends approached her,
Calling her name,
Fracturing the grandeur of that moment.
Later at home,
She wondered if what she had felt was real,
If something that beautiful truly lived within her.
As she recalled the bliss,
It rose up in her again as expansively and luminously as before,
And from this vantage point she saw her life in a way that she had never seen before.
She saw that she had been living an essentially meaningless life,
Fabricated out of fear,
With one facade hiding behind another,
Producing a mechanical,
Insecure,
And unhappy person.
The clarity was so unmistakable that it toppled her sense of identity entirely.
Along with her sense of place in the world,
Her plans,
And her desires,
It was as if the rug had been pulled out from underneath who she thought she was.
It frightened her.
Almost by instinct she grasped for her old life,
And a moment later,
The bliss was gone.
She was back in her smaller,
Contained way of being,
And glad for it.
But when she recounted the event to me,
She was no longer glad.
She said,
What if that vision was dissolving all that was false in me to make room for that beauty I felt inside?
Mary Ann Williamson states it poignantly.
She says,
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light,
Not our darkness,
That most frightens us.
Like this woman,
At times we feel a faint stirring of an ancient state,
A holiness we share in.
It is distant,
Yet strangely familiar,
Enough to awaken a memory so grand,
So beautiful,
And so dear to the heart,
That as A Course in Miracles states,
It would make you weep.
No treasure in this world could compare.
And like her,
We hesitate before the grandeur of it,
Fearing we might lose the world we have so carefully constructed,
Along with the very person the world has shaped us to be.
I saw this laid bare in a shamanic support group I once attended.
One or another of us in that group would be graced with moments of experiencing the beauty and power within,
Yet we were unable to hold on to the radiance for long.
We did not love ourselves enough then to believe that life could be that beautiful,
Because we believed we were not that beautiful.
Soon,
We would slip back into what T.
S.
Eliot called the life we have lost in living,
That diminished existence society programmed into us,
A small life of stress and anxiety,
Chasing success and status,
Struggling to trust ourselves,
Feeling socially insecure,
Craving approval,
Misinterpreting honest feedback as criticism,
Fearing failure,
Exaggerating adversity,
Believing we were not good enough,
Patterns that at times led to a moralistic condemnation of ourselves whenever we made a mistake.
How could it have been otherwise,
When as this course will show,
We had been fear conditioned and shame conditioned by every sphere of our culture.
To love yourself is to heal,
And in that group we came to see that we were all in the same boat,
That our lives were false in many of the same ways.
Seeing this was how we began awakening to the self-acceptance that opens into self-love.
It deepened through the compassion we extended to one another until gradually we could extend that same compassion to ourselves.
Only then could we open more fully to the faint stirrings of that ancient state whenever it returned.
Beyond the body,
Beyond the sun and stars,
States A Course in Miracles,
Past everything the eye can see,
There is something strangely familiar,
A golden arc of light curving into a vast radiant circle.
As you gaze,
The circle fills with light until there is no place it does not touch.
Everything is joined here in unbroken wholeness,
And it is impossible to imagine anything outside it,
For there is nowhere this light is not.
This is the memory of what you truly are.
Accept the vision that reveals this to you.
This is the vision of Spirit s homecoming.
You are part of this,
Joined to all that is,
As surely as all that is is joined in you.
You have the eyes to see through the false beliefs and condemnation of this world into what lies beyond them.
Cease believing in illusions,
And they dissolve.
Everything you hold with clear vision will gently fall into place.
This excerpt invites us to awaken to the infinite depth of our own being.
The term The Grandeur Within refers to coming home to yourself.
It is about not acquiring something you lack,
But rediscovering what has always been present and available within you.
