I mentioned that the veil is a loving fog of forgetting. It is not a punishment or a test. It is not cruel, although we have thought that it was.
I believe that we ourselves created the veil of forgetting. When you are ALL and choose to know yourself, you must become less than ALL. For we can only know about this in relation to that. It is an intricate dance of knowing and feeling in which we are engaged. We have been engaged in this intricacy for so long that we tend to think that it is all there is. Yet when we take a deep breath and call to the ALL, it makes itself known to us.
Take that deep breath. Invoke the ALL-That-Is into your consciousness. Breathe deeply with it. No words will suffice. It is enough that we feel it. It allows for no words. It is vast. It is silent. It may be felt only dimly by you. Take another breath and stretch your knowing out to ALL. Make no attempt to define it in any way, by any means. ALL cannot be defined.
Compare that to all of our being and doing and knowing. Compare it to all of our daily this and that and the other. Feel the busy back and forth of our world beneath the veil, a world of the mind, of comparisons and relativity, of yes and no and the frustration of maybe, and compare it to the sense of the ALL that is now perceptible when we breathe deeply and call it into our consciousness. It seems almost unbelievable that we would have chosen to experience this up and down, this back and forth, and yes and no. Yet we did. It was not imposed upon us. We chose this.
To feel the exquisitely subtle difference between tastes, textures, sounds and colours - we chose this. To know the richness of experience in this long and complex dance of being and becoming - without any guarantees - we volunteered. To contemplate death - the complete negation of what God is - the perfectly balanced foil to all of our being - that essence of non-being which we call death - to feel it pressing close is to know what all the angels and archangels can never know. And we chose this.
I have a friend, a painter in oils, and I was trying to explain to her why death is so important. Without it, we cannot love as we do with it. Without it, we cannot live as we do knowing its always immanent shadow as our frame. I compared death to the edges of her canvas. Without limits, art becomes impossible. Without death, we could never truly know life.
Perhaps you can begin to feel, as I do, the great gift given to us by this forgetting of who we truly are. Dreading mortality, we explore the essence of eternal being. Experiencing loss, we understand what it is to win, to gain, to triumph. Losing one whom we love, we understand what love truly is. And when we bring the play of choice, of free will and trust into the game, it is enriched even more.
Under the veil, experiencing all that is to be experienced, we are ALL-That-Is in service to ALL-That-Is. And we are loved in this. We are brave adventurers exploring in the fields of the relative world. When I look around me, sometimes I feel overwhelmed. Often I feel myself to be in love. And I am glad to be here. It's not easy, but it's really something, isn't it? Something to write home about. Something worth exploring. Something worth experiencing.
Be of good courage under the veil.
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