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Divine Embodiment

Divine Embodiment - The Embodied Present Process
In late June I went to England with my daughter for a two-week cycling trip. At the halfway mark we had lunch with Rowan Williams, recently retired as the Archbishop of Canterbury. I treasured our visit with him – the sheer delight of sharing the company of someone as down to earth, humorous, honest, deeply thoughtful and trenchantly brilliant as he, and being able to do so without any agenda attached. In the wake of our visit I found myself reflecting on the presence of the Divine, and I eventually articulated what had been trying to make itself known: you cannot be fully embodied without a sense of the Divine. Let me explain. First, by “a sense of the Divine” I am speaking of an abiding truth that every culture has felt and named and imagined in its own way. Each and every clear visualization of the Divine is an accurate perspective, and is at the same time an incomplete one: no limited representation can convey what is limitless. However you might feel the presence of the Divine, though, at the core of your experience is likely the sense of a love that mindfully suffuses all things; and that sense reveals the world to be a living expression of that love. The other side of my explanation has to do with what it means to be “fully embodied”. Our culture inclines us to imagine embodiment as a condition that is achieved within the boundary of our skin. But to be fully embodied is to be fully present to the world, and that means that you are feeling the world in your body: you are feeling its presence living inside you, resonating at a cellular level. As you fully enter the present, its energy and particulars and ‘flow’ fully enter you, informing you with a subtlety that is beyond the range of the rational mind. To be fully embodied, then, asks that you welcome the world’s presence into your body. If you have no sense of the divine, then you will believe that all the world’s events are created entirely by miniscule particles of matter interacting with mathematical inevitability. This belief tells us that the essence of the world is dead. That is a stumbling block when it comes to embodiment: who could invite a dead presence to live within them? You can only invite the world to live within you when you feel it as a living presence – and to feel it as a living presence is to feel its essence as Divine. So that is why I say that you cannot be fully embodied without a sense of the Divine. But there is a telling corollary to that as well: your ability to sense the Divine similarly relies on embodiment – each facilitates the other. That fact might go some way towards explaining why a culture such as ours, which promotes living in the head as normal, is largely dismissive of anything other than a strictly material universe. It’s all we can feel. Our deep mistrust of the body leaves us mistrustful of knowledge about anything that by its nature cannot be separated from the world and studied as such. Consciousness is one such phenomenon, as is the Divine – neither can be separated from the world. Both can be experienced, though – and the deeper the embodiment, the more profound the experience of each.

2 comments

Philip Shepherd

Thanks for this beautiful response, Phyllida. It resonates with the evocative power of poetry – which to me is grounded in the evocative power of a spoken truth. I’ve been delayed in getting back to you with my appreciation, caught in a whirlwind of recent events, including the marriage of my daughter – but I’ve enjoyed reading and re-reading what you have written. Many thanks!

Phyllida

Ah yes! I love this…thank you. The language we use and you have used to try and understand mystery is so very important . Academic language insisting on theories and analysis leave me cold, not wanting to read further. When we consider the grounding, the earthing of divine intelligence we have to bow low to begin with and hold this sacred sense of awe in our consciousness . To actually speak truth and say, I am the in- bodiment of divine love brings tears of humility coupled with wow! Enough to leave me mouth opened in absolute disbelief and trepidation. Our indoctrination which grew in us the state of unworthiness and guilt , coupled with a sense of MEA CULPA , has done its work at keeping us on our knees , bowing to a strange almighty self centered being called god. This dualistic insistence leads to a kind of spiritual psychosis , and at best confusion . Truth says …you are the beloved outbreath of the creator , religion says…you are a wretched guilty sinner…let the truth SET US ALL FREE .🙏🤎

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