Find Trust in the Light of Awareness
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Readings
Jeremiah 17:5-10
This is what the Lord says:
“Cursed is the one who trusts in man,
who draws strength from mere flesh
and whose heart turns away from the Lord.
That person will be like a bush in the wastelands;
they will not see prosperity when it comes.
They will dwell in the parched places of the desert,
in a salt land where no one lives.
“But blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord,
whose confidence is in him.
They will be like a tree planted by the water
that sends out its roots by the stream.
It does not fear when heat comes;
its leaves are always green.
It has no worries in a year of drought
and never fails to bear fruit.”
The heart is deceitful above all things
and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
“I the Lord search the heart
and examine the mind,
to reward each person according to their conduct,
according to what their deeds deserve.”
Psalm 1
(Responsive Reading for our Live Service)
Blessed is the human
who walks not in the counsel of the wicked,
nor stands in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like a tree planted by streams of water
that yields its fruit in its season,
and its leaf does not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous;
for the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
Read the written message below with music videos
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When you tell someone you trust them it usually means that you don’t believe they are lying to you or hiding anything of importance to you. However, people can change or surprise us, and so we can’t know that the person we trust will always be trustworthy to us, and so the statement “I trust you” comes with a natural caveat: “for now.” Even those whom we trust implicitly may drop off the face of the earth or can’t always be there when we need them available. But there’s a force in the universe that can always be trusted, even trusted with our full attention as well as our betrayals, and which when trusted will enable a life of peace and natural flow beyond our current understanding, at least, according to Christ, the Buddhas, Krishna, and others.
The space and silence of awareness itself is something that never leaves us. More spacious than space, it allows us to perceive space. More silent than silence and more subtle than the details we see, like an HD screen that serves as the screen of life and every thought and thing we or anyone will ever perceive. Like a TV, it is the light of awareness that enlightens the mind and the things that we see within it. It is also the love of this light, its warmth, that allows us to feel, to desire, to care, and to discover true compassion and love within and to perceive a mirror of it in others.
Meditating on its presence, we can start to discover a part of ourselves that is the perceiver of change but never changing. Even our depictions of ourselves are perceived within its spaciousness. If we have trouble finding it, one trick is to notice that all the other things in our heads change over time. Ask yourself, what hasn’t changed throughout these years? Even our idea of ourselves changes, so what’s more fundamental than that? Awareness itself. Notice that place of transcendent silence and spaciousness within, I promise it’s there but it should take little convincing – see for yourself. Start to remember it even as your talking mind continues to chat and your judgments, aversions, and attachments continue to spring up.
The scientist-turned-sage Emanuel Swedenborg was another with this understanding. He believed that one of the best ways to start to understand our universe was to come to know that the intelligent force of the universe was Divine Love itself in the form of wisdom. He said that this love and wisdom shines down from God, the one true being in existence and the root of each of our lives. This “spiritual light” of God is the fundamental force or energy that allows all of us to live, to love, to know, to learn, and to grow. It’s also the very energetic force that is the essential building block of all material energies, thus the known universe itself.
Interestingly, the so-called awakened masters have agreed with Swedenborg (and of course, often pre-empted him). In the Bhagavat Gita, Krishna shares that all things are expressions of God and made of God, and the more that we come to trust in the unattached light of God within the more we find our true Self and allow God’s Divinity to shine through us. Similarly, the Buddhist masters such as the Buddha and Padmasambhava emphasize the transcendent benefits of uncovering our inner silence and the cultivation of peace and wisdom from that. They too believed that all beings were one in awareness itself, and that coming to centre on this ever-stable spaciousness within opens ourselves up to a natural trust in life and providence, as well as wisdom and compassion itself even in the face of challenges.
Christ also called on us to trust in him as the Father on earth, as well as to trust in God. In that vein, much like some of the others, he told us and showed us what God is, saying that we should find unity in him. The scriptures say that he is the light of the world, true awareness itself, as well as love itself, life itself, and truth itself. These things are synonymous with each other, like the different names of one being. This Being tells us that he’s always with us and that we should come to centre on these qualities in him within ourselves. Thus finding our true selves and a “complete unity” with the Father, with him, and with each other.
What’s interesting is that whenever anyone else asks us to trust them it often involves some obvious effort on our part to garner some inner trust. But according to these sages, trusting in God actually entails a rediscovering of the trust inherent in the Divine light already within. As we come to be pulled toward this light, so to speak, we come to know that within the indescribable spaciousness of awareness itself we find a trust everlasting, coming to intuitively know that all things and all situations work to eventually enlighten beings. And, similar to that time at death when we should “follow the light,” when we start to do that in our earthly lives our earthly life is transformed and the old us begins to die - but not in a way that leaves our families heartbroken. Indeed, this is a death of our deathliness and a further discovering of the natural flow of the perfection of life within and without.
Another practical way that we can start to find the peace of awareness within is to come to notice how bad a friend our thinking minds tend to be. How often does your mind say something you wouldn’t appreciate from a friend? Practically 100% of the time our minds paint a picture of the world that is brimming with false ideas and cartoonish or judgmental caricatures, and the problem with this is that as much as we identify with our minds all of its ramblings are empowered. Noticing this, or perhaps getting tired of our mind’s constant grappling with anxiety or something else, we can use this opportunity to tune into the silent focal point of spacious awareness, which allows our minds to heal and find their true use. This ever-present awareness is subtle enough to discern the subtle, spacious enough to allow for all things. And if your mind says that you can’t find it, that it doesn’t exist, notice that you’re perceiving even that!
Ultimately, coming to trust God is synonymous with coming to centre on the infinite light of love and wisdom at your core, the light of consciousness itself. The sages invite us to notice that this trust is at the root of our everyday awareness itself. It’s just that we miss the forest for the trees and tend to identify with our thinking minds: their thoughts and all of their ideas about who and what we all are. Instead, we should truly ask ourselves, “What and who am I really?” and then search within for the part of us that we can trust, the fundamental beingness within that’s consistent and always here.
Go with God and God’s light of awareness - seeing as you don’t have a choice ; )
Rev. Cory