Gathering in Satsang - Faith in the Great Unfolding

Gathering in Satsang

Receiving nourishment together is really important. As a family, it is important to eat together. As a sangha, it is important to come and be in satsang together. Recognising togetherness is a movement towards oneness. 

Being able to get on in large groups together is a massive yoga in itself. To keep putting the stuff that is not important aside to keep remembering that which is important. Our species has the capacity to squabble and get into endless conflict with itself over meaningless things but this also means we must have the opposite capacity. Someone who is abiding in a great deal of effortful hatred has immense capacity for love, it is just that they’re choosing one end of the spectrum currently. 

To come together and celebrate existence, that thing which is common to us all, but out of which we also all derive our uniqueness, is a really wonderful thing. We create a certain energy together, then we all move out from the ashram and spread that energy before coming back to the hub again to charge up. That is the natural pulse of the place.

It is even more awesome when people come and sing together. That takes some doing these days, but it never used to. If you look back over our ancestry, it was an absolute given that you would gather around a fire and sing together. To gather together to honour something bigger than our own little specks is just intrinsic to us. We have gotten so caught up in ourselves that it seems unnecessary or a chore to most. That is a long way from truth. 

What happens to us as a collective if we’re not honoring a bigger power, energy and intelligence?  You don’t have to look far to find the answer. We become isolated, individualistic, scared, stressed, angry, the list goes on. And that’s alright too! It is all part of a pulse in which we remember and forget all in a cycle, but it is important that we are remembering. It is important that we make the time to unplug, gather in the woods together with our fellow specks of divinity, and honour the wonder of it all. 

Sometimes you will want to hear satsang and sometimes you won’t. The bigger understanding in this is that it doesn’t matter if you want satsang or not. What matters is that each thing spoken about will be important for you at some point. There is nothing that can happen in the space of satsang that is not relevant. That is the deal that people who gather in satsang make together. How many times have you heard something that you didn’t want to hear in satsang but later on you were really glad you heard it?

Faith in the Great Unfolding

Come into an acknowledgment that your life is an incredible unfolding. It always has been, is currently, and always will be incredible. It is amazing that you and I are having an experience of unfolding into Life. Recently, I’ve been suggesting that we could say ‘I love you’ to Life inside ourselves in our practice. That is a suggestion that we could stop resisting the way Life is unfolding for us, even if it is unfolding contrary to how we would like it to be. Instead of resisting, we could say I love that this unfolding is happening. This is important because if we go deep into ourselves and get honest, we don’t actually want it to stop 

When we talk about being in love with the unfolding of Life, we are talking about faith. The unfolding is a mystery and it will always be a mystery. To me, to you and to even an enlightened being it is an absolute mystery. 

You don’t know what is coming in the next second; that is how much of a mystery this incredible unfolding is. Falling in love with that is faith. To have faith means to be okay with the mystery of the unfolding. Faith is the secret mechanism inside of us that changes everything in our relationship to Life.

It is the difference between resistance and surrender. It is the difference between opening to learn from the mystery and putting a barrier up and blaming Life for your circumstances. Opening to it, compared with being a victim of it. It is just a different game altogether. 

The idea is that our faith gets so strong that we cease to dramatise the present events because we know it is part of an unfolding that is an absolute mystery to us. Even when life events make absolutely no sense at all, at some point they will be seen to be part of an incredible unfolding. 

To not know and not need to know is faith and that can turn into the love affair of all love affairs. In the mystery, there is an aliveness. The moment we think we know it, we have already killed it. Will you choose a dead life or an alive life? Surely we would choose the mystery every time. Despite its inconvenience and being totally contrary to our plan at times, the mystery is always alive.

That is when we start saying: “Life, I love you. I don’t get you one little bit, but you're enormous and you’re clearly running the entire show anyway. I clearly have absolutely no say so I will give up this foolish notion that I do and I will just surrender to you.” and we come into peace and ease. 

Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita takes the position of Life itself and says: “Arjuna, because of your faith, because you are trusting in the unfolding, I am going to tell you the most profound of secrets. I am going to give you both wisdom and direct experience and I am going to free you from all evil.” He is saying I will show because of your faith and to the degree of your faith that is what I will show you. If you have a little bit of faith, I will show you a little bit, but if you increase your faith, what I show you will increase also. Arjuna has taken eight horrendous chapters of his life to get to the point where he has enough faith; where Krishna deems him open enough to be shown. To the degree of our faith, it will be revealed to us. That is natural law. 

He goes on to say: “This royal knowledge is the greatest purifier. Righteous and imperishable it is a joy to practice this surrender to Life and can be directly experienced. But those who have no faith in the supreme law of Life, do not find Me and they cannot know Me.” It is not because Krishna isn’t available; it is just that they have no faith to trust in something other than their own control.

If you are not open, you cannot be shown. It is simply daring to trust in the unfolding of your own existence that you are going through right now, regardless of how difficult and challenging it is. You are going through what you need to go through in order to grow into what you will grow into, just like the caterpillar and butterfly. The caterpillar cannot see what it will become before it becomes it. We can’t see anything because it is a mystery, so give up trying to see and try trusting. 

It all starts on your cushion. It is a safe place to practice trusting that what you are feeling currently is right. You allow the unfolding to take you where it wants to. You do that for one hour in your day and it starts to permeate out into your whole life.