When I was young, I held many confused and conflicting beliefs about who and what I was. It is certainly not unusual for a child or young person, but in retrospect, I find it surprising that it did not bother me. I at once had a vague notion that I held a spark of the Divine within me that was, for want of a better word, my life force. On the other hand, I also knew that I had to obey Divine rules or else I would be punished as a bad child. Do you sense the potential conflict in my understanding? These two ideas did not cause me any confusion. I was thinking that I was both a part of God who was both my source and essence, while I still held the idea that God was outside and distinct from me; God was vigilantly observing and judging my every thought and deed. I have come a long way since those days. I now know that the Divine Creator and I are not separate. I am, in fact in essence one with God. All that I see and experience in this physical world is God, or Allah, or Brahma, or Great Spirit. As I am one with God, we also share the same essence. While words cannot describe the essence of God, I have found that four essential states, Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness, that are drawn from scriptures of all religions, give me a very useful symbolic grasp of the Divine, and that from these four states, all other Divine qualities, such as creativity, peace, playfulness, and even compassion, naturally flow.
But aren’t Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness emotions or actions? I also see them as states in their purest and most original essence. We make, show, and express love. We feel love. We love. However, before all of those actions and the feeling, there is the pure state of Love, which is who we all are. The joy we feel and express flow from our pure original state of Joy. The well-being that we feel, search for, or try to maintain and foster in others, is an expression of our original state of Wellbeing. And our ability to be aware of the external world through our senses and our internal experience is a manifestation of our state of Awareness that existed before we took on physical form. As these states are our original essence and in fact the essential state of God, they cannot be taken from us or die. They are our eternal living state. We certainly find ways and reasons to resist our natural state while we are here in these physical human bodies, and while our original state or soul or spirit may be obscured with fear, suffering, or ignorance, for example, our essence is always there, ready to reveal itself. That is why when we meditate, there is no need to search for enlightenment or our original state. The essential four states are always here within the resistance and negative emotions we have accumulated over the years. When we shed all of those accretions or when we look within them, we find the four original states of Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness.
When I think of the four essential states, I see three of them existing within a unity of the fourth. Have you ever heard of the Divine Trinity in the Christian tradition? There is one God with three Persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. They are indivisible and in communion with one another as one God. They are at once One and Three. I see the four states in a similar way. It is easiest for me to imagine Love, Joy, and Wellbeing all being within a unified state of Awareness, but it could just as easily be that Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness are aspects of Love. There is also nothing that would prevent all permutations to be true at once. For me, here and now, I see Awareness being filled with three indivisible states of Love, Joy, and Wellbeing. They combine and express themselves in the creation of the physical universe. They also diverge and create more specific and diverse expressions of the One Divine as you and me, and in fact as every aspect of this physical universe. All of this is in essence Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness expressing itself in all of our universe’s wonder diversity in physical manifestation. As human beings we often get distracted from our essential state, but we can always return our attention to it, allow it to flow and shine, and ultimately live our highest potential at any and every moment in recognition of our union with the One Divine.
We are Love, Joy, Wellbeing, and Awareness as is God. We can realize more of our potential and be ourselves more truly the more we can allow our essential state to flow through us into the world. We can be the people we want to be, have the experiences we want to have, and continue to evolve and create the more we let the shine of our Spirit radiate and light our way.
