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Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace: Jeff Buckley (2004) is an hour-long documentary that investigates why Jeff Buckley and his legendary album, Grace, became a cult music phenomenon

 

Listen on YouTube

Click on graphic

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Amazing Grace

The Movie

 

 

This is one of this writers all time favorite movies.  When you think that you are only very small and that you as an individual cannot do anything of import to change the world then play this movie.  

This is the story of a politician (William Wilberforce) who was inspired by the Divine and supported by a Prime Minister to change the world in service to Love.

I always cry at the end because I feel this is the only response that such an amazing grace movie can evoke.

Here is a part of this amazing movie.  Click on the graphic below.

As a storyteller I sing, listen too and contemplate songs for the mystical heart. This often makes me dance with joy and weep for the sorrow of the world and this experience of separateness from Love called Tony Cuckson tramping the world of Boogie Street.

The Three Graces - Part I 

Sir Edmund Burne-Jones

The Three Graces

If you could name the Three Graces, what names would you give to them.  What practical application would such naming have for your life.  Writers play with words and names.  I like to play with combinations of words that begin with the same letter.

In "7 Ways to a Wonderful Life," I choose to begin each of the 7 Ways  with the letter P.  For this writer and storyteller I would name the three graces, Silence, Stillness and Service.  

Let me take you into the fullness of what such graces would mean if you chose to consciously live these practices in your life.  The first amazing grace is silence.  In this article I am going to write about silence as an aspect of feminine power.  This power is not gender based but a spiritual power.  This is the real power of silence and when enacted with service allows for Love in Action.

This world of time and space and form has become a much nosier place over that last 100 years.  This is a reflection of the distance we have moved from the power and beauty of silence.  This reflects the disturbed dynamic of the masculine which gives us more and more forms of communication and less and less ability to commune.

To be able to commune needs no form.  You don't need a mobile phone.  You don't need email or the latest social networking tool.  You do, however, absolutely need to be prepared to trust and to tune into the creative process that you alone are here to be.

For most people spending time in silence ( which is not simply spending time in an environment devoid of noise) is considered a waste of time.  Mystics will laugh at the very idea that spending time in silence is a waste of time.  The will tell you it is the only way to make time meaningful and to expand it without limit.  Those storytellers, who are walkers between the worlds will tell you the same.

Our Western culture and increasingly all around the globe we are bombarded by messages that tell us we need this and that in order to be happy.  This bombardment continues apace unless you consciously choose to turn away from it.  

This is the first step in atonement.  Atonement has nothing to do with sin or guilt.  It is more a conscious choice to move toward a sense of longing for what you have come here to be and to express as beauty and grace in form.  Atonement begins when you turn around and move inward in order to find your true home and true grace.

When you begin to value silence it will challenge you in ways you can now hardly imagine.  Silence will disturb "little me."  This is because silence is so vast and full and cannot be continued within a limited time, space and form identity that does not allow for the limitless to be.  This is a living paradox to be lived rather than thought about.

Silence is the invitation from the soul.  It is the invitation from divine command contained in one of the greatest practice wisdom teachings of all time.  This is the spiritual instruction par excellence that is the entry into grace.  This instruction is "Be still and know that I AM God."

Living this instruction is real power and true grace.  It allows you to feel connected to the infinite.  You let go and you let be.  Creation dances through you except that in the beginning you will want to control the dance.  You will, in the beginning fall over.  This dance of Love in form that you are to realize is very unsettling.  

You are already unsettled.  You do not know peace of mind.  You might for a time feel happy but the flower of happiness contains the seeds of unhappiness.  This is the nature of the world of time and space and form.  Is this a philosophy of despair?  Only if you think that happiness is all there is and that it is even the purpose of creation.

Examination of wisdom teachings do not tend to emphases happiness.  They emphasis peace.  This is not a peace that is simply the absence of conflict.  This is a peace that gives one a sense of centeredness amidst the changing sands of time.  It is the rock upon which a life of silence, stillness and service can be build and won't come tumbling down.

This peace cannot be found in ego pursuits.  The ego which is your felt sense of separateness from Love cannot give you peace because is connected to that which will eventually end.  All forms born in time end. Except that you do not.  The peace that wisdom teachings invite is the peace of knowing who you are and the grace of knowing who you are.

This knowing (a deep felt experience not of the intellect) that gives you certainty is a knowing that allows you to feel eternal.  Who would think that you could find such a treasure within your self.  Actually you don't find it in thinking.  You find it in the silence of no thought.  Creation doesn't create in words.  It creates in wholes which is why we call it holy.

The beginning of the creative process and the entry into the dimension of peace begins not with words but with intention.  Words and thought are too often a barrier and a resistance to the power and the beauty of the silence of no thought.  In Zen this is called "beginners mind."

Alan Watts the great contemporary mystic asked one of the greatest questions in his book of the same title.  This is the question, "Do you do it or does it do you?"  Most of our time is spend doing our lives.  We hardly ever get to experience the grace of allowing Creation to do us, allowing the dance to do the creative process that it knows how to do better than "little me."

This allowing "it to do you" gives rise to Love in Action.  The result is not happiness but joy.  One will be the experience of fullness that you will simply give away because you cannot contain the excitement.  The other you will tend to be dependant on outer circumstances.  One expands the other tends to contract.

It is a terrible affront to the ego to learn that it is not needed in order for you to be the grace that you are.  Ego is needed in an organizational sense but not as a psychological attachment.  Relying totally on the ego is like saying to creation, "Get out of the way and let me do creation better than you."  Creation always does your will until you allow it to do its will.  Ego is like trying to dance with your shoe laces tied tightly together and blaming the dance for the fact you keep falling over.

If you trusted the silent movement of creation within, you would move mountains of doubt and clear a space wherein the dance would happen.  You have, however, been taught that you are not to be trusted.  You are told that you have fallen far from grace and that you have in some way to prove that you are worthy of the dance.  You are not unworthy.  You will never be unworthy no matter what you do.  Creation graced you life.  It loves that life it created.  It always loves that life it creates.  It loves that life forever.

Creation does not ask you to prove anything other than to accept the gift that is given.  This is your birthright.  Your work here in time and space and form is simply to allow this.  There is nothing wrong with you.  You are not someone born in sin.  You are someone born in grace.  You have the unique opportunity to express this grace in the unique form of your body.  When you do this you light up the life and the light within you.  In this way Heaven comes to earth.  The formless expresses in form. God dances with you and you and Love are together as an eternal dance of becoming.

Practice a period of silence every day.  In that practice trust the process.  Creation knows how to do through you better than your limited thinking about how to do it will ever take you.  This doesn't mean you don't go shopping or learn new skills.  But it does mean you can relax sure in the knowledge that life and you are a dance of love.

Watch how you will be uneasy about this.  The exercise will begin to show you that your mind is not at peace.  It is like the experience of Humpty Dumpty who fell of the wall and all the Kings horses and all the King's men could not put together again.  However, the Queen, who represents the power of the feminine will put you together again when you are completely in pieces on the ground.

You don't get peace of mind until you become peace of Mind.  You are already a piece of the Mind of the All One although you and the mind of the All One are not separate.  You are apart and not apart.  Don't try and reason this out.  Feel what it means.

When you learn to enter this state of peace of mind you are a servant of Love.  You bring harmony into the world of form.  You are one of those that the Master Jesus said off "Blessed are the peace makers."  To be a peacemaker is to enter a combat zone.  Spend time with you mind and you will become a spiritual warrior.  This is a great grace.

© Tony Cuckson 2009

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