My friend Daphne, who graduated a few years ago from USC, wrote me a birthday card last week that warmed my soul.  In it she wrote these wise words:

“I love who I am becoming.”

I love who she is becoming.  And I love that she enjoys witnessing that process in herself at least as much as I enjoy witnessing it in her.

In contemplative practice we discover that as we mindfully observe our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and inner narratives, we’re not watching separate “atoms” of experience, each discretely distinct from the next.  We start with that assumption, but after long periods of practice, we wake up to see that there are no tidy boundaries between one experience and the next.  Careful attention reveals that, rather, we are observing a continuous flow of experience.  The divine “eye” within sees everything about what I think is “me” – mentally, physically, socially, spiritually.  That Knower remains one and the same – but what the Knower knows never stays the same.  The Knower within us lovingly observes our constant process of becoming.

My wife Roberta and I had a yellow Labrador dog, Kai, when we lived in Mill Valley, California.  Our house was located near a steep flume that tumbled with water in the winter months.  Kai loved to play in the stream.  He would see a riffle of water flowing over a rock in the flume, and he was convinced it was a solid object that he could grab with his teeth.  He would bite it, over and over and over, bewildered that it could not be grasped and played with like a stick.  I loved to watch him bite the riffle, laughing at his futile attempts hold it in his teeth, until one day I realized that I do the same thing.  I keep acting and thinking as if my inner experience, and the world beyond me, consists of things I can grasp and possess.  I keep thinking and acting as if I am a discrete and definable and enduring entity.  But in fact, everything about me, at every level of being, is in a constant state of becoming.  I’m a tumbling stream with rolling riffles that only appear as if they are solid and enduring entities.

My dear friend Daphne has the youthful wisdom to be able to see that who she is today will not be who she is tomorrow.  And she has the perennial wisdom to enjoy the very flow of her change, reveling in her process of becoming.

Do you love who you are becoming?  Are you enjoying the giddy delight of tumbling down the flume?  Because in your delight in becoming, the Knower within you will transform your relationship to time, and usher you into the eternal now – the kin-dom of heaven on earth – where there is nothing to grasp, and everything to love…

(See more of my “musings” here…)
 
JIM BURKLO
Senior Associate Dean, Office of Religious Life,
University of Southern California
 
 
 
 
Videos of my recent weekend workshop (4 sessions) on Mindful Christianity: Practicing with the Mystics: Krotona Institute of Theosophy:

Mindful Christianity 1
 
Mindful Christianity 2
 
Mindful Christianity 3
 
Mindful Christianity 4
 
Use my RESOURCES for churches, individuals, families
 
Souljourning – Nurturing Natural Spirituality in Young People – my new project!