Uncover the Rock of Consciousness
by Rev. Cory Coberforward
Readings
Matthew 7:24-27
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
2 Samuel 22:17-20 (group reading for live service)
“He reached down from on high and took hold of me;
he drew me out of deep waters.
He rescued me from my powerful enemy,
from my foes, who were too strong for me.
They confronted me in the day of my disaster,
but the Lord was my support.
He brought me out into a spacious place;
he rescued me because he delighted in me.”
Read the written message below with music videos
There’s something in all of our experiences that is as solid as a rock, even amidst the trials of life. Something that we all share, no matter our beliefs, but is often overlooked. What has been with us, exactly as it is now, since before we even knew our name? That is the very light of awareness itself, the seat of “I am” in our lives. Even our sense of our body changes, identities change, feelings and thoughts obviously change, but there is something that sees all that. Tell me, are you aware right now? Even just this simple question can help us take a step back into an awareness of our awareness, something that by its very nature is expansive and as solid and peaceful as a rock. Our sages tell us that just noticing this seat of awareness (i.e. ourselves) more can lead to its peace pervading our lives, as well as opening us to the joy, love, and wisdom inherent to our consciousness, our spirit, what some may call the light of God.
I’ve heard many preachers talk about how belief in God, or more specifically the Christian Trinity, is a rock on which we stand. I can’t help but caveat this with what Christ actually said, which is that the rock is listening to his words and putting them into practice. Christ described ways that we can better know God, not just believe in some specific idea of God. Indeed, a lot of his language points us back to the core of our very being, the love and wisdom that naturally shine in consciousness. We have but to return to our childlike nature, return to loving others as ourselves, return to a sense of the peace of our very awareness itself.
Whether we believe in God is often a moot point. Sometimes we feel that we believe in God, but that faith only serves to embolden our tendencies to control, our neuroses and addictions. Whether we have a name for God or not, if God exists how can we find ourselves separate from the source of all life, the infinite One, Love itself, Being itself? At worse, we can get so caught up in our developed sense of separate identity and ego that we feel rocked by the waves of life, instead of sensing the rock beneath our feet, connecting all of us.
Whatever our beliefs, there must be a way to know, to experience the core of our very nature – whatever we may call it. The only trick is, on this earth we’ve become addicted to seeking elsewhere for fullness, wholeness, and love. We ignore the very thing from which, in which, and by which we perceive everything else. Often, even when we believe in God, Krishna, Christ, or Allah, we envision them as a separate being, which only propagates the very delusion that many spiritual teachings strive to help us shed. Answer me this, if God is love, or wisdom, or life, or consciousness, what distance can God be from us?
However we may formulate our search, whatever our beliefs, there is no argument that we are aware. Notice this sense of awareness. Our awareness can hold multiple layers of things, from our vision and sound to imagination and thought, all at the same time. But there’s a reason why Christ, like many voices of God across traditions, tells us to “turn” in order to find the heaven “within.” Indeed, all of his teachings tend to point us back toward our natural space of freedom, love, childlikeness, openness, unity, and wholeness. In order for us to build our house on a rock, we should listen to these pointings and then enact them.
Sometimes we allow the distractedness of the way we perceive the world pull us out of this last bit - enacting the teachings of the sages. We can easily turn to the more external aspects of religion, the trappings of spirituality, instead of empowering ourselves into discovering the point of religiosity. This can be true more generally about life as well, buying into a material mindset while missing the very root of life itself. This means we miss its fundamental joy and peace! Understandably, our thinking mind thinks it knows just about everything about the fundamentals of life, but we don’t realize that the very light of life that watches our mind talk has qualities and a transcendence that we know very little about, even though it is always with us as the very seat of our experiencing.
Our suffering and anxieties are a sign that the way we are approaching or interpreting life is not quite healthy. Like the pain due to a rock in our shoe, it calls on us to take some time to make things better for ourselves. Fluctuating in and out of suffering (or you can call it hell) and grasping for a fleeting pleasure isn’t the natural state of our being, we are made for and made from peace and joy (or you can call it heaven). This is the fundamental wisdom of our greatest spiritual teachers and the very rock from which they stand.
You can think of Christ’s teachings as triangulating for us this rock in our lives. In his parable about building a house on the sand or a rock indicates that the rock is already there, we have but to set our home upon it instead of the shifting sand of the ever-changeful mind. And when we start to uncover the natural peace of consciousness, we can still take a walk out onto the beach! Indeed, without the pitfalls of settling there, we might find that the shifting nature of experience and thought is quite pleasant when seen in this different light.
Our current experience is the equivalent of building our house on the sand. We easily feel thrown about by the whims of life and mind. Homes don’t do well with much sliding and moving, let alone the pitfalls of sinking deeper and deeper into sand and sea. But, like a house on the sand, when we realize the pain that we’re carrying is inviting us to move over to the rock, we can immediately start to set up camp out of the dangerous, troubled space we used to call home. In this process, it would do us well to pay close attention to our troubled house, in order to avoid injury and to learn from our mistakes with our new home. Watching the flimsy, fleeting nature of our old foundation, we learn to appreciate our newfound and growing groundedness, and we can start to naturally carry aspects of the old home that are useful to our new ground of being.
Let’s not store any wisdom we’ve gleamed today just in our memory but come to live it and discover its truth for ourselves. We’re blessed with scriptures and insights that point us back to ourselves and our fundamental nature, telling us that our burden can become light and that a type of resurrection is available to us closer than our heartbeat, within the peace of consciousness itself. This light of consciousness is shared by all, and so in finding that we are it we find love for others and a deep appreciation for life. Divesting from the sand of mind as we notice and turn to the ground of being, we can return to a childlike awareness and can start to appreciate what we might have or might not have truly believed in before, God.
Peace is with you,
Cory