"This joy I feel at realizing that I am by nature grateful in the face of life's trials is my salvation". U
—Q: The silly question I want to ask...is how you became this...and how can I become it?" L
—A: For me? I stayed in. For long enough. This was key. Pressure cooker on a timer. Alchemy. Saturn. The Teacher. For you? By your asking, I would say you know what I mean.
By grace of circumstance relative to our own bid for living liberation, we will meet in time with the full force of divine providence all at once, again and again! As free as you consciously aspire to be, your wish is fate's command. Be care-full of what you wish for!
I was feeding the Indian crows one Saturday as an Upaya or astrological remedy for Saturn's intensive presence in my life. A presence made manifest through the illusion-crushing tragedies that have defined the unavoidable tests of indelible merit.
As I broke up little pieces of chapati and scattered them as fairly as possible between the black birds huddled restlessly in the coconut grove, I broke up into bottom-deep sobs of indescribable gratitude and joy.
A revelation. It had been all for me. The pain was for me. The pain had carved pathways through me. And the pathways were vibrating beyond their ends into infinity. And the feeling was neither pain nor pleasure but the bliss of non-polarized allowance of it all to be—without even trying.
Bliss personified as Saturnian Love overflowing, suffusing each cell of me. For me. All the pain was all for the love of me to flow as me. The "mantra" that entered my expanding mind was, "It's all to thank You, all to thank You, all to thank You." Gratitude and Love were synonymous. "It's all to love You, all to love You, all to love You."
May we pass on the keys of remembrance to fellow alchemists in the living process that inevitably leads us into the grottoes and crevasses of our deepest resolve to persist through the dissoloution, reduction and "swooning" until we drink deeply—as the first and last breath itself—of what we are in essence.
For me it was the very trial embraced, the very test confronted, the very wound spiraled into that opened into the crucible of eternal truth itself, and the deeper I went in all willingness and faith to face and challenge my end—the greater the potential for imbibing and assimilating the unearthly joys of realizing that the singular essence of multi-aspected being is verily indestructible in the face of my own unveiled mortality.
There is more here. The questions are the turning key.