“In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems. You dance inside my chest where no-one sees you, but sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art." - Rumi
What is devotion? And how is devotion different from attachment, obsession or addictions?
The dictionary definition of devotion is depicted as love, loyalty, or enthusiasm for a person, activity, or cause. Fair enough.. but this definition leaves something out that is all important to this understanding and has everything to do with qualifying this process. For it is not the love, the loyalty or the enthusiasm that creates devotion... it is the why behind those things that tell the tale.
Devotion also has an inherent sidenote of exclusivity. We've often heard the phrase, "you cannot serve two masters". And while this is certainly true, when there is devotion, it's not that there is no other.
Quite to the contrary, for in that devotion lives the All... and the passageway to the door of everything... a way in the depths of understanding required to unlock our heart of hearts.
True devotion is complete in and of itself, and takes not away from anything else,
nor adds to it. It is timeless, and eternal.
Before devotion, we are as scattered seeds... floating, falling, landing... here, there and anywhere... everywhere... looking for love in all the wrong places. Be-longing our existence. This is by design. For devotion is an electro-magnetic force that calls us into a higher order of being and helps us to find our place in the galaxy. The faint memory of this cohesion lingers, haunts and propels us forward, seeking, reaching and expanding.
The shadow side of devotion is addiction, obsession, codependency and attachment. These are the seeds of devotion, and the responses of the mind or body thinking and feeling its way to love, inching along in lack and control in search of a connection that has been veiled, but far from forgotten.
Devotion does not offer a solution, it is the blackhole that consumes us and when it comes it brings an opportunity to give unconditional love. And in the absolute abundance of that giving, all is received.
Even in the shadow of addiction and attachment this process gives back all, as it takes everything.
Yet, devotion lacks the hallmark of addiction, namely a price that can never be paid in full...
in a deal with the devil. For it is a deal with an angel, the angel that overlights life and the
eternal will to good, and it never takes the light from our eyes or our soul.
Devotion gives life, like breathing.Within the cocoon of devotion there is an in breath and an out breath. Unlike our addiction to love, devotion is alive, filled with the energy that sustains life..
and the full undivided attention of the divine presence within.
It takes nothing real, and gives everything essence. It takes everything false, and breathes flesh to its bones.
The price of devotion is inherent in the devotion itself, and requires no external motivation, as it appears only through the free will of our attention, appreciation and awareness, which becomes the devotion itself.
Devotion cannot be attended fully without inner vision and spiritual sight. For in devotion
we are called and carried into the sea of our devotion to depths and heights not able to be accessed
in physical realms alone, nor in spiritual realms alone. Devotion will not suffer ignorance on either side.
Devotion is at once simple and complex in its subtleties.
The beauty we receive compares in no way to what is merely seen.
True devotion takes us beyond good and bad, beyond our preferences.
It takes us to a new land of day, even in the darkest night of our soul.
Devotion is the synergy, the third thing that arises from true love.
Having a life of its own, it calls us forward into a world
that was barely accessible to us. With devotion, the deepest, highest, quietest and largest levels of love are revealed.
Devotion is the opposite of attraction, addiction and attachment. It is a love so complete that
we die the ego death every day willingly, just to stay attuned. For devotion opens our palms and lets fall out of our hands the need or desire to control. The wait for what comes next is breathless, inspiring, inspired and pregnant with unimaginable possibility.
In devotion, the last thing you would ever want to do is change a hair on the head of
the beloved... whomever or whatever or however that applies.
Devotion is love in action... wringing a response from the depths of our being.
To not respond, even in inward movement and leaping heart, or silent reprieve is not an option.
Not because it demands it, but because it is it. It simply is... and has no meaning, beyond a deeper understanding that is ineffable, often wordless, nameless and still.
Devotion makes us content to sit, stand, move, run, jump, or kneel. It makes our whole life a prayer, and in that sacrament all action is sacred. And when there is someone or something eternal that draws us into this space, then we will know God.
When we can take that devotion all the way, go all the way down into it, it will always bring us home to ourselves.
When we serve in the light of devotion we are not excluding anything else... for in that devotion all is served, all is included. It brings us to the wholeness of our freedom to choose.
And in the absence of self and devotion to this external God, if we remain humble
teachable, receptive and giving to the All... there is no way that we will not find ourselves standing at the temple door of our soul.. to worship the divine within each of us...and all around.
And when we reach the shores of our own soul... all the souls are there...
we can hear them... see them... sense them... listening... exquisite... now the single
point of God is revealed in this moment of eternity that is ever expanding
in our mind, in our heart... and if we can allow... our body... and every single
thing that we see, touch, taste, hear and smell... every sensory.. both physical and meta
translates the bliss of our devotion.
This is how Divine identity... divinity is brought forth and birthed... through our devotion. The act of true devotion is the operation that leads us to the light of our own soul.
Leading us to the treasure of our own soul... and to the oversoul of this entire creation. The way out is through, and once we make it through the path of true love and devotion we find that there is no place we'd rather be, for we have found our home.
How do you find your devotion?...Beyond good and bad, beyond your preferences, your likes and dislikes.... what else is there?
"If you bring forth what is within you What you bring forth will save you If you do not bring forth what is within you, What you do not bring forth will destroy you". - Jesus (The Gospel of Thomas)
be; Rev. Renee Bledsoe
Rumi on Devotion
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.”
“The minute I heard my first love story,
I started looking for you, not knowing
how blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along.”
“What you seek is seeking you.”
“Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”
“A thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home.”
“People want you to be happy.
Don't keep serving them your pain!
If you could untie your wings
and free your soul of jealousy,
you and everyone around you
would fly up like doves.”
“I have lived on the lip
of insanity, wanting to know reasons,
knocking on a door. It opens.
I've been knocking from the inside.”
“Take someone who doesn't keep score,
who's not looking to be richer, or afraid of losing,
who has not the slightest interest even
in his own personality: he's free.”
“Knock, And He'll open the door Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.”
1st Corinthians
If I speak in the tongues[a] of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast,[b] but do not have love, I gain nothing.
4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part,10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
