The Open Road ... Summer 2007

In the Morning When We Rise

By Mark Finnan

Wishing you could live a more spiritually centered life? Disappointed or disheartened by your inconsistency in following your chosen path? Wanting to find a way to bring your profoundest beliefs to bear on the business of your everyday life? Do doubts, insecurities and past failures occasionally leave you feeling inadequate or incapacitated when you want so desperately to change for the better? Many of us have and do struggle with such challenges. Whoever thought up the “climbing a mountain” metaphor to represent the upward path of personal growth and spiritual development sure got it right.

Yet, regardless of whether we are just about to begin this journey or are struggling to stay on it there are directions and practices in the Cayce material that can help us. A very obvious and essential one has to do with our mental functioning during the first few minutes after we wake up each morning. It is one that is in keeping with the direction given that we should “Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven.”

The Cayce discourses on personal spiritual development encourage us to see each day as a new opportunity, similar to each new lifetime, to become more attuned to the Divine within and to express that consciousness in the material world through our abilities and talents. We are advised that each morning before our feet touch the floor we should spend some time reflecting on and relating to the best that is within us, to what we believe in, so that we might better manifest that in the circumstances and situations of our day to day life. A short morning practice beginning with a simple prayer can have life changing results. In giving advice to a sixty one year old woman, recently widowed, who wanted to grow and be of service to others but who was not sure of how she should proceed the Cayce source suggested she should begin each day by repeating this short prayer three times “Lord, what would you have me do this day?” Then spending a few moments in silent receptivity for a response from within. The woman, who had never worked outside the home in her life but who enjoyed writing, eventually became a successful editor of inspirational books and wrote back to Cayce that his advice had given her a new zest for living and living a purposeful life.

This simple advice is something that we can all follow and benefit from in our own lives. Of course it is important that this spiritual exercise is entered into with sincerity and faith and a willingness to relax into a time of prayerful and contemplative attunement, leaving aside for a little while the call of the outside world. As someone who sometimes wakes up with thoughts of what has to be done today whirling around in my head and feeling that I should be up and at it, I know the challenge it can be to just relax, dismiss those thoughts and give time and energy to an interior spiritual awakening. Yet once worked with, this short daily discipline can have beneficial results in that it allows us to sense and see solutions to problematic situations as we allow the source of our being to influence our consciousness and impact on the circumstances of our daily lives.

We must first, of course, feel so motivated that we will make the choice to do this and then be willing to set aside the time each morning to ask and to listen. If we have set the Christ as our ideal, as the influence we seek for ourselves in our living and working in the world, then as we enter into our morning spiritual practice, it may be helpful to remember the promise given to us “Behold I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door I will come into him(her) and dine with him(her) and he(she) with me.” The implication here, of course, being that we should allow ourselves some time to listen for that “still small voice” within. As idealistic and even demanding as such a scenario may seem for someone who is just starting out on a spiritual path, it is in the patience and persistence with the practice that the spiritual seeker may find the assurance that this approach can really work.

Of course, a morning spiritual practice of this nature, with additional time spent in meditation, is essential for anyone wanting to remain on their chosen path. Advice from the Cayce source to those involved with the A.R.E. in its early days surely applies to us today. In responding to those who wanted to commit to the work yet also had to deal with the demands of pressures of their personal lives he had this to say. “For there is set before thee those choices to be made, as to whom ye will serve...” (254-91) Later in the same reading, after questioning whether there had been the application in the daily life of what the individuals involved had found to be good and worthwhile in their lives, he went on to say ...“ Yes, thy Lord, thy God, showeth ye this day by day in His dealings with thy fellow man, to show those promises that have been made sure in the experience of those who seek. For he giveth good and evil unto all, and ye choose through the will thy relationships - as to whether they shall be for self-exaltation, self-glorification, self-indulgence, self-gratification, or for the love of life, of truth, of hope, of honour, of virtue, of patience, of brotherly love.” (254-91)

The mystic poet William Wordsworth once wrote “The world is too much with us, coming and going we lay waste our powers.” How much more pertinent his words are in the fast paced, in your face, world of today. Yet we have the choice each morning of either allowing the world to be “too much with us,” or spending a while in communion with the Divine within, by and from which we may all the better be able to relate with causativity and positivity to the day ahead.