Last Saturday, in meditation, I merged with the heavy guilt seizing my body.  Moving through the outer layers, I touched on something at its core.  An overwhelming desire to embody divine love.  I opened a magazine near my bed and read about a dance performance of the Gita Govinda, a story of divine love between Krishna and Radha.  There was a time when I thought I could embody divine love in a relationship, but we fell short.  The pain of that was enormous.  Therein lies the guilt.

I have at times experienced divine love moving through me, surrounding me, imbuing all that is, but to embody it–to give it form in this human realm–is a different story.  A taller order, it seems.  Still, the desire is so intense, everything else falls away.  I’ve given up on finding a romantic partner, at lease for a time.  I’ve let go of friendships that seem to disintegrate the moment I stop funneling energy into them.  All I can think about are the many ways in which I failed, but while the outer shell of that is guilt, the inner core of it is not guilt at all.  Not even pain.  The inner core is a burning desire to allow the universe to knead and sand me until divine love is the only thing left of me.

On my altar is a large pebble of glass polished perfectly smooth by years of erosion.  How long did it take to turn that piercing shard into a gem?  “If it takes this universe one million years to do that to me,” I thought, “then it’s not impossible.”  With that thought, I smiled with relief.

The fertile ground seems to be both humility and refraining from judgment while at the same time opening to one’s own holiness.  I was inspired, although I’m not really sure who or what inspired me, but some salient yet unidentifiable image of someone who embodies divine love entered my thoughts, perhaps a distillation of figures and their divine perfection.  Like watching a touching movie about Jesus or Siddhārtha Gautama, except I hadn’t.  It was more of a feeling, something very real and believable.  I was stirred.  I felt an overpowering compulsion to focus all of my awareness on this nondescript figure.  I wanted none of my attention to fall on anything else.  Perhaps if I focused my awareness on this figure, I would become more like him or her.

Then something very strange happened.  I did the refuge meditation several times.  There is something special about this meditation.  It’s essence is simply a complete focus of attention on figures representing transcendant awareness, wisdom, compassion, and love.  Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night from a bad dream, and some awful feeling has come over me.  I’m wracked with anxiety or grief or feelings of horror, unable to find relief, and I cannot fathom why.  I decide that I will do the refuge meditation, and in that very moment, before I even begin, an otherworldy peace rains down on me.  In one single moment, my horror becomes bliss.  Like a wrecked car going from zero to 120 miles per hour in two seconds.  How?  I smile and laugh and bask in love.  Not from me.  Not of me.  Not my doing.  I seemed only to have opened a small crack between the hell I somehow woke up in and some vast space of light, and that was enough.

That night, I sat in meditation for a long while doing the refuge meditation, and soon, I was compelled to crawl into bed and rest in that space.  I was in and out of sleep all night, or rather, in and out of lucidity.  Whenever I could remember the moment, I was in heaven.  The quality of the awareness filling this small “me” like a hand in a puppet was entirely different.

I think the awareness in “me” has wandered into heaven and spent the night there more than once.  It is no wonder that when events of life bring overwhelming pain, the very moment I redirect my attention to the ineffable divine, it all comes back to me.  Thus, the longing.  And thus, the terrible pain of moving through any day without knowing or sharing it or seeing it reflected in the forms around me.

Since reaching the end of a very long journey–getting my graduate degree–I’ve had time and space to open my attention to things that never resolved when I was still a student.  A different quality of grief arose.  Throughout the week, I began to notice an enormous heaviness in my heart and pain, as though someone were wringing my heart out like a wet rag.

I entered the pain during meditation and strained to allow it to unfold, but it was very strong and seemed bottomless.  A singularity of hardened sadness.  When I touched it, the energy began to gush, and I immediately sobbed.

The pain was not really pain or sadness.  It was the vague but intense memory of being loved in this human realm the way the Divine Beloved loves me in every moment.

It is upon us to try–as sincerely and passionately as we can–to give form to divine love in this human realm and open to its presence in others.  Perhaps that is why we’re here.  To love and just as importantly, to be loved in that deep, sacred, and transcendent way.