For some time, "Devotion" escaped me, it was seen as the worship of otherness, an odd weakness of spirit investing in some-thing or someone else's answers.
Devotion and Worship may be something you have enjoyed since childhood or are naturally attracted to, but it can also be something you secretly despise. For some, devotion is a sign of giving-up on ones personal autonomy and giving-in to mass hysteria and lazy follower-ship. It can be hard to understand Devotion, if the lens you are looking through sees devotion as supplication to someone or some God. For many, Devotion is seen as adherence to, allegiance to and loyalty to, a person and the teachings of that person (or God) For some it is much simpler - it is a recognition that the person or god they have come to know, has a great presence or a radiation that they treasure and wish to acknowledge. Whether because of in-person contact or through written words or transmissions of various sorts.
But Devotion may also simply dawn, in reference to no god or person, it may dawn as one sheds the ebbing rude coarseness that stood solid on so many willful grounds of insanity and ignorance. Simply, Devotion IN Light
In the beautiful stillness, the boundless Presence, the magnificence and majesty:
Devotion is camaraderie with the highest light. It is attending a dance with Angels.
IN Nothingness, great transcendence radiates within, one cannot but Be in devotion. It is not a choice or a failing or a failing, it is the twilight of all holding, the touch of one finger to the hand of Divine Essence in Living Light.
Love unbounded, unbinding.
I pondered why many great teachers are known to show Devotion to many outside of their circles and lineage. Some are given a picture of someone they are told is a great prophet or saint or God, and from then on they accept the image and the story, or so it appears. You see them accepting a picture and years later bowing to it, even though it might be a picture of a teacher that teaches things contrary to the very teachings they hold dear.
It can appear that they are easily taken-in, or that they are a bit simple minded. It can be written away in the view that they are big hearted and simply encompass all who stand out in religious life.
But there is something far higher: with no regard for the actual person, supposed saint or god, and even whether they even existed, one can have Devotion IN the archetype that these people or images have presented. The Highest of the High, the Unimaginable, that which IS and Will Be.
In abiding wakefulness, grace is ever present, gratitude pours forth to nothing, it is Light. Yet, this Light is ever-expanding, as all horizons fall away, again and again. The Light ever increasing.
One may know nothing of an image or a man or a god, but the Light that is the All and Everything is that man, that image, that god.
And in those coveted pictures that might be given, their archetype is that of the Highest Light in the concepts of Man, and in the Highest Light beyond Man.
I am the Light, and I am embodied as Man.
Devotion to the sublime archetypes of that which is ever bright, serves as a shepherd to me, for I know nothing.
Copyright David Doyle 2/2023