Meditate | Expansion

Meditate is a monthly column in which insights gained from meditating on the Word are shared. We welcome your insights, too, in the form of comments or even your own article. Contact us if you'd like to write a submission for this column. -Editor

Before we are reborn, we do not know even that an inner being exists, let alone what it is, imagining there is no difference between the two selves. This is because we are absorbed by bodily and worldly interests and merge the concerns of the inner being with those interests. Out of distinct and separate planes we make one confused whole. Therefore the first verse says that there should be an expanse in the middle of the waters, then that it should exist to make a distinction…The second thing we begin to notice while being reborn, then, is that the inner self exists. We become aware that the attributes of the inner self are good feelings and true ideas which are the Lord’s alone. (Secrets of Heaven 24)

Madyama vikasha cittananda labah…The bliss of Consciousness is attained through the expansion of the center. (Pratyabijna Hrdayam 17, trans. Swami Shantananda in The Splendor of Recognition)

So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27)

Angels are in the Lord and the Lord is in them…God—that is, the Lord—is in the sun above the heavens and is in the heavens by means of his presence in warmth and light…Further, even though the Lord is present in heaven in this apparently distant way, he is still also intrinsically present there, so to speak, since…the distance between the sun and heaven is not a distance but a virtual distance. Given the fact that this distance is only apparent, then, it follows that the Lord himself is in heaven. He is in the love and wisdom of heaven's angels. (Divine Love and Wisdom 113)

Okay, that’s a lot of quotes. But all of these played a part in my meditation this week. Meditating on the idea of the expanse in the middle of the waters, my mind immediately brings up the sutra from the Pratyabijna Hrdayam, about expanding the madya, the center, or the middle. So I found myself in this meditation going through several opposites or dichotomies that surfaced in my awareness and I practiced holding them together in my mind, while I breathed and focused on just being present to their existence—focusing my awareness not only on the expanse that might be between them, but also the expanse within and around them, in other words, holding them in the atmosphere, so to speak, of the Lord’s love and wisdom.

“The bliss of Consciousness is attained through the expansion of the center” between…

My “self” and the Lord: The Lord Jesus Christ, the Divine Human One, is the sun in heaven and there is a sun in me, the inner self. I am aware of a tension between these two in my mind. How can they both be? What happens when I hold the truth of each of them simultaneously? How are they one and the same and yet I experience one in me and one outside of me?

In my marriage: My husband and I are both images of God. Held side by side, we are so different. Expansion of the center between us unites us.

Within myself: The Lord’s love and wisdom (good feelings and true ideas) are the inner self and the Lord’s alone, and my material and lower level experience is the outer self, and “I” am in the middle. What is the self? It is “the quality of its own receptivity” (Divine Providence 308). Expansion of the center in this case is expansion of my practice of choice.

Me and my children: There are two sides to my experience in parenting: an inner self side—the usefulness of the work, the purpose of love, the opportunity for healthy relationships—and the outer self side—the nitty-gritty, the frustrations, the material neediness. I hold them both in the expanse so that the center encompasses all of it.

Within my one body: My right and left sides—in this moment one feels tight and achy, the other feels free and at ease.

The center begins to encompass all of me and upon coming back more fully into an awareness of the room, I’m left with a simple message, a message that, having traversed from the infinite wisdom of the inner self, came packaged neatly for my outer experience: “Slow down. Don’t worry.”

This message carried a full resonance of peace and stayed with me for the rest of the day.  

Chelsea Rose Odhner

Chelsea is an assistant editor for New Church Connection and an editor and writer for New Church Perspective. She lives with her husband and three children in Willow Grove, PA.