Enough.
I wanted to talk about the concept of ‘enough’ as compared to the idea of ‘abundance’. This has been rattling around in my head since July when I had the rare opportunity to sit alone with my brother at a café after his Naturopath appointment. He had a cancer called Mesothelioma, brought about from working with and around asbestos. I’m speaking in past tense because he passed away on the 20th of August 2018. This blog entry is for him.
We had a rare if not unique opportunity to have a conversation on our own, I was only too aware of the fact that he’d be gone one day very soon and so I hung on his every word. Phil was a Gemini so talking was a big part of his life (snicker, understatement…) and he tended to speak in riddles and very cryptically which I found frustrating but weirdly endearing. On this day he told me about a conversation he’d had with a mate about God and what his mate believed God to be. He said he believed that God was Abundance, that nature was a thriving bounty of prosperity in all things (paraphrasing here), and that all of us were able to access this abundance if we were to open up to it.Then his friend asked Phil what he felt God was. Phil said that he “believed God was Enough.” I’ve heard that idea before but this time I was listening. God is Enough…Let’s go back to the idea of Abundance. What exactly is an abundance? If I’m thirsty and I want a glass of water, would an abundance be 2 glasses? Would an abundance of water in that moment be a lake or an ocean? Or would it just be the fact that I have a tap that I can turn on at will? Do you see the dilemma? Abundance is not defined, it certainly has a limit or we’d use a different word like ‘infinite’, but it’s a bit arbitrary. In that moment my body requires water, a glass of water will suffice, it is enough. There’s no confusion about the concept of enough, I know what it is in any given moment and in that moment I have it - I am replete with enough-ness. So with that said, let’s do some rabbit hole-ing… I’ve been reading ‘The Hermetica’ or a summarised version of it by Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy (collection of selected excerpts) and I came across this quote:
"Atum is the whole
Which contains everything.
He is one, not two.
He is All, not many.
The All is not many separate things,
But the Oneness that subsumes all parts.
The All and the One are identical.
You think that things are many
When you view them as separate,
But when you see they all hang on the One,
And flow from the One,
You will realise they are united -
Linked together,
And connected by a chain of Being
From the highest to the lowest,
All subject to the will of Atum."
This struck me as exactly what I was pondering about. I like that in this book they have chosen to use the word Atum (Egyptian word for God) rather than God, as it allows us to read the text minus our attachments or ‘mind filters’ regarding the word God.Regardless of your feelings about God, the Universe and Everything, we can all benefit from changing our mindset around to the idea of trusting that we have enough rather than expecting the abundance. We live in a corporeal world so we see ourselves as separate to everything we experience through our senses therefore we see ourselves as the Many. However this is not our true state of being, we are a part of the Oneness that subsumes all parts but to exist in this corporeal reality we must suspend the Truth of being all One so we can interact and relate, so we can move through this space and leave creation in our wake. So how do we incorporate this Knowing into our everyday moments?This corporeal reality is defined by the polarities within it. Light and dark, sound and silence, hot and cold, here and there. This is a world made up of opposites, this is why we have such a hard time understanding the concept of All is One, our brains are hard-wired to find comparisons with which to relate ourselves to. There’s a wonderful story that I love to refer to when talking about this concept:
"Imagine that you were in an all-white room, totally white: white floor, white ceiling, white walls. And imagine you were suspended in that room, as if by magic, so that you couldn’t touch anything, just dangling there…And imagine that nothing else exists at all. How long do you think that you would exist in your own experience?” And the answer came up for me: “Probably not terribly long, not very long.”
Because, in the absence of anything else, I am not. Not in my own experience. I mean, I am that I am. But I can’t know that I am. I can’t experience that I am, except in relationship to something else. So, I can’t know anything about myself.
Yet, if somebody were to walk into that room of white- ness, and just put so much as the tiniest speck of ink on the wall, to the degree that I could see that speck of ink, that little black dot, to that degree suddenly I exist. First of all, over there would exist, and over here. Because the dot would be there, and I would be here. I would begin to define myself in relationship to that other thing… Put a cat in the room, and suddenly I have much larger experiences of myself, because that which is also in the space is much larger than the dot on the wall. So now I begin to conceptualise all kinds of things about me. Maybe the cat is softer than I am, but maybe I am older than the cat, or whatever.”
by Neale Donald Walsh from his book “Little Book of Life”
This story tells us so much about why we live in such a world, why it’s so important to embrace the polarities we experience - we learn about ourselves through them. So it’s okay to not live in every moment knowing that All is One, it’s enough to carry the knowing in your heart and let it ‘paint’ the world for you as you move through it. Then you can still relate, interact and grow towards the Light as we are meant to. The Knowing makes life easier to navigate and understand.So I have enough compared to what I had a moment ago. Can I have an abundance compared to what I had a moment ago? No I can’t, and when I compare myself to it I actually feel less than I was a moment ago because I can’t attain it therefore, I feel like I’m lacking in what I believe I need.So let me suggest that we adopt the adage ‘God is Enough’ as it is capable of changing the world. I believe that a world full of people who feel replete in their enough-ness is better than a world full of people trying to have abundance and never feeling satiated.In an abundant world YOU are enough…God is enough.Spirit is enough.The Universe is enough.Nature is enough.Life is enough.I Am Enough.
Thanks Phil, you were Enough…