For reasons I don't understand, I am come here to this life to feel all things that come. Grief and sorrow, fear and loneliness, as well as joy and goodness, happiness and love. Everything is required somehow for life; and in order to fulfill my being-duties as a creature of the cosmos, it is my obligation to suffer all these things to be within me to enter me, to penetrate me, and to find their way, each one of them, into the deepest parts of my being, where, having suffered them and allowed them to be real within me, they can begin the great work of transubstantiation that blends them all into a single whole. This process is a real and active and living substance of being, a chemical process, both physical and metaphysical, that involves not just the atoms and molecules and cells of my body, but the energies that make them. I realize that my preparation for this being-duty is to come into relationship with the sensation of being, which actually represents the fields of energy which affect these changes and fuse these substances in being. And I realize that in coming into relationship with this suffering, coming into relationship with this sensation of being, that I will be asked to suffer much more deeply than the surface of the water that I am filled with can reflect. I am asked to suffer not just in the reflections of the surface and ordinary life, but to suffer deeply within the hidden reservoirs of being. I realize that I am asked to come here in order to fuse this great sorrow that penetrates everything with the active spiritual element of joy. Joy blends with sorrow here, on the edge of what they make together, which is light, and truth, and love and compassion, and goodness and mercy and care, and all of the things which we call wholly affirming, and which can also be called glory. So as I join together with the gravity of this sensation, and I sense the magnetism that concentrates my attention in this field of energy, I begin to realize that I have been invited through this depth of suffering to become a representative of this great glory, which exists throughout the cosmos. Through my sensation and my suffering, I am called to this purpose. And here within, my attention is where I learn to listen.
