Honouring the gods
Accepting all aspects of life
When we let go of the world completely - when attention releases its grip on every object, every thought, every sensation - something remarkable happens.
We don’t disappear.
We become awareness itself.
This is not a theory to be debated or a concept to be understood intellectually.
It is an experience available to anyone who turns attention back upon itself with sufficient stillness and patience.
In that experience, there is total unity. No differentiation between self and other. No passage of time. No boundaries marking where “I” end and “you” begin.
In this experience, we are the One - not as a belief, but as direct knowing. There is no separation because there is nothing separate *from* anything else.
Yet notice something curious about this unity: in it, there is no world.
No colours, no sounds, no faces, no stories.
The infinite rests as infinite - complete, whole, needing nothing.
But within that unbounded potential lies every possible form, every possible experience, every possible world.
For any of that potential to be explored, for the infinite to know itself through finite expression, thought and form must flow forth.
Creation must happen. The One must breathe out.
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And so we find ourselves here, in this world of time.
We experience. We become. We are flickering, dynamic forms arising and dissolving in an endless dance.
This is what the world is - an interdependent net of evolving, interacting forms, each one connected to every other in ways we can barely comprehend.
Within this net, there is staggering beauty: the slow burn of a sunset painting the clouds in colours that have no names; rainforests humming with millions of lives woven together; the face of a child looking up at you with complete trust; the pure joy of discovering something true for the first time.
These experiences move us because they are the One tasting itself through our eyes, our hearts, our wonder.
But alongside that beauty - inseparable from it - there is decay.
Transformation. Death. Pain. Sadness.
The sunset fades. The rainforest burns. The child grows old.
The discovery becomes familiar and loses its shine.
For new forms to emerge within a finite manifestation of the infinite, old forms must pass away.
There is no other way.
A universe that only accumulated, that never released, would quickly become static—frozen - dead in a far more profound sense than any physical death.
Change requires endings. Growth requires loss. The new cannot be born unless the old completes its cycle.
Here is where our human minds create suffering for themselves.
We label “good” whatever maintains our body, our comfort, our familiar forms - and we label “bad” whatever threatens them.
This is natural. This is what minds evolved to do.
A mind that didn’t prefer survival wouldn’t last very long.
But this same tendency, when left unexamined, causes us to fight against half of existence.
We grasp at pleasure and push away pain. We cling to life and rage against death. We want the gods of springtime and reject the gods of winter.
We want growth without decay, gain without loss, love without grief.
To speak mythologically - and perhaps more truthfully than we realise - we need to honour all the gods.
Not just the bright ones who bring abundance, beauty, and joy.
Not just the gentle ones who maintain the forms we love.
But also the dark ones. The fierce ones. The gods who ensure variety and growth through the very processes we fear most: endings, dissolution, transformation, death.
These gods are not enemies of life.
They are servants of the same infinite source, ensuring that the dance continues, that stagnation never sets in, that new forms always have room to emerge.
Without them, the universe would be a single frozen moment - beautiful perhaps, but incapable of exploration, discovery, or becoming.
Our awareness - which is not truly “ours” but a participation in the One itself - has the capacity to hold all of this.
It can hold the joy and the grief. The birth and the death. The creation and the destruction.
Unlike our thinking minds, which must choose sides, awareness simply is.
It does not grasp or reject. It illuminates everything equally, the way sunlight falls on flowers and garbage with the same impartiality.
Making peace with all things is not passive resignation. It is not saying that nothing matters or that we should not act. Quite the opposite. We still honour our own humanity, our own precious life, by seeking to enhance it, protect it, and express it fully.
We still build, create, love, and strive. We still prefer health to sickness, kindness to cruelty, beauty to ugliness. That is our nature as human beings, and honouring the gods means honouring that too - including the god of our own life force, our own will to flourish.
But after that work is done - after we have given our best effort, played our part in the dance as fully as we can- then we are invited into something larger.
We are invited to identify with the unified awareness that we also are.
Not trying to isolate ourselves in one part of experience while rejecting all the other parts.
Not demanding that life be only pleasant, only comfortable, only what we want it to be.
But rather accepting all of it - every last thread of it - as a manifestation of the One exploring itself through time.
This acceptance is not defeatism. It is the deepest form of participation.
When we stop fighting half of existence, we become available to the whole of it.
We stop wasting energy on resistance and find that energy now flows into presence, appreciation, and authentic engagement.
We discover that even the difficult experiences, held in awareness rather than resisted, have their own strange beauty - their own teachings - their own place in the pattern.
Honour all the gods. Let awareness hold everything. And find, in that holding, the peace that was always already here.
Practice: Accepting All
Find a quiet moment. Sit comfortably and let your breathing settle naturally.
Bring to mind something you find easy to accept - perhaps the warmth of sunlight, the face of someone you love, a simple moment of peace. Notice how your awareness holds this without resistance. Let yourself feel that openness.
Now, gently bring to mind something more difficult. An uncertainty. A loss. A fear. Something you would normally push away.
Instead of analysing it or trying to fix it, simply let it exist within the same awareness that held the pleasant.
You are not approving of it or inviting more of it.
You are simply acknowledging that it is already here, already part of the dance, already held by something larger than your preferences.
Breathe. Notice that your awareness does not break. It does not collapse. It remains spacious, present, capable of holding this too.
Silently, you might say: I honour even this. I let awareness hold even this.
Rest there for a few moments.
Then, gently return to your day - carrying with you the quiet knowledge that you are vast enough to hold all of it.
Our awareness, which is a participation in the One, holds it all.
Making peace with all things, letting go of grasping, letting go of the judgements of our human mind (which is aimed towards our finite survival), gives honour to all things - all processes.
This is still honouring our own humanity, our own life, to seek to enhance it. But after that work is complete, then we should honour all the gods by identifying with the unified awareness that we also are.
Not trying to isolate ourselves into one part of experience and rejecting all the other parts.
But rather accepting all as a manifestation of the unfolding of the One.
“Then, gently return to your day - carrying with you the quiet knowledge that you are vast enough to hold all of it.”
YES 🙌