THE SHIMMERING THRESHOLD BETWEEN REALIZATION AND EMBODIMENT
Realization strikes like lightning. It does not arrive with fanfare or analysis. It is not earned, prepared for, or manufactured. It comes—suddenly, quietly, unmistakably. The veils part. The fog dissolves. The eyes, once dimmed by layers of story, conditioning, and seeking, see reality directly: naked, unadorned, radiantly alive.
This is not the end of the journey, but its true beginning.
For while realization reveals what has always been—timeless awareness, unconditioned light, the isness of now—it does not, in that instant, rewire the whole organism. The mind may still cling. The nervous system may still contract. The body may still echo with the cries of the past.
And so begins the path of embodiment.
Embodiment is the alchemical dance of that glimpse of light—pure, whole, infinite—descending into the gritty reality of human life. It is the slow transmutation of every cell, every wound, every knot of fear or resistance, into something porous to presence. It is the integration of heaven and earth, not by escaping the world, but by becoming more fully present within it.
This is where realization ripens into wisdom. Where insight becomes flesh. Where silence learns to speak through a human tongue, and love learns to walk with feet of clay.
The world, with all its density—its pain, its fragmentation, its dream of separation—becomes not an obstacle, but the field of embodiment. The pain body is not denied but met. The matrix of egoic control is not battled, but gently exposed by the unrelenting clarity of truth.
This path is not linear. It is not a climb. It is a surrendering. Again and again, the one who wants to hold onto realization, to possess clarity, is undone. And in that undoing, the radiance of being filters through every crack.
Realization is the threshold.
Embodiment is the devotion to live it.
And the dance?
The dance is the sacred rhythm of light entering form, of eternity becoming intimate with time, of truth daring to inhabit a human life.
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Don’t dress up your spiritual ideas In robes and ashrams In transcendence and escape Don’t bring your imagination to it It’s more essential than that More naked and free It doesn’t look a certain way There are many ways to clothe The silent emptiness of love’s being. ------------------------- The holy light pours you into form The divine in-breath marks your arrival And the out-breath your departure How can you say you are alone When that light and breath Animate you every moment of your life? ------------------------- I arrived on the spiritual path Naive and full of pain Desperate and deluded No one told me it was a spiritual path I had no time for concepts I was too busy coming apart Trying to hold myself together And losing I had no idea I was on a path at all For there was nothing to follow No signs and no-one saying ‘go this way.’ If I had thought about where I was going I may still be desperate and full of that pain Only the undoing matters The divine essence will put us together again In its own way. ------------------------- Be noble and humble See how the lily Displays its beauty Yet has no arrogance Nor any shame All creatures are worthy. ------------------------ If your house is built on needs and desires It will be unsteady and fragile And always prone to collapse. ----------------------- When you embrace your sorrow As something beautiful You have allowed the river of grace To flow again And it will heal you. ---------------------- Marooned and alone Abandoned by God He wept in his sorrow Remembering the totality And the grace of being He wept in his joy. ---------------------- You are the perfect expression of the infinite But you keep wanting to be different Celebrate your beauty Don’t try to improve what is already perfect. ----------------------- In the quietness, the silence, the stillness, is a vast awareness and natural intelligence. Infinitely available and utterly holy, it is there at the core of us, radiating into us as we go about our lives. Call it presence, the peace that passeth understanding, or the silence of being. It’s all the same pointing. We ignore it and easily miss it the whole of our lives. Some turn towards it. This poem is about reconnecting and remembering, and seeking a deeper abiding in that sacredness. This is about turning towards it.
Thanks for reading:
Well put, Kavi, very well put. I like how you are using embodiment as well as ripening wisdom. In my experience, both are happening especially when met with old, engrained patterns that reinforce separation. For me it is meeting this conditioning with an "informed" openness and love.