Pentecost, the most social of the Inner Festivals, is a great gathering in an upper room. I wonder at this image of the upper room. What is it? Where is it? How do we prepare to enter it? Here are my thoughts. Let them inspire your own imaginations.
Take a moment of timeless time and imagine an upper room of boundless space – space that allows for the presence of all others. You cannot enter this space if you haven’t imagined it, prepared it in your heart with your heart.
Become the designer of your inmost interior of I for that is the forecourt of the Upper Room. And like your heart. the forecourt has four chambers: loving kindness, compassion, equanimity, and sympathetic joy. Buddha spoke of these four chambers as sublime states.
Sometime in the future you will be entering into the upper room with all other human souls, in the presence of the great archangels, the Virgin Sophia, and the Holy Spirit.
As you reflect on the upper room, breathe deeply. Do you experience a feeling of growing sacred awe? Sacred awe or whatever name you give this feeling, is humbling. I find it keeps enlarging my inmost interior, that I become less ordinary, limited me and evolve into more limitless I-consciousness. All this I-space feels strange. It’s vastness seems filled with holy threat, but when I still my soul, the holy threat is revealed as its opposite. I feel holy comfort providing holy sweetness and holy certainty and the I-space that can embrace all others becomes boundless.
Perhaps, preparing for entering the upper room for the great gathering is the metamorphosing of holy threat into holy comfort through the practice of contemplation, meditation and inner dwelling in the four chambers and filling with the sublime states.
I feel more and more that the celebration of the festival of Pentecost is less a festival of remembrance and much more an imagination of a future. At some time in the future of human consciousness, we actually enter the upper room prepared to know all others with unfathomable knowing. It will only happen because we have dwelled in the four chambers of the forecourt patiently and with perseverance, until our loving kindness, compassion, equanimity and sympathetic joy know no bounds.
Imagine that this Sunday when Pentecost is celebrated.
I found this warm and profound essay on the Four Sublime States and feel it is a true guide for those of us willing to imagine Pentecost and prepare. http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/nyanaponika/wheel006.html
And you may want to look at the work of Frank Chester and his spiritual research on the fifth chamber of the human heart. I believe this fifth chamber is the upper room. http://www.frankchester.com/2010/the-heart/
