Reverence Protects Life
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As you work toward becoming reverent, your tendencies toward harming others and other forms of life diminish. As you acquire a sense of reverence, you develop the capacity to think more deeply about the value of Life before you commit your energy to action. When you are fully reverent, you cannot harm Life, even (if/)though you are unempowered. Without reverence the experience of being unempowered can become a very cruel one because a dis-empowered person is a frightened person, and a frightened person is a person with no sense of reverence, he or she will harm or kill indiscriminately.
Reverence is a level of protection and honor about the process of life so while a person is maturing toward the journey and through the journey of authentic empowerment, he or she harms nothing. Because we have no reverence, our journey to empowerment often includes the experience of victimizing life. Therefore, there are victims and victimizers. The process of destroying Life while we are learning about Life that has characterized our evolution would cease, or at least would be very different if we approached Life with a quality of reverence.
It is because(/when) we have no sense of reverence, no true belief in the holiness of all of Life, that Life is destroyed and tortured, brutalized, starved, and maimed while we journey from unempowerment to empowerment. If a sense of reverence were brought into the process of evolution, then as each of us, and our species, moves through the cycle of being unempowered to becoming empowered, the many learnings that are contained within that growing process of evolution would not likely produce violence and fear to the extent that it is now experienced.
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If we perceived Life with Reverence and understood the evolutionary process, we would stand in awe at the experience of the physical Life, and walk Earth in a very deep sense of gratitude.
The above is excerpted from "Seat of the Soul." Gary Zukav is a renowned American spiritual teacher and the author of four consecutive New York Times Best Sellers. Gary now works through The Seat of the Soul Institute, which assists people across the world in creating meaning and purpose, creativity and health, joy and love.
SEED QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION: How do you relate to the notion that empowerment without reverence can cause us to harm life? Can you share a personal experience of a time you felt deep reverence while being unempowered? What has helped you maintain reverence toward life?