RECEPTIVITY

Excerpt from a talk by Angela Fischer (English translation) January 2012

„Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing.

 Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

You might remember a certain experience in your life, or even more of them, when in a difficult and seemingly insolvable situation you were painfully approaching the moment, when you had to realise that you do not know how to go any further. We humans are stubborn and complicated, a strange species. Now and then we need a long time to get to that moment. Although we tend to avoid pain, we sometimes seem to deliberately stretch the time of increasing pain, because the last thing we want to do is to give up.

Yet what happens, once we fully allow to not know? When we stop fighting and stop complaining, just because we are tired of it? When all at once we become still and give ourselves to the moment just as it is? When we stop doing anything and just are ?

A space opens. And the open space is getting wider and wider.

How do we relate to this space and how does the space relate to us? We are not thinking at those moments, we are not in our mind, we are beyond trying to make use of this space, making plans or creating concepts of what could be the right thing to do.

Sometimes we may pray. It is not a prayer of asking for something, because prayer in this state is just being, being with all the need and vulnerability inside of us. We are completely naked, and so is the space – empty. In our nakedness we are human, full of need, and we do not deny it any longer. And then, very tenderly, an ear is opening, an ear in the heart, and we are listening into the silence of  just being. Listening here is not stressful, there is no effort. It is infinetely relaxing.

This is the moment when the tide is turning.

There is room for something new that is waiting to arise, something we would not have thought of before. Sometimes it is through a clear thought, an answer that comes from within or an outer experience that lifts the whole situation to a different level of experience. We truly experience a deep process of transformation, but this transformation could have never happened without the crucial point of allowing to become receptive. Like a woman can never attract a soul to come into this world without being receptive. Without her receptivity there is no conception, no pregnancy and no birth of a child.

The feminine quality of receptivity is what mystics know as the deep loving and longing in our relationship to God. Many mystics from various traditions contributed to the treasure of poetry about the most beautiful relationship that ever has been and will be: The loving relationship between the soul and God. And in this relationship the soul is receptive.

In the soul there is a deeply rooted yearning for receptivity, to live it, to be feminine, no matter whether we are women or men, to be as we are – naked human beings with a deep unfathomable need for the Love of God. As Meister Eckhard says, „God is the sigh in the soul.“