A Word from David Simon

The sacred challenge of human beings on a spiritual journey is to reconcile the opposing experiences of being both personal and universal. Your day-to-day existence is woven around choices that reinforce your sense of individuality. You get out of your bed, brush your teeth, put on your clothes, prepare breakfast for your children, take out your dog, get into your car, and listen to your radio station – until you arrive at your parking space at your job. And all the while, as you go through the motions of a body-mind personality, you have the subtle awareness that your essential nature is transcendent to your skin-bound identity. Experiences, relationships, and beliefs transform, but an unwavering sense of continuity of being persists.

The contradiction between identifying as a human being and identifying as a spiritual being can generate turbulence, as our human mind seeks to fit concepts neatly into one box or another. And yet the essence of spirituality is the coexistence of opposing values – the recognition that I can be this and I can be that. When we move from struggling to resolve contradiction to embracing paradox, a playful sense of release and relief perfuse our mind and body and we feel connected to source.

Self-love is the embracing of all the dimensions of our humanity. It is the fruit of knowing that I am a skin-encased ego and unbounded, infinite, divine consciousness. I am the darkness and the light, the material and the spiritual, the “I” and the “Thou.” I am the divine in compelling disguise as a person, and I love the costume. As I embrace and celebrate the paradox in my own life, I spontaneously recognize that you, too, are God in drag, and I cannot help but feel light and loving.

With love,
David