Obligolnian Strivings: Week Nine of Inner Task Series by Heather Ruce

This week we add in, again cumulatively, the fifth and final striving: the striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting of other beings (remember striving one), both those similar to oneself and those of other forms, up to the degree of the sacred “Martfotai,” that is, up to the degree of self-individuality.

First, we see in these words the striving always to assist the most rapid perfecting of other beings, the same invitation to us back in the second striving…to have a constant and unflagging instinctive need to perfect oneself in the sense of Being. It is once again clear that we are to do this for ourselves AND are to assist others in the same endeavor. Of course this does not mean evangelizing the way or trying to get others somewhere but rather comes as a result of nurturing, tending to and enflaming that ember of Being in another. Through our Being, we can spread oxygen to that in another such that it too sets fire and spreads like a contagion.

Second, we see in these words both those similar to oneself and those of other forms, that no-thing is excluded. When we touch into this perfected Being within, we don’t have to effort to care about the arising and individuality of all of creation—sentient and insentient—it just happens naturally. It can be seen as a profound act and posture of mothering.

Third, we see in these words, up to the degree of the sacred “Martfotai,” that is, up to the degree of self-individuality, an intentional cosmic servant. Cynthia has explained this to mean one whose consciousness attained manifests the capacity and willingness to contribute as a transformer of higher meaning. It is one who bathes and suffuses the planet with spiritual nutrients. She says, “The restoration of our intended level of “self-individuality” is not a private invitation to enlightenment but a collective duty. For without humans functioning at their appropriate level in the great chain of being, the whole thing will continue to sicken and spin out of control.” The kind of self-individuality spoken of here is much closer to what Teilhard calls a ‘person,’ someone who does not live for oneself alone but knows oneself as belonging to a greater relational whole and therefore gladly responds in kind.

Ultimately, as Cynthia has said, this striving is another way of articulating the bodhisattva consciousness. A vision of one for all and all for one. We allow ourselves to stay in this dense realm in order to be of assistance in the conscious attainment of all beings. This is the heart of the Christic vision, a striving toward this higher collective consciousness.

On this day of honoring motherhood, we might consider this striving to be the ultimate act of motherhood like God as mother hen drawing her brood under her wings (Luke 13:34, Matt 23:37). Each one of us regardless of gender are able to participate in this kind of mothering with Christ our true mother (in the words of Julian of Norwich) in us, through us, as us. Beyond the celebration, grief, sentimentality, and pain of the particular human experiences we may have had with mothers, lies a profound invitation to each one of us to engage in the act and posture of divine mothering. The task this week is to lean into the natural impulses that arise toward assisting others in this way, to fully embrace it as an act of mothering and in this way participating in the generative process of giving life to and fanning the flame of Being, not only within which doesn’t stop, in everything.