The Third Force: A Place of Reconciliation

Everything we do, think and feel influences both our inner and outer world. Where the inner and outer meet is truly a remarkable place. We really are one with God, with Nature, with all we come in contact with, and also, with ourselves. There is a magical place where it all meets up. 

This is a place of reconciliation where the mighty Third Force abides.

I have just come from a long solo time on the farm. I abandoned my watch, my electronics with goals to get somewhere spiritually, and an aim to have a vision for what is next. However, I didn’t start that way. The more I pushed to do those very things, the more I found myself frustrated and needing to abandon those goals. 

Just being one with the light, the sound, the color, the feel, and the “atmosphere” of my surroundings in conjunction with the “atmosphere” of my own Being was all. Soon there was no object or subject of my attention regarding this. I no longer felt separate from the atmosphere around me or within me. 

I started out with a schedule of meditation 3 times a day, a Lectio Divina, practical work, and minimal cooking, but by day three I was dealing with such intense resistance to this type of schedule. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do the schedule. It was that I DID want to do the schedule. I pushed against that resistance until I abandoned everything.

I am not sure if that came before I buried the dead baby deer or after...

For this ultimate immersion into oneness, I had to let go of the effort I thought I had to make and give way to something more mysterious and mystical and...beyond any control of my own. I had to come with the aim, the wish and the active element but found that when it became the focus, the third force could not appear. This required throwing out attachment to the method and the goal.

The Third Force, for the many of you who may not be familiar, can be seen as a reconciliation of both active and passive forces within oneself. It can be found in our actions in the outer world or within a process. 

It feels like a melting point, a giving way, an effort - no effort kind of place.

I had many frustrating moments during this retreat, which was unexpected and new, yet it harkened back to the days many many years ago of simply developing my attention and my openness. I have a dogged way of pushing myself. I am an expert at discipline. It was almost as if I experienced something eerily similar to those first years but on another level. I had to remember through experience what it is to abandon the wrong kind of effort in order for something to enter.

It truly is experiencing a force that comes in when one abandons trying so hard to make things happen. It’s when you give up...

I went in with the intention to become more at one with God, only to abandon the effort to get that result. That was the only thing that could have brought on what finally happened.

We cannot beat down the doors to heaven, and by the same token, we cannot stand around with our mouths open waiting for roast chicken to fly in.

This is where my zen background kicks in and more fully understand this fourth way idea of Third Force. I can go in guns loaded with all the intention, discipline and planning, and come out the other side having reached something only because I abandoned said plan and let go of getting results. 

When I deferred to just Being, regardless of any progress, I became more one with everything.

If you want to learn more about making the right kind of effort, understanding the third force, and other ideas regarding spiritual development, you may want to take the Awareness School’s Practical Awareness 8 Week Course offered two times yearly. This course provides information and practices to last a lifetime.