Coup de Foudre

The French literate probably associates "love at first sight" with the expression "coup de foudre", but I am referring more to the general meaning "thunderbolt" when I came up with the idea for this note. Has it ever happened to you that you just instinctively reacted to a situation at hand? Your body reacts and the words shoot out of your mouth, apparently carried by the energy of the situation, while your brain provides the explanations only micro-seconds later. As a matter of fact, sometimes the thunderbolt becomes so overwhelming that even the mind is silenced altogether. If you have ever been in a situation like that, it becomes pretty apparent that during this thunderbolt we have no conscious degree of freedom whatsoever.

When you truly reflect, every situation is a "thunderbolt" of sorts. It doesn't matter what I might have decided to do in advance, it doesn't matter what my agenda might have been; when two or more people come together an energy exchange decides on the outcome. If you happen to be a spiritual traveler, these moment of pure energy exchange will become more and more frequent. We only respond to energy, the voice in our head only helps us telling the story to ourselves and others in the aftermath, but it is not involved in the decision making.

True, there are some choices and some deliberation for us as well. Thoughts like, "No, you just didn't do that! Well, if that is what you do and say, here is how I respond to it!", while the guy in front of us digs a hole for himself. Or we think, "Come on now, you can jump over your shadow", while the sister talking to us soul-searches on what her next move will be. We spiritual traveler think as we interact with others just like everyone, but we don't fabricate those responses ahead of time. We also don't carry agendas around because we know that the WAY will rip it to pieces right in front of us. We let the story develop and then respond to the invite of the WAY. Nothing is ambiguous where SHE treats. Everything is just energy and we respond to it in the nick of time.

As a spiritual traveler you must have noticed that our degrees of freedom go up all the time. A "coup de foudre" of the past becomes a strong pull in the second iteration of the spiral, but only becomes a barely noticeable preference the third time around. After the thunderbolt passes, the energy and the karma of the situation is gone so to speak. A spiritual path is a disentangling from the necessity to act until one day - at work, at home, and with our family and friends - the reaction function is born from the necessity of the moment, and not from the history of prior actions, fears or urges.

Engage here and now and let the energy of the situation carry you HOME. As the agenda of the mind loses its drive, the "coup de foundre" is with HER every step of the WAY.