Aye! feast! rejoice! there is no dread hereafter. There is the dissolution, and eternal ecstasy in the kisses of Nu.
I say, “Cultivate the divine gift within you.”
A gift implies an external relationship. I cannot give a gift to myself, at least not without implying opposition within myself. It therefore implies that the thing given is not me or is not of me. It originally came from someplace else. It is of another place and another time.
That the gift is divine implies that this gift does not come from another place and from another time. Instead, it comes from beyond space and beyond time. It is transcendent. It comes from the divine realm, which is said to be both on the top of a very tall mountain but also deep under the Earth.
But the divine is also that without which life has no meaning. The divine is neither the summit of a mountain nor the depths of the Earth; rather, it is the ground itself, the ground of being.
So the gift is not just within me or entrusted to me. Rather, before it, there is no me. Wherever I am, wherever I find myself, wherever and whenever I have found myself, there, always already, was the gift.
So it is a gift which could never have been given.
To cultivate implies that the gift can grow: by seed and by root and by stem and by bud and by leaf and by flower and by fruit.
Cultivation is not the same thing as building. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, things that grow have their principle of motion within themselves, whereas things we make have their principle of motion outside of themselves. When we cultivate something, we support its principle of growth by supplying it with food, air, water, and sunlight, but the principle of growth itself lies within the thing itself, not within us.
So the gift is not within us in the sense of being within our grasp or within our power. It is within us the way a seed is within the Earth. And for us to cultivate the seed really means we are to feed ourselves to it as it grows.
Living things don’t just grow into nothing, though. They grow into a particular being, a particular image, a particular end. This end is unified. It is itself and not another thing. The trajectory of growth is defined by what the growth is growing into. All doing, all movement, all growing is for the sake of this end or telos. In other words, rather than just showing up at the end, the end defines the whole process. The end is the beginning.
To “cultivate the divine gift within you” means “feed yourself to the god from beyond space and time which is implanted in you, so that you may be metabolized forth into the unified appearance.”
And how does one go about “cultivating” or “feeding” this god? Is there some special set of techniques? Some divine names in another language that have to be uttered? Some arcane symbols to blow thine load upon?
No. All you have to do is surrender your attention to it. The miracle that is Mother Nature will accomplish the rest.