A Teaching and A Revelation
Trip Start
Oct 09, 2007
1
35
45
Trip End
Mar 10, 2008
Kolkata (Calcutta),
West Bengal,
India
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Tonight I went over to Baba's for a visit. As my time to leave Kolkata draws near, I am feeling sad. I am painfully aware of how often I have related to Baba in very ordinary, everyday, one-dimensional consciousness rather than at any depth. So the sadness is deeper with the sense of lost opportunity.
We had been in Maa's room, watching a TV program on one of the spiritual channels about a devotee who was very sad at not being able to have the vision of Lord Krishna. I commented at the time, "I certainly understand that...I go through that all the time. So it's normal to be this tortured?"
"It's totally normal," Baba said. "It's part of the process. Everyone goes through it who is on the spiritual path. Absolutely everyone."
Afterward, we went into the living room, so Maa could meditate and read. Baba was having a bowl of Muri (puffed rice). I said to him, "I've been thinking that maybe I'll never have the peace of mind that I long for in this life. Maybe I'll never have that conscious awareness of the Spirit in any ongoing way that I have tasted. My mind has been at it again. Getting ready to leave, I am so aware of how much I have related to you at a superficial level, and now I am leaving. But the misery drives me to deeper practice, which is good. That is the source of the only peace I do have."
"Whenever you have a thought like that, don't let it own you," Baba said seriously.
"Those thoughts are tricks of the mind. The mind is trying to keep you where you are longer than you need to be there.
"You have no idea where you are. You do not see yourself as you are. You see yourself only in comparison to others, through the filter of your expectations.
"That happens to everyone on the path. You read the great Masters, the great teachings, and images form in your mind. Expectations form, of how you should be, how you should feel. You compare yourself to the Masters, to the fully enlightened, to the absolute truth that has been realized and hinted at through the great teachings. And you compare yourself to other devotees with different backgrounds, with different gifts, with different karmas, with different dharmas.
"Your comparisons, your expectations of how it should be, are ridiculous. You are where you are. You are where you are in your own process of evolution, in your own process of your prarbhabta (the pleasant and unpleasant karmic experiences you must go through). You cannot be other than where you are. God has embraced you. God accepts you. God loves you. God has been blessing you all the days of your life. And God is leading you through each and every experience in your life toward the ultimate realization of your soul and your oneness with all that is.
"Whenever you have one of those critical, limiting thoughts, put that thought aside for a moment and remind yourself that God loves you as you are. God does not love as you are not. God knows you cannot be other than exactly as you are at this moment, struggling with the limitations of consciousness that you have.
"You are safely in God's Hands. God knows where you are in the process of your evolving consciousness. So you can never fail. You are held in God's heart. You live in God's protection. You are going through a purification process. It may be painful. It may be hard. You may lose your way more often than you care to. But you have done nothing wrong.
"You have absolutely no idea of where you are spiritually. You cannot know because you are seeing yourself with the eyes of the Mind, the critical mind, the distorting mind, the imprisoned and imprisoning mind.
"So promise me when you have these thoughts that you will not be so hard on yourself. I have seen time and time and time again how hard you are on yourself. You are relentless. You hold yourself to such a high standard. You have impossibly high standards.
"When you are hard on yourself, you are being hard on your Soul. You are not just limiting yourself. You are limiting your Soul.
"The soul never sees with eyes of criticism. It never sees with the eyes of recrimination. It is the Mind that sees with criticism and recriminations. It is the mind that sees with hate. The Soul never sees with the eyes of hate. The Soul sees only with the eyes of love, with the eyes of compassion.
"I don't think I compare myself with the Masters so much. What I compare myself to most is those times when I have seen and experienced life with the energy and luminosity of the Soul, when everything was one, living, beautiful and flowing whole, when everything was flowing in and out of that One life in an ever-blossoming revelation. When I am away from that, I am miserable. I also see very clearly everything I have done to sabotage myself. I am trying to get back to it, without knowing how, afraid I might never find my way back, because I have tested God and what I can get away with once too often."
"Again, I say to you, 'Everybody goes through that, absolutely everybody'. You are not special and you are not alone in that.
"So you have had this beautiful glimpse of what is real. And you have lost it. That is not a crime! That is part of the process. It is absolutely inevitable and predictable that you would lose it. It is not a crime. You are not enlightened. You are exactly where you need to be in your process. Of course, once you have seen that reality, once you have experienced it, you are miserable without it. But making yourself wrong for that, condemning yourself for that, is crippling your ability to move forward. If you have experienced reality, if you have tasted it, if you have glimpsed it, that reality is already alive within you. You could not have experienced it if it were not within you, if it were not who you already are.
"You are undergoing a purification process. You are like a grain of rice that has decided to become muri (puffed rice). You have been thrown into the fire, and the fire burns. "Ouch!" You are complaining, "I don't want to burn." But burning is part of the process of transforming a grain of rice into puffed rice, which is what you yourself committed to becoming. So it is with the process of the soul. The process takes heat. It takes fire. The old consciousness, the old limitations of mind have to be burned away in the furnace of experience. That doesn't happen just studying the teachings and meditating. Consciousness is born through experience.
"Instead of condemning yourself, spend more and more time thinking about all of the blessings you have had in your life, at every stage of your life. You have been blessed in thousands and thousands and thousands of ways. Put your attention there, on all of those blessings. Dwell on and in those blessings. Your body and your mind will begin to fill with gratitude.
"You have been dwelling long enough in your self condemnation. It is time to leave that behind and dwell in appreciation. The soul doesn't demand condemnation. The soul demands appreciation. When you begin dwelling in the awareness of all that you have already been given, there is no room for all of the old, negative habits of your mind. You will not fall into self criticism as often or as deeply as before. Your tendency toward self criticism and condemnation, and all of the misery it gives you, will begin to dissipate.
"The mind had to be filled with something. You did not know how to fill it with what is true and real. So you filled it with garbage, with the stinking residue of the past. You developed deep negative ruts in your mind. It is critical now for you to retrain your mind.
"Whenever you see yourself becoming critical, use it as a signal. Return your focus to how you are blessed. Fill your mind with the truth, with the wealth of the good that you have been given. Gratitude and appreciation for God and for life will naturally expand. There won't be room in your mind for so much negative.
Another thing that will help is stepping back in your mind whenever you are being critical to find the witness.
"You and I have only one thing in common. It is not the color of our skin. It is not the language we speak. It is not that we have two eyes, two hands, two legs, two ears and a nose. It is none of those superficial things that we could lose tomorrow. What we have in common is that we are the witness. Who we are is the witness, the one who sees. We are the witness that has been born into a body to have certain experiences.
"The witness is eternal, it is stable. Whatever your experiences have been in your life, from childhood, the witness has been with you. That is true for all of us. We were born, and we have certain experiences we have to go through. It doesn't matter how far along we are on the spiritual path, we still have to go through those experiences. And all of those experiences, every one of them, are leading us to the ultimate realization of who we are.
"The witness does not criticize. The mind criticizes. The ego criticizes. Whenever you are criticizing yourself or others, it is the mind, the ego, the one who is not. It is illusion at play. Simply step back. Step farther back to find the witness. Find the one who sees without judgment, the one who simply is, the seer, the seat of consciousness within you who is simply present to life as it is, and peace will come to you.
Monday, Feb 16, 2009. The Revelation
Rather than meditate or take a nap after lunch, I decided, as Baba suggested, to take stock of all the blessings in my life, which resulted in the journal below.
What have the blessings of my life been?
You have given me a strong, healthy body ... a good, though less than extraordinary, mind ... lot's of energy, a loving family. A mother and father that loved me and did their best - and whose human frailties and suffering evoked deep questioning about the human condition in me, and which prompted my drive for life and the spirit.
These are huge things, incomprehensible blessings in themselves. But I have also always had everything I needed: food, clothing, a good education, a nice home. I have lived without war or famine or desperate societal upheavals going on all around me. My grandparents - and living next door to them as a child, with twice a week extended family gatherings at their house - gave me a base of love and security and the sense of a larger family surrounding and loving me. I had a wonderful, loving, solid, stable, very bright husband who was a good father and a good man. We really loved each other; and our love triumphed over deep conflicts caused by our conditioning.
You launched me early in life in my spiritual quest, with Sr. Jacques (my senior English and religion teacher), who became my model for the kind of fiercely intelligent woman I wanted to be ... living in the dignity and power of her being, in her ability to be present, with her ability to respond creatively and with aplomb in the moment. She became my lifeline when I decided I would rather live than die or kill myself.
You have answered my soul call immediately whenever I have cried out to you ... from the psych ward of the UofA Medical Center when I was 18 asking for help finding a new way to live, and every time since.
And Mr. Moss, dear Mr. Moss, what a difference he made in my life! He called me, out of nowhere, to offer me a job with college night class perks - that led me to get my degree. I never would have gone to college otherwise, and that changed everything in the quality of my life, in what I valued and saw into as I looked out at the world around me.
When I think back to how difficult it all was at the time, how the pain and the struggle overshadowed the gifts and the blessings, and how all that pain has dissolved into nothing, into irrelevancy, in the stream of my life, it speaks to what an illusion the negative is...how unreal it is, how little power it really has. If my life proves anything, it is that if our hearts are reaching out to God and the Good, with whatever strength and constancy we can muster, the Good is stronger. I have always been afraid it wasn't, and that the evil, my failures and inadequacies, were overtaking me.
But I was being carried along by life's blessings, even when I was unconscious of them. They were carrying me even when I was blind to them, when I was drowning in my pain and fear and self loathing, when the grinding pathology of my mind dominated almost every waking moment.
I have heard Baba say it a thousand times, but I have never seen it so clearly before: the mind and all the pain it causes us is unreal in the scheme of things. Yes, I have seen, very clearly at times, what illusions the mind fabricates over the past 15 years with Baba (even though I could not free myself from its grip). But the pain and suffering that we all go through has always seemed so treacherously real . I simply had no clue that the suffering is just as much an illusion.
I have faltered often in my effort to come home to God. Though my searching has been sincere, I simply wasn't capable of totality or even a modicum of discipline. What I see now is that didn't matter to God. Because God was total in His love and patience and understanding of me and how limited I was! - Just as He is now.
Looking back over my life now, what I see is that, yes, there was darkness in my family, tortured and intense darkness, but it was all a lie. My mother was a good woman who got lost for decades in her anger, rage, fear and hate. But in the end, the love and goodness in her was stronger than the hate she had surrendered herself to. She lived the pain of it (and we lived it along with her), but then she came through that searing fire, leaving this life as pure and radiant as she came into it, going eagerly and freely to meet her God.
Her family's story is the same...of getting obsessed with the negativity of what didn't work out in two bitter divorces and their aftermath. But that doesn't obliterate the good people that made up that family or the river of love that flowed through it.
That is the dominant theme of my family for the three 3 generations I have been carried along in its stream: The tragedy, the error, the waste, the illusion of letting the darkness and toxicity, letting the lie of what is unreal, overshadow and obscure our experience of the ultimate reality of the Good which is going to triumph in the end, regardless. It is the lesson of my life.
So if I could say anything to someone young, it would be this: Darkness, pain and struggle will come in your life. It may feel at times, even for long periods of time, that that is all there is, that what is threatening you is swallowing your life, all its possibilities, and your soul's deepest aspirations. But reach for the Light anyway, dig deep in yourself for the goodness that you long to bring forward in life. Hold onto it as best you can. Call on the forces for Good in the Universe to help you...call on them often. Focus on the good that is at work in your life as often as you possibly can. If you do that, I promise you that someday you will realize that the Good was always there, it was always stronger than the darkness. You will realize, just as I did for the first time today, that the struggle and the pain were not real at all. They were phantoms. They were lies. They were veils covering what was real and what was stronger that was always working below the surface.
