=kit003.txt

KIT 3 - Bringing Spirituality Into Everyday Life

The ancients used to divide the world between the sacred and the
profane.  The temple represented an area considered sacred, and
within it, the "sancto sanctorum" (the holy of holies) was out of
bounds for anyone except the priests since they were organized in
a way that was conducive to the strictest dedication to a
spiritual way of life.  In our day and age, we are doing away with
the barriers.  Under the guise of bringing spirituality into
everyday life, we run the risk of profaning the sancto sanctorum
with the gross and rather uncouth attunement of those who are
vying for personal gain.

The link between you and me is chiefly in our quest for our
spiritual home.  The real sancto sanctorum is in the very depth of
our beings.

The mystical tendency in people seeks for the personal experience
of that which is formalized and organized in any religious
institutionalization.  We are the real temple.  Truly, a person
who has become deeply attuned to the atmosphere of the divine
presence becomes sacred.  Entering into his/her presence is an
experience of communication with the condition of God in His/Her
pristine condition.

It might be helpful to grasp the subtle difference between saying
that "all is God" and "all is divinity", a distinction which
Murshid illustrates by the difference between the drop and the
sea, or, better still, the seed and the plant.

"Divinity is like the seed that grows in the plant and it comes
again in the heart of the flower.  In a similar way, the God who
was manifested as the seed of the plant of this creation rises
again towards fulfillment, and in that fulfillment He produces a
seed in the heart of that flower, which is divinity. The seed
comes last after the life of trunk, branch, fruit and flower.  And
as the seed is sufficient in itself and capable of producing
another plant, so man is the product of all the planes, spiritual
and material, and yet in him alone shines forth that primal
intelligence that caused the whole - the seed of existence - God."

Though the plant is the unfoldment of the seed, it still never
expresses all the many splendored bounty potentially present in
its seed.  Besides, just as the plant may get tarnished and
eventually will disintegrate, even so, disintegration sets into
the body of God, the universe, since it is the condition for
rebuilding and evolving.  Just as in the body, the hair and nails
are less important than the cells of the brain, even so, one might
grasp that there are degrees of Godness.  At the jagged ends, the
universe and creatures get tarnished.

Getting in tune with this immaculate nascent sacredness in its
pristine state prior to its becoming tarnished does make one
rather out of synch with any grossness or just worldliness or
selfishness.  This is why the hermits do build up barriers (just
like the precincts of the temple and the regions out of bounds) to
protect their attunement from the profanity of the world. 
Meanwhile, hopefully the faithful may be observing ablution
rituals with the effect of washing away some of the inevitable
psychological pollution.  Since one feels the need to adapt
oneself to the common denominator, maybe one does not observe this
tarnishing in the midst of life.  When one is programmed into the
personal vantage point, one fails to see that which transpires
behind that which appears; one gets alienated from one's spiritual
home, the holy of holies, and feels sullied and profaned.

Therefore, after freeing oneself from the conditioning of the
environment, the next step consists in consciously building a
temple out of the very fabric of one's being and establishing
thresholds to protect the sancto sanctorum such, that the outer
world cannot invade it and pollute it.

That temple, made of the fabric of our being, ranges from gross
matter to the most subtle gossamer.  All living structures in the
universe including our bodies, are based on the same formative
process as the galaxies, more elaborate than a vortex.  In fact,
the formation is a double helix on the principle of the caduceus
of Esculapius:  two crisscrossing spirals generated by an axis
that is considered to be a vacuum but represents the threshold
into an inverted space.  It can only maintain its continuity in
the process of becoming by continually dissolving and reforming
itself and it edges off into the stars.  It is pulsing, sparkling,
radiating and whirling in many dimensions.  The inlets and outlets
are what the yogis call the chakras.  One may discern an altar
corresponding to the heart (anahata) chakra, mounted upon the
tabernacle, the solar plexus (manipura) opening into the inverted
space where one has access into the treasurehouse of the many
splendored bounty of the universe (Pandora's box).  For the Sufis,
it is the "hidden treasure that desired to be known."  At the
vortex, in the middle of the resplendent radiance, flashing out
like a fountain, is a channel wherein one may experience the
descent of pure spirit (which again is a dimension of our being).

By the sheer act of envisioning this temple, one will dynamize it
and form its structure.  Reciprocally, the energy so generated
catapults one's consciousness into the higher spheres.  At a
further step, one envisions the temple as made of light, the aura. 
As soon as one realizes that the light of the aura is hurtling
through space at the pace of 186,000 miles a second, one cannot
look upon the temple as made of a membrane any more but as an
expanding vortex reaching into the universe, intermeshed with the
light of the whole universe while still maintaining some
paradoxical mode of identity.  If one observes the axis of one's
aura, one will notice that it is like a flame, red at the bottom,
violet at the top, surrounded with a corolla likened to a rainbow. 
In addition, one may consider one's akashic body as a further
sheath of that temple, a body of vibrations which also diffuses,
in this case, in the symphony of the spheres, while still
retaining its own specific signature tunes or frequency patterns.

In considering the inner temple, moral codes represent the
provisions taken by society to ensure a basic order and protect
its members from exploitation and abuse.  Its buttresses are built
of the taboos we have come to observe to avoid being humiliated in
our spirit.  This is brought home to us particularly forcefully
when we become aware of the divine nostalgia within us bursting in
the pursuit of excellence of the divine creator, which is our
innermost being, as a challenge and eventually, victory over any
defilement in us.  It is climbing the hill of divine orderliness,
overcoming the entropy of slackness, disenchantment,
destructiveness.  It is a pilgrimage to the sources of life, much
as the throngs of pilgrims trek to the source of the Ganges in the
high Himalayas.

The world is a treasure house of splendor manifesting as beauty
wherever it can overcome the resistance of those who obstruct it. 
By what sardonic twist do people choose ugliness when there is so
much beauty about!   It is very sad.  There is no accounting for
taste.  Beauty is an expression of that sacred source of
inspiration.  The beauty of one's being flows through when one
plugs into the splendor of the divine being where it is to be
found, in its pristine state, in the holy of holies, within the
depths of our own being. Such is the mystery of the sacred heart.

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