=kit083.txt

KIT 83 - HEAVEN AND EARTH INTERSPERSED - PART II

            The question in the mind of Buddha and also of those
in the Hindu tradition was whether pain is due to our giving in to
our humanness and whether we can find protection against pain by
withdrawing our need to fulfill our desires. I believe it's
similar to anesthetizing oneself. Cancer patients who have the
choice of doping themselves with painkillers have to decide to
what extent they feel comfortable about doing so or to what extent
they feel that it is separating themselves from the reality of
life.

            Maybe there is another way of looking at this. The
consequence of trying to highlight and also unfurl the celestial
aspects of our being is that we encounter pain when our celestial
ideal is being violated. So the pain is in the way of translating
our celestial ideal into earthly conditions. The curious thing is
that in fact if we look at it we will realize that it is love that
typifies the celestial aspect of our being as opposed to desire.
Desire can lead one to slip into wanting things that are
comfortable or even wanting people in our relationships that give
satisfaction to our ego, that's not love. Of course in love there
is the greatest of all vulnerabilities as is illustrated in the
songs of the Sufis where one is on tenterhooks as to whether one's
love is reciprocated. We can illustrate it by the heavenly beings
being rejected by the egos of the denizens of the earth with the
consequence of being bereft of their ability to nourish the earth
with that special dimension that they represent. It's a kind of
refusal of beauty. It's a very strange thing but it's something
that one wouldn't believe unless one saw it happening today,
replacing love by desire.

            By love I mean unconditional love which you could see
as a yeast which has a transforming effect, but also makes one
extremely vulnerable. Paradoxically this vulnerability avers
itself to be a great power: it's the power of truth. As we know
youthfulness has a resilience that is lost when the personality
becomes jaded. This innocence bespeaks of reliance upon the
parents and has a lesson to teach us as adults, however important
our incentive, that there are times when we need to trust
ourselves to the self-organizing faculty within us and beware of
interfering with it by our personal volition. This is precisely
what the Sufis call reliance upon God.

            So if we introduce this into our way of doing and
thinking then we have an immediate measuring rod which gives a
sense of what we are doing in our lives which goes counter to
bringing heaven on earth. We have a feedback system there. Then it
becomes very clear that what we are doing to Mother Earth is the
result of greed, desire having snowballed, having reached the
point of gross exploitation. Ruthless cruelty is the opposite of
love. This has been the message throughout the ages but somehow it
has been downplayed, even in the name of religion like the
terrible persecutions in Spain at the time of the reformation.

            So far I've highlighted innocence as being one of the
features of the heavenly states and then love. I think we also
have to feature beauty or we could think of it as splendor rather
than beauty. Beauty is just the way that splendor assumes a form.
It could be the beauty of our thoughts, or it could be the beauty
of our way of handling things, or it could be the beauty of our
aspirations, the beauty of our willingness to be of service, or
making personal sacrifices. There are many ways in which the kind
of beauty which we ascribe to the heavens become a reality on
earth. Of course it is on earth that beauty is to be found. That
is why we need to change that tendency of thinking that the
heavens are up there and that's where we want to reach and perhaps
we will reach it when we die.

            If you seek beauty it will elude you. If you unfurl
the beauty latent in your being, it will attract beauty. This is
the reason why seeking for the angel in the heavens is misleading.
Instead, find the heavenly dimensions of your being and the
environment will be transformed.

            Pir-o-Murshid said that the state of the heavens is
embryonic, that means that it is a virtuality. It means that the
reality is down here because this is where the celestial
virtualities of our being are unfurled in our personality like an
egg that has unfurled into a blastema and an embryo and then a
baby and so on, originally it was an egg. So think of the heavens
as being in a seminal state but then it doesn't have to be up
there, it's in us. It's not contained in us but if you think of
the hologram again it's a virtuality that can be highlighted and
by being highlighted it can be really called into existence.

            At the very thought of the divine splendor there is a
kind of ecstasy that Sufis have often called an inebriation. Now
one projects it as a reality up there but the great breakthrough
is when one discovers the splendor in oneself and one doesn't dare
to do this because one thinks that it is too grandiose. Pir-o-
Murshid  gave us a clue as to how one can do this and that is to
accept that we have both in us, the aristocracy of the soul and
the democracy of the ego. Otherwise if one were to claim that one
is the splendor then one would be guilty of megalomania. But that
is why Abu Azid Bastami said, 'how great is my glory.' So he did
make that step that we have difficulty in making, at least I do.
So it's much easier to project and think that one is enamored or
enthused or inebriated by the splendor of the heavens.

            It seems rather prosaic to be enthused by the splendor
that one discovers in oneself, it seems very self assertive and
yet ultimately it's the same but one needs to see that it is the
same thing by overcoming one's sense of otherness. By highlighting
one's problems one tends to slip into a very commonplace picture
of life which does not honor the needs of one's soul even though
one is in theory trying to actualize spirituality into real life.
A criteria that might prove helpful is the difference between
one's needs and one's wants to which Pir-o-Murshid  drew our
attention and moreover the needs of the soul, in contrast to the
needs of the psyche although these are both interspersed and
reciprocally relevant.

            Our pain is the wounded child, so it is the celestial
in us that feels rejected by the human. On the other hand the
child has an extraordinary capacity of laughing and crying at the
same time. If we dwell in our pain, then we are allowing the
angelic in us to be bogged into the human condition. Therefore the
joy that we ascribe to the heavens is a liberating emotion from
the constraint of our humanness. If we do not avail ourselves of
this resort we get bogged in by our human condition. Those who are
trying to actuate spirituality in daily life continually encounter
the tendency to get caught in the perspective of human problems to
the extent that one has lost sight of the spiritual values behind
them even while one is trying to actuate those values. It's like
the perspective in the hologram, if you highlight one then, of
course, the other tends to fade away and it's very, very difficult
to extrapolate between both at the same time. So our attentions
are right in line with the need in our time which is to make God a
reality. But as Pir-o-Murshid says very clearly the soul in its
search for fulfillment on earth tends to lose its way. That's the
reason why one needs to refer back to the original motivation of
one's soul and realize that our minds tend to sclerose the dynamic
intention into concepts. When this happens we get caught in our
concepts of spirituality and that's not spirituality, it's our
concepts.

            Therefore, although Pir-o-Murshid  said, 'shatter your
ideal on the rock of truth', I think it would be better to say,
shatter your concepts of your ideal for the sake of being
realistic. Then you will find that your ideal will find further
outreach, further perspectives that will free it from its
limitation in your mind, but never give up your ideal because then
you are lost.

            "In order to fulfill the practical duties of life, it
is not necessary to forget our ideal. We can hold the ideal in the
tenderest spot of our heart, and yet fulfill our practical duties.
The ideal is to illuminate our lives, not to paralyze our
actions."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

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