=kit107.txt

KIT 107 - Escape? or Creativity?

What contribution does our spiritual dimension offer our human
problems? Circumstances are not always favorable. Most people are
afflicted by hardships, frustrations, misfortunes, even misery and
catastrophe. Therefore hail to the good moments! The yearning for
escape from those circumstances if one perchance entertains such
day-dreaming could simply lead to ruthless unkindness (generally
only to slip back into a similar pattern) or to unfulfilling
isolation, or to the other-worldliness of an Ashram.

Do you ever experience that yearning for the zephyr of not just
evasion of the turmoil, greed, manipulation for power and
possession, and the conditioning of our society, but the search
for the serenity, the nobility, and the ecstasy of "another
kingdom", only to find, as Buddha said, "there is a place which
you cannot reach by going anywhere."? "That kingdom" is meshed in
"this kingdom", however, being subliminal to our existential
universe, and consequently clues to "that kingdom" may transpire
through what appears in our life circumstances. These clearly
represent another dimension than the one paved by our daily life
struggles, therefore we need to find the route accessing its
reaches through our meditation practices.

Let us explore what light the spiritual overview may throw on our
assessments of our problems.

If you train the light beam of your eyes and your consciousness to
espy what is trying to transpire from behind whatever appears,
wherever you turn your eyes, the splendor of the universe in all
its bounty and at all its levels will reveal its potentiality;
whenever you listen, or feel, or taste, or smell, or love, or
bewonder not only in a dawn in the high mountains, or in a
cathedral or a Beethoven symphony, in human ingenuity, in the
scientist's mind probing outer space, in the eyes of a baby, or
the prowess of a hero, but also in a resentful victim of abuse, or
the millions in distress, in those who are disenchanted and
embittered and floundering in our sometimes cruel society. Oh
marvel! It is also in you, lying in wait to be aroused by being
awakened. We discover the splendor latent in our own being through
the object admired, and it reveals to us our own beauty, but to
have eyes that see "what transpires", our eyes need to be active
rather than passive.

"All that man considers beautiful, precious and good is not
necessarily in the thing or the being, it is in his ideal; the
thing or being causes him to create the beauty, value and goodness
in his own mind."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

We must look further. To paraphrase Verlaine: two prisoners - one
sees the bars the other the stars.

Our prison is our horizon, our self-image, the outreach of our
realization, our discontent, the measure of our ability to love
unconditionally people who make themselves difficult to love, our
addiction, our self-pity, our inadequate ploys to protect our
vulnerability by a puffed up front briefly, our own ego.

To be disenchanted by the hum-drum of the life to which we have
been conditioned by our civilizations, to find our
responsibilities confining, the challenge of opposition and
competition stressful, to find the support system for survival
leaving too little time for spiritual practice, to complain at
being let down by acquaintances, and especially, to be
disappointed in what situations do to our personality, can only
prove counterproductive.

"Unhappy is he who looks with contempt at the world, who hates
human beings and thinks he is superior to them; the one who loves
them thinks only that they are going through the same process that
he has gone through."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

Check to what extent you are affected by prevailing circumstances
to ascertain to what extent this hampers your freedom to be
yourself.

"A person asks himself how all he sees affects him and what is his
reaction to it all. First how does his spirit react to the objects
or the conditions he encounters, to the sounds he hears, to the
words people speak to him. Secondly see what affect he himself has
on others when he comes in contact with them. One should learn
one's condition, the condition of one's spirit, of one's mind, of
one's body, one's situation in life and one's individual
relationship with others."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

We may think that we long to escape from unfavorable
circumstances, but if so, we most likely fail to see that we are
unconsciously trying to escape from the way we were in the past
that contributed towards creating those very circumstances. Turn
within and ask yourself introspectively where your decision
triggered off those circumstances, and to what extent the
fortuitous situation that you ascribe to fate could have been
called upon surreptitiously by something in your nature that
needed to surface to heal or overcome. This may not be the case,
because randomness upsets the programming of the universe to offer
scope for a further degree of orderliness.

 We find that our resentment rivets us to the past. Somehow we
lose our real self by identifying with the person afflicted by
external conditions.

"It is the situation we are in that makes us believe we are this
or that."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

The only way to free ourselves from our past is to reconnoiter our
fears and motivations to protect our psychological vulnerability,
and admit that we have been falling back on our ego's strategies
having a cantankerous, disgruntled nature due to our frustration
at being unable to retaliate, or being loaded with self pity,
flawed by its inadequacy rather than relying upon the rich pool of
resourcefulness latent in the seed-bed of our personality, and
thus evolve.

"The false ego is what that ego has wrongly conceived to be its
own being."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

"By independence is meant self-sufficiency: that what they can get
from their own self they must not look for outside. That is the
principal motive of those who are striving for self-attainment,
because it is the means of overcoming the sorrows and troubles and
woes of this life. One sees a constant striving in the life of the
adepts to make themselves independent of outside things as much as
possible. On the other hand worldly people think it progress if
they can become daily more dependent on others. Every step we take
is towards dependence; and the more we depend upon others, the
more we think we are progressing. In the end we come to such a
stage that for what the soul needs, what the mind needs, what the
body needs, we depend upon others."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

Moreover, one so longs to turn the tables on time to undo one's
iniquity, the harm done and the pain wreaked upon others. Could
good deeds ever compensate, or give absolution? If we have
changed, does it change the past? Indeed, the past has changed,
our resolutions are retroactive. One learns by trial and error.

"Everything has its purpose, but knowledge of that purpose makes
us able to use it to the best advantage."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

The key is to try and prefigure "how I could be." Our nostalgia
for "the way things would be" if we became "how we could be" will
redeem us from our past by opting for our next move on the chess
board.

Give vent to this longing for our projections of a state of
awakened awareness and unfoldment concretized by the creative
power of our imagination. It will arouse latent faculties lying in
wait in the seed bed of our personality

All depends upon the expanse of the environment we embrace: our
commonplace lives with its "storms in our teacups", or the trivia
and drama, perchance the exciting findings dispensed by the media,
or alternately the creative visions of the "explorers of
meaningfulness", or the expanse of our own being as it customizes
more and more of the inexhaustible bounty of the many-splendored
universe of which we are a part.

"We occupy only as much horizon as much as we are conscious of."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

We can only enhance our way of being by exploring beyond its
confines. To achieve this, imagine as we meditate how things would
look from the antipodal point of view (the divine). What if the
universe (God) finds fulfillment in being liberated from its
(His/Her) virtuality by being existentiated as us? Conversely, is
it not that nostalgia of the universe (God) which sparks our
realization of our need to actuate the universe (God) as ourselves
by our personal incentive?

"As the seed is sufficient and capable of producing another plant,
so man is the product of all planes, spiritual and material and
yet in him alone shines forth that primal intelligence that caused
the whole."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

"As the whole of nature is made by God, so the nature of each
individual is made by himself."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

Rather than resorting to escape, which arises out of your personal
perspective, you will find in your meditation personal fulfillment
in the way the universe may reveal itself to you as yourself, in
the unfurling of your personality. Think that you are transforming
the universe into yourself by dint of your creativity, which is
triggered of by the awakening of your realization. The wider and
loftier that scope, the richer your creativity.

"Man's greatest need today is for the exploration of the human
personality, in order to find there the latent inspiration and
power upon which to build the whole structure of his life. For
life means not only to live, but to ennoble oneself and reach that
perfection which is the innate yearning of the soul. The solution
to the problem of the day is the awakening of the consciousness of
humanity to the divinity of man."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

If you greatly improve your personality, you will find that
circumstances now need to adjust to your new being, or
alternatively, your circumstances will not disturb you that much
(like the elephant that gets use to the jiggling of chickens).

Instead of trying to escape the prison, expand its walls (like
Marcel Marceau in his mime) so that it is no more a prison by
including the higher dimensions of your being, like overtones in a
musical tone, without which the tone would sound flat. Our social
circumstances will prove confining unless we see it is our domain,
and work at embellishing and brightening it with those "higher
octaves" of our being.

 "Every soul has his domain in life consisting of all it possesses
and of all who belong to it. This domain is as wide as the width
of the soul's influence."
PIR-O-MURSHID INAYAT KHAN

To make this quantum leap, you will need to ride the tide of
evolution, you will venture to access a wider orbit than the
samsaric repetitiveness of the commonplace: the spiritual
dimension. This does not mean to elude your life's situations, but
include them on a wider octave like the Comet that has not lost
its contact with the solar system, including Planet Earth (or
other planets), but connects these in the perihelion (nearest to
the sun) in its orbit in a wider loop than the scope of the
planetary orbits with that mysterious nebulous cloud, at its
aphelion (farthest removed from the solar system).

To escape, on a tangent, from the repetitiveness of the samsaric
wheel we have generated, we need to hoist ourselves in a very
elongated elliptic orbit (like that of the Comet), polarized by an
ever more advancing vertex, lured by extra-samsaric dimensions,
without losing our connection with our earthly personalities.

We now know that Comets may be the originators of our solar
system, emerging out of a nebulous cloud that little known area of
space-time which the Sufis call Adam, the cloud of unknowing and
continues to spew upon us, and consequently ferment us, maybe feed
us with its ionized gasses and stardust by sublimating itself,
approaching close. Yet its gift to us denizens of the Solar system
is not without a life-threatening risk to itself. If it allows
itself to be caught by the gravity of Jupiter, it will immolate
itself to give its life over to the solar system, as was the case
Shumaker Levy in July 1994, or crash into the sun, as West did in
1976. Moreover, it is invariably perturbed by its ever-
intermittent visit.

If you espy this originating cloud of unknowing lying at the edge
of the outreach of your consciousness in infinite regress, you
will find that it dispenses recurrently renewed vitality and
bounty to the existential underpinning of your being, which it
will, however, annihilate if overstressed.

Likewise, the celestial counterparts of our being suffer by their
investment in our earthly personalities, yet they ferment them,
ripen them, and sublimate them by overarching them. By evolving,
we are setting in motion in ourselves this further latent
dimension of our being: "the evolutionary drive", which is
inviting us to find our place in the scheme of things.

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Skim_Check against SOS KIT 107 -- OK.

sa Campra 30 Nov '05 -- 28 CheShvaN -- 27 Shawwal -- 
about minus 10 Centigrade, snow on the ground 

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