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.
