103 - Reconciling our Psychological Needs with our Spiritual Needs

Here lies the crucial issue for those who harbor an imperative nostalgia for the sacred, yet honor their responsibility in our human society in the world.

We may acquiesce to our need to involve ourselves - with people, with situations - to manipulate the fabric of our Planet, to find fulfillment.  We may achieve mastery by taking responsibility, upgrade our support system in the physical environment, improve ourselves physically, healthwise, unfurl our human potentials, nurture our intellect, cultivate our culture, our music, our art, to enjoy entertainment, relaxation, jokes, to discover hidden perhaps unavowed aspects in ourselves by identifying with the person enacted in the human drama.

However, we may become increasingly concerned that in the course of this involvement, we easily and unconsciously get inveigled in constraining situations, not only circumstantial, but in our way of thinking, which affects our attunement, which evidence the impact of conditioning upon our free-will. Our sense of suffocation, of frustration can become desperate. That which once delighted us avers itself to be a prison. Our need for freedom becomes all-consuming, compulsive.

The moment a prisoner feels that he will no longer remain in the prison, the prison bars must break instantly, of themselves.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

At first shot, we tend to jump perfunctorily to the conclusion that our prison is our environmental and social circumstances; that to grow, we need favorable circumstances, just as a plant may need just the right sunshine and water and quality of earth to flourish. We suffer if our need for the sacred is waylaid by the sacrilege of worldly ways. We feel that we are missing out on something quintessentially important in our life: awakening, enlightenment. But what do these words mean? Are they cliches of our mind? Are they projections of our wishful thinking? Let us be wary of words, of doctrines.

We may well have created these circumstances (as we imagine a spider confined to its web), before we had this breakthrough of realization, albeit there may be cases where it appears that the prevailing circumstances are fortuitous, irrespective of our choice.

Many a soul in their yearnings for freedom have escaped from what they thought was prison while failing to recognize that the prison was in their thinking. 

There is a place that cannot be reached  by going anywhere.

Buddha

As our outlook changes, our sensitivity is sharpened. The grossness, the selfishness, the worthlessness of so much that is avidly pursued in the world, the facetiousness, ruthlessness of some, the insensitivity to the suffering caused, wounds our soul to the core. Modern technology has made our lives in the world more comfortable and practical, while more challenging, albeit at the cost of much defilement, pollution, unfair competition wreaking destitution on the unadapted. At what point does need become greed?

All that produces longing in the heart deprives it of its freedom.

Yet He who arrives at the state of indifference without experiencing interest in his life is incomplete.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

What at first seemed worthwhile now avers itself to be trivial. The support system takes over, so that our purpose in gaining insight, unfurling potential qualities, our attunement to the divinity of our being, gets lost from our view. This is what everything was about! The futile, misconstrued game played itself out. As this gradually dawns upon us, our suffering seems to need to exasperate itself to a paroxysm of pain before we either do something positive about it or simply go under, wallowing in self-pity. We ask ourselves: what am I doing in life?

There comes a time in one's evolution when a passion is awakened in the soul that gives the soul a longing for the unattainable.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

 As soon as we realize that we are ourselves party to all of this - that surreptitiously it has spilled over in us, while we were inculpating others - we realize that the prison is in our having failed to spot this. We had been denigrating ourselves unbeknown to ourselves on a hunch that "something was wrong", unwittingly intuiting that it eroded our spirit, and we had failed to see this until the burst of realization struck us.  We had been contriving to escape from circumstances whereas we failed to acquiesce that we were trying to flee from aspects of ourselves that we dislike and had been denying, albeit unconvincingly, and which are our real prison.

Consequently, we make a decision to not participate in what arouses our wariness, our aversion, our abhorrence. Can we live the life of the world without belonging to it? Instead of "seeking another kingdom", can we bring the sacred right into the profane? Can we handle ugly situations beautifully?

Those who think that heavenly knowledge is sufficient are mystical; but the joy of the heavenly knowledge and the full understanding of it come from being able to express it in the world's medium of expression.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

But here one encounters the danger of falling into a still more pernicious prison: vanity in our sanctimoniousness, which traps us in our ego, and which is the ultimate misconception. This is precisely what Pir-o-Murshid points out: what we call 'me' (the ego),  is only a fraction of what we are. If we earmark and identify with a fraction of ourselves without including the whole picture, we distort the picture. Under the glare of awakening, that phantasmagoria exhausts itself. The way out of that prison is to extend our identity beyond what  we think is our self.

The false ego is what that ego has wrongly conceived to be its own being. It is not that the false ego is our ego, and the true ego is the ego of God, it is that the true ego which is the ego of God has been reduced to a false ego in us.

 It is the situation we are in that makes us believe that we are this or that; whatever the soul experiences, that it believes itself to be.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Suddenly we realize, "I am not what I thought I was, whereas I was thinking and behaving according to what I thought I was!"  It is by shifting our consciousness and sense of identity in the transcendent dimensions that we first grasp unity: beyond matter, beyond the subtle body, beyond form (imagination), in the realm of pure light, beyond consciousness, beyond the seeds of existence - awakening beyond existence - then reversing and  seeing unity in diversity - in the seeds of existence, and then in existence. 

True exaltation of the spirit resides in the fact that it has come to earth and has realized there its spiritual existence.

In him is awakened that spirit by which the whole universe was created.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Encompassing all beings, we see God as a potentiality, striving to emerge in each fraction of itself.

The soul may be considered to be a condition of God; a condition which makes the only Being limited for a time.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

The eternal is to be found in the becoming. It is a virtuality actuating itself in each fraction of the totality, which is what we are ourselves, also the "others". 

When a person awakens to the spirit of unity and sees the oneness behind all things his point of view becomes different and his attitude changes thereby. There is nothing and no one who is divided or separated from him.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

But to believe in the metaphysical concept that 'all is one' is not good enough. Experience eludes the meshes of the knowledge that tries to scoop it up. Reciprocally, will knowledge spur us to experience? to experience what we know?

The breakthrough of realization will make us beautiful; and if we have been able to lift the veil that buried our own beauty, we see the beauty in others behind that same veil. When they discover themselves in the mirror of our soul, the chances are that they will undergo the same awakening process that we have gone through ourselves.

At this point in our forward march, we stumble upon the ultimate realization: is our quest for freedom not the ultimate selfishness of the personal ego that we confused with the Self? Is not that erroneous notion of ourselves the ultimate prison? Is our quest for freedom not itself an expression of the ultimate concern of the personal self?  

The ego holds its prison around itself, it takes this prison with it, and there is only one way of being delivered from it, and that is through self-knowledge.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Discovering our real Self, which is what we mean by the Oneness behind the fragments of the One, opens the door of the prison. The way out of that prison is love. It is here that we are tested in our love and compassion, which is a gratuitous act of our free will - perhaps the ultimate freedom from the want of the self. This is enabled by avoiding criticism of those who are still immersed in "the ways of the world", who are struggling, self-destructively, incongruously, blindly. People need to go though their trips, be replenished or disappointed, or disconcerted, or devastated. We must know that we cannot spare another from his/her follies by dint of having overcome our own. These are the pangs of birth. Our latent perfection and that latent in others, which we ascribe to God, is striving to break through our imperfection, which we ascribe to ourselves, and so indict others.

As soon as we have ceased to fret about our own suffering, we become sensitive to the sufferings that spark the arrogance of other people toward us. When we see how they overcompensate their vulnerability by their possessiveness, we love them and would wish to help them in their covert distress.  Laughing at our own past stupidity while bemoaning the suffering it caused acts as an alarm signal to those still in the quagmire.

We should be careful to take away from ourselves any thorns that prick us in the personality of others.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

In India this is coined "indifference"; it is really finding freedom in ourselves from being disturbed by the attitude of others. The consequence is the peace that is not born of the escape from prevailing conditions, but which is the catalyst of benevolent action arising out of the peace within. We need to watch that our equanimity is not reliance on a doctrine rather than having been achieved personally by meeting a struggle chivalrously.

We find that there is no end to the demands of people: they will want us to help them achieve their selfish ends, they may wish us to support their ambition, their power trips, to flatter them, feed their vanity, bolster their self-esteem, overlook their foibles, have patience with their follies, understand their incongruities, corroborate their judgment of others, or to commiserate with their sorrows for failing to attain the satisfaction of their desires.  Perceiving our innocence, people may deceive us, to pull us on their side in their conflict with another person. We must be careful lest by our good will to fulfill their demands, we find that we participate in their covetousness and sometimes concupiscence, or at least reinforce them. We do not want to become dependent upon their dependence upon us.

Things that people take to heart will seem to him of little importance. Things that people become confused with will become clear. Disappointments and failures will not take away his hope and courage. There comes a time when all that he has accepted in his mind, all that he believed in appears to be quite the contrary to what it seemed before. Wealth, position, all the things he had pursued sometimes seem to become the opposite of what they seemed.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan

Every new outlook that frees us from perfunctory assumptions will change our relationship with others, and thereby alter the circumstances.

Suddenly the same world that we despised appears beautiful, we see the struggle for perfection in imperfection, the transparency of beauty trying to pierce the veil of ugliness; we see the immaculate present within its very defilement, order within disorder. "That which transpires through that which appears" is already present in that which appears; it is not elsewhere, it is not "other". It is in the highfaluted legendary past of a pre-established harmony, and it flashes in the future as an intention: it is "infinity in a finite fact and eternity in a temporal act" (Preston Milford). It is the everywhere and always in the here and now. The existential is not an illusion veiling reality, it is the reality embedded in actuality. The purpose and fulfillment and reality of the blueprint of your house is in your house. The cosmic code does not precede the existential universe, it is self-organizing itself and thereby discovering itself in the "here and now" - "God hidden within His Creation" (Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan)
