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.
