28 - Perfume of the Rose

It has been a summer of intense activities, very exciting! I had reservations about personal adulations - for my 70th birthday celebration - that might spoil my ego but what I found by accepting the happening graciously was that I was giving many people an opportunity of expressing their love and an opportunity for me to reciprocate it a hundred-fold. I realize that this gift of love of so many launches me into a new lease on life in the service of The Message.

By practicing the B-Minor Mass of Bach, we are somewhat on the way to the performance in the year 2,000. We are grateful to him for opening the doors to the heavens by using the language of music.

The two plays presented at the celebration - one written by me at age 15 and one written by Michael Seraphiel (now Zia) shattered a sensitive fiber in the core of my being because they embodied so dramatically the concerns, ideals and challenges of those dedicated to a spiritual ideal! History repeats itself. One We could have added Pir-O-Murshid's play, "The Living Dead." The traditional way was either that of the sannyasin or that of the householder; today it is being in the world but not of the world. But the specter of the tradition hovers in the unconscious indelibly; it needs to be overcome by exploring the spirituality of the future.

Yesterday's journey of the pilgrim to the pinnacles of splendor in the solitude of unity or the glory of the heavens becomes today's laborer in the fields of the earth or the knight on the battlefield of our commonplace existences embued with a passion for excellence. One brings heaven on earth by handling ugly situations beautifully rather than escaping into a utopic no-man's land of bliss. Make God a reality. But is it not permitted sometimes, to suspend the strife to spend a chosen moment in beatific music? By emphasizing the God manifest in the divinity of our being, the glance behind our consciousness, and the background of our personality, are we not missing the uplift triggered off by the hunch of that aspect of God that is beyond any manifested expression whatsoever? Capture this moment between moments which passes before one has noticed it, when you have ceased to try to achieve to be. It is like the perfume of the rose that does not seem to have a utility, a kind of bonus, the divine grace.
