45 - The Critical Issues

Our self-esteem is the real issue in our lives. This is usually precariously suspended on our own fallible assessment or that of others. That on this thin thread of a mind's notion hangs our performance in achievement, our prospects of unfurling our personality, and our joys and pains calls for serious soul-searching and some restructuring of our thinking. For here lies the critical issue.

At a time when in our present day civilizations the struggle for survival has become so desperate, the distress of the destitute so appalling, competition so ruthless, emotions so callous, the clue to material survival has become psychological survival founded upon our Self-respect. Thus the key to fulfillment is a function of our self-image.

Realizing how crucial our self-image is, it is the more amazing that it is really a projection of our inherent creative imagination. Our performance in life, our success or failure, is suspended upon an act of imagination! So the question becomes, how do we work with our self-image in order to upgrade it?

We are touching upon the very crux of psychology, and yet we must also include and honor our spiritual dimension since it would be a violation of the holistic paradigm to neglect or underestimate the value and role of this transcendent dimension of our psyche. Our self-image is the product of scores of unassociated factors and it gels easily into a tenuous Gestalt which resists change. This process is insidious. It can even become compelling and obsessive and may ultimately lead to self-defeat.

The clue is then to earmark the essential ingredients enmeshed in the particular admixture that is our personality. This is not easy since this is an enormous spectrum. After this we need to identify with these, that is, really convince ourselves that they are latently present within us and can be unfurled, reinforced, nurtured, and protected as they grow.

A perfunctory probe of our idiosyncrasies will evidence the degree of our parental, ancestral even evolutionary inheritance, as well as the imprint of our culture, upbringing, schooling, and social environment. The transpersonal elements in our psyche are more difficult to earmark, and are inevitably, inextricably intermeshed with the ancestral ones. To cull these, one needs to apply methods of modulating consciousness into its transcendental setting. This is just exactly what meditation is about.

At this stage, it gradually occurs to one that indeed one does inherit from the genes of the entire physical universe including the stars, the galaxies, and cosmic rays. One inherits from other dimensions of the universe as well, such as: the thinking of the universe, the emotion of the universe, its programming, motivation, hopes, expectations, fears, precarity, disappointments, and more generally, its magic.

If the way you interpret the term God is: the universe as a being endowed with a body, mind, emotions, consciousness, will, etc., then truly one might say with Pir-o-Murshid Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan that we carry within us the divine inheritance. Seen holistically, this would also include a material inheritance as transmitted bodily through parents, for indeed our bodies are formations of Planet Earth and made of the fabric of the universe, including the sun, the galaxy, and traced ultimately to the Big Bang. And if we recognize that the universe is not just a physical reality, we will realize that we also inherit from the personality, consciousness, and will of that being whose body is the sun. This is the being the Sufis call Prince Huraksh, and who was looked upon by Suhrawardhi as an archangel. By expanding the envelope, we would discover our inheritance from that being whose body is our galaxy, the Milky Way, and whom the Sufis consider as a super archangel incorporating the psyche of Prince Huraksh and many more, including yours and mine.

And if this sounds disconcerting, there is more, because we have to include the clusters of galax- ies, and ultimately the whole of that being whose body is the physical universe. This indeed makes sense of that term: divine inheritance.  Most importantly, what does it take to be able to experience this? The theory will not suffice. Perhaps the clue resides in the fact that while the peripheral and readily retrievable storage of our memory only covers data inputted since our birth (generally after a year or more), the ordinarily unfathomable depths of our unconscious store a host of data that never cease to overwhelm psychotherapists and especially those carrying out research in the unconscious, with utter dismay.
