50 - The Human Drama

Before we realize it, we are involved in the human drama willy-nilly, irretrievably. Life may prove exhilarating, disenchanting, awesome, disturbing, depressing, or just hum-drum.

Our co-actors on the scene may prove to be friendly, supportive, or inimical, compassionate or vindictive, loyal or manipulative, harmonious or treacherous, insolent or gracious, inspiring or repugnant or just indifferent and incompatible...or some or all of these contradictory traits paradoxically lumped together.

At every move our intentions are tested; shall we say by life itself? We are ourselves mostly precious little aware of what these motivations are, except that life itself unmasks us; besides they do emerge to view to the eye of the aware even if we ourselves fail to espy the proof in the proved. Even when our covetousness or grudge, or axe to grind, or cantankerousness, or conceit, or power-trip, or failure to take responsibility had devastating consequences, perhaps decades later, we may deplore our poor judgement or our folly or our inane decision, but still belie our intention, perhaps because it masks something deeper: our need for self-validation, for self-esteem, for attention, for security, for achievement, for love. Besides these we may uncover the precious ones: idealism, dedication, a spirit of service or self-sacrifice, altruism, compassion, mercy, an unscrupulous concern for truthfulness, purity, innocence, beauty, glorification, holiness, a need to partake of the intoxication of divine ecstasy. These may aver themselves to be the moving drives behind our handling of situations.

Our involvement with people, with situations, with the problems that arise apparently uncalled for can pummel our heart into agonies of excruciating pain, or more rarely spur it to outbursts of joy, or just pleasure or a sense of well-being at the venture of life.

The interplay of destiny and incentive, baffles our understanding. Are we the victims or the doers? As in the game of chess, sometimes we assume that it is our move, but how far are we reacting to the move of our partner, looking back into his/her mind, witnessing in the move the signature of his/her intention? Or how far are we projecting into the future, that is forecasting what his/her move could be if we decide to move this way or that way? Yet even when reacting to our partner's move that is his/her intention, our move is still motivated unmistakably by our intentions. 

Moreover, what do we know of the role played by a cosmic motivation behind our moves? Let us not think of it as other than our motivation, but just the cosmic dimension of our motivation - something like the harmony of the stars and galaxies, the Pythagorean harmonic relationship that governs the intricate mechanism of which we are a part. The more we become conscious of this dimension of our own being, the greater our achievements. Here lies the real meaning of spirituality according to Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan.

Of course the intricacies of our motivations in life's drama are incomparably more complex and paradoxical then in the game of chess; and consequently the influence of this cosmic factor is more readily detectable. Here in real life our motivations really give away where we are at. Here lies the criterion of our mettle at this point in time - which hopefully may improve. Here the real person is revealed in all its nudity and authenticity, eluding any pretence. But also here as Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan says "the hand of God" which we often ascribe to fate or destiny is made noticeable to the intuition of the seer.

Since unmasking our intention proves to be so ultimate a criterion, as to what we are in our person, it constitutes an incalculable feed-back system right there at our disposal. And doubtless our ability of availing ourselves of it depends upon our readiness to confront ourselves, and call our own bluff. But earmarking somehow the way the universe fulfills a purposefulness through or rather as us, which the Sufis call the divine intention behind our intention; or discovering the conflict between this and our personal intention - which is really tantamount to a conflict of allegiance to different values within ourselves becomes difficult.

It is as difficult as assessing whether it is the trace that a physicist detects on a screen is the same electron that reappears, or whether this trace betrays the 'probability' of another one substituting itself to the first one. Or is it another one? Or is it just the whole process appearing and disappearing in its parts? Thus the issue that we may read as our intention or the other's intention is far greater than the purview that we may have ascribed to it in our introspection. Therefore beware of miss-assessing yourself in your self-confrontation in a closed circuit.  

Behind the thrust of our motivations lie deeper roots: our innate qualities, or foibles, or rather those that have been so far actuated in us; which are precisely those which we believe we possess. Unfortunately our self-assessment is often mistakenly based upon our success or failure in our performance in the challenge of life, which cannot by any means be the ultimate criterion.  Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan points out that a victory may aver itself to be a defeat and defeat a victory.

The push that it takes to move out of a rut, go out on a limb into an undertaking whose success remains questionable may be sparked by the values we believe in, but is powered by our belief in our potentials. Our real value is stored in our potential which is ultimately infinite, albeit it is the activated fragment of this potential that has real life effectiveness - that is that measure of our potentials that is turned on, in contrast with those infinite bounties that lie in wait unknown to us, because unexplored. For example we only discover our power when we are called upon to overcome obstacles, or our compassion when faced with someone suffering, or our perspicacity when unmasking a fraud.

Besides it is our motivations that spur these potentials or their shadows on into existence in the human drama. For example if one's motivation is service to people, one's potentiality for compassion will emerge through one's personality traits more markedly; and one's dedication to service will have the effect of allaying one's resentment, so that one will prove more magnanimous towards the person who has offended one. If one's motivation is personal gain and dominance, one's personality will no doubt manifest more power, but this kind of ego trip may be looked upon as the shadow of genuine power. It distinguishes itself from real power by its ruthlessness. Here the potentialities of one's being have been constricted, defiled and deviated.

It is as though life offers us the most incredible array of bountiful values that corroborate the values that we ourselves cherish and uphold. Just consider what our civilizations have bequeathed us as a heirloom of works of art and architecture and music and poetic lure, of ingeniousness, of know-how of organization, of skill, of discipline, of inventiveness! Consider the wealth of emotion that has filtered through the human transducer and been customized by our inventiveness! The acts of dedication and mercy and heroism! The whole universe is enacted in the human drama including that little patch that seems to be of our resort: our problems and life situations, our achievements, our fates and destinies! Our lives are traversed, in fact fermented, suffused by the fruits of the inspirations of creative beings in the past and all around us. The bottom line in our lives is what our contribution is to all this bounty. We are not only the products of these civilizations, of the genius of their outstanding pioneers but also their successors and nominees.

Moreover we need to extend our grasp beyond our terrestrial civilizations, and include all that lies behind the moving scene of the human drama on Planet Earth. Do we know what spawns the stars? What emotions or aspirations convulse the galaxies? What beings lie beyond our ken? Do we espy traces of the symphony of the spheres or the cosmic celebration in those emotions that make our heart beat faster, or shatter and delight our soul, or spark our spirit? It is these springheads of cosmic moment that lie behind our motivations and potentials, sometimes dormant, sometimes hopefully active.

A formidable power lays waste at our doorstep. The Sufis call it the divine power, actually it is the potentiality of our divine inheritance. While at the transcendental pole of our being (let us say in the seed of our personality) the bounty of the qualities that flower in the existential universe lay potentially dormant, these qualities contrast with their actualization in the existential pole of our being (let us call it the plant) in excelling everything one might imagine by their awesome perfection. Besides by becoming conscious of our divine heirloom, we start integrating the opposites while paradoxically by-passing them: for example being powerful and radiant at the same time - that is manifesting power without being stern; or being both loving and at the same time free inside; or wise without being smart. 

To avail ourselves of these features of the divine perfection invested in our being, we need to extend our thinking beyond the middle range. Evolution advances by burning the hurdles on the way and continually making the leap to the next step which always takes off from a springboard that integrates all the previous steps, thus carrying them further. 

The clue lies in espying the motivation of the universe behind our motivations and the qualities the Sufis call the divine qualities behind the qualities that we have actuated so far, and assessing what are the values that are being enacted in that fragment of the human drama that we are involved with, while realizing that in fact it is not a fragment, because everything involves everything else, so that we are irrevocably involved in the cosmic drama, and this is the measure of our grasp of what it is all about.

To track down this infinite dimension of ourselves, albeit remotely, Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan outlines two steps: the first conceptualizing God, because by so doing, one is nurturing one's creative imagination which is the self-same power that projects the software of the universe as its hardware. The act of conceptualizing needs a support system which consists in actually recognizing the values that one cherishes in nature, than in the qualities that are being enacted behind the drama of our lives, then recognizing them in our own nature, finally embodying them - thus making God a reality.
