83 - Heaven and Earth Interspersed - Part II

            The question in the mind of Buddha and also of those in the Hindu tradition was whether pain is due to our giving in to our humanness and whether we can find protection against pain by withdrawing our need to fulfill our desires. I believe it's similar to anesthetizing oneself. Cancer patients who have the choice of doping themselves with painkillers have to decide to what extent they feel comfortable about doing so or to what extent they feel that it is separating themselves from the reality of life.

            Maybe there is another way of looking at this. The consequence of trying to highlight and also unfurl the celestial aspects of our being is that we encounter pain when our celestial ideal is being violated. So the pain is in the way of translating our celestial ideal into earthly conditions. The curious thing is that in fact if we look at it we will realize that it is love that typifies the celestial aspect of our being as opposed to desire. Desire can lead one to slip into wanting things that are comfortable or even wanting people in our relationships that give satisfaction to our ego, that's not love. Of course in love there is the greatest of all vulnerabilities as is illustrated in the songs of the Sufis where one is on tenterhooks as to whether one's love is reciprocated. We can illustrate it by the heavenly beings being rejected by the egos of the denizens of the earth with the consequence of being bereft of their ability to nourish the earth with that special dimension that they represent. It's a kind of refusal of beauty. It's a very strange thing but it's something that one wouldn't believe unless one saw it happening today, replacing love by desire.

            By love I mean unconditional love which you could see as a yeast which has a transforming effect, but also makes one extremely vulnerable. Paradoxically this vulnerability avers itself to be a great power: it's the power of truth. As we know youthfulness has a resilience that is lost when the personality becomes jaded. This innocence bespeaks of reliance upon the parents and has a lesson to teach us as adults, however important our incentive, that there are times when we need to trust ourselves to the self-organizing faculty within us and beware of interfering with it by our personal volition. This is precisely what the Sufis call reliance upon God.

            So if we introduce this into our way of doing and thinking then we have an immediate measuring rod which gives a sense of what we are doing in our lives which goes counter to bringing heaven on earth. We have a feedback system there. Then it becomes very clear that what we are doing to Mother Earth is the result of greed, desire having snowballed, having reached the point of gross exploitation. Ruthless cruelty is the opposite of love. This has been the message throughout the ages but somehow it has been downplayed, even in the name of religion like the terrible persecutions in Spain at the time of the reformation.

            So far I've highlighted innocence as being one of the features of the heavenly states and then love. I think we also have to feature beauty or we could think of it as splendor rather than beauty. Beauty is just the way that splendor assumes a form. It could be the beauty of our thoughts, or it could be the beauty of our way of handling things, or it could be the beauty of our aspirations, the beauty of our willingness to be of service, or making personal sacrifices. There are many ways in which the kind of beauty which we ascribe to the heavens become a reality on earth. Of course it is on earth that beauty is to be found. That is why we need to change that tendency of thinking that the heavens are up there and that's where we want to reach and perhaps we will reach it when we die.

            If you seek beauty it will elude you. If you unfurl the beauty latent in your being, it will attract beauty. This is the reason why seeking for the angel in the heavens is misleading. Instead, find the heavenly dimensions of your being and the environment will be transformed.

            Pir-o-Murshid said that the state of the heavens is embryonic, that means that it is a virtuality. It means that the reality is down here because this is where the celestial virtualities of our being are unfurled in our personality like an egg that has unfurled into a blastema and an embryo and then a baby and so on, originally it was an egg. So think of the heavens as being in a seminal state but then it doesn't have to be up there, it's in us. It's not contained in us but if you think of the hologram again it's a virtuality that can be highlighted and by being highlighted it can be really called into existence.

            At the very thought of the divine splendor there is a kind of ecstasy that Sufis have often called an inebriation. Now one projects it as a reality up there but the great breakthrough is when one discovers the splendor in oneself and one doesn't dare to do this because one thinks that it is too grandiose. Pir-o-Murshid  gave us a clue as to how one can do this and that is to accept that we have both in us, the aristocracy of the soul and the democracy of the ego. Otherwise if one were to claim that one is the splendor then one would be guilty of megalomania. But that is why Abu Azid Bastami said, 'how great is my glory.' So he did make that step that we have difficulty in making, at least I do. So it's much easier to project and think that one is enamored or enthused or inebriated by the splendor of the heavens.

            It seems rather prosaic to be enthused by the splendor that one discovers in oneself, it seems very self assertive and yet ultimately it's the same but one needs to see that it is the same thing by overcoming one's sense of otherness. By highlighting one's problems one tends to slip into a very commonplace picture of life which does not honor the needs of one's soul even though one is in theory trying to actualize spirituality into real life. A criteria that might prove helpful is the difference between one's needs and one's wants to which Pir-o-Murshid  drew our attention and moreover the needs of the soul, in contrast to the needs of the psyche although these are both interspersed and reciprocally relevant.

            Our pain is the wounded child, so it is the celestial in us that feels rejected by the human. On the other hand the child has an extraordinary capacity of laughing and crying at the same time. If we dwell in our pain, then we are allowing the angelic in us to be bogged into the human condition. Therefore the joy that we ascribe to the heavens is a liberating emotion from the constraint of our humanness. If we do not avail ourselves of this resort we get bogged in by our human condition. Those who are trying to actuate spirituality in daily life continually encounter the tendency to get caught in the perspective of human problems to the extent that one has lost sight of the spiritual values behind them even while one is trying to actuate those values. It's like the perspective in the hologram, if you highlight one then, of course, the other tends to fade away and it's very, very difficult to extrapolate between both at the same time. So our attentions are right in line with the need in our time which is to make God a reality. But as Pir-o-Murshid says very clearly the soul in its search for fulfillment on earth tends to lose its way. That's the reason why one needs to refer back to the original motivation of one's soul and realize that our minds tend to sclerose the dynamic intention into concepts. When this happens we get caught in our concepts of spirituality and that's not spirituality, it's our concepts.

            Therefore, although Pir-o-Murshid  said, 'shatter your ideal on the rock of truth', I think it would be better to say, shatter your concepts of your ideal for the sake of being realistic. Then you will find that your ideal will find further outreach, further perspectives that will free it from its limitation in your mind, but never give up your ideal because then you are lost.

            In order to fulfill the practical duties of life, it is not necessary to forget our ideal. We can hold the ideal in the tenderest spot of our heart, and yet fulfill our practical duties. The ideal is to illuminate our lives, not to paralyze our actions.

Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan
