99 - Awakening Beyond Life; Awakening in Life

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

The usual inadequacy in our understanding of what is being enacted in our lives presents a resistance to further unfurling of our personality potentials. The resultant vulnerable self-image and dissatisfaction in our accomplishments is owing to our being entrapped in our personal perspective, thus we fail to avail ourselves of all the resourcefulness of our being. This is the crux which may determine ultimately "whom we are."

How can we free ourselves from such constraint of personal perspective, or complete ourselves with additional wider perspectives? 

If you look at a cube drawn on a black-board, you can toggle your glance and alternate between seeing it "this way" or "that way" in what may be considered complementary perspectives. How does the set-up of our nervous circuits operate that fluctuation? The unconscious automated programming of our neurological sensory pathways is sensitively balanced in a state of near-equilibrium so that it may shift easily from one pattern to its complementary function. That precarious balance (Kemal in Sufi terms) eschews the disadvantage of a system getting bogged into a sclerosed impasse which resists change, and therefore favors the advance of the evolutionary thrust.

In our psyche, this delicate balance is ensured by the antinomy between interest and indifference, which is one of the important themes in our Murshid's message. Hence the chance of freeing ourselves from the rut into which we may easily slip lies in the degree of our enthusiasm for, dedication to, and motivation for what we value. This is sometimes accessed by our intuition, in what at first seems a hunch: regarding an alternate perspective to the commonplace one, heartening in its excellence and splendor. To this alternative one may toggle the setting of ones consciousness f rom the commonplace perspective in which one gets so easily entrapped.

Secondly, this chance lies in giving vent to our nostalgia for freedom, our ability to extract, redeem ourselves from our dependence, addiction, selfishness. This provides the power to shift the perspective of our consciousness in meditation as in real life situations. Murshid defines this nostalgia as "the quest for the unattainable" which has the power of shifting our perspective from the compulsiveness of "maya". The choice of that word "unattainable" indicates that it always lies further - we can never claim to have "got it".

However, the paradox lies in that it is the power of love that involves us in the existential condition (the way of the householder according to the Sufis),while it is the power of freedom (the way of the ascetic) that frees us from being entrapped in a constrained and deluding perspective. Toggle between joy and pain and ecstasy, between awakening in life or beyond life. Now try to extrapolate between these two poles of your being which are of necessity interrelated and interdependent, rather than toggle. To reach beyond the middle range, we need not just to shift our sense of bodiness and self image into discovering ourselves as subtle bodies, or better still as auras of light, but also activate the process of transmutation of matter into spirit in our very constitution - an alchemical process. 

Our quest for the unattainable actuates our curiosity to "peer beyond the veil"; to espy not only the "programming" of our lives and life in general, but what is the originating intention set up in the "software", and more so to apprise the way that our incentives affect and update the programming of our lives and of life in general. Let us bear in mind that, much as the knowledge of the programming exhilarates us by stirring our understanding beyond its limits, it is for the sake of the house that the blue-print is designed. The blue-print only enlists a small sampling of all the creative potentialities that it customizes. This could be illustrated by the fact that the radio simplifies the bounty of the wave-interference network from which the sounds that we hear are derived by limiting the frequencies in a manner that our ears can handle.

The paradox is upon us in our life as soon as we seek to make sense of it. We are shattered by joy flawed with pain, and overwhelmed by pain, illuminated by flashes of joy, and ecstasy beyond. The precious gift, which is it? Hope, despair, interwoven? Like a kaleidoscope, the scene or rather the scenario of life passes on unaccountably. 

The encounters of beings are tokens of our involvement in life. Sometimes ephemerally like ships in the night, sometimes compellingly involving, they may bid rapture or wreak constraint upon our freedom; their impact may prove intrusive or enriching and healing. One may be lucky to come across such encounters that trigger off illumination, realization, a break-through of alacrity apparently providentially or those that spark a sense of deja-vu that shatters and enchants our soul. What a miracle - life!
