Steve Pavlina writes: “You can’t be intelligent if you turn your back on truth and succumb to falsehood and denial.” How Much more true that is if you are striving for higher consciousness or even Self Realization.
This process of facing truth and not succumbing to falsehood and denial is a continual challenge. We so much want to identify with our successes and with what makes us separate from others. Just when we think we know ourselves we have to accept the fact that we don’t. We identify with the finite limitations of the ego-mind instead of with the infinite reality of what Emerson called the “Oversoul.” The difference in the two is like the difference between a drop of the ocean and the ocean itself.
We are blissfully ignorant of our Oceanic Infinity and ignorantly content with the false assumption that we are only drops. We are bound with limitations, but this is a limitation of ignorance – an ignorance of who we really are. And to know and experience consciously who we really are is Knowledge.
How do we get there? It’s not easy.
It takes courage to let go of the familiar and the comfortable. And it takes wisdom and understanding to see the limitations of conditioned consciousness, and to know that there are more conscious ways of living, and deeper levels of fulfillment. We have to always be willing to sacrifice who we are for what we are destined to become.
And it is always easier to stay limited than go beyond self-created limits. But go beyond limits we must, because that is the nature of infinity, and to accept anything less than that is a denial of truth. And with this denial comes self-created and unnecessary suffering.
It’s not so much a question of becoming intelligent. It’s a question of discovering it within. The Intelligence that created the universe is also within each of us. The most sublime beauty we have ever seen in nature or art is but a shadow of that beauty that is within us. Krishna tells us this in the Bhagavid Gita. Meher Baba tells us that in God Speaks.
To settle for anything less than the infinite and eternal nature that belongs to us is to embrace falsehood and is a denial of who we really are. It’s like a river that resists flowing to the ocean and it becomes stagnant and foul.
We can never become too satisfied with our lives. For our lives are created out of false assumptions. And it is our duty to shed these falsehoods, these false beliefs about ourselves, one by one. It is a continual answering of the question, “Who am I?”
What this amounts to is a process of unlearning. You have all heard the expression, “If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it’s a duck.” Well, not exactly. What it really is is consciousness temporarily assuming the form of a duck, only to be discarded when it realizes that it is more than a duck.
We are human beings, in various forms, nationalities, races, religions, for the purpose of discovering that we are more than form. That is, we take on a form to discover formlessness. For consciousness, in its essence, is formless. It is beyond opposites.
All of the forms taken by consciousness, from stone to human being, are for the purpose of experiencing limitation – not that we are meant to be limited – but for the purpose of transcending the limitations inherent in form.
In human form, we have the capacity to experience the inner realms of the subtle and mental worlds and to transcend even those experiences and find union in the Absolute Oneness that pervades all of creation. For we are that Oneness.
Fortunately, Oneness is longing for us as much as we are longing for it.
When people suffer it sometimes prompts them to try to understand the purpose of suffering. “Why me?” is a frequent refrain. But the answer to the question is that it comes to us all.
My wife has been going through some physical suffering for the last week. This prompted me to seek a solution for her in the Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine. And as I looked through the chapter summaries, I realized just how much suffering there is in life. There are so many illnesses that plague so many people.
But the physical suffering that is so common in the world is only part of it. There is also emotional suffering — the suffering that comes from loneliness, or from people being abandoned by spouses, or people losing loved ones to death.
And then there is the suffering of hopelessness that so many experience when whole cities are wiped out in tsunamis or hurricanes or earthquakes. For others, the suffering comes from violence, war, poverty and injustice.
There is no way to escape it. Suffering is a big part of life. But what is the purpose?
If God is compassionate, then why are the people who love Him put through so much suffering?
In the course of my life, suffering repeatedly has stripped me of the extraneous. Ambitions, careers, relationships and miscellaneous pursuits have all gone up in smoke. Over the years it has forced me to focus on the bare necessities of life.
It was immense physical suffering that led me to the awareness of an inner life. And I think that is the case for many, many people.
I remember the director of a cancer center telling me once that a lot of their cancer patients were actually glad they had cancer, as it led to their discovery of an inner life. And my wife last night told me she is glad she went through this recent bout of suffering. “I needed a wake up call,” she said.
So, with the theme of suffering on my mind, I was happy to stumble upon a 1986 Glow International interview with Eruch Jessawala, a disciple of Meher Baba, who expands on these ideas even further:
“God’s compassion is not according to our concept of His compassion. His compassion is that He would do His very best to get anyone closer to Him. And get him out of the rut of these constant reincarnations. So his compassion would always be directed towards getting people out of the maze of illusion, in one form or another. And the best way to get them out of illusion is to bestow upon them not relief from suffering, but more suffering. That’s His compassion. It seems ridiculous, it seems preposterous that the Compassionate One should shower upon us this suffering, but that is the only good weapon that He can utilize in order to make us turn towards him and face Him. All other little trinkets that may be bestowed upon you by others who are advanced on the spiritual path, and who have got some powers, they might give you limbs and they might give you sight, or they might even raise you from your death bed and all that; but that is not real compassion if it entangles you more and more in the mazes of illusion. So His real compassion is to get you out of the maze of illusion. And the remedy is that you always call out to Him. And when do you call out to Him? Well, when your fingers get burned or when your backbone gets ripped or hurt and so forth; then you call out with all your heart.”
It was the famous Sufi poet Rumi, who wrote in his discourses, “I am amazed at the people who must be dragged to Paradise in chains and fetters.”
It is amazing that people have to be dragged to spiritual freedom, but it shows the addiction so many of us have to illusion. It’s hard to resist. But that is because for most of us, our consciousness is only of illusion. Suffering helps this consciousness to lose its grip on us. And when that happens, when we can get a glimpse of the sublime, of the eternal, we see with our inner sight the Divine Beloved waiting to give us His embrace.