A major problem I had in my younger days was the assertion by great masters that everything was going exactly the way it needed to be and that all is well.
If you look at the world today, it seems self-evident that all is most certainly not well. There are a half dozen hot wars going on. There are crazed dictators and wannabe dictators unleashing fearsome weapons with scant regard for life. Schools full of children have become ‘collateral damage’. The economies of many countries are topsy turvy. There is fear everywhere.
So how does this square with the injunction that the unrest is within you, not outside. That, if you were truly on the path to enlightenment, you would see that the world is perfect exactly as it is.
I am going to answer this question on two levels.
On the highest level I want you to consider a nightmare you had. Let’s say you were being chased by Jason of Friday the 13th fame. You try to escape as he chases you. You hide behind a curtain but he rips it aside and confronts you. And then he stabs you multiple times. The pain is so intense that you wake up.
And you say it was all a dream. Nothing really happened.
But when you were dreaming, it felt awfully real. Your heart pounded. Your blood raced. You really wanted to escape. And a wondrous escape came when you woke up.
In exactly the same way, the world you are living in is a dream. Sometimes it is a nightmare. If you are bothered by what you are seeing, then Father DeMello’s advice is to ‘wake up’. And the dream will dissipate.
How does one wake up?
I will share this in future columns.
For now, I just want you to recognize that you are living in a dream world and have always been living in one. I cover this in my book Are YOU Ready to Succeed, so those of you who are impatient can access the method to waking up right away.
Recognize that this is a deep teaching and don’t get caught up in ‘spiritual bypassing’. This is a term coined by psychologist John Welwood as a method by which some people use spiritual concepts to sidestep genuine psychological work including unresolved trauma, difficult emotions, relational wounds and legitimate human suffering.
So, at the highest level, it is a dream world and nothing is happening.
But you are not at that level and are still strongly identified with your particular body-mind-intellect complex. So, you do what you can to ameliorate the suffering that so disturbs you. Work for political change. Mobilize what resources you can to leverage your actions.
Take a leaf from Abraham Lincoln and “with malice towards none, with charity for all, do the right as God gives you to see the right.”
It is obligatory for you to do this even as you recognize that the world is OK and will always be so.
It will take you some time to become comfortable with this teaching. Stick with it. It is powerful.
Peace!
