I heard a dream of Dalai Lama on YouTube the other day where he said he had been dreaming that in THIS CENTURY, the world would become one big happy family.
I thought, “Oh… Sounds like wishful thinking. Based on how this century began, I really doubt that the continuation will be any different. Humanity is too sick – just like most people it consists of, including me.”
But then he added something interesting. He said we would only need one thing for it to happen – a realization of the oneness of all humanity.
I scratched my head: “He’s on to something here.”
And then he said that this one realization would be enough to uproot the very cause of all war and conflict.
I found myself thinking: “Yes, of course.”
The problem is that I don’t see myself in anything except me. Then I thought, “Hm… often, I don’t even see myself in me either.”
Then, I thought, “How interesting – when I don’t see myself in others, I don’t see myself in me. And when I see myself in others, I see myself in me.” Serendipitously, a phrase by Jesus popped up in my mind that I had read recently,
“Most certainly I tell you, because you didn’t do it to one of the least of these, you didn’t do it to me.”
When I look at the other person, what do I see? How I treat them is secondary; how I see them is primary. Do I see God in them? If so, God is in me. If not, God is not in me.
In other words, if I didn’t recognize Jesus in another person, I don’t know him, and he doesn’t know me. I miss out on Heaven, and I am in hell. Conversely, if I do recognize Jesus in the other person, I know him, and he knows me. I am in Heaven.
Recognizing God in the other is the ultimate litmus test for whether God is in me. The hell we are seeing around us is a sure sign that God is not in us. If he is not in the other one, he is not in me.
When there’s no sense of connection between me and the other person, I have lost God… and myself. But how do I recognize myself in the other? It happens when I start looking beyond appearances. If I start with an assumption that there’s more to a person than meets the eye, I will start getting glimpses of the Divine in them.
C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory,
“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit – immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”
There is divinity behind every appearance. Sometimes, it is distorted, but it’s there. If I see it, I have redeemed the appearance. I have glimpsed through. I have seen the divine spark.
Meister Eckhart says there’s only one way to attain this divine soul spark in yourself and in the other:
“Therefore, I say, if a man turns away from self and from created things, then – to the extent that you do this – you will attain oneness and blessedness in your soul’s spark, which time and place never touched.”
There’s no ethics before seeing this divine spark. All ethics flow out of it – ethics spring from esthetics. The moment we let go of self and all created things, we sink into the stillness and darkness that is brighter than light.
According to Meister Eckhart, we attain the divine spark not through any effort or “addition” on our part but rather through the process of gradual subtraction.
“Everything is meant to be lost so that the soul may stand in unhampered nothingness.”
To attain true knowledge and commune with the One, we need to recover our inner silence – the language of the primordial Void in which the worlds were made. Then, in this unhampered nothingness, we will start hearing the Music of the One incarnated in the many.
The fragmented world will disappear, and all things will become one, just as it says, “God will be all in all.”
“All that a man has here externally in multiplicity is intrinsically One. Here all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One. This is the deepest depth.” Meister Eckhart
Until I let go of self, I can’t see the divine spark in the other. Holding on to self blocks my spiritual vision. But if I let it go, I exclaim like Bilbo Baggins after he had dropped the One Ring,
“I have thought of a nice ending for it [my book]: and he lived happily ever after to the end of his days.”
As I got off the phone with an old friend this morning, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being under some spell.
He had shared a video with me from 12 years ago when we were much younger, my daughter was 10, and my son was 6.
We had a picnic around a fire, cooking hotdogs, chatting, and enjoying a warm summer evening in Siberia.
As I watched my daughter’s cute chubby face chewing on the hotdog and my son’s frantic hopping and jumping over the fire, I teared up.
“This is Paradise,” I thought. “Why didn’t I see it then?”
“Paradise,” echoed my friend on the other side of the conversation.
“Hmm…,” I thought to myself after I hung up. “Why is it that we tend to see an experience as ordinary when we are in the middle of it? And when there’s some distance between us – whether it’s time or geography – it transforms into something else.
Why didn’t I see all that before? It was an ordinary evening. Yes, I enjoyed it very much, but now I almost see it as a doorway into some inexplicable magic. A picture of another world.
Is my memory playing a trick on me, so am I imagining something that wasn’t there?
Or maybe it’s the other way around – my memory shows me something that was there, but I was too close to it to see it for what it is.
“You can’t recognize a person’s face when you are too close to it,” said the Russian poet Sergey Esenin.
But how do I know that my memory is not deceiving me?
Owen Barfield said in his poem The Tower:
But many times, the secret-breathing world Whispers to thee, yet whispers with a voice Which memory shall warehouse as a shout.
Is it possible to generate positive emotions or do we have no control over how we feel?
Have you ever noticed what your mind is doing when you are not watching?
When I suddenly become aware of my thoughts, I am always surprised to find out that they are happening without my involvement. They are automatic. I am on autopilot.
Thoughts just pop out of the blue, and my mind catches on to them and keeps chewing on them.
One automatic thought leads to another, then another, then another until I am drawn into an incessant inner narrative that usually comes with bright pictures and images.
Before I know it, those “voices” from the past get mixed with something I heard on the news recently or some of my old fears and resentments.
This deadly mixture circles in my mind, eventually creating a dark cloud of negativity that grows ever bigger until I become aware of myself and say: “Why am I thinking all this!”
It’s so hard to stop. If you are like me, you know that negativity can be delectable. There’s a certain pleasure in savoring how you’ve been mistreated in the past or how things can go sour in the future.
But such thoughts and emotions are poisonous and will very soon generate fear, anger, resentment, and selfishness.
All attempts to fight ego will ultimately strengthen it.
What you focus on gets energized. Ego cannot be suppressed; it can only be transcended.
How do you dissolve Ego without fighting it?
It dissolves by itself when we no longer need it for our sense of self. It gets bigger every time we feel we need it for the survival of our Self.
It melts away when we encounter a loving Presence and lose ourselves in Wonder.
This year, I felt it most acutely at Lake Tahoe – the place we go to for a short break from the stifling heat of summer in Houston.
June and July were oppressively hot and humid this year. As the muck intensified, I was yearning for vacation. When I am tired or feel stuck in the rat race of life, Ego shows its ugly head.
It’s hard not to think about yourself when you feel you lack something.
I tend to get irritated, impatient, frustrated, demanding, anxious, and perfectionistic. I may look calm, but I churn inside.
What are the signs of true humility?
C.S. Lewis said:
True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it’s thinking of yourself less.
But how do you think of yourself less without thinking less of yourself?
How do you diminish yourself without demeaning yourself?
How do you hush your Ego down without putting a gag in its mouth?
Can you just talk it into quieting down without making it into your enemy?
It turns out that the art of humility – thinking of yourself less – cannot be achieved through willpower. But it comes naturally when we are smitten by Wonder.
The Greek for “beauty” — kalos — has the same root as the verb “to call” — kaleo. Beauty calls. Kalos kaleo. The true function of Beauty is to call – to call us out of ourselves by the magnetic pull of Wonder.
As I stood by the quaint jewel of the Sierra Nevada, Echo Lake, I was smitten by its turquoise-to-azure waters set against the backdrop of gorgeous snow-topped mountains with their granite arms outstretched far and wide around the Desolation Wilderness in the most exquisite embrace.
I felt dwarfed, quieted, struck dumb, and ecstatic all at the same time.
I couldn’t think about myself at that moment – and I didn’t need to.
I forgot myself entirely – I was one with the Whole.
I was diminished but not belittled. And I felt great.
All the irritation, impatience, frustration, anxiety, and perfectionism were gone. I was pulled out of myself, soaking in the ecstasy of the moment.
The Greek word for “ecstasy” (ekstasis) literally means “to stand outside of or transcend oneself.”
