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.”
Recently, someone sent me AI-generated art and said, “How cool is that?” I looked at it, showed it to my wife, and we both said, “It looks kind of dead.”
It’s so mathematically perfect that there’s no life in it.
I immediately imagined myself seeing that picture in an art gallery hanging next to Monet. No comparison.
No doubt, AI-generated art is okay in the sense that it looks like art. But it’s not properly art. Because art is not created mathematically. It’s created inspirationally. It has a soul.
AI-generated “art” may look perfect, but it’s dead because it’s soulless. It cannot have a soul because no one inspired it.
It takes inspiration to have a soul. AI-generated content may read fine, even perfect, but is it food for the soul?
I experimented with ChatGPT, asking it to create a short story based on Russian folklore. It came out fine, readable, passable, recognizable characters that I knew from my childhood, but it was drab and meaningless.
But why? What is the fundamental flaw of AI?
The answer is deeply philosophical and spiritual – not technical or mathematical.
The “I-It” model is seeing the world as separate from myself. It’s literally “I” and “It.” There’s no connection. I am a subject, and the world is an object out there.
I can only observe it from the outside, gather data about it, measure it, and conceptualize it.
In the “I-It” pattern, we believe we only know something when we have studied it externally by amassing data about it. If I gather all the data about the Sun, I know what the Sun is. If I gather all the data about that person, I know what that person is.
But do I really know that person by collecting data about them? No. I have only created a mental concept of that person based on the data collected and mistaken that concept for reality.
How do you heal your inner child? What is it in the first place?
Your inner child is your inner guidance system that tells you what you need to be happy.
Your inner child is that part of you that always knows what you would have been if you had been loved perfectly.
It’s an inner sensor of love or its absence.
Your inner child is a flower inside you that blooms or fades depending on how much love you feel.
The inner child is that part of me that always tells me the absolute truth about how I feel right now.
If I feel bad inside but keep smiling on the outside, my inner child will be kicking and screaming – and I will feel inner conflict.
If I neglect him for too long and he feels desperate, he will hide – making me feel sad and lost.
If I really hate doing something but try to convince myself otherwise, my inner child will not be fooled. He will break the truth quite bluntly:
“I want to get out of here!”
You may ignore this still small voice for a long time – or even try to silence it entirely – but it will ALWAYS manifest itself in your subconscious through feelings, dreams, and those serendipitous moments when life catches you unawares.
Your inner child is your inner GPS system to always guide you towards perfect love.
The inner child knows what it feels like to be loved perfectly and always protests when you acquiesce to something less.
The more we neglect that voice, the further away we are from perfect love.
The more we want to control, the more inner conflict we feel.
Inner conflict indicates a struggle between what your inner child feels and what your controlling mind craves.
The difference between my inner child and me is that I can lie to myself, and he cannot.
He is my innermost treasure to point me to what I need to be truly happy.
But if I want to connect to this inner GPS system and allow it to lead me to real joy and fulfillment, I need to first recognize my inner child and start listening to him.
It’s not easy at first – the inner child has been hurt. He doesn’t trust me. I have been mistreating him for so many years.
Why would he go out of hiding? Why would he crawl from under the bed?
He will, eventually, if I keep showing up for him with RELENTLESS EMPATHY.
That’s what a loving parent does! They give the child RELENTLESS EMPATHY and UNCONDITIONAL ACCEPTANCE.
In Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling came up with a powerful metaphor for how to deal with hopelessness and fear when your soul is engulfed by bad news. And it helps you to change your energy in 5 minutes.
In the Harry Potter universe, Dementors are entities that feed on human joy.
As someone who has battled with depression for many years, Joanne Rowling captured her experience of dealing with hopelessness in the “Expecto Patronum” charm – a powerful magic that repels negative energy.
There’s only one power Dementors cannot withstand – the power of a person’s inner light informed by their happy memories. This inner light doesn’t allow one’s soul to be engulfed by darkness.
Those in whom this inner light is strong repel Dementors – joylessness, hopelessness, sadness, despondency. And they can change their energy in 5 minutes!
How do you find true belonging? According to Brene Brown, true belonging is the flip side of saying “No.”
What happens when we say NO?
We draw a line in the sand.
We are no longer playing “nice.”
We are no longer trying to fit in so people will accept us.
And we risk being rejected.
It’s scary.
In the age of increased polarization, a desire to belong is almost irresistible.
We all want to find true belonging.
But, according to BreneBrown, true belonging,
… starts with self-acceptance. Your level of belonging, in fact, can never be greater than your level of self-acceptance, because believing that you’re enough is what gives you the courage to be authentic, vulnerable and imperfect.
So, we have drawn the line. We have chosen to belong to no one.
My grandfather fought in World War II. As a child, I would often ask him: “What is war like?” He never answered.
The memories were too painful. He never talked about them. He just drank.
Every memory or thought about the war brought the same emotions in him AS IF HE HAD BEEN IN THE MIDDLE OF IT.
He wasn’t. There was no war around. But he still felt it as if it was his PRESENT reality.
One consequence of PTSD is that once your brain has been hardwired to expect danger, it cannot distinguish between thoughts and reality.
A thought of war feels like an actual war.
PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) has been known for a long time – during World War I, it was called “shell shock.” But it wasn’t until the 1980s that a corresponding diagnosis was proposed.
What is the mechanism of PTSD?
John Bradshaw, the author of the bestseller Healing the Shame That Binds You, says that when a person goes through a traumatic experience, it gets imprinted in their brain within the next 72 hours unless they are able to talk it through with someone they trust.
Why?
Because trauma does not get registered in the brain when met with relentless empathy.
Trauma gets recorded in the brain and causes PTSD symptoms under one condition – the person has FELT an overwhelming emotion but never got any empathy.
In other words, when a person talks through their experience with someone they trust within the first 3 days, the brain does not create neuron pathways (electrical connections) that produce PTSD-related symptoms.
If, however, they suppress or deny their feelings, the traumatic event eventually gets hardwired in the brain.
When trauma gets hardwired in the brain, the brain gets chemically conditioned to expect the same traumatic experience again and again (and releases the same chemicals before the event happens).
Since ancient times, people intuitively knew that if you reject your feelings, you will be consumed by them, and if you embrace all your feelings, you will be transformed.
Blessed is the lion which becomes a man when consumed by man; and cursed is the man whom the lion consumes, for the lion becomes a man.
The Gospel of Thomas
One thing my alcoholic father passed on to me is a feeling of emptiness and a desire to fill myself from outside in.
He chose to medicate the feeling with alcohol. I have tried to do the same with food, people, and workaholism.
If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it. Richard Rohr
The more I numb out my feelings on food, people, or work, the emptier I feel. The feeling is strong, and often comes without warning – regardless of what I do on the outside to alleviate it.
In fact, using external means to get rid of it doesn’t work.
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.”
