The Trouble with How We Love

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It seems we were born to invent. For better or worse, it is what we do. And not just things, but stories, excuses, and schemes too.

Thus, much of what we invent we would be better off without. Take the idea that love is selective, for instance. Who concocted that one?

Our inventiveness apparently dates to our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Since then we have twisted and spindled a lot of what was already perfect. Love, in particular. We have turned its all-inclusive ideal into a mere expression of personal desire.

Love was never meant to be a “want.” It has always been the omnipresent “is,” the inexhaustible source of “ever existing, ever conscious, ever new Bliss,” known in Sanskrit as Satchidananda.

Everything in this world is dual in nature. Yet, we have conditioned ourselves to love only the agreeable half of its two-sided manifestations. Our love of other people – and our lack of it also – tends to rest on the imposition of personal provisos. And so, it comes and goes. We may think this is natural, but really it is merely a habit, and a bad one at that, acquired of outward living.

Love that depends on certain physical, mental, and emotional criteria is a mark of instability, an example of egoic selfishness that becomes a magnet for the suffering we experience.

It is ego that leads us to seek outside ourselves for what we want, but the ego cannot love without parameters to please it. It weighs and labels what it sees, using its sensory scale of pros and cons. The result is distortion of love as pleasure or pain.

To see anyone as a stranger, or anything as separate, is to limit our sympathies to “I” and “mine.” The only cure is to live from within, to embrace the whole of life’s demands and diversities, no longer wounded of wanting.

Love is not an invention we can improve on. We have to let it be as it was intended. In its original state, it was – and is – the answer to every need.

Self-Talk for Two

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Do you ever feel like a slave?

You mean to my career, to my responsibilities? Yeah, sometimes.

I mean, more like feeling bound to how you think, to what you want and are still trying to get. More like that.

I’m okay with who I am, if that’s what you’re asking. Most of the time, anyway. But I get your question. We’re stuck with these bodies and their limitations, with this life and what we have to do.

Exactly. I don’t think it’s fair. We have free will, but to me it’s kind of a ruse, more like a sly form of bondage.

Growing pains are part of the deal, but having free will lets me decide if, when, and how I want to handle what comes my way. If my attitude is good, what seems bad gets better.

What do you think of this idea that life is a gift from God and that we’re supposed to use it to seek only Him? The way I see it, I didn’t ask to be born in the first place, and now I have to live in a certain way, or I get swatted down. What kind of a gift is that?

I look at the gift as a lease. Maybe I don’t remember that I signed it, and maybe I can’t break it, but in living by its terms, I can make the most of it, and it will serve me well.

Those terms are awfully strict. Indulge a desire, and suddenly there’s a gift tax.

Yeah, that’s true. Most of us run up quite a bill before we see the mistake of it.

But why is it a mistake? God has booby-trapped the gift. If He loves us so much, why would He do that? Why would He rig the game?

Maybe the better question is when and why did we decide that we should make the rules? There’s a flip side to every desire we pursue. That’s a given, as it has been from the beginning. Highs come with lows. There’s no getting around it. The slave is the one who keeps thinking he can.

It still feels like a forced march to me. “Here’s your gift. There’s a million ways to use it, but if you choose any of them that isn’t God-approved, you’re going to suffer.”

That’s about it. But the upside is that in choosing to act in ways that are God-approved, we not only don’t suffer, our experience of freedom and happiness continues to grow. The downside disappears.

How’s that working for you?

It works when I do the work, and it doesn’t when I don’t. I know how to talk the talk, and I know all about the sword of discrimination that I need to apply to my unsevered desires, but old habits die hard. It’s still an uphill climb.

That’s what gripes me. I have no real choice in the matter, free will or not. God put me here, and I can’t get out. If I end my life prematurely, I’ll be worse off the next time. The game is rigged. I have to make the uphill climb, or suffer for as long I refuse.

Seems to me a pretty good time to make the only good choice you have. It might even start to feel like a gift.

Do You Need a Guru?

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In any field of practice, when we reach the limit of our expertise, warning signs appear. Do not overreach, they say, or things are going to get dicey.

This applies to the spiritual path, just as it does to any endeavor that requires a progressive measure of proficiency. The climb to communion with God is not exactly an escalator ride. We have to do the work, and there are places where it gets mighty steep. Without proper training and guidance, a devotee can just as easily fall into darkness as an unskilled mountain climber could fall to his death.

Claiming to know more than we do, or believing ourselves more capable than we are, is not an uncommon trait. But it tends to be a signal that bad news is waiting to happen. The ego has an infamous reputation for reckless judgment when seduced by a strong desire or in defense of its own self-image. It seems, too, that people of my gender are especially susceptible to this affliction. That’s because, as you probably know, “Real men don’t ask directions!”

Part of what makes that funny is the volume of empirical data that supports the joke.

On the other hand, for men and women alike, I think it is fair to say that this earthly plane of existence is a very unusual place to have landed in the first place. Just consider the setup: We are born into tiny bodies that require care and feeding by other people, and by the time we have grown to where we have a degree of self-control, we have already absorbed a huge amount of misinformation, especially on the subject of what we need to do and to have to be happy. That’s because, for most of us, the ones who have been our parents and mentors were parented and mentored themselves by an earlier generation that also suffered from the same faulty conditioning.

I was in seclusion a few years ago, when it struck me how quite bizarre our situation is. Here we are, divine spirits, stuck inside these rather peculiar, low-efficiency vehicles we’ve been given to travel around in, which slowly wear out altogether, and which seem to run in large part on impulse and confusion.

Now add to this the dictates of karma and reincarnation. We arrive here as infants, completely helpless, with the memory bank of our previous lives erased. We don’t remember a thing about who or where we have been. Immediately, we are immersed in a system of duality, which guarantees that whatever we do in pursuit of a worldly desire will carry the onus of its opposite, downside effect. But people pretend this isn’t true, and so, as we get older, we learn to think that way too, which leaves us wondering why our lives are so often empty of what we really want: peace of mind, love, and lasting joy.

Then one day we are drawn to the teachings of Krishna or Jesus or the Buddha, or someone hands us a copy of Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, and we start to see a way out, which, more correctly, is the way in: into oneness at the center of being. But to get there we have to undertake a sacred mission, and it’s a real whopper! Our task is to break the spell of our thousands of delusions, slay all the karmic dragons that come flying at us breathing fire, and silence the voice of the ego when it tempts us with some new trinket or worldly ambition.

Do you think that having a guru might be a useful idea?

It took me over fifty years to arrive at that conclusion, and God knows how many previous incarnations of wandering in the desert of my own stubborn ways. To my credit, I was studious, but also terribly mental. I read inspiring books, attended inspiring lectures, married an inspiring woman, and yet those karmic dragons still knew where to find me. My worldly desires and attachments were greater than my ability to let them go.

When I came to Ananda, I resonated completely with the principles and teachings of Paramhansa Yogananda. I loved the idea that truth was the only gauge of ultimate value. I accepted him as my guru, and vowed to accept his guidance.

End of story? Would that it were so. Having a true guru, one who has been to the summit of Self-realization, is not only the greatest blessing of this earthly existence, it is also the greatest test of one’s willingness to obey what is required in return.

The trouble is, we, in varying degrees, are also still the disciples of our egoic tendencies.  Have I always followed Yogananda’s unfailing advice? No, I have not. Have I always learned from my first mistake not to make it again? No, I’ve not done that either. In fact. I have a few favorite mistakes that I continue to make now and then just to make sure they’re still really stupid!

It’s amazing what we get used to. I don’t mean that life on earth is just a plague of dragons. It is quite the opposite much of the time. Wonderful moments, loving people, personal victories, all kinds of toys to play with… these are available daily. But in a sense that’s the problem: They seduce us into a steady pursuit of the pleasures they provide. Every pleasure, however, has an expiration date, and it’s usually a rather short one. Trying to extend the experience beyond its period of sensation is like trying to nail Jello to a tree. It’s not going to stay there.

What can a true guru do for you? Everything but the actual work to reach the summit of your soul’s freedom. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna drove Arjuna’s chariot and gave him divine counsel, but he would not fight his disciple’s battles. Getting in shape and doing what needs to be done is our part of the deal. The guru’s job is only to lead the way with perfect insight and wisdom.

Here is why a true guru – Jesus Christ, Krishna, Moses, the Buddha, and Yogananda being most historically prominent among them – is essential to our success: He (or she) has lived many human lives, has been where we are now, has overcome every obstacle and setback on the path to Self-realization, and has returned from a life of freedom in God to show us how it is done.

Simple, yes. Easy, no. Having the right teachings and the right techniques is not enough to achieve communion with God. We need to open our hearts to the Guru’s loving presence – it is time for the capital G – open our minds to his divine wisdom, and take his hand in surrender to his will. Everything we want – love, peace, and joy – is part of the bargain if we do. What is so hard to fathom, and I say this about myself too, is why we continue to reach for the Jello, the hammer, and the nails.

Random Thoughts to Reflect On

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Goodbye is never the end. In the end, we begin again. Hello, goodbye, hello.

* * * * *

We may accidently make a foolish mistake, but we do not accidentally make it again. It becomes a choice.

* * * * *

Today’s version of you will awake tomorrow with a chance to do yourself better. Some days are easier than others to improve on who you were, but this, too, becomes a choice.

* * * * *

As you think, you receive. Your thoughts are vibrations that return to you as echoes, as circumstances in kind. That is because the universe acts in resonance with what you give it. It has no choice in the matter. Only you do.

* * * * *

Love conquers all, but so does fear. If fear is the one you feed, it will consume you. It will eat at your courage, your peace and your joy, leaving you a plate of misery alone to live on. Love is the feast before you. Fill of it and share it. Do not let fear to devour it instead.  Fear turns love to heartburn. Push it away.

* * * * *

If your heart has faith in God, your mind will follow. But it’s not the same in reverse. Faith expressed in the mind first does not filter easily into the heart. It may never get there, and so remain a mere hope or belief, subject to a shortage of power and magnetic effect.

* * * * *

Man has been given principles and standards to live by – the Ten Commandments, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, the Golden Rule – and free will to adopt them as guidelines. Choosing to adopt and adhere to them, however, is not our consistent modus operandi. Nor are we quick to learn that our sufferings are due to the errant behaviors we practice in place of self-control.

Not so commonly noticed is another set of guidelines, offered by Mother Nature. Witness, for example, that she never uses more than is needed to nourish and support her kin. Her expertise is also unmatched at fitting form to function. In nature, too, all that is required is recycled. Nothing is wasted.

Nature’s wisdom lies in its diversity, and yet it self-corrects to curb any movement toward imbalance, scarcity, or excess.

We don’t need myriad rules, regulations, permits, codes, and laws to govern how we live. We just need to pay attention to the natural ways of the earth.

The Trouble with How We Love

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It seems we were born to invent. For better or worse, we incline to stretch, twist, and reshape much of what is before us, until what is there is the next advance on what had been before. Inventing is what we do.

But often what we invent we would have been better without. New versions of a truth, for instance. Or the re-construed teachings of Christ. Or the idea that love is selective.

Interpretation, a favorite form of invention, can leave a real mess.

Our inventiveness apparently dates to our expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Since then we have bent, spindled, and revised a lot of what was perfectly given to us to last forever. Love, in particular. We have turned its all-inclusive ideal into a mere expression of personal desire, a relationship based on what we want. Love, of which all is made, was never meant to be a “want.” It has always been the omnipresent “is,” the inexhaustible source of “ever existing, ever conscious, ever new Bliss,” known in Sanskrit as Satchidananda.

We have been conditioned by our planet’s dual nature to love only the agreeable half of its two-sided manifestations. Most notably, our love of other people – and our lack of it also – tends to rest on the imposition of personal provisos. And so, it comes and goes. We may think of this as “natural,” but really it is nothing but a habit, and a bad one at that, acquired of outward living. Love that depends on the meeting and maintenance of physical, mental and emotional criteria is a mark of instability, an example of egoic selfishness that serves as a magnet for the suffering we experience.

It is ego that leads us to seek outside ourselves for what we want, but the ego cannot love without parameters to please it. It weighs and labels what it sees, using its sensory scale of pros and cons. The result is distortion of love as pleasure or pain.

To see anyone as a stranger, or anything as separate, is to limit our sympathies to “I” and “mine.” The only cure is to live from within, to embrace the whole of life’s demands and diversities, no longer wounded of wanting.

Love is not an invention we can improve on. We have to let it be as it was intended. In its original state, it was – and is – the answer to every need.

It’s Not About Innovation

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Every age is an age of wonder, but some are more wondrous than others, and the one that spans my current incarnation is beyond what I could have imagined in my youth. For over seventy years, I have witnessed astonishing scientific, technological and social innovations, which accelerate now at an exponential rate.

And yet, we are the same, still seeking answers to fundamental questions, which the latest innovations cannot provide. We want to know God, but our human limitations, and especially our worldly desires, put us at odds with even the possibility. God is formless. How can we see and relate to such a Being? To borrow a line from Gertrude Stein, “There is no there there!”

We can begin to “see” God, thank goodness, by feeling for His presence in all that is alive, in all that appears inanimate, and even in the challenges we face. But the key is to go even deeper, where we touch that same formless, mystical essence that also abides in us. Endowed with an immortal soul, we possess the innate power to connect with God’s consciousness, not as a tangible experience, but as an intuitive knowing.

Getting to that inner state of divine communion, in which knowing God is an ongoing reality, is surely the purpose of human life itself. It’s as simple as freeing the soul of its constricted body-mind association, and as terribly difficult as any earthly assignment will ever be! No wonder, after countless lifetimes, we remain on the uphill slope in search of that summit.

There’s a lot working against us, and it’s not just social pressure. The question of who and what we are is a hard one to puzzle through. We have thoughts, perceptions, freedom of choice, and constant sensory input, which we lump into an overarching category called “our experience.” The mind then segments this experience into a linear timeline, which we perceive as “one thing after another.” As long as we confine ourselves to this worldly perspective, there is no escape from its time-driven process that we regard as real.

To make matters worse, we tend to agree that reality’s trillions of features look, feel, taste, sound and smell much alike to us all. So, we give them names and definitions to identify one from the next: hand, harmonium, happy, sad, etc. But every label we apply adds to our delusional sense of apparent separation. You and I and all the people and things we see as distinct, prevent us from seeing the oneness of all that is, and thereby make it impossible to know God from such a point of view.

Now, that is not to say that we should neglect our senses. Without them we could not function in this world. But if the purpose of this life is for us to transcend it, what’s that all about?

Frankly, that question raises more issues than can be addressed in a single essay. But I think we have to understand, first and foremost, that the goal of this life is not in this life. The goal is for us to remember that we are infinitely more than what we perceive ourselves to be, and to act in accordance with that higher potential as we seek to attain it.

As I ponder this truth, I’m reminded of a quote by Gloria Steinem. “The truth shall set you free,” she said, repeating an old axiom, “but first it will piss you off!” Therein lies the rub. We want our truths to be easy-come for fast assimilation. But we are learned in the ways of outward living, and these tend to trigger resistance to accepting and doing what will set us free.

Jesus declared that to see God, we must be pure in heart. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” He didn’t mean 80% pure, nor even 99%. Purity is 100%. That means there’s no room for distracting desires, earthly attachments, poor habits or bad moods.

Undoubtedly, this is the kind of message that Steinem had in mind.

But the good news is, purity is also a direction. If you’re only at 80%, strive for 81, and 81 will get you to 82. Look for God everywhere, especially with your heart. As you do this, the journey through the ages of your life becomes increasingly joyful, and God becomes increasingly visible to your native soul.

What comes of itself, let it come. If it challenges you, so much the better, for it’s meant to be a stepping stone to your freedom. Know that in meeting it wisely and well, it will lead you nearer to your destiny: to seeing, knowing, and being with God; to where wonders never cease.

How Do You Know?

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Can the trillions of cells in your body know what it’s like to be the whole that is you? Each of them is endowed with a certain capacity and function that does not include the capacity of knowing more than what it’s to do. Nor can a drop of the sea know what it’s like to be the inconceivable volume of drops that is the sea.

How then can you, one of billions and maybe trillions of souls, know what it’s like to be God? The sea of Spirit cannot be contained in a cup. What you can know, however, is the love expressed in every cell and soul that God has created.

To realize the love that is God is not within the mind’s competence to accomplish. Such love is not a product of reason alone, nor even of reason primarily. You must strive in your heart to experience the oneness that unites the whole of you to the whole of everything else. As your inner sense of this oneness improves, so does your knowing of what you need to know, which is what will eventually free you of needing anything more.

In every expression of consciousness, including that of evil too, God is only love. The challenges you face, no matter how harsh, are lovingly gifted to you for your spiritual growth. Each bears your name and address. Not one is delivered by mistake. Learning to love, embrace, and resolve all that comes your way is what this human life is about. It is how you find your way to your destiny’s door, to knowing God as fully as God can be known. The door is on your side. It opens as you press forward, heart first.

What’s Holding You Back?

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Maybe it’s how you were taught to get ahead.

I was raised to compete. “It’s every man for himself out there,” my dad used to say, “To get ahead, you have to outdo the next guy.” That’s how I was groomed to get what I wanted. Top of the list: to live the American Dream.

Competing to get ahead is a restless occupation. It gives rise to a restless mind, and mine was no exception. I had the weight of our culture behind me too. It urged me in my development to study hard, work hard, make a lot of money, and have a lot to show for it. To me, this had the ring of a patriotic duty. Few were the voices that questioned the intelligence of living such a competitive-consumptive life.

Like everyone else, I just wanted to be happy. I figured that financial security was a major part of the package, and I was willing to persevere to achieve it. I played by the rules, but before I knew what a mantra was, I already had one: “What’s in it for me?”

By most common measures, I became successful. I worked for Disney and later moved to Hawaii, where “the good life” got even better. As a freelance writer, I was my own boss, free to set my own schedule and travel as I pleased. But something inside me was missing. No matter how many gains I made, my contentment would come and go like sand through a sieve. I was always in pursuit of the next fleeting pleasure.

When our joy slips away, most of us just try harder to get it back. We do what we have been doing all along, only at a faster and more strenuous pace. I was no different. According to my social conditioning, I was making all the right moves, a model of upward mobility. What was the problem?

The problem was society’s formula for finding happiness. It might look good in theory, but it does not jibe with reality. The messenger and message are upside down. Society does a masterful job of promoting and appealing to our worldly desires, persuading us that it knows what is worth our time and effort, but nothing it sells has the power or durability to keep us in smiles. Though its “good life” is portrayed as the Holy Grail, the more we buy into it, the more we are likely to wonder why the payoff doesn’t pay off.

Years ago, I discovered an age-old path to the peace and contentment I was seeking. It wasn’t fancy or fashionable, but the sheer simplicity of it was deeply effective. I walked into a class that taught me how to turn my energy inward instead of letting it dissipate in my outward chase of transient dreams and delusions.

What I’ve learned since then is mostly what I’ve needed to unlearn. I was looking in all the wrong places for what I wanted, and I was going about it incorrectly also. Instead of directing my competitive spirit entirely toward self-improvement, I was using it divisively, trying to be better than others.

“What’s in it for me?” was working against me too. I wasn’t nearly so happy when focused on getting more for me than when giving more to others. And oddly enough, the more big-hearted I became, the more abundance I attracted as well. Giving begets getting—what a concept!

Have I mastered the art of meditation? Or the science of selfless giving? Well, let’s just say that I’m moving in the right direction. Every day of showing up at the altar of silence within me makes the rest of my activities flow more pleasantly and smoothly. And every gesture of kindness and generosity adds to my happiness, too, even as challenges arise.

Technique plays an important part in the practice of meditation, but attitude is the one most important of all. I am seeing now as if through an open window that had long been boarded up. An expansive horizon has come into view, and it’s right inside of who I am.

Are rough spots still likely to lie ahead? Oh, yes. Kriya Yoga, the meditative method that I have practiced for over 20 years, has been described by Paramhansa Yogananda as “the airplane route to God.” But many choppy miles are yet to be flown. A lot of unlearning remains to be done; many habits and desires remain unresolved; and occasional attitude adjustments remain to be made. But redirecting my consciousness and energy from an outward, competitive aim to an inward, cooperative focus continues to change me. What’s in it for me now is letting go of the urge to run after gains that come and go. The real American Dream is lived by going within.

Still Trying to get It Right

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I keep hearing these days that happiness is a choice. Apparently, it’s up to me to make it happen.

“Okay,” says I, “I’ll give it a try.” I decide to decide to be happy. Then along comes a crappy encounter, and I react in my usual crappy-encounter sort of way. I get upset, and I’m not happy. No surprises there.

But a moment later, I remember: I can choose to be happy. So, I strive to turn the crappiness into gratitude and goodness. I call on my powers of reason for support. I affirm repeatedly that this particular setback is no big deal, and…

It doesn’t work. Now I’m not only unhappy, I am frustrated by the result of my ineffective effort.

Well, that wasn’t much fun! “Next time,” my brain implores, “let’s just let the unhappiness run its course. No more striving to make it go away.”

I am back at square one. My original reactive emotions are poised to pounce at the slightest hint of a negative intrusion. My life continues to go up and down, as it did before.

Is that as good as it gets?

Wait a minute. Here comes another theory. If I can accept my unhappy reaction to every crappy encounter, it will lose its grip, and I will sooner be happy again. I can hardly wait for another opportunity to give this a try.

Surprisingly, this helps. I still get unhappy when something unpleasant occurs, but not for quite as long. I think I’m on a roll.

Let’s see, what’s next? Maybe I need to meditate more. Om, sweet Om.

And that helps, too. Until… Whamo! Suddenly, a karmic bomb explodes in my path, and it wounds me to my core. Om, kablooey!

That’s when it hits me. It must be my social conditioning. I’ve been programmed to wish that things were different when I don’t like how they are. Is that the problem?

“Bingo!” said a voice from somewhere far away. “You’ve got to work with what is.”

The trouble is, I don’t want to. When things are not to my liking, wishing they were different is as automatic in me as needing to eat when I’m hungry.

That same voice interrupted again. “You don’t need to eat when you’re hungry, you are simply giving in to an urge. What you need is self-control. Face the music and dance to it. You don’t always get to choose the tune. The one that plays is the one that is calling you out, and it will play on a loop until you decide to cheerfully give it a whirl.”

Cheerfully? Are you kidding? If I get a flat tire, I have to cheerfully get out and change it? In the cold and rain? That’s asking a lot.

“That’s what life does,” said the voice. “It asks a lot. But if you give a lot back, you find that you’re not unhappy anymore.”

Well, I am hardly free of reactive emotions. But they don’t run me ragged like they used to, and meeting them with an understanding smile works well to quiet them down. Challenges are part of life’s daily docket, and it seems the better we get at facing them calmly, the more they test our mettle. The last part of the climb is usually the steepest and most exacting.

Like everyone else, I am trying to win my release from what causes me to hurt. Changing a flat tire cheerfully in the rain, slogging through a swamp of red tape, or dealing with a personal disaster, is a test of right attitude that can often be hard to get right. You know you got it wrong when it upsets you.

What’s funny is that the answer is so plain and simple. And yet, we fight it with our egoic desires as if they had the power to free us. The truth is, we cannot be happy if we make it conditional on getting what we want. Only in choosing to want what we get will happiness truly be ours, unaffected by flat tires, red tape and even personal disaster.

What comes of itself, let it come. Swami Kriyananda showed us how. No matter how severe the trial, he always made the most of it. And no one I have ever known was happier.

Ignorance: Bliss or Beware?

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We’ve all heard it said that ignorance is bliss, and that what you don’t know can’t hurt you.

But what you don’t know can hurt you. It can even kill you. I dare say that most of the people who die every year, die of some form of ignorance, whether slowly from decades of poor habits or suddenly from something they didn’t see coming.

Ignorance is not bliss. It is misery waiting to manifest. It is pain waiting to pounce. It is delusion waiting to deceive. You don’t have to look far and wide to observe the part that ignorance plays in the world. Not only is it pervasive, it is also powerful. Lately it seems that ignorance is the fuel that is powering our planetary decisions. This may be an ascending age of consciousness, but it’s a long way from where we are now to the top of the cosmic cycle.

Be that as it is, there’s a purpose to ignorance also. It is what we have to overcome in order to reach the summit of Self-realization. God did not mean it to be an easy achievement.

In a dark room, if you turn on a light, the darkness disappears. But where there is ignorance, the darkness remains even in the presence of light. “The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not” (John:1). In other words, we are eternally bathed in God’s divine light, but if we shut it out by turning to our egoic desires instead, we wind up in the shadows of that light, where we stumble and suffer.

Ignorance is expressed in endless ways, but its root cause is simply our lack of awareness of who we truly are. In looking for happiness outside of ourselves, we lose sight of our innate divinity. We develop a case of spiritual amnesia, thinking that we are the body-mind that we have merely borrowed for this incarnation.

There’s a funny story about a challenge that God was facing in relation to man’s tendency toward this mistaken identity. Rumor has it, He was having second-thoughts about what he had done in creating us in the first place. According to anonymous but reliable sources, God became exasperated over man’s constant pestering for favors, wanting Him to intercede to make life easy. So, God went to His council of advisors and said, “I’ve got to get away from these people down there, but I don’t know where to hide where they won’t find Me with all of their complaints and prayers for things they want.”

Many suggestions were made and rejected until one of the council members had a brilliant idea. He said to God, “Why not hide inside of man. It will take him almost forever to find You there!”

God loved the idea, and that is where He has been ever since, waiting for us to want Him alone.

To overcome our body-mind identity and its desires, we must rise above our ordinary human level of consciousness, and this isn’t easy. It means doing as Arjuna had to do in the Bhagavad Gita, purging ourselves of those myriad “mental citizens” that bind us to delusion, and thus to the shadows of God’s light. That light is ever present, but learning to live in attunement to it is no small accomplishment.

It’s a process, isn’t it. We do this one shift in consciousness at a time, and thankfully there is goodness and grace in every shift we make. But here’s what is most surprising and remarkable about that. Spiritual advancement is not a question of attaining anything. It is simply a matter of opening the door to a state of being that is ours already, hidden from us only so long as our focus is elsewhere. As that door gradually opens, the soul begins to emerge from the shadows, showing us the way to joy in God.

God’s creation exists on myriad levels of manifestation, all at the same time. Every generation has its extremes – Hitlers and Gandhis, fools and mystics – along with every human possibility in between. On a higher level, however, is God’s divine light, which forever surrounds us, forever dwells within us, is forever accessible, and which cannot be diminished by any gross material reality. We are literally imbued with the light, love, wisdom, peace, power and joy of God, untouched by darkness, hatred, ignorance, fear, weakness or sorrow.

And yet, we continue to suffer. We are practiced in the art of misplacing our priorities, in

seeking our satisfaction in egoic pursuits, which causes the light that “shineth” within us to remain incomprehensible. And so it is until we reach that point of “anguishing monotony,” as Yogananda called it, and we say “Enough is enough. I want more by wanting less of what the outside world can give me. I want God and the true abundance that wanting Him can bring.”

Krishna said to Arjuna, “Be thou a yogi.” In other words, realize, as the yogi does, that all is love, all is light, all is an opportunity to live in joy. We must only remember who we truly are.