REALISING OUR POTENTIAL
' Our Task is to relax and come home to our real self'' Sr Ishpriya
Our world faces a crisis and it is a crisis caused,in the main, by humanity's failure to realise its true potential. We have 'drifted' into a crisis situation and this is rooted in many misconceptions. One of which is our tendency towards greed and not need. We have reached a stage in our evolution where much of modern life is based on consumerism ,hustle and bustle. Thus, for many, perhaps because we have too many choices and too few 'real' challenges, we have paradoxically ended up in a state where modern life leads to a loss of freedom of choice. We have become caught up in a proverbial rat-race. Where expectations lead to a spiral of unrealistic and ultimately unrealisable expectations.
Sister Ishpriya, the spiritual guide of the International Satsang Association suggests that this tendency towards greed results in ‘a loss independence’, that is rooted in our failure to realise that we live in an inter-dependent world. More importantly, we are in the danger of losing our autonomy and our uniqueness. This failure to realise our uniqueness can result in a failure to realise our true potential. The consequences of this failure to realise our potential are truly tragic. They are of gigantic proportions. The result is a crisis of humanity that is rooted in a crisis of potential. There is a mass myopic distortion our true view of ourselves and humanities true connection and potential.
What could be a possible way out of this crisis? Well perhaps the answer is as old as the hills and one that sits at, and in, the heart of people. There a line from an old song that says ‘what the World needs now is love, sweet love’. Yes this is true. Experience tells and shows us that love does bring meaning. But the love that is needed is not the weak, sentimental, mushy sort of love beloved of romantics, advertisers and the media. No, what is needed is ‘the love of the spirit’. That love is a love that can truly redeem us . It is a love that can energise us and empower us to find our true potential. It is a love that can transform us and awaken our inherent natural curiousity. This a curiousity that attracts us towards the mystery of life , which many believe is the Ultimate Mystery , or God by whatever name we may call it. It is this 'real love' and its energising spirit that Mystics throughout the ages have possessed.
But who are the Mystics? The first response to this question is that Mystics ARE NOT extra-ordinary people. In fact every human being possesses this capacity for mysticism. The second response is that Mystics are ordinary people doing an extra-ordinary thing . What is this extra-ordinary thing? It is staying awake to , and remaining aware of , the wonder of creation within and around us all. The mistake we so often make, and certainly one I have made in the past, is to think that mystics are so unusual, rare and special.
No,the truth is this; mystics can be found in the highways and by-ways of everyday life.We can find them in supermarkets, schools, the workplace and in the ordinary everyday places. Mystics are in essence ordinary people who possess an ordinary, but rarely used, ability. In short mystics are people who are wide awake and aware ! What are these ordinary men and women awake and aware of? The answer is they are awake to the WONDER of our WORLD and the Cosmos. In short, we could say they possess the WOW factor about the on-going and awesome evolution of creation.
We live on a planet that is an infinitesimal part of an enormous and expanding cosmos. The Earth itself is almost 5 billion years old and human-like creatures several million years old. Spirituality is at least 70, 000 years old, with stronger evidence over the past 25 to 35 thousand years. Formal Religions are a mere 5000 years old. So what were the Creator and Creation revealing during all this time and certainly during the 70,000 years of spirituality? What does the Creator and creation continue to reveal? That the Mystery has been creating and revealing itself all this time and continues to do so. Furthermore, it is the Mystics, in every era and generation who have remained awake and aware of this evolutionary change.
There is plenty of evidence for this, not just scientific evidence but in , what psychology refers to as , the felt sense. This is the intuitive and 'gut feeling' that people experience throughout time. To support our intuition we have the wonderful discoveries of the ' acknowledged' mystics of all ages and cultures and the growing evidence and experience of scientists. These all point to a continuous revelation of the Mystery and creation.
Just consider the past 80 or so years. We have had Quantum and Nuclear Physics, DNA and the wonders of the Genome , the Space Age and our growing exploration and understanding of the Cosmos and finally , our increasing understanding of the complexity and inter-dependence of the myriad of creatures and plants on this planet, Mother Earth. In addition, consider our advances at Astro-Physics and at Micro-physics. All in all, we are living though and experience a quantum shift in our experience and knowledge at so many levels.
The major Faith Traditions that have emerged over the past five, mainly paternalistic, millennia, have Scriptures and these are often seen as God’s revelation. But we need to realise that these are not the totality of revelation, To consider the only source of revelation to be a series of writings, at the most several thousand years old, makes little sense. Science tells us that the Cosmos is almost 15 billion years old, born out of ‘The Big Bang’ from a mass no bigger than a golf ball. We live on Mother Earth, a planet set in a very small solar system in the massive ocean of the cosmos, which is almost 5 billion years old.
So the ‘Outer Life’ that I experience, gives me a further dimension into the revelation of the Mystery. Then there is the Inner Life. This is that inner place of silence and stillness that transcends my emotions and intellect and gives me an awareness of the Source. This awareness is what St Paul called ‘the eye of the heart’. This is the other dimension of revelation. When I combine the Outer and Inner dimensions then the words of the Jewish A Scripture really come alive ‘Lord, I thank you for the wonder of my being’. Thus I become more awake and aware to the continuing revelation of the Mystery. This revelation wakes us up to the mystic in ourselves.
Arguably, it is only when we wake up to our real self , to the mystical aspect that lies within each and every human being, that we can begin to realise how wonderful each and every person is and thus find our true potential.
I
