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Contrast the play of the divine child who always knows himself and who
is always in undiminishable joy, with the actions of a dog who happens
into the room of mirrors. Everywhere the dog looks he sees other dogs
facing him. He becomes agitated and ready to defend or attack; he bears
his teeth and snarls at the band of dogs surrounding him. Now he finds
that his adversaries are also getting excited and signaling threatening
gestures. He becomes afraid, adrenaline rushes into his blood stream and
he prepares to fight for his life. He barks and growls and menacingly
faces one after the other of his attackers to keep them at bay.
But there is no relief, the standoff continues and the threat is unabated
until he finally wears himself out, becomes weak and gives up. He becomes
defenseless. Amazingly, the band of dogs around him relax as well and
cease their attacking gestures. Of course, the whole scene of threat and
attack and the anguish that resulted from it, was all concocted in the
dog's mind. A shift in perception would have been so very easy to make
and would have so completely changed what he sees and experiences, but
it is a seemingly impossible task for dog-consciousness to manage.
Through the law of karma, the dog realizes that he himself is responsible
for all his actions. It dawns in his consciousness that everything he
seems to do to someone outside of himself, that every hurt he inflicts,
he himself will suffer from; and that whatever he appears to be doing
to someone else he is really doing to himself. Eventually he realizes
that all these projections perceived to be others outside of him are really
just himself. When the dog learns to look lovingly on his reflections,
100 dog reflections look lovingly back at him. Every kind act he takes
is magnified and returned a hundred-fold. It has been said that when you
take one small step towards the divinity, the divinity takes 100 steps
towards you. Align yourself with truth and all the awakened and realized
beings of the ages will come to bless you and shower their grace.
And so, this whole story is our story. It is the story of our daily progression
through the house of mirrors of our dreams. In time, the dog changes his
perceptions; he reverses his spelling and instead of a d-o-g, he becomes
the g-o-d that he has always been. This change in perception need not
take eons. It can happen in an instant. Right now we can leave our dog-consciousness
behind and return to God-consciousness. Nothing need be done. We only
need to stop giving our false perceptions continued validity by perpetuating
the belief that they are true. To let go of our belief in the reality
of illusion is the only spiritual practice that is required of us. Truly,
we need do nothing; we merely need to be willing to stop reinforcing life-times
of mistaken seeing and conditioning by continuing to see the false as
true and thereby making the error real.
You are the divine child, playing with all these seemingly different reflected
images of yourself. And now you are in process of turning inward and leaving
the house of mirrors behind. Just a few more moments and your awareness
will again be bathed in the infinite joy of self-absorption. You simply
do not realize it yet.
Sai Baba illustrates the letting go of false beliefs, by calling attention
to a handkerchief he holds in his hand. As he clutches the handkerchief,
he says, "Holding on is what is difficult." As he lets go of
the handkerchief and it falls to the floor, he says with a twinkle in
his eye, "Letting go is so easy." In other words, when we give
up all efforts to hold on to and give meaning and value to the illusion,
the truth reveals itself naturally, of its own accord. It is all so simple.
Sometimes the shift in consciousness comes quite unexpectedly for it is
available every moment of our day. All that is required is a willingness
to commit our lives to it totally and relinquish all efforts to hold on
to even the least part of the illusion by considering any of it to have
real value. To attempt to purify or sanctify the illusion with sacred
forms and rituals and incantations, in other words, to attempt to bring
truth into the illusion, as some spiritual paths advocate, will not get
us there. Even our attempts to spiritualize our lives within the dream
and hope thereby to awaken to truth, will also not do it. All these efforts
will not get us there because we are already there. In the end all our
efforts directed towards achieving awakening turn out to be futile, because
we don't believe we are already there. It is like looking for our eyeglasses,
when they are sitting on our nose and we are using them to look for the
eyeglasses we think we lost. We won't find them that way.
What does get us there, is our recognition that we are already there....
that we have kept the illusion alive through force of habit and through
non-inquiry, and this has covered the realization of our truth. We have
constantly reinforced the illusion by all our daily actions and thoughts,
by our judgments and perceptions as separate individual beings. We need
but to stop feeding the illusion with our belief in its existence. When
we no longer see differences and specialness, then all we see wherever
we turn is ourself, the one Self. In Christian terms, all we see is the
face of Christ, everywhere. Then love abounds, and illusion, shorn of
all our beliefs in it, wastes away and vanishes. Being no longer obscured,
the truth which was always there unaffected, but which illusion appeared
to have covered, now stands revealed. That is all.
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