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That is, whenever you find yourself in body-consciousness, experiencing
the serial adventures of a body eking out a life in a caringless world,
you need to remind yourself that whatever you experience, whatever you
perceive as outside of yourself, you are only doing this to yourself.
You are responsible for all of it. There is only your mind and all of
this dream is playing out only in your mind. The particular form it has
taken perfectly corresponds to your wish to be separate and create yourself
as a person in a body and in a world without God. All the suffering that
you experience and perceive follows from this wish to be your own creator,
separate from God. But now, finally, you say enough is enough. You don't
want to do this anymore. You want to change your mind and your purpose.
You want to return to your home in God.
To do this you need to expose the two antagonists, the Dr. Jekyll who
is the face of innocence and the Mr. Hyde who is the assailant. These
are the two characters you made up, only the former of which you consciously
acknowledge. But they are both there in your hallucinatory self, making
war in your mind and keeping you miserable. Let us look at this Mr. Hyde
character, who is so well hidden from view. You do not own him and claim
him as an integral part of who you think you are in your conscious awareness
of yourself. And so he remains invisible to you. Yet he is very easily
visible in the characters you have projected out and perceive as outside
yourself.
In Yaani's story, what is the unmistakable goodie for Mr Hyde? And remember,
we're not speaking here of the assailant, the rapist, but we're referring
to Yaani, as she has constituted herself, and inferentially, to the ego
lurking inside you. In acting out this drama there cannot be the merest
shadow of doubt in the separated mind as to who was the victim and who
was the attacker, who was the innocent and who was the guilty one. Nor
can there be any question that these two seemingly totally separate entities
had no relationship at all to each other, except through the insane act
of bestial violence perpetrated by one against the other. This is the
way the world looks at this incident. And the more violent the details,
the more convincing will be the belief in a dualistic world of threat,
attack and fear.
Nevertheless, this particular story has some unusual details. It was a
holy night at a most holy time, it was a temple, the guru's robe, which
he had given her, was on the chair in the bhajan hall in the next room,
the ring he had materialized for her protection was on her finger, and
a fervent call to the divine to rescue her had gone out. The memory of
her true reality had filtered into her dream and impelled her to call
out to the divine for help.
That call will always be answered. It must be answered, but the help that
comes may not look anything at all as expected by the dream character.
Our focus is always very small. We call out for help to relieve some threat
to the body. The answer will be a major shift in the mind. We won't have
any idea what the help looks like. The response will invariably be much
bigger and far-reaching than we thought. Often times it will call for
a dislodgment which may be experienced as intense pain or an emotional
devastation that does not resemble an answer for help at all, at least
in the way that we imagine.
When invited and called onto the scene, Spirit will use the very situation
that the ego made up, the stratagems ego has concocted to keep itself
alive and autonomous, to turn that very scene into an opportunity to expose
the ego and teach the powerful lesson that the real being cannot be threatened
or hurt. That despite the seeming violence, nothing happened. And so in
this story, far from succeeding in its designs, the ego failed miserably
in convincing our girl to preserve her separate self-identity; instead,
she recognized herself to be the Atma, the One Self, beyond world, beyond
time and space, one with God. To get to that point she had to turn to
God, acknowledge that she can't solve her problems herself, for that very
self she thought she was, was made by her to keep the problem unsolvable.
Once she turns to God in total dependence, the dream takes a radical turn
towards awakening.
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