There comes a time in life when all seems hollow and meaningless. It happens in most people’s lives more than once. It’s that time when you feel all alone, you can reach for no one; you see no purpose, no direction, and suspect you’re headed nowhere.
You search your relationships, occupation, endeavours, experiences for meaning and draw a blank. There definitely comes a time when, despite best efforts, one feels discouraged, disheartened and disenchanted.
The hollowness of the soul becomes palpable, the lump of pain in the chest becomes solider, desperately you close your eyes to search for light.
These are precious moments, during these brief moments the light can slip in, the window of the soul is open.
When the ego, intellect, logic and rational mind disintegrate, during those moments the window of the soul is open. We’re open to receive the divine, that faint voice is audible and we walk a few steps towards our inner journey. Ordinarily, we are so distracted by the noisy outer journey.
This time comes, it comes, whether you have nothing or you have everything. When either everything has been taken away from you, or when nothing more can be added to you.
When this moment arrives, it is a great relief, it is a great release; a letting go of resistance.
You realise you’ve been searching outside in vain- sometimes in money, sometimes in power, sometimes in prestige, sometimes in so many kinds of relationships. You realise your thirst is for the transcendental; you are searching for the absolute.
It first happened to me when I was in my late 20’s. It occurred despite a tender bundle of life, a few months old, laid happily beside me, despite my feeling so complete in my new-found motherhood. It seeped into my seemingly blissful life in a beautiful seaside home through the backdoor and drowned all my joy and dreams.
But we deceive ourselves all the time, we allow our small deceptions to grow large and loud enough to drown out our inner voice. Deceiving ourselves is even more deep-rooted than deceiving others, this kind of self-deception is human nature and, most often, keeps us distracted from the search for truth.
When I reached middle age, it knocked me again, this time it was inescapable.
It is most agonizing when others can’t perceive it, no one can hear you, you’re in it all alone. It’s like a disease that inconspicuously ruptures your inside yet you’re declared healthy.
This time I couldn’t befool me, it felt like a vortex that threatened to swallow me from within.
Nothing could deflect me; my mind stopped functioning.
And the miracle is you can enter existence only when you’re unclutched from the mind- from past and future. Those dark moments of sorrowfulness render past and future irrelevant and open the window to our deep inner-knowing.
If you want to enter existence, the mind has to be shut completely. In those moments when there is no respite offered by the past and no future hopes and imaginations are present–in those moments of emptiness, you meet existence for the first time.
That’s the time when we realize that we are the only source; that we will not receive from the other, nor through money, power, material possessions and accomplishments- that lasting fulfilment that we long for. The Only and Original source is within us; there is no separation between the ultimate and us.
The pain and suffering serve to nudge us, to shake off our delusions, to release us from bondage and open the door to freedom. It gives us a glimpse into the truth. To see the glimpse of the truth is a beginning of a pilgrimage that leads us to the ultimate, authentic self.
ॐ peace, peace, peace!
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