to console and reassure me. He then stayed close by me for the rest of my stay at the ashram to ensure that I was okay. We had established a deep bond and connection that I will remember for the rest of my life. We felt an affinity based on nothing more than the willingness to look deeply into the other, past the superficial detail of our bodies, and beyond the distracting details of our personae.
We achieved in five minutes, what can take days, months, and even years to achieve in our interactions with all the people that come into our lives. We spend so much wasted time and effort making judgments, latching onto preconceived notions of who and what others are, only to find once we have the chance to really get to know them, that we are deeply connected and that we are One.
What is important is not that we all express and manifest our spiritual identity in equal or similar ways but that we understand that the process of enlightenment is perfect and that everyone is receiving their inspiration both in the form they need it and at the speed that is optimal for their spiritual growth. No one is ever in a position to judge the progress of another.
It is like the reflection of the sunset on the water. When we walk along the shore, the sun seems to be coming directly at us and no matter how far we walk, the sun dances on the water and the rays bounce right up at us. Everyone else seems to be experiencing just the flatness and dullness of water without the sparkle of sunlight, but in fact they are receiving the same amount and the same brightness and persistence of light, wherever they go. It is just not visible to us.
No matter the circumstances of other people’s lives, they are always receiving the light of inspiration, which gently guides and guards them on their own path to enlightenment. It is only our faulty perception that leads us to judge their lives as a series of mistakes, or believe that they suffer ‘sin,’ disease, unhappiness, grief or loss. But we judge amiss.
What Really Makes Us Happy
The exciting and activating cause of duality is the illusion that, firstly, we can be separate from our Source, and secondly, we possess a single, separate and individual self/ego that has its own power, capability and agenda. However, if we look carefully at our experience in our less-than-perfect body, in this less-than-perfect world, we begin to see that all sorrow, grief, and unhappiness is the result of the fear that we do not have something we need.
It is amusing, yet at the same time instructive, that babies learning to talk usually get everything they want for a significant period of time with only two or three words, one of which is almost always ‘more.’ Once on this earth it doesn’t take long for us to feel we don’t have enough.
Modern capitalist nations are founded on, and continue to exist on, the notion of more: more for the seller, the consumer, the shareholder, and - increasingly more importantly- the company director. More is almost always seen as better.
We rarely feel we have enough. Much of what we spend all our time acquiring we unconsciously believe will make us better, more attractive, more desirable, or more powerful. We have an abiding sense of inadequacy and worthlessness, and often whole lifetimes are spent trying to silence and assuage this lack of self-love. A fundamental underlying sense of shame, and the desire to flee that shame (which is often unconscious, but nevertheless continuously active on our psyche) is the driving force in most people’s lives.
I found this very behaviour in myself. It recently occurred to me that when I shop I go with a sense of lightness and anticipation, poor deluded fool that I am. I always look forward to changing my look, finding a way to make me more attractive, more acceptable in more people’s eyes. Going home with my purchases I am always hopeful that this time I have finally done it: I’ve found what I need to make me beautiful.
But you gotta love ego. Its ability to find the trick that will get you every time is boundless. You have to give it that. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to follow the crowd, and wants to wear what I think reflects who I am. I’m not always sure these days who that person is, but I want my clothes to reflect it!
But it’s ironic. No sooner do I find that item of clothing that is not found on every magazine page or every shop rack, I wear it and then I start to feel freakish. No one else is wearing it, and then I start to wonder if the reason no one else has chosen it because it is ugly, tasteless or both. So then I become paralysed, so deeply self-conscious that I start to feel everyone is staring at me, wondering who was so crass as to choose that outfit.
Actually, if I’m totally honest, this is only a fear of yesteryear. Now I’m over fifty, I could go naked and no one would notice me.
I have to say, it’s taken me a long time to begin to understand this largely unconscious, process. I’m starting to realise that what drives the whole chain of events is a deep-seated shame – shame that I am not beautiful enough and therefore not good enough as a woman, because it is very clear in this society that a woman who is not attractive has less worth.
Thus, I now realise, I am, and always have been, doomed to failure. No amount of beautiful clothes, shoes, make-up, hairstyling, waxing, working out, dieting, or even cosmetic restructuring and reconfiguring (neither of which I have undergone - but I have lived long enough to understand the wisdom of never say never!) will ever do it for me. Nothing will ever make me feel beautiful if, inside, I carry around a deep belief in my own unattractiveness.
Not even swapping bodies with Elle Macpherson will do it. I remember when I was in my mid-thirties, I was walking through a department store with a girl I played water polo with. In addition to being a top-class athlete and a part-time model, she looked more like the famous supermodel, both facially and in her body structure, than anyone I’d ever seen. So she just stopped me in my tracks when, as we walked through the lingerie department hung with large posters of Elle, she said to me: ‘I wish I looked like her.’
That was when it started to dawn on me that no matter how supposedly beautiful a woman is, she rarely feels beautiful.
Men are also wracked with this insidious self-doubt and self-hatred. Ian was driven by a deep sense of unworthiness, but for him, as with many men, it manifested in his attitude to work. He was never able to feel okay about his work, and he could never feel that he’d worked long or hard enough, despite his 10 to 12 hour days. He was so driven to achieve, to be seen to be doing a good job, that for the 18 months before he passed on, he actually added a 20-hour weekly commute to Asia, which continued right up to the week when he was finally diagnosed with terminal cancer.
For almost six months before this diagnosis he suffered extreme lower back pain. He thought it was because of all his flying, and tried to get it treated, but never once did he think that he should reduce his work commitments in Asia. Even when his pain was 24/7 he still he worried whether he was working hard enough!
His performance assessments always confirmed that he, in fact, achieved the absolute highest levels on all performance indicators, usually in the top two to five per-cent of all employees in large multinational companies. Like my new outfits, such feedback only temporarily soothed his insatiable need for approval, and all too soon the encouraging and complimentary words would fade and he would climb right back on the corporate treadmill, striving and struggling for the next ‘achievement’ and acknowledgement.
Nothing I, or anyone else, said could change his view of himself. Throughout his successful international career spanning more than 20 years, his fears never diminished.
Our sense of separation from our Source is the cause of all guilt and shame, creating our deeply embedded feelings of inadequacy, insufficiency and worthlessness. We constantly crave something to allay our
