This Too is Lord

Transcript

Im a little bit hesitant to speak about this idea but this is what I truly believe in my heart even if I haven’t managed to fully embody this idea yet.

Let’s say it and see what happens. Perhaps by the process of speaking it, it will become more true for me and for others. Sometimes when we look at our experiences, sometimes when we are passing through a difficult moment of course many people will suffer through it and many on a spiritual path will say to ourselves this too shall pass.

So we try to remember its a delayed gratification, emotional intelligence. We are trying to manage our experience and put it into context. We are trying to say to ourselves “even though I am suffering now it will not always be so.”

The School of Kashmir Shaivism, our teachers Baba Nityananda and Baba Muktananda and Gurumayi Chidvilasananda. They all teach us the idea of non-duality or perhaps better stated, Monty, monism. Everything is one, there is no separation between one thing and another and in fact everything is divinity, that is one of the core teachings of Kashmir Shaivism.

Everything is God, everything is Shiva. It might be difficult for us to experience that, to see the truth in that.

Especially when we are going through one of those moments of suffering as I mentioned. Or one of those moments of pain that we interpret as suffering. Suffering we interpret as difficult.

Maybe its difficult tot see the truth in that moment, maybe its not. Maybe its not difficult at all. Maybe its not hard, maybe its the easiest thing we have ever done to give up the distinction between good and bad and welcome what is ours, our gifts, our strangeness, our suffering, our pain, our interpretations, our mind, our being.

This is for us, whatever you are experiencing right now it is for you. If we don’t manage to see the truth of it in the moment that what we are experiencing is glorious.

Many times we look back on our experiences, personally I remember one difficult part of my life, so it seemed at the time. I was living at a hostel and didn’t have much money. I was working as a door to door salesman living on commission. It seemed like a difficult time, I looked back a couple of years later and said to myself “that was one of the best moments of my life, I was living at my edge” even though sometimes I worried I wouldn’t have money for food.

The world always provided for me. Perhaps I never needed to worry about anything. Moving through these grand processes, perhaps even if the most brutal were to happen, perhaps if someone were to enter my room in the middle of the night, catch me in a deep sleep and place a knife to my neck, that knife would be an instrument of the diving.

In that moment though it might sound morbid welcome death as another experience just as when Baba Muktananda traveled to the world of the dead, he said he saw the lord of the dead, the lord of death on his mount and smiled. Just another aspect of the divine. Good or bad, difficult suffering, pain, joy it is all for us.

This too is lord.