Do not be ashamed of your pain. It shows you the way to your Heart. So now that you are aware of it, what will you do? You can now walk the spiritual path, the path of self-realization beyond the false self. It is how we heal beyond our self-identification with being wounded, with being a victim, with being abandoned, with being incomplete and broken; that is the false self that we have walked around as up till now. It does not lead to the Divine, but rather, only to a place of darkness that it calls home. The only other option is to continue to distract ourselves with a lifestyle that, if we are honest with ourselves, is largely a complex coping mechanism meant to distract us away from our inward suffering and perceived incompleteness. Patience is not about doing nothing. Patience does not imply idleness, a mere enduring of suffering. Rather it is the active practice of inward striving to uncover your own reality, your Divine nature by negating the negative energies, the negative emotions, and the negative thoughts and beliefs that assault your Heart daily. It is an inward battle. It is how we learn to cultivate value from within, for our sense of value and self-worth is predicated on our sense of reality – our own realness.

The truth is that we all have pain, we all have cracked Hearts, a Soul that is wandering a desolate wasteland, looking for a place of belonging. But a cracked Heart is not an imperfection, a flaw, rather it is the path of realization that leads beyond the Heart itself. Because as Rumi said, the cracks are where the Light enters, and this is absolutely true. We are searching for the Lote Tree at the farthest precinct of existence, beyond the Void. All Souls are in a state of returning. The death of our loved ones, a reminder of life, yet a powerful proof of the dream state of the Soul; its reminder, a blessing, a temporary dispelling of Mara’s magick, a refutation of Iblees’s lie. We are instructed to reflect on those who have passed away long before us. Keep going, expanding this awareness, this reality.

“Hidden from all,

I will speak to you without words,

No one but you will hear my story,

even if I tell it in the middle of the crowd”

– Rumi

Our lives here in this world are meant to cultivate the provisions for that long journey. Like in a dream, our life events are physical manifestations of metaphysical events, traumas that we need to overcome in order to continue that journey Home. In each event there is an underlying wisdom. The pain provides a direction for the Mind to be focused on, and as we enter the pain we clear it away thereby revealing the treasure that is God. We do this by orienting the Mind towards God, but what is really happening is that on a higher level of Being, our Soul is reorienting itself towards God and navigating the Void. That is the ultimate manifestation of wisdom. The geography of the Heart is a reflection of the geography of the world beyond this, as ibn Qayyim said, if you wish to know the state of your Soul in the next world then look to the state of your Heart while alive in this world. As we cultivate the path to our Hearts we are cultivating our path through to God. This clears our vision in this world – we see the Divine in all moments, in all acts, as the Source of all reality, as the dependent cause of all effects. In this perception, the belief that others have power over us vanishes. Our Heart expands, the anxiety is lifted as we sever our self-identification with illusions, and those illusions simply vanish from within our Hearts since that is the nature of illusions. They are self-contradictory.

Awareness of that pain within you has to do with a higher spiritual awareness, but it can seem overwhelming when we lack the spiritual tools needed to process it, to re-frame it, to use it, and to ultimately transcend it. That is the crisis of the modern world and why consumerism encroaches upon our lives so deeply. In the absence of those spiritual tools and techniques we are desperate even simply to cope. The premise of consumerism is a materialist epistemology, that everything – from pain and pleasure to meaning and value and purpose – is reduceable to the physical, and therefore, not a part of us. It leaves us feeling sick, neurotically chasing after the consumption of things in order to pacify our egos. A normalized addiction, we thus become commodities, predictable, usable, disposable.

Our perception of ourselves defines the state of our Being. This is because perception is merely the awareness of conceptualization; we become intimately aware of how we have conceptualized ourselves. The state of Emptiness, of Nothingness, is simply about the non-perception of the self, of non-Being. “I cannot be defined, I cannot be quantified, and therefore, I am nobody’s slave. I am free.” It is to perceive experientially that the reality of this world is at a lower level than the reality of our Hearts, which we conceptualize as the doorway into the Divine Reality. When you have glimpses of that state you will learn that all of these negative emotions have been added and compounded onto you by the later perceptions – the delusions – that you have acquired in this world. But were they to vanish, your Essence would still be, and so they are extraneous, illusory. You have to learn that they are illusions, and the more that this is learned then the more easily and readily they are dispelled. We made perceptions about ourselves that are so subtle that we don’t even notice them consciously, which is largely because we have self-identified with them, and yet they guide our lives so powerfully and so accordingly predictable. There is a pattern, and the only way to break that pattern is by addressing the underlying cause upon which that pattern is predicated. The negative voices of that internal critic is added onto us, typically through childhood conditioning but also through our continual cultivation of that negative energy. We cultivate that negative energy by dwelling within it, distracting ourselves from confronting it, and by letting it fester and becoming toxic.

But by removing those perceptions of ourselves, what the practice of non-attachment is ultimately about, we can change our emotional well-being for the better, to something more authentic and in line with our spiritual nature. You are allowed to believe that you can be happy, successful, content, valuable. But this requires us to learn how to sever our self-identification with that negative energy, then with that negative sensation and its associated emotions, then with those negative expectations and outcomes, and then with the conscious thoughts, beliefs, and self-imposed judgements that we’ve made about ourselves and others. And as we do this we can attain higher and more truthful perceptions about ourselves, and this pertains to the Divine Origin of our existence and having an inherent sense of value and self-worth.

In our pain is the secret to transcending the material world and awakening our spiritual capacity for True Perception. In the coming few posts I will attempt at providing a description of key concepts to be focused on during meditation, and also how to meditate upon one’s own Heart in order to dispel the darkness.