The State of Freedom
A journey of Truth into the mind’s sanctuary
with the destination of inner Freedom.
C4. The mind experiences the feeling of sufficiency and contentment of a Saint.
How is the mind going to train himself in the hard for his standards virtues of compassion, care, discrimination, selfless-ness, vigilance and humility, in order to enable himself to taste the ultimate joy of comradeship? He knows well that he is far from having these positive attributes attained on a permanent basis.
Specifically, he is aware of his indifference about the sufferings his brothers go through. Moreover, he remembers the superficial and often utilitarian[1] way in which he encounters them, without ever putting himself out to discern the deeper anxieties hidden under their masks. Hence, compassion, care and discerning ability do not exist, and, obviously, nor acute vigilance for immediate response to his brothers’ needs.
Besides, he does not forget his tendency to narcistically ad-mire himself for his worldly achievements; thus, it is for sure that on such occasions he feels superior to those of his brothers who have not attained achievements of the same importance in the past. As a result, there is no humility in the way he thinks. There is also no selflessness, since one of his motives for whatever he carries out is to constantly prove that he is more worthy than the others, for the purpose of dispelling for a while the self-pity which has been caused to him due to the hitherto defeats and failures.
Now he contemplates that, if he finds a way to incessantly remind himself that in fact deficiency is inexistent and that he has got within himself accessible and available the sufficiency of the whole universe, then all these shackles which now deprive him from the joy of comradeship will vanish, each of them for a different reason. Namely, when somebody experiences the feeling of complete sufficiency:
– Has compassion and care: He does not remain indifferent for his brothers, but he sympathizes with and cares for them, because his personal problems no longer trouble his mind and hence he is up to be concerned for their good.
– Has selflessness: He does not attempt to use and exploit anybody for his own benefit, because the feeling of absolute sufficiency does not leave any void unfilled in him, and thus there is no more reason for him to use and exploit his brothers with selfishness.
– Has discern and vigilance: He cannot see the other person’s problem superficially, since the sufficiency he experiences has removed from his mind all worries about worldly matters and has left all his time free to take immediate action, activate his discrimination, listen to his brothers’ worries in a multilateral way and find what exactly torments them and what they really need to hear or receive from him in some other way.
– Has humility: He has no need to feel superior to anybody, because he feels competent and self-contained and thus is capable of being humble, both as to the way he thinks and as to his conduct.
The mind now remembers how positively he has been influenced whenever he has read about the life, social work and teachings of great Saints and luminous Masters. This must certainly be a good way for him to start experiencing the feeling of sufficiency and fullness, which, as the mind just realized, is a requisite in order for him to experience the individual elements which compose the state of comradeship.
It is certainly true that reading conveys him to a positive state of mind, but, as he has realized, this is not enough, because reading by itself is not adequate to make a deep and essential surgical operation at the primeval functional structures of the brain’s cells so as to cause them permanent and indelible changes which will be able to resist all kinds of worldly influences.
Thus, the mind understands, that, in order to experience the feeling of sufficiency, which a Saint experiences, he will need to mentally enter His body, abandon his little ego for a while and identify himself with the sublime way in which the Saint exists and lives within the world. In this way, he will be able to sense the crystalline clarity of the cells of the Saint’s body in his own body, feel His sentiment of Love and espouse His positive thoughts about Himself and the world.
Hence, he mentally brings a favorite Saint of mine adjacent to me[2]. The Saint sits at my right side, his hands lying softly on his thighs. The mind watches him carefully with interest, be-cause he wants so much to learn how exactly a Saint lives within the world, as well as within his own body.
The Saint’s eyes are half closed and His face is radiant; He exhales deep serenity and welfare. His lips smile vaguely with an expression which denotes the coexistence of the inner bliss He unfailingly experiences and His compassion for the distress and suffering of His worldly brothers. The mind gets the impression that this Saint, although sitting motionless with His back erect, bends eternally with affectionate attention over the unrestrained anguish of all sentient beings for joyfulness.
My body is seated in the same posture as the Saint’s body, at His left side. Now the mind tilts my head a little to the side of the Saint. He is watching my body as it leaves its sitting position and penetrates – like a flowing immaterial kind of energy – into the Saint’s body; originally the head, then the neck, the torso and the arms and, finally, the pelvis and the legs. Now the mind has been physically identified himself with the Saint and is already sensing within his body the profound inner silence that He relishes.
Mesmerized by the Silence of the Saint, the mind pauses all his associations awhile, in order to enjoy it. The absolute motionlessness is for him an unprecedented joy, since he has learned throughout his life to incessantly move towards all worldly directions, either with his hyperactive body or with his relentless and ever-moving thoughts. Only a few seconds have passed since he penetrated into the Saint and they seem to him as if they were some hours. He figures out that the Saint lives in His Silence intertemporally and yet does not get bored. Silence is His nature. He lives in complete harmony with His nature. Also my mind’s nature is Silence, but he has been trained since he was an infant to live estranged from his true nature.
Now that he has got acquainted with his true nature thanks to his mental identification with the body and the mind of the Saint, he rejoices for it, yet it also puzzles him, as he does not know if he can bear so much Silence. Certainly he does not bear it for long, he says, but this does not matter; what is important is that now he knows where to find it now and then, whenever he feels the need to rest for a while, and perhaps he will sometime decide to reside there permanently, in his own inner Silence, like some beloved pensioner brothers do in an external level, who, as soon as they take retirement, leave their city and become permanent inhabitants of their summer house, where they take care of their garden in the silence which they had missed so much during the previous decades.
While he continues being in a state of total surrender to the Silence of the Saint, the mind observes and admires the inner order and clarity of His brain cells as well as their distinct and peace-inducing vibrations. His cells are totally vivacious yet withal completely calm. Heretofore, the mind had identified vivacity with tension, but he now sees that the exactly opposite applies; total vivacity can only exist in the presence of absolute calmness, whilst, contrarily, the constant excess tension causes fatigue and untimely ageing.
The heart of the Saint palpitates rhythmically while teeming with calm power. Every pulsation of His heart is an emission of Love. Each heartbeat is a prayer for all His worldly brothers to be happy. He does not cease to emanate and spread this blessing to the world, not even for a single moment, not even while he sleeps.
Because in reality the Saint never sleeps, as my mind now understands. He merely closes His eyes and is conveyed to a different level of consciousness, in order to have His nervous system revitalized, yet without becoming adrift under the control of the unconsciousness and without seeing inadvertent and uncontrolled dreams like the ones my mind sees. From that high level of consciousness the Saint continues to overflow with Divine Joy and Love and spread it to all his suffering brothers, who have not yet realized that they are wrongfully so much sunken in their worldly anxieties.
The mind, who remains still physically and emotionally totally identified with the Saint and His attributes and continues to experience His experiences within himself in all their greatness, has become ecstatic and amazed by the twenty-four-hours devotion of the Saint to the service of His brothers. “Well, and how does He find time to serve His personal needs?” This understandable question is born in my mind. “But what do I say! The Saint has no personal needs. Even if He has some, they do not concern Him”. “And what about the recognition of his worthiness? Does He not care about it?” “Obviously not. Nor does He care whether He is going to hear a ‘thank you’ for His offer or if He is going to receive congratulations or admiration from anybody”.
“If so, how does He rejoice? What is that which makes Him be so joyful?” “It is His heart, which palpitates in the rhythm of Love and incessant prayer for the joyfulness of all His brothers. His whole heart is Love itself; it is a sphere made from Love and condensed in material substance, which constantly warms and illuminates His chest. It is thanks to His heart that He has the total feeling of sufficiency, fullness and abundance which characterizes Him”.
The mind pauses his contemplation for a while and deepens into this unprecedented, for him, reality, in order to enable the cells of my body to digest and assimilate it, to they extent they are able to.
“Besides, I can see this man, how He brims with energy and Love! But what am I saying! The word ‘man’ downgrades Him. He is not a human, at least not with the common meaning we have learned to attribute to this word. He is a Saint, who merely happens to have and use – not even own – a human body. If we see Him from all other viewpoints, there is nothing in the way He thinks and feels about the world that could remind us of the familiar habits and worries of humans, since He is capable of being always happy without having any property at all, not even a woman to caress His hair now and then. What could He ever need the woman for? Thanks to harboring all warmth and sweetness of the world within Himself, He certainly does not miss the warm and sweet female hug. Internally he is both male and female at the same time, regardless if He happens to have a male body. This is what sufficiency and self-containment means. The woman and anything else worldly are for Him useful only in order to channel them the vibration, pulse and Love which overflow from His heart and from all His body cells and not in order to cover any selfish need of His, since He does not have such[3]”.
Having become one with the body, mind and heart of the Saint, the mind has momentarily believed His attributes as his own. Currently he experiences himself the absolute sufficiency, Silence and Love overflow from within his heart, as well as the peaceful dedication to the sacred work of the service of his brothers.
He can now feel the bliss generated by the Love overflow from within his existence. He senses his heart while pulsating intensely and rhythmically and his blood as it flows like a river of purging fire in his arteries and veins. His fingers have so much energy that he feels as if they were emitting sparks.
In his throat he senses the bittersweet taste of compassion; he feels as if the wanton and irrational suffering of all humanity were passing through his cells, to be there filtered, simmered down and healed. The centers of his brain, all sparkling, in constant and unhindered connection with the Divine, cause in him an inebriation which is not human, causing no oblivion and daze like the one caused by alcohol, but a divine one, full of vigilance, compassion, mental clarity, discrimination and devotion to his aching brothers, which have been unjustly lost within the agonizing delusion of their mind.
All these simultaneous experiences of his compose the abundant feeling of fullness about which the mind had heard his Master talking since a long time ago. At last, he starts now to understand the reason why the enlightened masters of all eras radiate from bliss. Of course, he is not yet up to taste but a very small portion of their bliss, since these experiences are totally new to him and have not yet subsided in him so as to become an undetachable and inextricable part of his everyday life and thus provide him with plenty of time to get to know them unhurriedly in their whole depth and breadth.
Anyway, what is at least certain is that today, with the help of his exercise, the mind created a very powerful model within his structure. He knows that he is not yet able to maintain his identification with the energy field of the Saint for long, because he is aware of his proneness to thoughts dealing with worldly personal issues. Moreover, he cannot bear this mental state for long; it overcharges him, his body starts reacting after a while and can no longer remain still. Nevertheless, he promises himself that he will be regularly returning to the body of his Saint, until his nature becomes absolutely harmonized with His nature, because he now knows that this and only this is what he wants to achieve in his life. All other desires and aspirations of his, with no exception, although legal and innocent, are nothing but poor takeoffs of this one great aspiration, deformed and perverted due to the mind’s unwitting identification with his deluded ideas.
[1] Namely, one day, while he was eating a salad garnished with sunflower seeds, he observed how he separated out the seeds from the pits which had by accident fallen into the salad while he was juicing a lemon over it. “That’s it”, he thought, “exactly this is what I am used to doing also with people; I separate them out to seeds and pits, that is to say to useful and useless ones for my personal pursuits. I ‘eat’ the former and ‘throw away’ the latter. Although they are all fertile seeds in their deeper essence and by their nature capable of becoming trees with branches, leaves, flowers and fruits and offer their oxygen and relieving shadow of compassion to every soulmate, I nonetheless – instead of watering them with my understanding and love and helping them to sprout and develop – see only their transitory current façade and judge them according to how tough their shell is at this particular moment and to what extent their ego is edible and easily digestible for my own stomach, and I accept or reject them accordingly”.
[2] The mind spontaneously chooses my Holy Master, not because he considers him superior to other saints, but because he is more familiarized to him and so he can more easily feel in the same way he used to feel, since he has experienced him in his everyday life watching him how he watched, spoke to and adored people, how he believed in their concealed Entity and with what a devotion he was totally committed to the sacred work of Its emergence, with the sole motive of his compassion and hearty will to see them liberated and leading a fortunate and prosperous life.
[3] If I were a woman, I would have invited my identification with a female Saint or Virgin Mary and would have come exactly to the same the conclusion, to wit that men as well as any other worldly entity are for Her useful only in order to channel them the vibration, pulse and Love that overflow from within her and not for any other selfish purpose.