Life Challenges

Creative Ways to Transform Challenges:
Deepening Your Spiritual Connection

Finding the Bliss of Unity: Transcending Pain and Separation Swami Ty

What causes pain? Why are so many people in so much pain in these days? The answer is very simple. It is identification with the separate self. There's really only one self, but most of us have a second self that we identify with that is the false self. The original self, the god self is the immensity, that one being that we are all a part of. And then the separated self is our own sense of "I am," our own sense of ego self.

We spend a millennium building this if you believe in reincarnation. But this is the source of all of our pain. It's a source of great joy as well, but the greater joy is when we begin to identify with the god self or the higher self. When we identify with the physical body, we have physical pain. We have hunger, we discover that the primary use of our toes is finding furniture in dark rooms. And we damage the body by habitual actions that are not for the best interest of the total being.

Many philosophers have come up with the idea that the end of man is happiness, and that is quite true. But how do we find happiness? Happiness is considered by many to be the absence of pain, the presence of joy. Joy is always available, it's a matter of perception. When you stub your toe in the dark, feel joy that you can have that sensation, after you're through jumping around and cussing the furniture, I suppose.

After physical pain is emotional pain. When the object of our desire doesn't reciprocate the way we think they would, we have emotional pain. It can be a lover, a friend, or just a person on the street that doesn't seem to honor us in the way that we want to be honored, or the way that the small self wants to be honored. That can give us pain. We can react with anger. We can react with withdrawal or any number of things, but it's all because of the pain of separation.

Going up a notch, there's mental pain. Things are not working out like we want them to. We hang on to the illusions of the world. Spiritual pain is getting deeper into who we really are, but the pain is even worse, and that pain is even harder to hang on to long enough to get over it, get through it, find a way around it, balance out the energy so that the pain goes away.

Love

The way around pain, I feel, is love, forgiveness, gratitude and compassion. Love is the hardest thing to define. There have been all kinds of definitions. In English, we have too many things layered on to the word love. It can mean sex. It can mean I really enjoy a good book. It can mean spinach soufflÈs, or something I really enjoy eating. It can mean I think I've found my soul mate. It can mean this really sexy person I saw on the subway attracts me a lot. But I feel the real meaning of love is the recognition of the god self in another. The god self is the basis of all. The whole material world is made out of god's material. The emotional world is made out of god's emotions. The mental world is made out of god's thoughts. The spiritual world is made out of god.

I don't usually use the word god, but it's something that everyone understands. When you say the high self or the true self, people can't have the emotional connection to that that they do the word god. But it's the same thing. The more we identify with the high self, the less we identify with the separated self. The more joy we have, the less pain we have. As we work to love everything that comes along, every being, every sentient being, every tree, every flower, every rock, every star, every planet, we feel that incredible expansion in the heart chakra that we identify as love. So you can look at a plant that needs water and feel that incredible love and go get it some water. You can look at a person that needs comforting and attempt to comfort them. You can feel a person that needs scolding and that same love comes up and you can just scold the hell out of them. Feeling this intense love for them, takes practice.

Most people don't have that to begin with. Although they did have it to begin with when they were first born. They saw the first faces around them-the mother's face, the doctors and nurses, the midwives, or the rest of the community, depending where you were born. The infant doesn't recognize self and other. Most infants are not fully god-realized, but they don't differentiate. They've been swimming around in this environment where self extended beyond their body. Now they have a body to deal with and they begin to learn to be separate. But when they are first born, there is no separation. These funny faces and warm, cuddly bodies that they encounter are an extension of their own self. It's only when they have pain, even the pain of being birthed, gives them a sense of separate self. As these pains develop, the sense of separation develops. But if we can get back to that incredible feeling of oneness, that's the feeling of pure love.

Forgiveness

The next word that I'm using these days is forgiveness. Forgive all those that caused pain. Some of them meant to. Some of them didn't mean to. Most of them would be horrified if they felt that they meant to give us pain, because everyone feels deep down that sense of unity. We all know when you give pain, or pleasure to someone else, you're really giving it to yourself. But the ones that give us pain give us that sense of separation. So it's so important to forgive all of that. Forgive your family for the pain that you experienced growing up. Forgive your school teachers when they tried to teach you in a way that wasn't compatible with the way you were being at the time. And forgive your lovers and friends for not being exactly who you thought you needed at the time.

Real, true forgiveness is an opening and a turning-a turning loose. It takes a little training to feel magnificent expansion when you forgive someone. It has to be true forgiveness. It can't be saying, "I forgive you," in order to make them feel bad. Lot's of people do that. Or saying "I forgive you" in order to feed your ego and show how magnanimous the separated ego can be.

Gratitude

How grateful we must be for all of the pain and suffering, and for the joy and the happiness, as well. This gratitude is another thing that gives you that incredible expansion in the heart. When you're able to give total gratitude for every experience, for the suffering as well as the joy, then that gives you that incredible heart rush.

Compassion

The next one, compassion, that's another quiet one, sort of like forgiveness. A compassion is realizing that everyone is on the path, everyone is going to be there. Everyone is truly god. The high self, the unseparated self, is the same in every living being. And the non-living ones too, the ones we feel, like the rock people. We seem to think that they are not conscious, but they are. Their consciousness is much slower than ours, but they are very god, of god, exactly as we are, as the angels are. If it weren't for the rock people, we wouldn't have any place to stand. Our planet would be a blob of liquid or gas out in the middle of nowhere or even less than that. Without the gravity of the rock people, we couldn't stand. We couldn't exist in these physical bodies and have this amazing experience of being the physical body. And we couldn't have the experience of going out this far and then going back to the oneness, the absolute unity of the high self.

So those four words give you two expansions: the expansion of love and that amazing heart energy when you love something truly, and then the calmness of forgiving all of the non-loving things that you've experienced. And forgiving yourself for being non-loving as well.

And then you have the expansion again of gratitude. Gratitude for all of the horrible things that have happened so that you can learn and get out of this feeling of separateness. The more we feel separated, the more we want to feel unity. If we only felt a little separated, there wouldn't be that great push to get back to the unity, to understand that all is one. This pulse, this expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction, it's the beat of our heart. The heart's beating is caused by a tiny, little experience of god-realization. And then ecstasy in being, in being the separated self, in experiencing the physical plane. This physical plane, although it gives us all of our pain and our separation, is a great opportunity to learn, to enjoy, to experience.

Spiritual enfoldment

The wise ones have pondered the problem of existence for millennia, and they always come up with something similar. The deity, the god self, that which you really are, was pure and perfect, but innocent and it wanted experience. In order to have experience, it began to pretend to be separate, so it could look back and know itself. And these separate, in mysticism, the separate beings are called ego, the monadic ego. The monad, or the absolute unity, produces these egos. And the ego can look back then and wonder at the magnificence of the monad, the absolute unity, but it can also look outward and wonder at the glory of the other egos, and of the universe that is beginning to develop and come into existence as they become aware of it.

Our scientists these days are discovering that awareness affects whatever happens. The scientists have gotten to the point inside the atom where they are experiencing the beginnings, actually, or creation, where simply observing changes what is happening.

The monadic egos observing the possibilities caused creation to occur under the divine will. But they had perfect free will, so they didn't have to go along with everything that the divine will indicated. They found great joy at first in failing to go along, in doing something different and surprising the god self. And the god self took great delight in being surprised, because that had never happened before creation. So as we flowed out from there we became more and more dense and we used our free will more to come down clear in physical manifestation, which is about as far away as you can get from the monadic ego. But as soon as we lost sight of that basic unity, and began to think that the creation was the reality, that's when pain started. And it's getting away from this pain, balancing out the pain, so that we can return. That is the path of spiritual enfoldment.

We get into all sorts of things: karma, cycles-but basically, the thing we wish to do is alleviate all of the pain, feel a little bit of the ecstasy, and then return to the monad. The monad, the high self god, doesn't experience pain or ecstasy as a general thing. It only does that through us, through the separated egos that have come and turned themselves into egos with their free will.

Most people on this planet at this time are not experiencing free will, they are only experiencing reaction to what's gone before. But as soon as you start to meditate deeply, to feel love for other beings, for the rock people, the spirits of water, air, earth, fire, or the spirits of plants and animals and other people, for the angels, as soon as that love bursts forth, we feel a tiny bit of love, a tiny bit of ecstasy, a tiny bit of freedom and we have a tiny bit of free will that we can experience, that we can exercise in order to return to that oneness. And then of course reaction takes over, we go into ecstasy and pain again and create more karma, but as soon as we open up to love and forgiveness again, we begin to erase those karmas, to balance them out, and to find in compassion the free will to turn loose a little more of the external world, balance a little more of the pain and ecstasy, and come a little closer to the divine unity.

This can happen on the heartbeat. It can happen on the breath. The whole path of yoga is based on the heartbeat, on the breath-turning loose of the karma, of the external, getting back into the balance of pain and ecstasy and returning to the one. My wish for you is that you find love, forgiveness, gratitude and compassion. To that end, on the other side of the tape, we have a meditation. There'll be some talking at the beginning, perhaps the sound of bell, the conch shell, very little reminders as we go along. You can use the tape for going into meditation, for deepening your meditation, or for going of to sleep at night. Whenever you use the meditation part of the tape, you're invited to join me on the inner planes in my search for unity. Join the great souls that have achieved unity. And join the unity and ever deepening spiral of love and compassion.

Excerpted from the meditation tape: Finding the Bliss of Unity: Transcending Pain and Separation. ©Swami Ty 1999. All rights reserved. Transcript reprinted by permission of Swami Ty. For more information, or to find out about Swami Ty's meditation tape, go to: www.jothimarga.org. or write to Swami Ty, Box 99, Cedarville, CA 96104.

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