Doorways of Support and Inspiration:
Healing Your Mind/Body/Spirit

Befriending Suffering  Ken Wilber and Treya Killam Wilber
 
Ramana Maharshi used to say, "You thank God for the good things that happen to you, but don't thank Him for the bad things as well, and that is where you go wrong." (That, incidentally, is also exactly where the new age movement goes wrong.) The point being that God is not a mythic Parent punishing or rewarding egoic tendencies, but the impartial Reality and Suchness of all manifestation. As even Isaiah, in a rare moment, realized: "I make the light to fall on the good and the bad alike; I, the Lord, do all these things." As long as we are caught in the dualities of good versus bad, pleasure versus pain, health versus illness, life versus death, then we are locked out of that nondual and supreme identity with all of manifestation, with the entire universe of "one taste." Ramana maintained that only in befriending our suffering, our illness, our pain, could we truly find a larger and more encompassing identity with the All, with the Self, who is not the victim of life but its impartial Witness and Source. And especially, Ramana said, befriend death, the ultimate teacher. Ken Wilber
 
This makes me think of something I read in Ramana Maharshi's biography last night, a direct quote from one of his answers to a devotee: "God has no desire or purpose in His acts of creation, maintenance, destruction, withdrawal and salvation to which beings are subjected." That's a tough one for a life-long meaning and purpose junkie like myself, but Buddhism has been a big help in my letting go of trying to figure it all out, in my learning to let things just be .... Treya Killam Wilber
 
From Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber by Ken Wilber, Shambhala Publications, Inc., Boston, MA, 1991. P. 319

Copyright © 1999 Life Challenges