Religion is about embracing life. It is saying ´yes´ to
both our inner and our outer life. By being religious we affirm life to
the fullest and in doing so our life reaches its final peak. When we
affirm life, go down on our knees and say in gratitude, with the tears
of ecstasy in our eyes, ´yes´, then the final purpose of
our life has been reached. For it is the meaning of all life to affirm
itself, because by affirming, it proves itself healthy and strong. For
every healthy and strong living being will finally say unto itself: `I
like being alive. I´m proud to be alive!´.
So the ultimate state of being is religious. For in true religion, the
aforesaid happens with the greatest intensity. When you have ever met a
truly religious person, you will recognize this to be true. For here we
meet a human being so full of love, so radiant with life, so all
embracing, so full of laughter and joyous, that life itself seems
to disclose itself in front of our eyes. Life here has become so
transparent, so very clear in its purpose and meaning, that instantly
we get the message: ´to become like this person, what a wonderful
thing indeed...!´
Like true art, true religion always restores psychological balance. Our
psychological make up, in a life of pursuing selfish needs and aims,
often has become distorted and disharmonious. The balance is gone. The
smooth rhythm of life has vanished. We no more walk in pace with our
natural life. We are totally estranged from it by separating our self
from it. We have become distant, cynical. We confront life and fight
it. And then we say that life has become harsh and bitter. But we
ourselves are to blame. When we no longer flow with the course of life,
then life slowly dies out, like a candle in a room with not enough
oxygen.
Now, true religion restores our contact with life again. We have the
feeling that we are born again, that we have gone through a second
birth. The birth this time is more intense. For it is not a birth
´of the flesh´, but a birth of the soul. It is our soul
making contact with its final ground of being. Now a new, a wider and
higher consciousness is born in us. So it is not becoming like a pure
child again, as it is sometimes said in spiritual literature, but it is
rather the opposite: it is finally becoming mature and ripe, a casting
away of the unawareness of the child. It is a final becoming of age.
The act of embracing life must be studied from two different and
opposite angles. For it is both an active as well as a passive act.
This means that we have to see it both as an intent and as a result.
In the mystical experience that leads to our religious conversion the
essentials of life are finally revealed to us. With deep surges of
emotionality, with the high flights of ecstasy, but also with the cool
and icy pace of rationality, we come to see life as it is: essentially
good. We may have been in a deep crisis, we may have suffered a great
deal, we may loath our self and deem ourselves great sinners, so to
speak, and in our hearts there may live a deep discontent about all
that life has presented us until this moment, but in the final mystical
experience life will be revealed to us as perfect.
In the mystical experience all duality is finally surpassed. With
penetrating eyes and a jubilant heart we look life in the face and come
to see that this mixture of both good and evil, of both beauty and
ugliness, of both love and hate is perfect, just as it is. This is the
final revelation, the final intuition that flashes through
consciousness with the speed of a beam of light. After this mystical
experience life will never be the same.
For this mystical transcendence of all duality leads to a total
acceptance of life, in both its positive aspects and in its more
negative traits. We do not fight and resist our suffering anymore. We
begin to see it as a preparation for the acceptance of a higher life,
as a signal pointing us the way to the here and now, as well as to the
beyond. Suffering has deepened our interior life. It has made us more
aware. It has contributed to seeing and feeling more. It has made our
hearts beautiful, that now we have become sensitive to beautiful things
and to the love of life.
In the mystical experience it becomes clear that we cannot do without
the negative pole of life, without suffering, evil, ugliness. Good,
beauty, love and truth only become significant, only have meaning when
they are juxtaposed against opposite qualities. If there was no evil,
we would never know about the good. If there was no ugliness or
unseemliness, we would never know, be it in art or in real life, about
the appropriate thing to do. In the relative world everything derives
its meaning and value from what is opposite to it. Seeing, knowing and
deeply feeling this very mystical transcendence of all dualities makes
us embrace life as it is, as perfect in its mixture of the relatively
perfect and the relatively imperfect.
There have been so called religious people who have tried to
´mortify the flesh´. Especially in the Middle Ages it was
custom among the religious to torture the body with iron clad whips,
sleep with nails girded around the waist, lie on sharp pinned wooden
crosses, or otherwise castigate and defeat the so called baser drives
of the human body. Especially the sexual drive was the great enemy to
be defeated. But also the other bodily emotions had to be subdued, like
anger, grief, indignation, rebellion etc. All out of love for God.
But God is nothing but another name for the totality of life as it is.
Now please stop, close your eyes and look! Sexuality is a part of life,
isn´t it? Anger is. Grief is. All the emotions are a part of
life. So sometimes God is a sexual God, an angry God, a grief stricken
and forlorn God. We have to accept this. We have to embrace this.
Because this is the way life is. Remember, we do not need to fight with
life as it is. We need to go with it, not against it.
To enlighten our hearts and souls we need not mortify our body and
despise the material. The thing to do is to lift all things material up
to a higher existence. We can in fact spiritualize all existence. In
the higher mystical transcendence the material and the body is not infused with higher spiritual
energies. No, it is seen by then as
already infused with these higher energies. But because we were
until that moment vast asleep and under ´the cloud of
unknowing´, we were not able to see that godliness was always
already the deeper quality of all things in the universe.
By embracing life, by accepting it as it is, this godliness, that is
already manifest at the material plain of life, will gradually be
revealed. The religious person does not turn her back against life, but
dives deep into it, in order to be cleansed by it through knowledge.
Let´s take our sexuality for instance. If we´ll deny it and
push it aside in ascetic contempt, then we will never know that
sexuality can be helpful in arousing our kundalini and promote our
spiritual insights. But sexual abstinence will not give us the
knowledge either, that the joys of a sexual life are rather limited and
shallow, compared by the rapturous delights of the spiritual life. We
have to experience these facts of life first. This can only be done by
living it. Sexuality can only be transcended when it has been compared
to other feelings and experiences and when it has been lived out to the
full.
But what about the real evil, such as the atrocities of war or the
horrendous acts of murder and violence? Do we need to embrace them too?
Is it not both natural and spiritual to be abhorred by these? Is being
spiritual not the same as being non-violent and peace loving?
Yes, certainly, violence and cruelty are acts of evil, but not
absolutely so. Maybe there are circumstances feasible wherein violence
is the right thing to do. For in this relative world all things are
relative, which means that they depend for their value and meaning on a
wider context. The meaning of something can be different according to
different circumstances. What sometimes is the right thing to do, can
in another context be the wrong thing to do. I think this holds true
for all morality, from abortion to euthanasia. It´s better not to
have any a priori´s as
morality is concerned. Ever situation should be judged according to its
own intrinsics.
We mystics have a different way of looking at how each situation should
be acted out. We close our eyes and anticipate the consequence of any
given undertaking. We look at how our body responds to the premeditated
action. We try to picture all the ins and outs of a given action and
then we look at the body. Does the body become tensed, closed,
restless? Or do we open up in a feeling of love, joy and harmony? If
the action that we are about to take makes us anxious and stressed,
then we refrain from it. But if it deepens out in a wider embrace of
love and quiet compassion, then the sign has been given: this is the
right way to act.
So love is better than hate, not absolutely so, but because love
relaxes the body and creates a feeling of harmony with the surrounding
world. Conversely hate closes the person in on itself and makes the
body tensed and uptight. It walls the person down. Instantaneously the
body senses the apprehension. But in love, compassion and forgiveness
the body opens up and relaxes. This we know by mystical experience. For
the mystical element in this whole process is the fact that the body
already knows a priori what
is the right thing to do. But we can only give the right interpretation
to these bodily signals if our mind is completely empty and does not
stand in the way. If our mind is filled with all sorts of a priori judgments, then we will
not know what is the right thing to do in a situation. Our thinking
will cloud our sound judgment, paradoxically as it may seem.
So embracing life is embracing the deeper wisdom of our body. To know
how to embrace life for the benefit of the whole universe, we have to
sink into the life of the body, with our eyes closed. For life itself
already knows. We only have to remember it. It will show us everything
we want to know. All it needs is trust in life itself.
Embracing life is not excluding anything
Most people live by exclusion. The so called ´worldly
person´ pins down her life by sticking to one job, one sexual
partner, one home, one ambition etc., at the exclusion of others. In
the end this attitude will cause psychological suffocation and will
create deep feelings of unhappiness. Living like that will take away
our most cherished possession: our sense of freedom. Why so? To answer
this question we have to look into what freedom actually is. What do we
mean when we say ´I am free´?
Freedom is the possibility for spaciousness. It is having a wide inner
horizon, that leaves all possibilities open. Anything may occur in
freedom, both the positive and the negative. What will occur, though,
is always new and fresh. It will have a springtime quality surrounding
it. It will be surprising and therefore exhilarating. In freedom you
never know what is going to happen. For the daring person this is what
makes freedom so attractive: that life is always new when you are free.
But for the bourgeois living
in freedom is very scary. The uncertainty of it must be eliminated. You
need to know how your life will look like the next day. Otherwise
you´ll go nuts, they think. So they speak of freedom in bondage,
not a mystical paradox, it seems. Because every bondage is an
impediment for being free.
So from the day they are born they start to exclude. Their fear of life
impels them to exclude life. New possibilities, new loves, new sources
of happiness, new ways to learn about life and the self, they are all
excluded out of fear for the unknown. But all growth, all happiness and
fulfillment can only come from the unknown. Where can it else come
from? Learning is always learning something new. Growing is always
growing to a new stage in life. All progress is always made into
unknown territories.
But life cannot be excluded. For you are not living life, but life is
living you. The totality of life is always closing in upon you, however
hard you may try to keep things out. So even if you are married, new
loves will present themselves at your well guarded threshold. Even if
you pin your life down to the fulfillment of only one ambition will
life present you numerous tasks to accomplish. Life always comes
unexpected. It can give you no certainties and no assurance. The only
sure thing to know is that the unexpected may happen any moment.
So the wise person sits down, closes her eyes and just embraces.
Sometimes with a more passive attitude (´what else can I
do?´), sometimes with an active attitude (´I am glad that
it happens to me´). But always with the total acceptance, that
whatever life gives is good.
final purpose of
our life has been reached. For it is the meaning of all life to affirm
itself, because by affirming, it proves itself healthy and strong. For
every healthy and strong living being will finally say unto itself: `I
like being alive. I´m proud to be alive!´.
the final intuition that flashes through
consciousness with the speed of a beam of light. After this mystical
experience life will never be the same. 
open. Anything may occur in
freedom, both the positive and the negative. What will occur, though,
is always new and fresh. It will have a springtime quality surrounding
it. It will be surprising and therefore exhilarating. In freedom you
never know what is going to happen. For the daring person this is what
makes freedom so attractive: that life is always new when you are free.
But for the bourgeois living
in freedom is very scary. The uncertainty of it must be eliminated. You
need to know how your life will look like the next day. Otherwise
you´ll go nuts, they think. So they speak of freedom in bondage,
not a mystical paradox, it seems. Because every bondage is an
impediment for being free.
