I was hit with a $6,666 income-tax bill a few days back, (1) on top of a $1,350 medical bill a few days before that.
Those are on top of $46,000 of bank debt, most of it incurred for living expenses while waiting for the Reval, which was “just around the corner.”
My various pensions don’t cover the rent. And I still have responsibilities. I feel stretched in between.
When I think of getting a job, I remember that I’m 72, in an employer’s eyes (28 in mine).
Therefore, you can imagine that I was a little glum tonight. My friend that I was with is in about the same place. However, he wasn’t glum, thank heavens.
He reminded me that I wasn’t staying in the moment and he was right. But I still came home at least a little down.
And then I read an email from a reader and her situation was worse than mine. She asked me what she should do.
Well, it isn’t part of my mission to advise anyone. I share my own experience only. I may suggest or recommend a path for us as a collective, but I don’t “advise” individuals.
But in this case, something snapped in me, perhaps a delayed reaction to both situations – with my friend in the car and the reader. My pen started flying.
Then I realized that what I wanted to say to her was something I wanted to say to everybody, me included. It’s going to sound airy-fairy and out-of-touch with reality, but in fact – in reality – it’s exactly the opposite.
The ultimate answer to all our situations is to be found by looking, diving, or imaginatively journeying into our own hearts. (2) Call this the way things are designed, it just is the way things are that all that we really seek – really seek – is to be found in our very own hearts.
The love that we find there isn’t normally perceptible because the door of the heart (the hridayam in Sanskrit) is usually closed. (3) It’s love of a kind that I think very few people know right now.
If we, with our imagination, can reach that higher form of love and have it blossom through our recognition of it, (4) our spiritual/emotional troubles will be over. I cannot say our debt will. I have no idea. But our suffering will. (5)
That having been said, I must add that our suffering will be over only for as long as we’re in the experience of this form of love. Freedom from suffering will only be permanent after Ascension/Sahaja Samadhi.
Only the experience of Sahaja is powerful enough to burn the seeds of our issues/vasanas, the seeds of future karma or action. Sahaja is itself the experience that sages call mukti, moksha, or liberation.
Nevertheless, for me, being in the experience of transformative love is the answer. It may sound impossible to do (it isn’t), but that doesn’t change the fact that, as far as I’m concerned, it remains the answer.
Moreover, a planetary heart opening (again temporary, before Ascension) is gradually occurring for all of us open to the Light. So we’ll all experience this condition at some point in time.
(Concluded in Part 2, tomorrow.)
Footnotes
(1) I hadn’t done my taxes in several years waiting for the (you guessed it) Reval.
(2) This is the only piece of advice I have to offer anyone.
(3) A “heart opening” has little to do with the condition we call “being open-hearted.” They are apples and oranges.
(4) When we recognize transformative love or bliss or peace, it sets off a chain reaction that sees the divine state expand in us and ends with it swallowing us up.
(5) A person negotiating from this love would mean none harm, say none harm, and do none harm. Details could be worked out.