Baba’s Lessons Keep Teaching, Part Two….

Baba always spoke of not hurting a human heart. This was and is the crucial guide by which to assess our motivations and actions. True sādhana bruises the ego, but it never injures the heart. If you are hurting someone’s heart, you should question your actions and motives.

In the last few weeks I have come to see why Baba had me knock on those doors and walk in those rooms, feeling like the downer that most people took me to be. Of course, he was doing this to benefit everyone—me, and also the people who opened the doors I knocked on.

Baba created situations that allowed me to feel the vibration of being excluded and therefore hurt, and the vibration of not fitting in. He allowed for a series of cliques to form, so that everyone had a chance to face whatever they had going on internally. If someone was included in one place, they were usually excluded from somewhere else. The only place I wanted was with Baba. That was it. So I ended up working and playing with all sorts and never being “accepted” by anyone. Even when I did puja for Baba with others, the other women would say, “I don’t understand why he picked you”.

Baba wanted me to be free, to be free of that vibration that went all the way back to before I was born. Baba did not want me attached to any vibration, outfit, institution, or job. He loved me so much that he kept at it until one day I was able to walk away and free myself from that vibration of exclusion. Knowing what I had done, he called me to his room and gave me the Guru stone, saying, “Now you have the Real Guru”.

But I still had work to do, so much work to do. And Baba has been always with me, guiding me.

When he was in his body, people thought that Baba was more “real” in his house than outside, more “truthful” there than in public. They were imagining a no-boundary zone that didn’t exist. Baba allowed people to imagine all kinds of things, and that idea was meant to bring out a delusion people were supposed to see and then let go. But if we are not facing the truth of our vibrations, we are destined to repeat them until we finally have to confront them.

The truth is, I never wanted, nor could I be accepted, in a no-boundary zone. And now, with Baba’s help, I can honestly say I tried, but I know in my Heart that it was not good for me and it is not good for anyone. No-boundary zones only create secrets and injury.

The lesson I learned is for me to walk away from no-boundary zones. The day Baba gave me the Guru stone, I walked away from a person who excluded and hurt people while calling her activity “teaching them lessons”. This was not building community, and I saw that. A community is permeable, a clique is not.

I finally saw through the veil of words. Baba rewarded me and showed me the correct action for me. But we are to be tested in our lessons again and again. It then took so long to apply what Baba had taught me. I thought I could be okay in a hurtful environment. If I got strong enough, I thought, I would not get hurt. That was not what Baba was teaching me. That was not “my” lesson. That was my wrong understanding of practice. That was how I could remain within the confines of my shrunken self. I was instead to acknowledge being hurt and walk away. I tend to be too patient. Too much time passes before I walk away.

Consider how we go about healing a physical injury. Healing an injury does not mean pushing through the pain. There is a difference between pushing through the discomfort of necessary work and aggravating an injury by continuing to irritate it. We care for an injury by not continuing to inflame it. We remove the cause of the inflammation. We walk away. If we work to the best of our ability to change what we bring to the table and still the injury is there, then we walk away. The lesson is then to leave the environment. It may be that we can return because we heal and get stronger, but it may be that we really should not return, even in full health.

Baba wanted us to be healthy on all planes. He wanted us to be who we are, and have all our action be informed by who we are. He wanted us each to learn our lessons. One vital lesson is that walking away is not necessarily excluding anyone or anything; it is freeing ourselves from hurtful environments. For me, walking away meant walking away from the vibration that brought me to the hurtful environment, and toward Love.