As we practice, we disentangle more and more out of each of our perceived vehicles, and we keep heading back to the Perceiver. And each time we disentangle, we then are able to see in a greater way what’s actually going on. If we are involved, we have myopic vision. We’re caught in the problem, yet we’re so sure we see it the way it is.
The other day, I was talking with a student about Dante. And I was saying that the reason for writing in the vernacular, as did Jnaneshwar, was to show that when we are coming from that bottom line underneath it all, from the Self, and we allow that to inform everything we say, then writing in the vernacular reveals that the world is God. The world is perfect just the way it is.
At the same time, hell, purgatory, and heaven are all right here, right now. And which realm we inhabit depends on where our vision is, and where we reside within ourselves.
In Dante, hell feels like walking through the Natural History Museum going past dioramas. Each of the stories in hell is a diorama. And the damned are committed to their stories, never changing, locked in. So if Dante said, “Oh I missed that story! I want to hear it again”, and he ran back down to that circle of hell and to that little spot in the museum, he could press the button and hear the same story again. It never changes.
That’s us. That’s us in hell when we’re committed to our narrative, to our character. Nothing changes. We never accept our responsibility. We never accept what we’ve actually done. And we’re stuck. We’re in that diorama forever. We relate the same way; we’re sticking to our story. “It’s the truth. This is the way I see it”. How myopic is that? As a character in T. S. Eliot’s play The Cocktail Party says, “It isn’t hell until you become incapable of anything else”.
We cannot become capable of anything else until we actually confess. But it’s easy to confess in a shallow way. We can confess from within the character we play, but that is not confession. In order to confess, we have to be actually disentangled enough from the character to say, “Whoa. I stepped back a little. That diorama that I’ve been committed to is not all that good. I’m not right. I didn’t see everything as clearly as I thought I did”. Then we can confess.
This is not just saying, “I know I have a problem.” When we say, “I know I have a problem,” we’re still caught in our little narrative. And when we say, “Oh yeah, I do that” or “I did that”, we’re still caught in our narrative. We’re stuck, and Dante is walking by, saying, “Oh, there it is again”. Same story. We have to disentangle.
If we actually disentangle and are present and committed, then we get to purgatory. This is where sadhana begins. From here, we can move. Right here, in the world, we start relating differently; we have now moved from hell to purgatory. And we will face maybe the same situations that we got before. The world we created is the world we created, but we are now relating with the same situations differently. We see things differently. We understand differently. We respond differently. We keep moving up the mountain, and things don’t bother us as much. And we make different decisions. There are also new situations: “Oh my God, I never saw that before. Oh! That’s been there all along. I never knew that”.
We have to keep moving until we are completely disentangled—when we are pure Subject, the Perceiver, not the perceived. Then, we are in heaven. We are still dealing with the same situations we were facing with before. But we see them differently all over again, act differently, respond differently. We come from a place of Love, and All is Love.
That’s what sadhana is about. Hell is here. We can all live in hell. We can all stay in our narratives and just keep them going. Most people do. But through Grace and reflection, we can choose to move from hell into purgatory. Once there, we can practice diligently as we continue to accept Grace. And eventually we can rest in heaven.
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