Cosmic Emotion

Titre

En Cosmic Emotion

Date

En 1976-Oct-24

Decade

En 1970s & Earlier

City, State

En New Lebanon, NY

Lieu

En Abode

Description

En Describes the experience of suddenly discovering God’s action and being in oneself, in life. This is not like meditation where one sits back, using it as a buffer and protection from life. It is like opening the windows of the soul to discover the presence of God, of Love, and being shattered by the encounter with life.

Topic(s)

En Awakening

Ecstasy

Meditation Practice

Subtopic(s)

En Awakening in life; Cosmic emotion; Nostalgia

Type of event

En Family Talk/Class

Type of publication

En Recording

Media

En Audio

Transcript

Importance matérielle

En 0:26:42

Identifiant

En L7629

File Format

En mp3

PDF

Langue

En English

Digitizing Team

En Abad

TajAli Keith

Kirsten

Author(s)

En Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan

Full Text

En There are moments when one's whole being resounds very deeply to the significance of life. One feels the heartbeat of the universe, and somehow one is shaken into the depth of one's being, into a kind of harmonic resonance.

We all have had those moments, and you know that they're the most treasured, the most wonderful moments of one's life. Sometimes one sits back and tries to meditate and one doesn't experience anything quite as dramatic, because one is cutting out life. And real meditation should include all life. However, these are special moments which stand out as compared with the humdrum moments, which we spend in our routine living, sometimes with ups and sometimes downs, joys and disappointments, and sometimes real celebration and at other times despair. But this is something different, because it is not just something that one is experiencing oneself. It's something that shatters one very deeply in one's relationship with the universe. It's something that links one inexorably, not with the environment, but with a significance, a meaningfulness far beyond the happening at the purely physical level. It may be a physical catalyst that sets this condition into motion, like for example, the sight of someone dying, or the

thought of the concentration camps, for example, in the last war. Or, it might be something at the other end of the scale, like a supreme moment at the top of the mountains, when the sun is rising and one just can't believe

that nature could attain such sublime beauty.

Or, as Murshid says, "the moment when you discover yourself as being the Being of God". It's something that shatters one's understanding. It shatters one in one's sense of oneself. It's not just understanding meaningfulness, which is always a moment of jubilation. Even for the child, in looking at a puzzle and suddenly seeing: Yes, I see it. That's a great moment of triumph. But when what one sees shatters one's understanding, then it is ecstasy. When it shatters one's sense of oneself, then it is ecstasy. Or, you could say rapture, because ecstasy is seeing from the vantage point of the person who is carried ec-stasis-- beyond his condition. But rapture means that one is [pause]

that it is God who carries one beyond oneself.

One is enraptured by God. It denotes an action beyond one's own and of course, that is true, that one can never trigger off ecstasy by one's own efforts. But it is contagious, it does communicate itself from one being to another.

And, if one could just let oneself be carried on the tidal wave of the miracle of life, one would experience it without provoking it, by letting go rather than by trying to achieve it.

It means accepting

to suffer dissolution or disintegration, or as I often call it shattering by the encounter with life. You can't just be the witness. You have to be part of what is experienced.

You have to be disintegrated from the self and integrated into the experience.

Of course, it is like discovering the glow behind the trees that one hadn't seen before. Or the beauty of a person who didn't look particularly beautiful before. Or the

good luck that is present in what seems to be a fiasco. It's not just discovering meaningfulness--that's one of the aspects--but it is discovering dimensions of reality that we'd flattened out to our very ordinary standard of what they call the norm. We suffer from a terrible impoverishment of life, by having [pause]

given up pursuing our ideals, by having settled for something less, because it's more convenient. It's the place where most people are at.

It's like trying to protect oneself against the erosion of life that always is negative to the sense of the self–

except we burned by the light once–even cover one’s eyes when facing the headlamps of a car. One even tries to protect oneself against the impressions of life by sitting back in meditation. It's something like insuring oneself for going against all kinds of hazards,

because one doesn't have the courage to take the plunge into life and accept the gamble for better or for worse. It's an instinct of self-preservation. But ecstasy is, as I say, negative to the sense of the personal self. It's accepting to be battered and transformed beyond recognition, for one's whole world to break down like a pack of . . . like a castle of cards– and the bottom falls out of all that one had constructed-- and realizing that it has no value. When the voice of life speaks to one, with its reality, with its authenticity, we realize the sham that we have taken for granted.

It's always very intense, even if it's peaceful. Peace can be so devastating by its loneliness,

even if it's harmonious and not dramatic. It takes a tremendous sense of balance to feel the harmony of the universe in one's being [pause]

because one is always imposing one's own. As I say, it is flowing with it. Flowing with the choreography of the stars, and the natural growth of the vegetation, and the whispering of the wind. It's being part of it. It is attuning oneself to the music of the spheres, and at no time holding back and saying, Well now, what do I get out of it? There's nothing you get out of it. It's the other way around. You cannot put it in your purse, you cannot take it home and tell people about it at a party.

You can't read books about it, because it is gone as soon as you try and grasp it. Just like the bluebird. It is intangible and the greatest moments are those that happen so fast that they are passed long before one realizes that they happened. Then one tries to reconstruct them in one's limited way. And of course, one spoils and distorts them, disfigures them and betrays them. We are always betraying the most sacred in our being by trying to speak about it, or trying to remember it, because an eternal moment can never be remembered. It always is. You can't trace it back in time. It belongs to another order of things which is not in time. [pause]

Hazrat Inayat Khan said how the mystic sometimes will become so sensitive that the slightest vision of–witnessing of–something beautiful, triggers off the state out of itself. For example, you give him a rose, and a lot of people are delighted to receive a rose, but that rose will set him off into ecstasy, because he sees more than the rose, and more than what most people see in the rose.

The same is true of your relationship to a person you might take for granted. And when you discover dimensions in it that you had never seen before, that is when the relationship will become a golden one. It's always new, it always opens up new perspectives because you flow into it, instead of trying to encompass it yourself, to possess it, to hold it.

All experience is spontaneous, and free. It's part of the divine freedom that I talked about the other day. It can never be sclerosed, fossilized. When it does, it isn't authentic anymore. It's lost its genuineness. And that those are the effigies, that we, as I say, we settle with in our lives, while closing out the heartbeat of life.

So, you see this is meditation in life. You don't have to sit somewhere alone and close your doors–close your doors to life. We have learned to do this, because of the impact that the environment has on most people, by imprisoning them into their limitations. But that is still a negative thing. It's not yet the positive aspect of meditation. It's just the preparation. It's like the kind of mathematics that one does at school. Then you have to step out of all that, forget all that you ever learned in meditation [pause]

open up the windows of your soul to the discovery of the presence of the One we love, whom we call God. It's the one that everyone loves, in every loved one. We project it upon the loved one, not realizing that the loved one IS, that's the one they love, beyond his person--his or her person--or personality.

In fact it is being in love that reveals to one the beauty of the Beloved.

It is nostalgia that makes one discover what one is seeking for. [pause]

And, one thinks one is seeking, but in fact it is the One and only Being who's seeking himself through each part of himself.

And so, it's not discovering God as the object that you're seeking for, but it's discovering His action in you. It's why the Muslims: He is closer than your jugular vein. Like we're desperately seeking outside for that which is our true selves.

Because life is not outside.

You are part of it. You are it.

It's emotion of the heart that bursts with emotion.

And we like then to interpret it as joy or pain and it's of course beyond the two. Ecstasy is neither joy nor pain, it's beyond the two.

But even that is transcended in the highest states, which we may call rapture. And that is when it isn't any more the emotion of the heart, it's the emotion of the Soul. That is, the whole universe is moved in the emotion of your soul. It's all encompassing. [Pause}

It is experiencing the emotion of God. This is where Hazrat Inayat Khan says, "it's experiencing the pleasure and displeasure of God." Instead of just seeing phenomena or people or events, one is conscious of the total Being. It's like, for example, you've been enjoying the music of a composer, and all of a sudden you discover the composer. Now all of his time you've been enjoying his music and you hadn't really given a thought to the composer. It is the same thing. When enjoying these wonderful things that one can enjoy, or suffering from the terrible calamities that one can undergo in the universe, without ever reaching the reality of the being. And then all of a sudden, it all . . . He reveals–one can say "he" of course, but it is revealed to one.

And one's emotion was the emotion, the pangs of love for that Being, who is the very depths of one's own self and the Self of all beings. [long pause]

Cosmic emotion.