Tuesday, 08 March 2011 17:42 Written by Nirmala
Someone contacted me with the following questions:
Can or does God answer prayers? If we ask, will we receive? Also, you have mentioned 'many lives'. If you don't actually 'know', as you said in the blog about What happens when we die', then where does the theory of many lives come from? Thank you.
Here is my response:
Thanks for your very good questions. There is no simple formula as anything is possible. We may or may not receive an answer to our prayers and requests, although in a sense, we always do even if the answer is different than what we wanted. My sense is that the divine intelligence, or God, takes into account what we ask for and what we want but uses its infinite wisdom and perspective to determine what we will get.
It is similar to the way we might care for our children or pets. Ideally, we would never neglect their real needs, but when it comes to their specific wants and desires, we may or may not give them what they want. Responding in the most loving way would mean taking into account their desires and giving them what they want when it is possible, healthy, and appropriate. Delaying or denying their wishes might also be part of loving them. The child doesn’t always like or understand the parent’s bigger and wiser perspective. While growing up, I was never very happy when my mother wouldn’t let me eat ice cream before dinner, but there was actually a good reason for it!
As for what happens when we die, I hold all perspectives lightly. The biggest truth is that I don’t know for sure what happens when we die. That being said, within that big mystery of not-knowing, are many possible perspectives about what happens when we die. My own sense is that all perspectives have some truth to them, including reincarnation. However, no perspective contains all of the truth. Reincarnation raises as many questions as it answers: Who or what reincarnates? Where are we in between reincarnations? Can you “remember” future lives as well as past lives?
Holding perspectives lightly can even allow you to not know and to know something at the same time. You don’t need to hold onto either knowing or not-knowing. And you don’t need to limit yourself to one way of knowing versus another. Why limit yourself to one perspective or another? Why take a permanent position about anything, including the fixed position of “I don’t know”? Life doesn’t seem to limit itself to the ideas and beliefs we have, and it also doesn’t limit itself to the known or to the unknown. It dances in and out of all of these experiences.
I hope this helps make it clearer why I sometimes contradict myself. Putting anything into words immediately limits and distorts the actual truth. Sometimes in order to speak more of the truth, you have to contradict what you just said. If you can hold all of it lightly, then you can benefit from all of it without being trapped by any words or beliefs. Words don’t contain the truth, they just point to it.
Wednesday, 02 March 2011 17:43 Written by Nirmala
Q: How do I reconcile the teachings of the Law of Attraction with nondual teachings? I wonder if involvement with the mind by trying to create a different reality would interfere with the deepest recognition of my true nature.
A: My own sense is that there are many levels of truth and that they all exist at the same time. On one level, it is true that you can manifest and create your reality, at least to some extent. However, it is also true, on a deeper level, that divine intelligence is unfolding everything from a bigger perspective. It seems that this deeper truth can override the smaller truth offered in teachings about manifesting, which may be one explanation for why people don’t always get what they want when they apply the principles of manifesting.
An even bigger truth is that everything is an illusion (even you!), and it doesn’t matter what happens. When we experience this bigger truth, there’s a natural relaxation of effort and struggle. Everything is fine no matter what happens.
You asked about reconciling these different levels of truth. I would suggest that there is not a better level, but just different levels of truth. The levels don’t contradict each other but complement each other. To me, the ideal is not to experience the biggest truth and somehow stay there, but to have the flexibility to try on different perspectives and to be able to play freely on all the different levels. For this, it isn’t necessary to reconcile the different levels of truth, since they are already reconciled. They co-exist quite naturally and easily without any need to change anything about any of them. You can play however you wish with these levels: You could spend your mornings playing with manifesting your desires, your afternoons surrendering to the divine plan, and your evenings penetrating all illusions and dissolving the sense of any separate self who could do anything about anything.
There’s no right or wrong way to play in this life. It does seem that this human experience on earth is meant to be a place where people at these different levels interact and to some degree affect each other. In a way, this planet is like a one-room schoolhouse, with some people in daycare, some in kindergarten, some in elementary school, some in high school, and some in college and graduate school—all in the same classroom. In such a classroom, the adults would naturally have more to talk about with the other adults, but they might also enjoy playing with the infants, children, and teenagers and may even find they learn a lot from them. And you can imagine how the younger students would also benefit from contact with the older students.
Within each of us, these different levels interact and exist simultaneously. Your own psyche and soul are also a one-room schoolhouse, where all levels of your being exist simultaneously. There’s no right or wrong way of experiencing the multifaceted being that you are, just different ways.
To fully experience your pure nature as awake, empty space, it’s true that the mind needs to be relatively silent. However, that doesn’t make the moments when the mind is active and the illusion is capturing your attention wrong or bad. Furthermore, the distinction between various levels isn’t black or white, as there are many levels in between dissolving into the source of existence and full identification with the body and mind. Why not find out about all of these levels, especially since it’s not really up to you when the mind falls silent or not? That isn’t something you do, but more like something that happens to you. What you can do is be very curious about all the different levels and experiences you have each and every day. Experiencing every level fully and with deep curiosity naturally allows more ease in shifting and dissolving the boundaries and attachments that can keep you from moving more flexibly between the levels.
Ultimately, however, every experience is already an expression of an even bigger flexibility. Consciousness even seems to also love getting stuck in various experiences, at least for a while. But then it always gets unstuck sooner or later. It is so flexible that it even allows itself to get stuck! So what I’m offering isn’t really a prescription for how to become more flexible in your awareness, but a description of how amazingly flexible your awareness has always been. By being curious about the endlessly different experiences that show up, you may simply recognize more and more deeply how beautiful and mysterious your existence is and always has been. This can lead to not only a realization of the deepest truth of your nature, but also a fuller realization of the infinite capacities and dimensions within it.
Monday, 28 February 2011 14:55 Written by Nirmala
Nirmala's wife, Gina Lake, offers a free ebook on here entitled, Radiance, Experiencing Divine Presence. Thanks to the generous help of a volunteer, this free ebook is now available in Italian.
Scaricare la versione italiana qui (Download Italian version for FREE)
(Coming soon: French version of Radiance and a Polish version of Gifts with No Giver.)
Note: Several of the free articles on Endless-Satsang.com are now available translated into Polish, Spanish, and Russian here, and one of Nirmala's ebooks, Living from the Heart, is available in Spanish here. These free articles were translated by volunteers. Thanks to the volunteers for making these versions of the articles available. Please let us know if you would like to volunteer to translate Nirmala's articles or free ebooks into your own language, and we will add the translation to our website.
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