A sense of awe can produce maturity. Great and wise teachers can inspire this awe. If we come before them, off the street, full of ourself, immodest, needing attention, needing love, just desperately needing something, they stand us in front of a flame which produces awe, a transformation occurs, awe transforms us. It makes us modest, mature, surrendered. It can put us in a state like a bride’s, ready to enter the next maturing phase of our life. If this process continues we are ready to understand the truth of this existence, the truth of reality.
God gives us many chances to understand His truth. The world is in a constant state of re-creation, if God suspended His sustenance for even a nanosecond everything would disappear. Sustenance is the act of creation, again and again. Why does God keep re-creating us this way? He does it to bring us to the place where we can know Him, where we can become a being who has no beginning or end.
It has been explained that if we enter the place of light there is no night, there is no tomorrow, there is only today, only now. Darkness disappears, it no longer returns, there is no separation between past and future, there is only now and light. Even the separation between our substance and reality no longer exists. The need for separation is gone. When there is no night, when there is no other side, no dark side, One alone remains, One who is eternal.
We should not be afraid of merging, becoming one, but many aspects of ourself have that fear because these things do not want to disappear, they know that in the act of becoming one their worldly life ends. They are the qualities which are not God, qualities which know only separation and differences. They have a will to exist, understanding that if we find the truth they are finished, there is no room for them to exist in the truth. They struggle to hide the truth from us, trying to make us something other than what we are, presenting us with images which cause states of anxiety, states of fear, states which keep us from understanding our true self. We become our own enemy, not allowing ourself to be content, paying too much attention to the world, to the manipulation of things which have form, believing that contentment lies in the manipulation of such things. Qualities which are other than God’s keep us focused on outer things; we mistakenly believe that there is some kind of safety in the outer, that by gathering and assembling the things of the world we can create a protected situation where we are safe.
There is a traditional story about a man who was told he was going to die within a few weeks, given the exact date of his death by a wise astrologer. He decided to go to a faraway mountain and hide in a cave. Taking a few servants with him, he instructed them to roll a huge rock across the entrance to the cave and take it away a few days later, after the appointed date, then the Angel of Death would not be able to find him. When he entered the cave and his servants had rolled the rock into place blocking the entrance, he discovered someone was already there waiting for him. The Angel of Death said, “I couldn’t believe I would find someone in this remote cave, but I was told you would show up, I was told the exact moment I would find you.”
The truth of the world is beyond our comprehension, beyond our ability to understand, yet we have been told since childhood this world is understandable. Science tells us it knows the answers to everything, it understands creation; in fact, the reality is that creation cannot be understood by man, creation is God’s realm, God’s domain. Science lives in the world of night and day, but God does not. The world of night and day has a different reality from the world of light. Scientists hide in their kind of knowledge as protection, just as we hide in our worldly possessions, expecting them to protect us.
Ostriches hide when they think they are in danger. They dig a hole in the ground and put their head in, believing they are hidden from the world. When the hunter comes along, with one stroke the world is over for the ostrich. We have to learn not to hide like an ostrich, we have to learn that no protection exists within the world. The only protection is with God.
