The Journey of Consciousness Culminating in Divine Love The spiritual journey of consciousness, lovingly guided personally by Baba, proceeds through lifetimes from the head down to the heart, and from the heart ultimately into the soul, the “realm of the spirit” as Darwin refers to it. The base of operations for most people is located in the head, the mind, the realm of thoughts, beliefs and theories. Life is seen through the lens of right and wrong, good and bad, spiritual and unspiritual, loving and not so loving. Sooner or later, we become painfully aware of our cramped and limited mental world of time and space as well as the frustrating tension of the opposites. We’ve habitually turned to the mind to tell us what to do and what is important in life, and we find ourselves harassed by thoughts all day long. Eventually, Baba brings home to us the limitations of seeing and reacting to life through the narrow lens of the mind, and coaxes our inner awareness down to the realm of the heart, inspired by His love. Unfortunately, much of this awakening comes through experiences of heartbreak and disappointment. Nevertheless, we gradually find ourselves in a much more expansive place. We are in the realm of emotions, desires, and the deeper feelings, initially a cauldron of powerful forces and impulses that are overwhelmingly difficult to control. Yet compared to the mind, which one might think of as three-dimensional, our base of operations in the heart is multi-dimensional. As the Sufi poet, Hafiz, once wrote, “The mind cannot occupy the throne in the palace of the heart. It can only be its doorkeeper.” In the heart, there is more substance, it is more spacious, and we enjoy flashes of timelessness and, as Baba has said, “fleeting moments of union with God.” Intuition begins to replace the mind as the arbiter of what we do. In one part of the heart, the superficial layer, resides the negative emotions such as anger, jealousy, greed, envy, fear, resentment, sadness, and hurt. And there are also deep-rooted desires and multifarious wants. In all of these, we feel a narrowing down of life. We feel small. Now begins our inner work, and it requires tremendous tolerance to remain consciously in the heart and not continually retreat up into the mind. As Rumi says, we become “a wound without a shield.” But with our persistent and painstaking efforts, Baba begins to transmute these lower selfish reactions to life into loving responses, the divine qualities such as: anger into patience, greed into generosity, desires into purity, resentment into forgiveness, entitlement into gratitude, self-centeredness into empathy and compassion. After many years of inner focus, however, we are astounded to find that even the heart itself is too small! The heart, in its greatest depths, has this profound limitation: it divides life into me and other, me and nature, me and Baba—it splits creation into two. In the mind, the soul is stuck living in a veritable shack. In the heart, it lives in a great mansion, spacious and with windows that can look out on the timelessness of life. But eventually the soul can no longer breathe in this limited, divided space of the heart. It feels suffocated, and longs for oneness. This is when Baba, who provides all the necessary inspiration, begins to draw our consciousness directly into the soul itself. If living at the level of the heart is compared to residing on the rugged terrain of the earth, rising to the level of the soul is like viewing the earth from above, from a transcendent place of oneness, in a most loving place within that still maintains its compassionate participation in the ups and downs of life. The soul has an intimate view of our heart interacting with others and the world. It experiences life as a glorious loving whole; it dissolves our separateness into a supreme completeness. As Rumi, the great Sufi mystic once said, “If the door of your soul were to open for an instant, you would see that the heart of every existent thing is your intimate friend.” At first, as Baba has said, our experiences of the soul are fleeting, a brief and yet sometimes overwhelming experience. As years goes on, we are able to spend more and more time in the soul where we merge for longer periods with Baba and experience His magnificent sweet love. We begin, as Darwin has said, to change our address from the heart to the soul, from living in a mansion, so to speak, to being in the boundless expanse of all creation. From the world of form and space, we dissolve in what Rumi calls “the spaceless.” From living in the world divided into myriad forms, we inherit a glorious unified vision. At last, we fall back into Baba’s loving all-embracing arms, whole and complete. Rumi says it beautifully, “The roads are different, but the destination is one. All those who yelled at each other along the way, ‘You hypocrite! You infidel!’ in the end, drink from the same keg of wine and laugh out loud!”
