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What is Real and What is Unreal?
The following
talk was given by Yaani Drucker to an audience of Sai Baba
devotees who had gathered for the annual Sai Spring Retreat
which was held at the Lord Wandsworth College, Long Sutton,
Hants, in the UK over the weekend of April 14th/16th 2000. It
has been edited but only for the purpose of reproducing it in
this Newsletter.
From the
unreal, lead me to the real.
From darkness, lead me to the light.
From death, lead me to immortality.
What Is Real
and What Is Unreal?
I would like to
share a story with you that is not real, that never happened,
and that had no effect on Truth. It did, however, serve me
deeply as a wake-up call, as a classroom for discerning that
which is real and eternal from that which is unreal and has no
power over me. It revealed to me the truth of who I really am.
Fourteen years
ago, I had a most intense experience, which at first seemed
incredibly brutal and which I now see as a true spiritual
turning point. Up to that moment in time I had been Sai Baba’s
ardent devotee, living a simple life as a Montessori teacher,
residing by myself, spending six months of every year in India
with Sai Baba. Life was beautiful. Then, one night, everything
changed. It was Mahashivaratri in India, the holiest day of the
year. I was staying in a Sai Baba centre in California. We
were scheduled to celebrate with an all-night bhajan session the
following evening. I was fast asleep in a room adjoining the
bhajan hall. The time was 3.00 am. It could not have been a
more auspicious time or setting.
Suddenly I was
jolted into awakening by a threatening voice ordering, “Scream
and I’ll kill you”. I felt a knife at my throat, and saw a
massive menacing figure looming over me. Still groggy, I
instinctively screamed, and to shut me up he pummelled me in the
face with his fist. I was drenched in blood. He gagged me and
tied me up and ripped my bedclothes off me. In total terror I
cried out to Sai Baba to come and save me. Somehow, in my heart
of hearts, I fully expected Sai Baba to physically appear and
dispel this horrendous nightmare that had suddenly overtaken
me. Sai Baba did not come. And yet he did. Even while I was
being brutally raped, within me all fear and horror of the
situation had left. Quite inexplicably I became very calm and
to my astonishment discovered an incredible compassion welling
up in my heart.
As he was
leaving, I managed a muffled “God bless you.” He hissed back
“God hates me!” and he disappeared into the night. I struggled
to untie myself and went to get help. The police were called
and the man was caught. He had a long criminal history; he had
been in and out of jail. And yet, this time, something had
changed for him. From his jail cell he made a considerable
effort to get a message to me. And that message was “I feel bad
about what I did. I’m real sorry I hurt you. Please pray for
me.” So even in that horrible scene God was present and even
the rapist was affected. To my surprise, I could muster no
anger toward the man. I found myself focusing not on my
personal trauma but on the tragedy of the human condition that
could lead to such a desperate state.
Although my
body was badly beaten and bruised, I remember absolutely no
pain. Yet it was not like I wasn’t traumatised or bewildered. I
remember walking outside in the night and feeling afraid that
somebody might be lurking behind a bush. When anyone entered my
room I was startled and jittery, feelings that were completely
uncharacteristic for me. In my being I felt tainted and my
familiar sense of security, knowing that I was always in the
protective hands of the divine, had been badly shaken. My
confusion centred entirely on Sai Baba. In my mind, Sai Baba,
in whom I had put complete trust and whom I regarded as my
saviour, had not helped me, though I had desperately called out
to him. Why hadn’t he? I kept praying to Sai Baba, imploring
him “Why did you let this happen to me? Please help me to
understand.” As I was praying thus, I distinctly heard Sai
Baba’s voice gently asking, “What happened to you?” “I was
raped, brutalised, robbed, and my very life was threatened” came
my response, “and I called out to you, but you did not come!”
Again Sai Baba asked, ever so tenderly, “What happened to you?”
Suddenly, I
understood. Nothing had happened to me. I remembered one of my
favourite passages in the Bhagavad Gita where Krishna taught
Arjuna, “You are not this perishable body. You cannot be
destroyed by weapons, you cannot be incinerated by fire, you
cannot be drowned by water, you cannot be blown away by the
raging tempest. You are the indestructible, eternal Atma, the
one Self.” Suddenly this mystical pronouncement of Lord Krishna
was no longer a conceptual thought but a direct experience for
me. My bewilderment, my fears and feelings of abandonment, all
dissolved in the light of that incredible realisation. Far from
failing me and abandoning me, Sai Baba revealed to me the truth
of who I am, the immortal Self, and there is nothing in the
whole universe that can ever threaten me now. I knew myself to
be invulnerable, indestructible, eternal. I exploded in joy and
exhilaration. What a surprising outcome for such an intense and
fearful happening! It turned out to be the quantum leap into
the discovery of who I truly am. I am so very grateful. Thank
you God!
Over the
fourteen years that have ensued, many more revelations unfolded
from that powerful experience. I have come to understand that
not only nothing happened to me but, even more profoundly,
nothing really happened at all. I started this talk by saying
that I would like to share a story with you that is not real,
that never happened, and that had no affect on truth. What do I
mean by that? Did anything happen at all? Was any of it real?
The story wasn’t real, the rape wasn’t real, the brutality
wasn’t real, the fear wasn’t real, but the peace that I felt was
real, the compassion that I felt was real, the presence of God
was real, the Atma, my true Self was real.
If none of the
horror was real, and yet I felt so deeply affected by it, what
was going on? I wanted to find the cause. Only in uncovering
the cause of a problem can I hope for a solution. Some of you
may believe that the whole thing was God’s Will. After all,
isn’t everything that happens God’s will? When I prayed to Sai
Baba, “Swami, how could you let this happen to me?” it was
clearly my belief that it could only have happened because it
was God’s will. But this created a real problem for me. In my
mind nothing untoward could happen to me because I loved God and
He would protect me. I had been a good devotee, I did my
sadhana and I felt God’s love. In my mind God’s love for me had
manifested in many ways, in Sai Baba materialising a ring for me
and in presenting me his robe for the Centre’s altar, and in
many deep inner spiritual revelations, dreams and visions which
I experienced as tokens of God’s love. Then how could God let
this horrible thing happen? Of course, this assumes that God
did let this happen. If He did, wouldn’t that make Him cruel?
What kind of a God would permit such horrors to happen?
Certainly God does not wish us to suffer. God is pure love. He
loves us so incredibly. There is simply no way that God could
have wished this for me.
The other
obvious alternative is that there was a rapist out there over
whom I had no control and who the divinity could not prevent,
who caused this to happen. Certainly this is how the world
would see it. Isn’t personal security a major issue for us? So
much effort goes into protecting ourselves from hostile forces
outside of ourselves. But is that really how it is? How could
I possibly return to normalcy, if this were so? Then, at every
turn, I could expect another incident. There could be no peace
if this were true. Could the divinity be that impotent? I
simply can’t accept that a rapist randomly breaking in and
assaulting me could be the full story, particularly on
Shivaratri night in a Sai Baba Centre.
Well then, if
God is not the cause and if the rapist is not the cause, the
only other possibility is that I am the cause; that I did this
to myself. That’s a tough one. Not only did this nightmare
happen to me, but now I am owning that it was my own doing. I
arranged the whole thing. Wow! It was I who arranged this
horrible thing? But that’s impossible. Why would I do
something so utterly insane? Why would I do something so
hurtful, so humiliating, so devastating? What purpose could it
possibly serve? If I’m the author and the director of this
movie, and let me tell you that I have known myself all my life
to be so positive in every way, a real Pollyanna, then something
must have gone badly wrong. But was this script really so
unreasonable?
Think about
it. If I’m desperately attempting at all cost to maintain my
individuality and autonomy, which is what we all have been doing
for countless lives, then doesn’t this story dramatically keep
the belief intact that I am a body separate from other bodies
who can hurt me, that I am vulnerable and subject to dying at
any moment, and that even God himself and all the protection of
his temple could not save me? What I am admitting to myself is
that I would even be willing to hurt myself so drastically, to
the point of death, to hold on to my belief in separation and
make the unreal real for me. And so this whole drama was put
there by me to verify my own self-identity. This is the
insidiousness of the ego thought system, with which I have
allied. But once I recognise that I am the cause, I can see
that I am also the solution. If I did this to myself, then I
can also undo this. How?
Is it by seeing
that I was paying off some karma? Some well-intentioned friends
told me that now I had removed a big chunk of negative karma.
It provided a possible explanation but no solution, and it
certainly didn’t make me feel good, because it left open the
question of how much more negative karma I might have to
undergo, whose effects I might experience at any time. I wanted
a solution that would guarantee the end of all suffering, and
that solution hinged on my discovering why I would do such a
thing to myself. Karma does place the responsibility on me. It
considers whatever happens in a situation to be an effect of a
previous cause for which I am responsible through my past
actions. Karma will attempt to heal a specific incident,
specific actions of one body doing something to another, but it
does not address the one purpose for all my actions. And so the
Law of Karma cannot free me. It does not address the real
underlying purpose of the body, which is to maintain my
separation.
Karma is based
on the ego thought system which sees another body outside of me
that can hurt me or that I can hurt, which then leads to future
retribution, in line with the idea of ‘as you sow, so shall you
reap’. But once I realise through direct experience that there
is nothing outside of my mind, and that the world and the body
that’s within it are all part of a dream that I am dreaming,
which is not real, then the Law of Karma has no power over me.
I now know with certainty that I am not bound by karma, and nor
are you. Karma binds only as long as I retain the purpose of
separation and body-consciousness, within which it applies. But
I am not a body. I am as God created me, whole and perfect. My
mind joined with God is all-powerful. In the past I misused my
mind to make a meaningless world of illusion. I imposed an idea
of time and space on the seamless eternity which is the
omnipresent now. But I cannot be bound by the past. I can
choose to totally let it go. Sai Baba teaches “Past is past.
Forget the past. There is no past. All there is is the
ever-present now.”
To be free of
karma the idea of separation has to be rooted out in its
entirety, and that will happen only when I realise that all of
it, without exception, is playing out only in my mind. It is my
dream of death, the nightmare I made up to prove to myself that
I can be a little being separate from others, with friends and
enemies and a wide world out there, that define me and affect me
night and day, and that whatever in this short lifetime I manage
to accomplish in this world, I inevitably end in death. Yet
nothing could be further from the truth. My mind is
all-powerful and it is my dream. Whatever story I make up and
whatever world I fabricate, I place it all there to reflect my
wishes, my purpose and my thoughts. There is no rapist outside
of my mind. If I accept suffering as a way of paying off a
karmic debt, I have stated a purpose for suffering. As long as
I have that purpose there will be the suffering. But this need
not be. Fortunately I was ready to see another purpose.
Everything that
happens to me is because I want the purpose that it serves.
Think about it. What is your purpose right now? Undoubtedly
your first thought will be that you are here in a spiritual
retreat, diving into the experience of Sai Baba’s presence and
imbibing his teachings. But go deeper. Are you a body sitting
there listening to me? Is there someone else sitting next to
you? Or is there just you and is everything you experience only
happening in your own mind and is orchestrated by you? Could
you even conceive that the person sitting next to you is an
image you made up to keep your reality of separate existence
alive? Or can you see that you as a body and they as bodies are
all within your mind, not separate from you? And I am just a
part of you speaking to you within your mind? Even if you
cannot immediately accept all this, do you see that you can
always have only two possible purposes? It is either to abide
in the One Self, the truth of who you really are, or it is to
maintain a separate self-identity. One is of God, the other is
of the ego. One is real, the other is unreal. There is nothing
that will not be undone instantly when I see no further purpose
for it. I am all-powerful because I am not separate or
different from God. Can we imagine God being victimised? No.
Well, then neither can I be victimised, unless I want to be,
because He created me just like Himself. I am not a helpless
victim of circumstances beyond my control.
I once had a
dream which came to me at a time when I had been struggling with
the question of free will. In this dream Arjuna and I were
chatting like brother and sister. “You know Yaani,” he said, “I
saw the whole Mahabharata war from start to finish before it
ever began.” Upon hearing that I threw up my hands and
exclaimed in dismay, “Oh Arjuna, does that mean that I have
nothing to say about what happens to me in my life, that I have
no freewill?!?” “No, Yaani, it is not like that” he replied.
“When your consciousness changes, your destiny changes” In
other words, it is my dream and I can change it from a dream of
death into a happy dream of eternal life. All I have to do is
change my mind from body-consciousness to God-consciousness,
from untruth to truth. Every thought that I think is either
real or unreal. My real thoughts are thoughts I think with
God. All the other thoughts are unreal, yet they will have
their consequences. There are no neutral thoughts. That is why
Sai Baba constantly reminds us to watch our thoughts.
Today I can say
with total conviction that I am certain of who I am, and who I
am not. I can speak to you freely about my rape experience,
because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that in reality it
never happened. It has no charge, no juice, no power over me.
But first I had to look at it and take full personal
responsibility for all of it, without guilt or self-condemnation
or judgement, holding Spirit’s hand and asking to be shown.
When I am willing to fully expose to myself my willingness to
hurt myself in order to keep my belief in separation alive, and
see that I no longer want that, the truth reveals itself and
shows me that none of what I think has happened was real. In
truth, there could never be anything but God and God’s love.
Please don't misunderstand me. I’m not advocating denial of
your negative experiences. Denial gives energy to the darkest
fears by attempting to hide them and put them out of the
consciousness. Exposing our fears or negative qualities undoes
them and reveals them as the nothing that they have always been.
I am deeply
grateful for the classroom that this episode has become for me.
What have I learned? That I am the indestructible Atma. That
what is real cannot be threatened, and what is not real does not
exist. That only God’s will is real. And that whatever I
experience will be what I choose. As long as my underlying
purpose is to maintain my separate identity it will not be real
and I will not be real. All suffering is self-inflicted, and is
over when I no longer see any value in it. Once I see no value
in my separation thoughts they will simply fade away. Then my
will is one with God’s will and I experience only the constant
extension of love and joy. That is awakening from the dream of
death.
The experience
I recounted turned out to be a great gift and a blessing to me,
for it impelled me to change my mind. But this was an extreme
example, certainly not one you or anyone has to undergo. You
can change your mind right now. Use my experience, or any other
extreme example such as Jesus’ experience of the crucifixion, to
motivate you to change your consciousness and see that
separation, and you will see that this world of duality and
death that you made to maintain your separation consciousness is
no longer what you want. You don’t need to use pain to wake up.
It can certainly serve as one of the ways. But why not wake up
laughing? Whatever you do, WAKE UP! The time is now! Don’t
put it off. Choose now to die to your old way of thinking in
separation and body- consciousness and to be reborn in
God-consciousness. Turn your life and will over to God, and ask
for help. There is no way you can manage it by yourself.
Sai Baba says
the spiritual path is easy. It requires no effort at all.
Making what is unreal and non-existent real requires tremendous
effort. On the underlying basis of the unchanging eternal peace
and serenity of God’s love, I can choose to manufacture an
incident of such magnitude and intensity as this one just
recounted, in order to keep an insane belief system intact and
make it real for me. But how much easier it is to simply allow
what is real to be real, and to abide in perfect peace, love and
light, and be who you naturally are and always have been, one
with God! You don’t have to do anything to make the truth real.
Just let yourself be who you truly are. You cannot fail. You
are perfect and whole as God created you. Be happy!
Postscript
from Yaani Drucker
Two years ago Sai Baba asked me “What is your
seva?” When I replied “I serve my husband” he said “That is
very good, but you must do some service in society also.” That
nudge inspired me to create a website on spiritual consulting.
Because of the nature of my article I believe that some of your
readers would appreciate the opportunity to contact me for
e-mail satsang, comments or questions.
My website address is:
www.angelfire.com/co/omsairam
My e-mail address is:
omsairam@angelfire.com
Please feel free to contact me.
Source: Ramala Centre Newsletter,
March 2000,
http://www.ramalacentre.com/newsletter09_00_02.htm
Visit Ramala Centre Website:
http://www.ramalacentre.com
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