Namaste – the Greatness of God within me greets and honours the Greatness of God within you
(Image from here)
It is the day after Nelson Madiba Mandela’s memorial service at the Football National Stadium in Johannesburg. I watched it all on TV last night. I did not want to miss a moment. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted out of it. I just knew I wanted to be present to this great moment.
Perhaps I wanted to see how the world would memorialize this giant of a man, no not in stature though I have read that he is tall, but in spirit. Perhaps I wanted to hear again all that could be said about the greatness of this man. Perhaps I wanted to cling on to every last drop of him that I could get vicariously through the words of others who would speak about him.
So I watched as again and again, one statesman after another, one spiritual leader after another, spoke of what he had meant to his country, South Africa, and to the world. And almost all of them mentioned his ‘long walk to freedom’ in one way or another, whether relating to his release from prison in 1990 or to his imminent reunion with god. This was significant to me as I had read his book, A Long Walk to Freedom, many years ago.
The tears filled my eyes then as they do now. I cannot explain why. I had never met the man. I had never made any real effort to get to know him. I read his book because I wanted to know how someone who had been so oppressed, imprisoned for twenty-seven years, could rise to such greatness. I wanted to know his story from him. So I read the book and of all the things that made a deep impression on me, the deepest was his spirit of forgiveness:
“Great anger and violence can never build a nation. We are striving to proceed in a manner and towards a result, which will ensure that all our people, both black and white, emerge as victors.”
How was a man who had been treated with so much indignity and who had spent twenty-seven years of his prime in prison able to forgive so completely and so determinedly?
He clearly knew the answer:
“As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I’d still be in prison.”
This willingness to forgive was one of the things the world and many of its leaders revered in Mandela. Fidel Castro, quoted by his brother, Raul Castro, at the memorial service said:
“Nelson Mandela will not go down in history for the 27 consecutive years he spent incarcerated, without ever renouncing his ideas. He will go down in history because he was capable of cleaning up his soul from the poison that such an unfair punishment could have planted there, and for his generosity and wisdom, which at the time of victory allowed him to lead with great talent his selfless and heroic people knowing that the new South Africa could not be built on hatred and vengeance.”
I pause as I close my eyes in awe of the largeness of spirit that Mandela, whom I am tempted to from here on call Madiba (meaning father of the family of South Africa), demonstrated to the world. I close my eyes as my heart weeps with gratitude that he was on this planet in my lifetime.
How do you explain how someone can touch you in this way? Someone you have never met? Someone with whom you have little in common historically, geographically or culturally? There is only one explanation – his Spirit.
It was Madiba’s spirit, indeed the universal Spirit, the Great Spirit, the Holy Spirit, that connects us all and upon whose invisible ears we each whisper what we all know in our hearts to be true but what many of us are afraid to proclaim out loud – that we are born free, that we are god’s/love’s creation, that we are perfect, whole and complete, that we are limitless in our potential and that we are expressions of god’s/love’s greatness.
Fortunately for the world, some human beings like Madiba are willing to turn those whispers into words which mobilize collective action knowing that this is the only way that the minds of many will at last be forced to admit what they will not hear from their own hearts.
And when we eventually do admit it, when we eventually do listen to the truth, it doesn’t sound strange at all. Rather, it sounds painfully familiar, painful because we have resisted it for so long. And we are overcome with emotion that someone has loved enough to help free us from our prisons of denial about ourselves and about others.
For as Madiba understood so well, we are imprisoned by our denial of our greatness, the greatness of god/love that gives us life and that fuels this life with its energy.
And as we deny our own greatness, the greatness of god within us, so too we deny the greatness of another which is nothing other than the greatness of god within them. And from these prisons of denial, these prisons of smallness, we attempt to wage our war-full way through life.
Yes, it is war-full for we are constantly attacking ourselves. We are forever finding ourselves not enough – not good enough, not free enough, not brave enough, not rich enough, not attractive enough, not happy enough, not peaceful enough, not loving enough, not lovable enough, not innocent enough, not strong enough…
Today, I asked myself: What do I want to do with my life?
‘What you are meant to do’, was the answer I received, followed immediately by a question:
‘Are you ever not doing what you are meant to do?’
Instantly, the answer was a still and firm ‘No’.
So, if I am always doing what I am meant to do, why do I keep thinking that there is more? Something more or bigger or better for me to do?
Again, the answer came quickly and easily:
‘Because what you are meant to do seems to be less than what someone else is meant to do, someone like Mandela or Bono or Obama or Bill Gates or Michelle Obama.’
Oh wow. Oh mongrel wow. Oh pathetic wow. I am comparing my ‘greatness’ with someone else’s ‘greatness’ and find mine so pathetically less great!
It is the thinking of a deluded mind, one of many such minds that populate the earth. A deluded mind whose thinking seems dangerously reasonable.
It’s a tricky situation.
You will never exhaust your potential for god’s potential is infinite and can never be limited by what you choose to express. So, it is natural that you will always want to express more of god within you. But you want to do this naturally, in alignment with god’s will which is nothing but the will of love. Your alignment with god’s will, with the will of love, is your aspiration.
The word ‘aspiration’ means ‘the act of breathing into’ and breath, as we know, is universal energy, is spirit. So, ‘aspiration’ to me, is about the action of the spirit through me.
What is the action of the spirit through me? In other words, how do I express the will of god, the will of love in a world that is built primarily upon false perception by a deluded mind?
Naturally, the will of god, the will of love can and has to be expressed in infinite ways. What are its ways through the medium or channel of ‘me’?
At this point, it starts to become clear why comparing my aspiration – the action of the spirit through me in accordance with the will of love – with the aspiration/action of the spirit in another is just about sacrilegious. In effect, it means that we do not trust and value the action of the spirit within us that we are naturally called to express.
But, you wonder, if we do not aspire for more, for what is great or greater, will we not surely get locked in complacency and mediocrity? Is it healthy to be satisfied, to be content with what we are and what we have (not that we ever are!)?
This is how I see it. It is in our spiritual DNA to be creative. It is a natural and necessary quality of Love, the Universal Energy, to be creative. As long as we do not stand in its way, this natural quality, this spiritual DNA will express itself. It will direct and design its/our *aspiration*.
Our *work* is to allow it, to simply not stand in its way.
On a recent episode of Big Ideas, British psychiatrist, Ian McGilchrist, spoke about how our brains learn to perceive the world and make meaning. He also talked about creativity and how it isn’t something that you can teach or learn but rather something that must be ‘given space’, allowed to be made known or expressed. For us to be creative, we need to ‘unlearn’. In other words, we need to let go of our usual, normal, conditioned ways of seeing things.
In the same episode of Big Ideas, Chinese ballet dancer and now Australian citizen, Li Cunxin, spoke of his journey from deprivation to stardom both on stage as well as a best-selling author. In his concluding statement, with deep earnestness, he stressed that through all his hardships and with all his accomplishments, the one thing that he felt was absolutely necessary was keeping a free mind that was allowed to be creative.
I seem to have taken a major detour here from where I began which was with Madiba and the greatness of god/love/Spirit within each of us to what it is to have aspirations and finally now to creativity. They’re all related.
To aspire, to have an aspiration, to align ourselves with the action of the Spirit is, as I see it, the natural work of creativity which, as both our Big Ideas speakers said, is a matter of *ALLOWING*, of *GIVING SPACE*, of *KEEPING THE MIND FREE*.
A free mind does not compare. A free mind is free from the learned behaviour of comparing and wanting to be like another when god’s presence within us ensures a unique expression of creative work through each one of us.
Greatness cannot be compared although as human beings trapped in the quicksand of separation, we feel compelled to compare. Our sense of separation will not allow us to feel whole and complete. It will not allow us to trust in the wholeness and completeness of the love from which we are created. It will not allow us to see that the *greatness of what I am meant to do* is no less than the *greatness of what you are meant to do* and certainly no more than it.
Our sense of separation will compel us to feel ‘not enough’ and to do more and be more in the futile hope that it will help us feel enough. It never will.
Yet, if we were to give the creative spirit within us the space to do its work, if we did not stand in its way with our doubts, our judgements, our fears, our neediness, if we simply allowed our minds to be free, oh my goodness, would we not, like Li Cunxin and Madiba, allow the unique expression of the spirit through us, in whatever way that may be?
If only we could see, however briefly, that *greatness* is not a measure of other people’s recognition, approval or admiration but a measure of how much space we give the spirit to work through each of us! If only we could see this and use it as our constant guide, we would be consumed with living the effortless and enlightened life, joyous and free!
I want to leave you with one final quote from Madiba which, I think, reflects 2 points I made earlier:
- That there is not a moment when we are not doing what we are meant to be doing
- That when we are doing what we are meant to be doing, our will is aligned with god’s will or the will of love so that we cannot but act in accordance with it
Madiba’s words also reassure those of us who have not had *epiphanies* – those blinding flash-bulb ‘ah-ha’ moments about our life purpose – that we are in his good company:
“I had no epiphany, no singular revelation, no moment of truth, but a steady accumulation of a thousand slights, a thousand indignities and a thousand unremembered moments produced in me an anger, a rebelliousness, a desire to fight the system that imprisoned my people. There was no particular day on which I said, Henceforth I will devote myself to the liberation of my people; instead, I simply found myself doing so, and could not do otherwise.”
Namaste! (The greatness of god within me greets and honors the greatness of god within you)
Lucy
REFLECTION
Do you compare yourself with others? How? How does it make you feel?
Are you able to turn your comparing and not-as-good -as or jealousy or envy into childlike appreciation for another person? Would you like to?
CALL TO ACTION
Take somr time to walk in a park or forest. Look at the different trees and appreciate each one. Do this without comparing. Simply acknowledge that each one is a perfect expression of Life, of Love, no more and no less.
HEALING STATMENT
When there is no comparing, each moment is perfect. When there is no comparing, each person is a perfect expression of Life, of Love.
Adapted from Anthony de Mello
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