Los Angeles, Fall 1996

The Vast Wilderness of God

A few years ago I happened to be in India when the Sharikaracharya, last of a long lineage, died. The Times of India was filled with stories and obituaries about him, one of which, an account by a journalist friend of Indira Gandhi, caught my attention. It seems that during one of Mrs. Gandhi's difficult periods as Prime Minister, she decided to consult the Shankaraycharya, for whom she had great respect. She invited the journalist friend to accompany her on the trip to the ashram, and they flew to a nearby airport in a private jet from New Delhi. Mrs. Gandhi went in for her audience with the holy man while the journalist waited outside. After about an hour or so, she emerged from the room, and she and the journalist boarded the plane. She seemed to the journalist to be unusually quiet and serene. He ventured to ask, "How did it go in there?" Mrs. Gandhi replied, "It was wonderful. I put forth all my questions, and he answered every one of them, but neither of us spoke a word."

William Butler Yeats said, "We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us to see their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our silence."

Just being in the pristine awareness of here and now, you become as a reflecting pool, and those who gather around tend see their own images. What has been murky suddenly clears up, and sometimes in that clearing there is a fierceness. Truth and love don't always show up as honey dipped. Sometimes it takes a great courageousness of heart to allow a stripping away of all that is extra, all that we have been holding onto for so long.

Haven't you ever had the experience of finding yourself with someone who is just quietly present and suddenly there is something like a quake in your being. Some big construct of beliefs or identification begins cracking up and falling away. And though it may mean immense change of some sort, you find that you literally cannot hold onto the false construct any longer. So you surrender. You surrender into this fierce clarity. And there is love, there is compassion, there is your own natural wakeful presence. Are you willing to surrender to that?

Q: How can we know that in this quiet that you speak of we will experience goodness and clarity? Do you presume a benevolent force in the universe?

CI: Look to your own nature because, after all, we are each a microcosm of totality, inseparable from the macrocosm. Those moments that you have known pure love, have they not been the truest? Have you not felt the most authentic, the most alive? Through all the strange turns and wanderings of your life, isn't love what you have always yearned for, what you have wanted to express, what you have wanted to give? And can you imagine that on your deathbed the love that you have known and shared will be all that will have mattered?

So whenever you find yourself in doubt about a benevolent force in the universe, just return to this, back home, to your own true nature, love itself.

Q: I know that is true in my heart of hearts. But how does that explain the horrors that go on in this world?

CI: Love gets twisted sometimes. And it shows up in all kinds of sad and even tragic ways when it has been perverted, suppressed, and denied. Though love is everyone's essence, not everyone is aware of that at all times. Stay with your own knowing of love. It transforms your vision of the horrors.

Q: It seems that things are worse than ever in our time.

CI: The world has been mad for as long as we know. What is unique to our time is that through extensive media we have awareness of the darkness all over the planet simultaneously. This may result in a quickening of the light, as these polarities are always dancing with each other. But in any case, choose to rest in your own true nature and then you meet in the same love that one might feel for one's own children. Even those whose behavior is an outrage and whom we might work to deter are seen as wayward children, blind to the consequences of their actions. "They know not what they do." You will then stop worrying about how bad it is in our time. That worry will be transmuted into compassion and love for what is shining before you.

Q: Will you then know how to be, what to do, how to help out?

CI: Being and doing are one continuum. Action flows from silence and dissolves back into it. In this, you discover that love is running the show and you just follow orders. You take dictation. The love that you are says or does whatever needs to be said or done and you find yourself as surprised as anyone else by what is coming through you. It will be completely unique in its manifestation, something nobody ever taught or told you. After all, the great ones just went out and did their own thing. The Buddha, Christ, all of them. They didn't follow anyone else's formula. They followed only the dictates of their own hearts. And the power of their integrity in that surrender was such that religions were created around them, but they themselves were not out to create religions. They were just living their lives in a wild, unconventional and creative expression. What moved through them is now moving through you. You may find yourself blazing for thousands or you may discover that you were not as pivotal in changing the world as you once had hoped. In any case, ah so.

Q: In recognizing this true nature, is the body a distraction, like thoughts are a distraction?

CI: Thoughts are not necessarily a distraction. Nor is the body. Thoughts are arising in this present awareness and dissolving back into it. The silence remains untouched, unstained, immaculate. Thoughts are only a problem if you are preoccupied with them, giving them all your attention, believing in the entity of "me" around which the thoughts swirl. But thoughts in and of themselves are not some kind of enemy. Thoughts can be very useful, functional, and even entertaining. They are allowed in this vast clearing. No problem.

Q: Isn't there a process? Don't we need to go through some sort of mental purification to realize what you speak of?

CI: No. You don't have to purify anything. It's all done. This awareness, this love that you are is not diminished by your dips into neurosis nor exalted by your soaring or poetic insights. It is always pure and clear, here and now.

Q: I want to believe that.

CI: No need to believe this. Taste it. Experience it here and now. This vastness that you are is quite full and obvious. This is the feast and this feast is so rich that we couldn't possibly begin to take in even what is in this room. Think of it, each of us a human universe, yet made of all the same components. And all of this—the floor, the chairs, the flowers, the microphone, shimmering with this presence. Shining and shimmering and pulsating with life. Release your notions of "someday, I may experience this," "if only," or any sense of deficiency or postponement. There is no need to sit at the feast and feel hungry.

Q: Catherine, sometimes I have experienced what I think you are pointing to and it has come with a sense of boundlessness, nothing to hold onto, a sense of being in some great wilderness with no end in sight. It is occasionally frightening when I am in that state.

CI: You get used to it. And you discover that there is no longer any sense of in or out. It is only that-boundlessness— in all directions, and you are left in awe and wonder with no reference to any one having an experience or being in any kind of state. At that point, there is no reason for fear. There is only the natural experience of being without limits.

And then you realize that the wilderness you see with no end in sight is merely the vast and exciting wilderness of God.

top