We have lost the power to connect with our internal divinity, with our real nature.
This “disability” is the source of our suffering. A number of myths and false beliefs
fuel the ignorance we are trapped into: one of these false beliefs is that
we are disconnected and separated form each other as human beings.
However, modern physics is telling us that this is an illusion,
that we all come form an undifferentiated source of energy,
and take form and shape in separation as we “manifest” in the relative world,
at this level of creation, in the world of dualities and pairs of opposites.
Everything, at this deceptive level of existence we call reality, has a beginning and an end;
there is joy and sorrow, good and evil, black and white.
In this world, we are bound to feel both pleasure and pain,
because that is the nature of the Manifest creation.
Occasionally, an enlightened master comes along to teach us anew whom we really are,
to make us remember and take us back to our real nature, which is light,
bliss and undifferentiated consciousness. The Spiritual Masters of nearly every tradition
tell us that a human being who realizes his purpose on earth, has known God.
A human body, the Masters say, does not come along that easily.
Do not waste it; do not miss out on the precious opportunity
to enter the path of enlightenment, as this is the purpose of why we are here.
Know yourself, know your Divinity.

Behind this belief of mine that we all suffer, in a way or another, until we enlighten,
I am not sure of why good or innocent people sometimes suffers so brutally.
I don’t have a clear answer, but the perspective that we are here to learn,
that we choose our destinies before incarnating in someone’s uterus, really appeals to me.
The author of a book I recently read (can’t recall her name, but the title was “Embraced by the Light”)
had the magnificent opportunity to die and leave the limitations of her body
and travel through heavens and galaxies, and to experience boundless freedom,
intense bliss, as well as to learn a few things.
For example, she learned from her divine guide (whom she saw as Jesus Christ,
which seems appropriate, having she being raised Catholic), that spirits choose
to reincarnate and they choose their parents, as well as their lives and destinies on earth.
They do so for the purpose of learning and evolution. They do it to “get better” as spiritual beings.
She tells of the spirit that chose to reincarnate as a homeless man in a big city
and to stand right by a spirit friend’s (reincarnated into a busy lawyer), to
teach his friend compassion and love. I really like this interpretation of things.
It is hard to conceive that a spirit can actually choose to be born into an abusive family,
to be beaten up, sexually abused, to be tortured for years, maybe to know the horrors of war or sickness,
because of evolutionary purposes. However, in reading her words,
I had no difficulties in embracing this perspective. It makes much sense to me.
All throughout the years, I found no better answer to brutal pain and suffering than this one, I think.
From my part, I, too, along with millions of others human beings,
have pretty much struggled all my life with anxiety, depression, and severe emotional pain.
I have seen clients with identical issues, struggling to stay afloat, in survival mode.
Why innocent people suffer has been a very important question in my life.

I will share a little story, a brief piece of my life as a spirit on a human journey.
In a certain sense, I guess I am providing my modest piece of supporting evidence
to what I believe to be true.
I do know that God, the Light, is everywhere, literally, truly.
Some of the closest encounters with God happened to me when I was on drugs.
Desperation one day led me to surrender and then to experience the Light of the Divine.
Homeless, filthy, and crazy from using heroin and crank, I was walking to nowhere,
with no purpose but to be seen, silently asking for help in the old neighborhood,
where I went to elementary school, where I had grown up.
I had nothing else to lose but the ill, addicted body I was in.
The devastating sense of emptiness and desperation I was feeling
suddenly gave way to a fullness of the soul. Some soothing, beautiful and brilliant
great presence was walking with me, filling me, embracing me.
The little girl in me felt free and joyful, even if trapped in the weak,
strung out body of a street junkie. While I can experience holes in my memories
(regarding those years) that last months, this memory is as clear to me as if it happened yesterday.
For years, long after these tragic times, I scrambled my brain trying to understand
why was I in such emotional pain all the times. No answer came to me, ever.
Yet, I found something in my meditation practice that I could not get anywhere else.
The peace I found in meditation was not exactly happiness and was not necessarily
an antidote to depression. Rather, it was a powerful mean to go “beyond the pain”,
and find comfort in the experience of transcendence, in the connection with that undifferentiated source
from which we all come.

Know thyself. I am working on it. Thankfully, spiritual seekers like myself, enjoy plenty of illustrious company.
Joseph Campbell, the famous, late mythologist, informed us
-along the same lines of the eastern Rishis (“knower”)-
that we are trapped in the wheel of Samsara, of birth and reincarnation, of life and death:
we are to unchain ours souls and find enlightenment, which will free us from the chain if rebirth,
pain and suffering. Fears and desires are the deceivers,
that which makes this process of unveiling our Inner Knowledge challenging, to say the least.
So, Campbell says, we need to go “through” the gripping illusions of Fears and Desires,
dissolve the Ego, which is fed by it, and surrender to our Real Nature, which is Bliss.
Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual master of our era, after a lifetime of dealing with depression and anxiety,
one night found himself assaulted by intense fears, and became suicidal.
He recounts what happened to him in that life changing moment: After a while, he felt
as if he was caught into a vortex; he heard a voice telling him “resist nothing”
(from his book “The Power of Now”). He then passed out.
When he woke up, he heard a bird singing. He writes he has never heard
such a beautiful sound before. He saw light coming through the door and
thought that there was so much more to light then he had previously believed.
That light was without doubt a representation of the light of God.
He spent the next few months ruptured in intense bliss. He stated that, at one point,
he had no job (he had been a professor at a prestigious university up to then) no home,
no money, nothing that would give him a sense of identity as we commonly intend it.
Yet, he was completely happy. He spent the two years that followed, sitting on the park benches,
bathed in the Bliss of Divine Consciousness.

His message is that we have nothing to “acquire” from outside ourselves,
as we already possess everything we need inside.
Independently from level of intelligence, status, money, social position and health,
we all can enlighten. It has happened to him, and he is sharing
his experience and restored knowledge with the rest of us.

I now have come to experience Reality more and more often.
The more I meditate and bathe in Knowledge and Bliss, my real nature,
the more I grow, the more I want more of it. I am just a beginner in this path of knowledge,
although at times it seems as I have traveled long and far.
I have moments where I doubt everything, where I feel it is just SO HARD,
and I am afraid. But those are just moments, and they, too, pass.
I will continue to meditate, to develop myself, and to serve.
This is my way to deal with pain and suffering, in myself, in my clients, and in my loved ones.
This is the best way I know.