Written and translated from Hebrew by Moriya.

 

Edited by C.C. Saint-Clair and published under Moriya’s patronage.

 

Copyright by Moriya, 2009

 

Let's begin with a Sufi story:

Once upon a time there was a king who enjoyed the company of his trusted friend, a Sufi.

One day the king said: "Look, I love and trust you as much as I love and trust my soul. Please,” he said, looking into the man’s eyes, "I would like to give you a present, so ask whatever you wish, even to the half of my kingdom."

The Sufi replied, "My king, I do not wish for anything."

"Please, ask whatever you want and it'll be granted."

The Sufi said softly, "I thank you, but I honestly do not wish for more than I already have.”

Both men stood their ground until finally the wise man turned and said: "There is a question I would like to ask?"

"But of course,” replied the king.

"Imagine that you have become separated from your men and that you are lost in the desert. There is not one living soul around. High in the sky, the sun is hot on your head. There are no bushes under which to find shelter.

Your tongue feels as dry and dusty as the hair on your camel’s tail.

Then, an apparition appears in front of you and proffers a tumbler of cool water towards you. You reach for it but before releasing the tumbler, the apparition proposes a deal.

A tumbler of cool water for half of your kingdom. My King, would you agree to the deal?"

"Of course, I would!" exclaimed the King.

"So," continued the wise man, "why would I need something that is valued as much as a tumbler of water?"

 

So, what is the message of this story?

The message is that according to how much, at any given moment, we value any one aspect of anything over another, we attach an arbitrary emotional value to this aspect while failing to accept the whole.

 

Look at it this way: if we were in dire straits in a desert, lost and left for dead, most of us would, indeed, be willing to make a deal - any deal - with anyone holding a symbolic cool glass of water to us.

Interestingly, if lost in an arctic blizzard and about to die from hypothermia, what we would most greedily accept from a rescuer would not be a tumbler of cool water but a tumbler of brandy though, clearly, whilst in the dry desert the tumbler of brandy would fail to quench our thirst and might hasten our departure from this earth.

However, we are talking about the same tumbler of cool water - unchanged in its properties - whether it is offered in the context of the desert or the context of a frozen landscape.

Dependant on our need – be it real or imagined - the worth we attach to that tumbler of water is totally arbitrary and entirely of our choosing.

Equally, when we donate to charity clothes that we no longer want, the persons accepting these clothes will attach a value to them where, for us, there was no longer any.

Why, these men and women might even wear this shirt, that skirt, that tie, proudly on Shabbath, at the next Bar Mitzvah they attend, to their next job interview or to their next birthday party.

It can be said that one person’s trash is another one’s treasure.

 

When we value one item over another, be it an object or a human being, we create separation – in doing so, we create disagreement and conflict because things are inseparable in their essence.

Any attempt to attach greater value to one item over another causes an inner friction that expresses itself through an outer conflict, i.e. in violent behavior, be it against others or against the self. This conflict can also express itself in the form of illness or result in an *accident*.

 

Every single conflict recorded in history has sprung from a

value attached to worldly material goods as well as to ideas, notions, emotions and desires. In doing so, we separate them from the whole.

The action/reaction of inner conflict/outer conflict always repeats itself simply because there can never be a firm agreement between people about the worth of any specific thing or that of any specific individual they value, and the prize they are willing to pay for them.

 

Some will spend a fortune on a car. Others will spend a fortune on a painting, on a diamond, on a stamp collection, on a rug or even on another human being. Some prefer not to pay anything for these objects that they, too, value. They prefer to *steal* them while others would not give a thousand shekels to possess any such thing because, for whatever reason, they do not value such objects.

For example, when mere objects, locations and people gain religious significance, they also gain an added value – that of holiness.

Attachment to symbolic holiness leads to conflicts between individuals, wars of religions and war between nations.

 

The real essence of life - the physicality, unity of everything – is inseparable from the whole. No single aspect of it can be altered in any way. The value we attach to anything that has ever been created - from objects to selected individuals, dead or alive - is only as arbitrary as the value attached to the tumbler of water in the opening fable.

Any conflict is the proof that we, humans, are attempting to separate what is whole and inseparable into parts, while it is the natural state of all - conceived as whole - to realign itself back into a preordained wholeness.

 

The stronger the attachment to any element separated from its whole - be it in the name of a god, idealism, patriotism, authoritarianism or liberty - the stronger the eventual counter-reaction will be.

It needs to be understood that all-out battles on any level are always born out of a single-minded personal inner conflict.

All events, all objects are naturally neutral – they just are.

They do not carry any intrinsic values. They are neither good nor bad. They merely exist but we, ego-personas, arbitrarily decide what is to be valued or rejected, what is good and what is bad, according to societal trends, our collective emotional insecurities and the use we make of objects, thoughts and doctrines – personal and public ones alike.

 

Every act intended to ‘push’, to manipulate, in a direction

predetermined by the self, always causes a blow-out at the other end before it settles back into its original wholeness.

Love, on the other hand, is a pure and beautiful emotion – but only as long as we accept our loved ones as they are without trying to mold them to suit our desires and our insecurities.

 

When we peacefully accept our circumstances such as they are, the spontaneous flow of cosmic love energy remains constant, for it replenishes itself spontaneously. The more we share love with others, the more this cosmic energy widens and spreads.

Needless to say, we are not talking here about the simplistic, feel good Hippie flower-power and the New Age propensity for hugging and verbally stating acceptance and love. Neither are we talking about convincing ourselves that we are “doing” love through the simplistic repetition of mantras.

 

When we demand that love, such a frail and beautiful emotion, should be expressed in any particular way in order to satisfy our ego – selfish and insecure by nature – the counter reaction from the loved one is an annoyance that over time often turns into downright hatred, which often leads to the cessation of the spontaneous flow of love, if not to physical separation.

 

It is this negative charge that is transmuted into a karmic ‘blow to the head’ of the perpetrator via yet another inner/outer conflict.

What is a loss, an ‘accident’, bad luck, an act of violence or an illness, if not the materialization of the negative charge?

Take for example the case of an extreme fundamentalist who turned to epicurianism. That sort of erratic imbalanced behavior would create such an energetic kink that the flow of cosmic energy would be severely constricted. This would set the stage for yet another inner/outer conflict.

 

The first reality is that we are souls – souls disguised in our incarnated bodies.

The second reality is that all souls are love and, as such, our true purpose in this lifetime is to love one another unconditionally.

A third reality is that the source of all conflict and enmity is always rooted in our starvation for love and in our inability to satiate it.

 

We, human beings, are a combination of a body and a soul. When only the body needs are sated, the lonely starvation of our soul deepens accordingly and this is where, as a civilization, we err in thinking that satisfying the body, the persona, with more money at the bank, a promotion, more frequent and better sex, more entertainment, a more stimulating life, more exotic food - more and more of what is within material and within our reach - would solve the problem.

 

Instead of eventually feeling satisfied with what we have, we indulge a constant craving for more - as there is always more ‘out there’ that the media are trying to sell us. The more we indulge our base needs, the more our soul’s loneliness and starvation deepen. In time, the persona becomes miserable, emotionally unhealthy and ultimately physically sick.

 

The main problem of our civilization is that we have never

understood the connecting lines that link our actions in the material world to our spiritual deficit and to our emotional stress and physical ailments.

 

When the world came to be, all of creation – minerals, animals, plants, human beings, stars, suns, etc. – was born from primeval matter. The ‘phenomena’ world in which we live is, therefore, a complete world in which nothing can be altered.

Wood cannot become iron. Fish cannot become flora. Each creation has been given to humankind in its complete form. Therefore, there is no possibility of ever changing anything in our outer physical world.

 

Air pollution, greenhouse gases, pollution of the rivers and the seas, the hole in the ozone layer, the melting of the polar caps and toxic waste, just as the side effects of ‘enhanced’ food are the result of scientific ‘advancement’. Scientists take complete matter and alter its properties to invent an improved version of the original pattern.

 

The world could be seen as a huge puzzle in which all pieces are interlocking and each fulfills a function without which the puzzle cannot be whole.

So, although there is a general consensus that the contribution of an individual positioned at the bottom rung of society is minimal, this is a grave mistake.

Without such persons in our midst, the nature of the puzzle would be altered. Their absence, if removed from the equation, would cause a severe imbalance that would affect the whole of society.

It has to be understood that everyone alive here and now is a valid and integral part of our society.

 

Again, we are souls in disguise and the ‘phenomenal’ world in which we live has set us up with all the opportunities we need to reveal our true selves to ourselves by unveiling the mask of the persona - which is the only way to experience inseparability and our personal merging with the infinite wholeness.

 

Let's take the case of a rabbit. A rabbit cannot speak. The best she can do is growl a little because of an inborn inability to shape sounds into words. If we tried to teach a rabbit to speak, even after many years of perseverance, the rabbit’s throat would still not allow her to do more than growl. The rabbit is a complete creature that is finite.

Let’s now return to human beings. When we tell ourselves that we have learned ‘something new’, reality is that we have not truly learnt anything new at all. What we have succeeded in doing is remembering some of what we already knew.

 

As human beings, we are not complete, fixed creatures like the rabbit. We are able to ‘learn’ by internalizing something that, a minute ago, was totally unknown to us. When we “remember”, we are accessing prior knowledge. The ability to learn and to understand means that it is inborn within us and that it is unlimited.

Soul speaks to us through symbols. Understanding these symbols is a must. When we see the world through our eyes, we see pictures formed by a myriad of symbols which our brain analyzes through words.

 

As long as we stay within the picture's framework, we experience living in peaceful harmony with our selves and with each other.

However, the moment we interpret what we see with words, always attributing a higher or a lesser value to one aspect or another, we create separation. Separation fosters friction and friction leads to another conflict.

 

Soul is Love, Truth and Faith. It is therefore in her nature to desire a merging with infinite and eternal wholeness. The ego-persona, a mere tool, is a mechanical system intended to serve the soul by being a channel between her and the body, so that our soul can look at the world through eyes that see union and unconditional Love.

 

Each one of us is always dealt the cards we need in order to succeed in this difficult mission but all our difficulties in life spring from our refusal to accept our soul as our master and from our resistance to amend what needs to be amended. They are compounded by our doggedness to flow in a direction that is opposite to that of Life's flow – the unilateral direction of separation.

 

When a soul is reincarnated as a newborn within a specific family, it is the signal for the parents that the time has come for them to overcome all petty personal conflicts to clear the channel between their persona and their inner self - not to be hypnotized by their own persona’s needs and fears - not react mechanically to every one of

life’s prickly moments.

 

The arrival of a newborn soul in their lives is the signal that the time has come for these adults to learn about their true selves by observing their own reactions while refraining from interfering.

The arrival of a newborn is the signal to surrender to what-is, to accept holistically and to give unconditionally. The more the parents will be able to give, particularly when things become messy and difficult, the more their acceptance will grow, the more their energy will be renewed and the more they will evolve and rise up the ladder of spirituality.