Post-course rave

It's Thursday night; I submitted my stories for my course exactly a week ago. As always, when I finish a course of study, I have loads of plans about what I will do when I'm free, but fail to get onto them for at least a week - if at all. This time, my plans were to start selling stuff out of the house in preparation for our move north, but I couldn't muster much enthusiasm. I've done some cleaning up, but mostly have enjoyed reading. Ironically, although the course encouraged reading, I did less and less as the course went on because I was so busy trying to write the stories.

Now, I think that I'd like to write some short stories and put them up on my blog. I'm just not sure though, with the move north and work, when I'll get time in the foreseeable future. There are other things I want to write about too; and the trouble is that I have so many things I want to write about that the ideas make a knot in my head. I'm going to have to work with Baha'u'llah on a strategy for untangling it so that I can actually produce something.

Beneath all that activity is a spiritual current that flows through me concerning the issue of suffering in this world. I realise that there is hardly a day goes by when I am not thinking about it. Perhaps the issue was driven home when I was expelled and, in addition, lost a lot of friends for various complex reasons. The whole experience taught me how alone I was in the world. Around the same time, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and now, looking back after her death, I see that the last decade has been a very lonely and sad one for me.

During this time, I began to notice particularly passages in the writings where Baha'u'llah says things like this:

"Do not grieve over any matter, and be not perplexed at the adversities of this world. God shall send you forth in a station that is, in truth, exalted. For the world, its adornments and finery, shall pass away in less than the blink of an eye. Therefore, exert yourself in what will be everlasting for you in the highest kingdom, so that you will be safeguarded in the worlds of the spirit that revolve around the tree of immortality." Countenace of Love

And this was why I started talking about detachment. Baha'u'llah says here, and in many other places, that we shouldn't focus our attention on the ills of the world but on an eternal spiritual reality that floats beyond suffering and, indeed, all the qualities of this world. Suffering eventually passes away and what lives on is the effort we put in in the world of the spirit.

I find it impossible, though, not to grieve. The feeling came flooding back a couple of days ago (and hasn't completely gone), when I received a letter in the mail informing me that my dentist has been diagnosed with motor neurone disease. I wanted to cry, and still do if I let myself think about it. I also know that Baha'u'llah grieved, despite what he says above. There is one passage where he says he cried so much that his bed was drenched. ("Mine eyes have rained down tears until My bed is drenched" (Summons p132)) So I think his words aren't to be taken literally, for I think it is impossible not to feel sad about things that happen. I understand Baha'u'llah's point to be that we should keep our focus on the eternal and not allow ourselves to get lost on this world's stage by its dramatic forces. The eternal gives the finite a context and that context and its lesson is what we're here to learn.

I had a dream about my mother recently, which helped a lot. The dream was very simple: I watched my mother walk down the hallway of our old house, reading a book and holding a cup of tea. She didn't see me; she was engrossed in the book. Two things about the image were powerful and healing: first, mum could walk - I had not seen her walk for years; and second, she could read - I had not seen her read for years. In seeing her like that, I knew that she was healed from the Alzheimer's - something I needed because it tore my heart out seeing her so incapacitated. The image made me see the impermanence of what happens in this world, just as Baha'u'llah says. It was an image of the life beyond suffering, which he wants us to keep our eyes focused on.