Deceiving Light
Bright lights, cheering, chanting, dressed in a thick robe, a guru on stage. Mesmerizing words intricately sewed together, throw rose petals at you, a comforting performance part of what the job entails.
In return the guru on stage receives more gratification, a sense of superiority, financial gain and more importantly would do anything to ensure you stay captivated, engaged and loyal. The term guru is seen as a spiritual guide, expert or master and always remains above the people who he/she serves in order to provide them with a sense of illusive and abundant offering of wisdom, guidance and hope.
Man is hopeless. In his or her helpless attempts to find a path in life, the source of inspiration may come in the most vulnerable of moments. When we think we are having a breakdown, we have a breakthrough. When the knives of pain cut deep through our heart, we know our wound will run deep. We know that we may not recover. But we seek hope, we seek refuge and we seek a distraction that will keep our brain busy and off the pain we feel inside. Therefore, the concept of a comforting guide is sometimes essential to our survival. Yet between the sheets of our suffering, there lies a lily. The you that you have abandoned or neglected and you spend a lifetime searching for her because her scent was something that calls onto you constantly. Its fragrance comes out when you’re interacting genuinely with others or when you’re loving others and making art. She desperately seeks for your return and pleads for you to come home.
In the space of hopelessness, the one within is lost and so you go on a quest to find her by obtaining external wisdom and knowledge in a cult like spiritual practices. You make encounters with guides, chanters, healers, crystal merchants and the likes who seem to deflect the light of truth only to sell you a counterfeit spirituality. Could they truly help you find her or would you find her in the vast ocean of the self that is waiting for you to open the gate so that it can flow through you? All it needs is a simple acknowledgement from your end that you are worthy of being yourself. That you are at the shore of safety and that trauma no matter how severe and conflicted can reconcile itself in the presence of truth only to allow your inner self to grow into the person she has always dreamed to be.
There’s a direct line of communication between the realm of truth that lies within you and the wakeful consciousness of your day to day existence. You do not need a guru to have that conversation within. You do not need a guide or a spiritual being to show you the way. This is a place of privilege, of absolute truth and individuality that does not belong to anyone else and you must honor this fact and let no one inside. A place where only you exist and God is the only witness of your transformation.
Come! Look close and gaze deeply into your eyes, see that child? The free-spirited self? the teenager, the young adult, the beautiful or handsome man or woman? They all come together to celebrate you. To hand you the lily that resides inside and let you aromatize the space around you with your true beingness. Enough of the lying and the deception. There must come a time when the truth of your spiritual path will be evident and that you have no choice but to sail away to reach the land of God’s truth.
By Eiman Al Zaabi, Letters from the Desert
