Inner Work

For the week of: October 4, 2004

Subsuming the Personal

When a significant bodily ailment enters our life, we fall under its sway, not only physically — we have no choice in that — but also psychologically, emotionally. The state of our body then dominates our whole inner world. Perhaps this is necessary, as we need to bring our compromised and limited forces to bear on treating the problem and on healing. When we interact with someone who is ailing to that extent, we immediately recognize how totally wrapped up they are in their physical problem. Of course, the same happens to us when it’s our own body’s turn to suffer.

The decisions we make in the face of uncertainty and conflicting motivations can determine the course of our life. We can and usually should seek counsel from friends and others with experience; good advice certainly can help inform our deliberations. But if we let others make our decisions for us, we lose a precious piece of our freedom. No one knows our total situation as well as we do. We can search our own heart for guidance, but typically only find what we put there. So we are left with making a hard choice, one that may seem to be a loser whichever way we go.

Such illness, though, only illumines the shadow of how consumed we normally are by our personal world, by our opinions, desires, needs, failures, successes, habits, plans, grudges, reactions, fears, jealousies, indulgences, and so on ad nauseum. We hardly see beyond our own skin, except for what we want to take from our surroundings. Ultimately, though, our whole self-centered program proves unsatisfying. Yet we hold onto it for fear of losing the only reality we know, for the inability to imagine subsuming our personal agenda into a greater purpose.

But the larger world keeps knocking at our door. First is family, toward whom we properly relate in kindness, concern, and love. Next is society, toward which we must make our constructive contribution, be it through our job or otherwise. But here things can go sour, if we trade our personal egoism for the egoism of a group, be it a nation, a race, a religion, a political party, or a cultural stance. Through exclusivity, xenophobia, exploitation, or group animosity, we extend and multiply our problem from self-centeredness to group-centeredness. Group egoism can enmesh us and block our path to spiritual liberation and love, just as surely as personal egoism.

Can we vote our views and act on our convictions, but the leave the rancor behind? If so, we may turn toward the truly Great Purpose, into Whom we can whole-heartedly subsume our personal purposes, thereby undermining the walls of egoism. This gives us the release from inner divisions, contradictions, and attachments that opens to freedom, to the ability to appreciate and to serve ourselves, our family, our society, our planet, and the one God worshipped by all religions.

In our deepest meditation, in the stillness of the inner silence, we orient ourselves, mind and heart, toward the Greatness beyond that stillness, and surrender the personal for the Divine. Like everything else on the path, this is a practice. We do not expect to get it right the first time, but we continue to work at it, fumbling in the dark, and by doing so our understanding grows. We may even learn to walk, not merely as our own individual self, but in and as the sacred emanation that suffuses the world and everyone in it.

For this week, notice what subsumes your personal agenda, your inner convictions and drives. Explore subsuming the personal into the Divine.

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