Dreams… or Reality for the Soul

4 minute read

Many of us dream of a better life and of material and professional fulfilment that sometimes appears impossible to reach.

Others dream of fulfilment within the soul, of finding a kindred soul and creating a family with the right person, or still more, with the person they love.

A few people "dream" with their eyes open and in full awareness of an inner life like the one known by those who withdraw into the wilderness. At times, they are tempted to renounce the illusions of this world and the dream of the filthy and corrupt society in which we live, devoting themselves entirely to the lived experience of inner life because it alone soothes the soul.

Their "dream" appears illusory and far too immaterial to those who neither understand nor have known such lived experience. Most of us do not truly believe in the soul, God, religion or the inner world.

We say we believe because belief is fashionable, because we wish to respect tradition, because older people insist upon it, or because when hardship arrives, the soul can find peace nowhere else and hope finds no escape except through faith.

We regard the world of people gifted with grace and soothed by Divine Love - the Holy Spirit - as an illusion and believe them mad. They perceive the world in which we live in precisely the same way.

For them, our society and way of life are illusions because we move along life's waves unconscious and sleepwalking. When a few of us awaken, we understand how right they were and how much time we wasted, perhaps even countless lifetimes, before light descended upon our lives.

Few were born with the gift of living in this mad world from birth until death while remaining devoted to the lived experience of divine love, usually through a religious path.

Most of those who awakened withdrew completely from the world at some point in their lives. They followed particular practices and prayers, gained complete control over body and desire, and reached states and experiences that appear taken from science-fiction films.

After enlightenment, most returned to the world and helped other souls searching for the inner realm, so that those souls too could be freed from enslavement to this world's existence.

Reality therefore lies somewhere between the two, because both worlds are real. One is less tangible and hidden directly beneath our noses, within us.

What I have repeatedly discussed and described in Hearts of Love is the chance given to those of us who remain asleep: the chance to experience, here and now, what awakened beings liberated from this world have experienced and continue to experience.

This may be difficult to understand and accept, especially because for millennia, or perhaps aeons, the practice existed only at the religious level and within a restricted circle.

The world has now advanced greatly, although it sleeps as deeply as before. Thought has evolved because knowledge is accessible to everyone in this information age.

Anyone who has known and lived even one moment of love can understand and accept that the divine is reflected in the lived experience of love between a man and a woman. It is the most advanced lived experience we can have within this "world".

I will not enter into details or controversy by analysing and demonstrating why. Only when you truly love can you understand this lived experience and accept the divine within the lived experience of it.

Blessed are those who withdraw from the world, but more blessed are those who endure within it.

On Humility: Editorial Summary of the Quoted Dialogue

The Romanian original continues with an extended dialogue with Father Arsenie Papacioc. Its teaching is presented here in faithful summary.

Father Arsenie describes humility as the art that returns a person to the self and teaches them to remain there without pride. For him, the Incarnation is the supreme act of humility: God accepts human form in answer to the pride through which Lucifer sought divine identity.

Humility, he argues, is the only force capable of liberating a soul, a people and ultimately the whole of Creation. To remain beside Christ, the Christian must share His humility rather than merely perform an outward imitation of it.

He illustrates this with a story about a devoted Christian who knocks at Christ's door and identifies himself as one who loves Him. The door remains closed. Only after the man enters genuine humility and returns saying that the one outside is Christ Himself does the door open, because the believer has acquired the same identity through grace.

Turning to prayer, Father Arsenie says that people discuss it too much when it should be practised. Formal prayers have value, especially as discipline, but they must not become the whole of spiritual life or allow a person to believe the heart's obligation has ended when the appointed words are finished.

The essence of prayer is a continuous presence of the heart, an unbroken state of love and relationship with God. Deep silence can be deep prayer, and deep prayer becomes deep silence.

Every moment may become a time of prayer, and every sigh can be directed from the depths towards God. What matters is not an intellectually sharpened mind, but a clean heart continuously turned towards Him.

Unceasing prayer is possible, to some degree, for everyone. The person who desires it must stop turning it into theory, enter silence and pray. This brings clarity and release from temptation because it calls upon the Master of heaven and earth.

Father Arsenie closes by urging people to remember that God governs and protects human life, to remain close to the Church, to practise the prayer of the mind within the heart wherever hardship finds them, not to lose courage and, above all, to love deeply.

First published in Romanian on 8 June 2010. This English translation preserves the perspective of that period.

Original Romanian article: Vise... sau realitate pentru suflet.