The Glorious Future of Every Soul

If we want to find God, it is important that we strive to look at everything differently from how we are accustomed to doing. New insight will of course come to us as we progress on the path, but it would help us from the start if we made an effort to adopt those attitudes which will come to us more naturally in time, and ever more clearly as the veils of maya drop away, one by one, from our gaze.

How does the enlightened soul view life?

1. We shall no longer think of things from a center of ego-consciousness. We shall no longer refer everything, or even anything, back to ourselves, unless the reference belongs to a completely impersonal view of reality.

To give an example: a good singer-saint may be aware that he has sung well, but he will never think, “It is I who have sung well.” He will think, rather, “God sang His beauty through me.” That is to say, he will be well aware – perhaps even more so than most people – of the beauty itself. But he will never think of himself as the producer of that beauty. He will understand that God alone, in everything, was and ever is the Doer.

2. For another thing, he will begin to view everything and everyone in terms of the divine consciousness residing at the center of all things. When I relate to other people from my own center to their centers, instead of from my ego to theirs, I find myself feeling toward them in a different way altogether. I understand them better, and I also find that I evoke a new reaction in them. Even strangers are more likely to look upon me as their own, and somehow even to know me as their friend.

3. Best of all, perhaps, when I ponder the vast drama that is life, it all now seems so utterly obvious! Of course what we all want is eternally the same: never money; not power; not the prideful strut of self-importance; not the humble respect and deference of others. What all of us want is, simply, Bliss. It was bliss alone we were seeking in all those lesser fulfillments.

4. I see all life, now, as a dream. Such, indeed, is its fundamental “reality.” The entire cosmos is God’s dream. Nothing is real except in His consciousness. Living in that thought, even without the final realization of its truth, helps me to perceive with conviction that this is all I am, and all life itself is.

5. I see someone fulfilling some ambition and think, “That is how it will be, when I find God! It will be a release and relaxation from all striving – but it will be eternal. In God, fulfillment itself is final, complete, and eternal!”

6. I see two human lovers united joyfully at last, perhaps after numerous trials, and I think, “Yes, that is what will happen, in God: divine unity in the very perfection, for all eternity, of every desire for love!”

7. If I see people suffering, or weeping in the pain of bereavement or of some other disaster, or over some unexpected grief, I think, “How wonderful it will be for them at last, when they realize that all this was only a dream!” And I long to help them to see it as such, indeed – to show them not merely how to escape their present suffering – but how to escape every possibility of ever suffering again.

8. The more one learns to see things in an impersonal and divine way – and this has to be God’s view; the more one realizes that the greatest service one can render anyone is the knowledge of one’s own divine, inner Self, which through eternity, has been and ever shall be one’s sole reality.

9. Trying to see things with divine vision means contemplating the vastness of the universe and telling oneself, “At my own deepest center I am in touch with it all. I am that! Whatever happens in the most distant galaxy happens, in some way, also to me!”

10. It means to see life’s countless joys and sorrows, and to think, “How wonderful is this drama, that after all the suspense, uncertainty, and tragedy man endures, it will all end in a way so supremely and utterly satisfying! There is no other story even imaginably comparable to the one which God has written for every one of us!”

And so we should view birth, life, death, merry comings together and tearful partings, laughter of joy and sighs of sadness, and through all of them let our hearts soar upward in song, knowing that all of it has been for a supremely good end. There is a wonderful purpose to life! Everything we do, therefore, should be a song of unceasing gratitude and bliss.