Keeping the Heart Wide Open in Hell

Separation feels like hell. Connection feels like heaven. Relevance fosters connection. Nothing needs to be done.

“He’s looking at us,” said Jagjot. He pointed at a chai-colored monkey, a bandar, crossing the winding mountain highway. The monkey perched himself on the metal railing next to my car window and looked at me with a complete calmness. His eyes were copper-colored. I had been warned not to look at monkeys in the eye, but there was nothing but calm there that I could see. The leftover pyaz parantha wrapped in foil in the back seat came to my mind. Without thinking, I gave it to the bandar. I watched him eat with eagerness. I noticed his right-side jawbone and teeth had been broken and healed. I asked Jagjot if he thought the monkey had been hit by a car. Jagjot thought for a moment, then responded in his truthful way that it was more likely that the monkey had survived a fight with his own species. “They can be brutal creatures,” he said. Something resonated in those words, which I saw reflected in the monkey’s facial marks. I found myself weeping, looking into the monkey’s face with unbearable compassion as he pulled apart the parantha with his humanlike hands, one small bite at a time. In that moment, there was no thought in me at all. Such sheer witnessing is what I can only describe as being in the shattering light of God’s love for all others. My heart simply ached, without any reason. Then it passed as my awareness widened to see the green mountains beyond.

"If you are going to be free, your freedom means that you do not avert your eyes from anything, in yourself or in anyone else. Freedom means to be a free awareness with what is. No aversion no attachment. They say that for a saint, all the world are their children and you feel the suffering of another person the same way you would as if it was your own child. It’s almost unbearable." — Ram Dass

We on the pathless path know our own humanity, which is not separate from what the experience of suffering feels like. We may have known heartache, grief, loss, disease, poverty, addictions of all kinds, cold, heat, war, hunger, rejection, anger, and many other kinds of suffering. As Ram Dass described it, we can look around and see a sea of suffering.

We intimately know what suffering is, and we are still here. We are each unfolding, together in essence. We are in no way alone in this great, sometimes beautiful, and oftentimes horrific journey. We have seen suffering and experienced it ourselves firsthand; we have all witnessed it happening in our loved ones, and we have all seen it in others through media images or with our own eyes. We see it nearby and in others around the world.

Those of us who have the capacity to feel others' pain are drawn to the spiritual journey. It calls to the brokenhearted, perhaps because the spiritual journey can balance the suffering that seems to be everywhere around us, perceived by our human senses. We see news footage of suffering, we hear animals fighting to the death in the nighttime, we smell the exhaust of a traffic jam, we taste the blood in our mouth after accidentally biting our own tongue. We feel our hearts breaking, too.

I regard looking at humanity’s suffering and pain as a unique gift from God. I see it as how to love, unconditionally. I feel that we can remain present in the face of unbearable pain in another. This can happen spontaneously on the journey, and it indicates something within us is open: the Heart. We become nearly unshakeable. And I have seen how God uses this amazing instrument to share the message that peace is always reachable here and now, no matter what.

God calls us to be His peace in front of others. Not as an act, but as the clear light of Awareness. There is no separate light in one that is not dwelling in another. I cannot see that there is an “other.” There is only one existence, which is love. I regard God as this most pure kind of love. I feel that we are here to be loved by God. We are here to be love, to receive love, and to love.

We each have the capacity to be a channel for the loving presence that offers compassion towards a person who stands in front of you, expressing their suffering. Who can say they do not know the truth that we are all one, and that separation feels like hell? Connection feels like heaven. Presence fosters connection. Nothing needs to be done. Just be there for another who is in pain. Just be there, that's it. It is not necessary to shield your own heart in front of another who is exposing their suffering to the light of day. The face of the Beloved can be seen in their suffering, too.

That is the work: being aware, even in the face of shifting apparent horrors of human suffering. I regard this as a graceful human function given to humanity by God to be able to embody compassion while we share this uncertain dream. The faith that comes from personal experience is how we know that suffering is not what we are. This is the wisdom of the Heart, as I see it.

Why do we believe crying to be a flaw? Or a sign of so-called weakness? I cannot see it this way. Crying is an expression of spontaneous humanity. Indeed, it is said that Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi cried upon hearing the news of his friend's passing, and that Neem Karoli Baba is said to have cried when he saw his student in pain. I cannot conceive that there is a thing wrong with crying on the spiritual journey. One who cries knows that the shell that breaks open reveals softness within. When held up to the sun, the cracks in a clay pot reveal the light shining through. To be cracked open by witnessing the suffering in another is to have the ability to not close one's heart towards humanity, to which we belong. Humanity is not being separate from God's love, no matter what is happening.

Surely, we have tried walling off ourselves from our own suffering and the suffering of others. It didn’t work because we have glimpsed the Supreme Love of God in our own experiences. Shutting down felt like self-exile in the desert, so we returned to the Heart.

I see us as bold, divine instruments of peace in this world, not self-protective creatures. Show us the suffering, and we will be there. Still, we go on. That balance of compassion is alive in you and me. This is our work, here and now. To walk with each other through the so-named valley of the shadows, through the Dark Night(s) of the Soul. We are here to do God’s will, to lose our selves to the Beloved, to be in truthful company to each other on the journey home. God balances it like this, so that not all of us are suffering at the same time. We can be there for one another this way, perfectly balanced, in the hands of the Great I Am-ness. Haven’t you seen that is so in your own life? True, happiness and suffering are expressed pervasively in humanity, but we are able to bear the changes and move on. Isn’t it so?

We have heard the story of Christ, who, while being tortured to death, cried out that he felt forsaken by God before surrendering to the Heavenly Father. Buddha described existence as suffering, yet he is seen to wear a subtle smile on his lips. There can be no way for the creation itself (us) to understand God's plan, which apparently includes suffering. But we can have faith through personal experiences of seeing, over time, how suffering leads us each to our own illuminating insights, great insights. And suffering shall pass, always. In this, there can be total faith. Those who showed self-mastery had such faith in themselves as instruments of God’s mysterious will and ceaseless compassion.

Faith, as I see it, is not synonymous with belief; it is not blind. It is experienced firsthand, and then it is inwardly known. And, I say: thank God we have the capacity to have faith in this world full of suffering. Sometimes, we feel it is all too unbearable. This is when faith is our saving grace, our Godly touchstone. We know suffering, and we know it does not last. We know it is unreal because it is temporary. We know that only love is real, and that we are not alone in this suffering. God has given us a lifetime to get beyond categories, definitions, and limitations of belief. Because you are the Source, you are God, you are love itself. That's why we can bear it. That's where our self-inquiry, our satsang, our creativity, or our practices may help us, when we forget that we are the whole universe, and that we are endlessly beloved.

I regard all living beings as one with the Beloved. I disregard hierarchy, which I find serves no good purpose but only separates us from God’s loving presence. Which, in my regard, is why we on the spiritual path are unable to shut down our humanity anymore, even in the face of a seeming hell. No longer turning away, we are finally free from chasing the mirage of separateness, which was never there to begin with. The illusion is finished. There is the peace that passes understanding. It lives in the world through each compassionate being on the journey, through it all.

With love,

Jackie