Childhood Experiences 3

The other incident in primary school occurred after an intense discussion at school about the Holocaust. Most of the children in my class had lost family members in the camps. At the same time, in the evenings on television were replays of newsreels about the camps and the war. I would watch these with my father. I was walking home from school feeling quite depressed when I felt a slight “tugging” of my mind by a spirit being. My response was “Go away, go away!” What this being was telling me was below my conscious awareness but close enough to it that I could form this reaction to it. I was walking at a place where there was a sheer drop to my left that was a lightwell for basement windows. I said, “I will throw myself down there if you don’t leave me alone!” I kept walking. At the next corner I felt a strong force push me against a building. That got my attention. I was no longer resisting. I heard the words, “It’s all a movie.” I walked the rest of the way home feeling very weird indeed. My mind was unable to focus in the normal way and my body felt strange as well. I’m afraid I misunderstood the message. I thought I could pretend to be in my own movie starring myself instead of realizing that the events of this world are a mere acting out of our own aversions and desires and that we can wake up from that. The following quote from Swami Yogananda expresses this much more eloquently:

First World War was still being waged in the West; the newsreel presented the carnage with such realism that I left the theater with a troubled heart. “Lord,” I prayed, “why dost Thou permit such suffering?” To my intense surprise, an instant answer came in the form of a vision of the actual European battlefields. The scenes, filled with the dead and dying, far surpassed in ferocity any representation of the newsreel. “Look intently!” A gentle Voice spoke to my inner consciousness. “You will see that these scenes now being enacted in France are nothing but a play of chiaroscuro. They are the cosmic motion picture, as real and as unreal as the theater newsreel you have just seen — a play within a play.” My heart was still not comforted. The Divine Voice went on: “Creation is light and shadow both, else no picture is possible. The good and evil of maya must ever alternate in supremacy. If joy were ceaseless here in this world, would man ever desire another? Without suffering, he scarcely cares to recall that he has forsaken his eternal home. Pain is a prod to remembrance. The way of escape is through wisdom. The tragedy of death is unreal; those who shudder at it are like an ignorant actor who dies of fright on the stage when nothing more has been fired at him than a blank cartridge. My sons are children of light; they will not sleep forever in delusion.”

Yogananda, Paramahansa. Autobiography of a Yogi (Self-Realization Fellowship) (p. 307). Self-Realization Fellowship. Kindle Edition.

Ekhart Tolle states that cataclysmic events in our lives create an opportunity to break through our clinging of a self-identity based on relationships to others or to things, beyond that to a connection with the inner peace that is the ground of our being. “The world is here for you to experience things going wrong.” (See his talk on You Tube “Reality is Beyond Thought”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBISYSQjpUg )

I must admit my own continuing reluctance to view pain and suffering as “positive” forces for change but I realize they can be. The following prayer found at Ravensbruck death camp where 92,000 women and children died, many in horrific “scientific” experiments, is a great inspiration to me. It was scrawled on wrapping paper near a dead child.

“Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will also those of ill will. But do not only remember the suffering they have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have brought, thanks to this suffering--our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, the courage, the generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this. And when they come to judgment, let all the fruits we have borne be their forgiveness. Amen”