There is Always Light

Helen Keller lived most of her life in physical darkness. She was deaf and blind, and only learned to communicate with the help of her teacher, Anne Sullivan. Yet, despite the restrictions she faced, Helen found the light of consciousness within her.

In Keller’s book, Light in My Darkness, she wrote:

As I wander through the dark, encountering difficulties, I am aware of encouraging voices that murmur from the spirit realm. I sense a holy passion pouring down from the springs of Infinity. I thrill to music that beats with the pulses of God. Bound to suns and planets by invisible cords, I feel the flame of eternity in my soul. Here, in the midst of the everyday air, I sense the rush of ethereal rains. I am conscious of the splendor that binds all things of earth to all things of heaven. Immured by silence and darkness, I possess the light which shall give me vision a thousandfold — when death sets me free.

In an earlier book, The World I Live In, she wrote:

There is in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful, teachableness to what is tangible. If this is granted, it follows that this Absolute is not imperfect, incomplete, partial. … Thus deafness and blindness do not exist in the immaterial mind, which is philosophically the real world, but are banished with the perishable material senses. Reality, of which visible things are the symbol, shines forth before my mind. While I walk about my chamber with unsteady steps, my spirit sweeps skyward on eagle wings and looks out with unquenchable vision upon the world of eternal beauty.

In these passages, Keller is expressing the ineffable spirit that is ever-present and always shining. Even in darkness and silence, this revelation unfolded in her. Instead of living in despair over her own condition and allowing herself to be buried by suffering, she did not accept her limitations and instead found light.

Ineffable Spirit

Keller extended herself beyond despairing over Why is this happening to me? and instead served the world. She devoted much of her energy to helping blind and deaf people live fuller lives, but in a higher sense, she served the same ineffable, indestructible force that is present in every single one of us.

I use her story to illustrate that one’s experience in life is not dependent on conditions. We each think our problems are special. But what if we let go of Why is this happening to me? What if we surrendered our mental and emotional preoccupations and decided to serve and give back to life?

Prashanti Devi's statement, “I want to be lived” is another way to express this. She is saying, “I want to get out of the way, to live as that supreme, ineffable spirit, and have my life be an expression of that light.”

We tend to wallow in what we perceive to be our misfortune — on the things we didn’t get, things we got but didn’t want, and so on, ad infinitum. The willingness to be lived is the willingness to surrender to the indestructible force that is expressing our life without dissecting and analyzing it or being angry because things do not look the way we were expecting. If we can open to what life is giving us, we find the incredible gift of unconditional freedom. When faced with difficulty, instead of taking the stance life took something from me, we must understand that everything we encounter should be a reason to open and grow.

The Pathway to Freedom

Our sādhana is the pathway to freedom, allowing us to rise above the tendency to focus only on ourselves and what we are lacking, and instead fully enjoy the life we have been given. Sādhana brings us to an authentic inquiry in which we discover that life is the extraordinary, unimaginable expression of the potentiality of pure Consciousness. Nothing — no condition, loss, or gain — can diminish this. And if you look for this discovery sooner rather than later, you will find it sooner.

If we look for the ineffable where it is, we will find that it is ever-present. Yet if we allow ourselves to live in our own misunderstanding, we only reinforce that limited experience. The tendency to perpetuate our misunderstanding of life based on our experience up to now is driven by the very misunderstanding we seek to grow beyond.

It is only when we engage life from a different place in ourselves that we have a different experience from the one we’ve had before. When we stop perpetuating the misunderstanding, we can let ourselves be lived. In reality, we are already being lived, and experiencing this is true freedom.

There’s a wonderful word that sums up this concept: anugraha, which is the unfolding of the ineffable Self. This is another way of describing śaktipāta, the descent of grace: God awakening to Himself within us. I encourage you to discover that indestructible force in yourself and then be willing to nourish and cultivate it. Don’t let your preoccupation with your challenges strangle the new growth that is taking place in you. Be like Helen Keller and rise above whatever you face in life. This requires conscious discipline, but there is no spiritual freedom without it. Don’t choose anything else.