The following is an excerpt from Lark Syrris' Book, Discovering Super-Natural Love.
The Eastern Indian greeting of Namaste has become popular in the West. I first encountered it at the end of a yoga class. The instructor explained the word had its roots in the ancient Sanskrit word meaning “to bow down to you." The Namaste greeting involves pressing both palms of your hands together, placing them on your heart, and slightly bowing your head as you speak, “Namaste.” Our yoga instructor further explained that the whole of the gesture means more than just bowing. It is a way to express, “The Divine in me honors the Divine in you.”
To be greeted in such a way is to feel at once humbled and honored. Just thinking about the intention and meaning of Namaste touches me in the same way as a heart-felt prayer. I find it to be a beautiful reminder that we all carry within us a divine spark. To greet people in this manner is to reveal your intention to connect with them on a deeply spiritual level, soul to soul. Namaste elevates us and humbles us at the same time because we are reminded we both have the divine within us, and neither of us is superior or inferior to the other.
I have learned since that some of the ancient Eastern Indian religions teach that each of us is the one and only God who through creation is exploring the many aspects and possibilities of its nature. According to this teaching, to see ourselves as separate from each other is to forget our divine identity. It is to forget that we are God who is experiencing life in our current forms that may appear separate but are actually expressions of the same God. Perhaps the best analogy is the actor who enjoys playing different characters in different plays, but he is still the same person, the actor, learning different ways to express ideas and telling different stories. In the process of playing the different roles, sometimes the hero, other times the villain or the comical character, the actor learns a great deal about his own different dimensions in his personality and what he likes or dislikes and what he might want to change about himself or how he might make improvements in his creations.
For many Westerners, I imagine this is a mind-blowing concept, especially for those who believe the opposite—that we are all sinners, and God is an external father figure who punishes those who are bad and rewards those who are good. To believe we are actually all the same God playing different roles, one must come to the conclusion that the idea of good and evil is false. According to this idea, there are no real good guys or bad guys, no heroes or villains, no saints, and no devils. There is only God, and we are all God merely experimenting with different personas and expressing ourselves in a variety of forms through our creations.
How would the idea that we are all the same God be experienced in this world? I suppose the God in me must be in agreement with the same God in you to act out whatever roles we are playing together on our shared life stage. Perhaps Shakespeare was more insightful than even he understood when he wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
The only problem with accepting this belief, it seems to me, is although our characters may not be real on this life stage, the pain we suffer when we are injured or ill feels very real. Are we a God who sometimes chooses to experience this pain? Jesus, who, as the story goes, could have called upon an army of angels to rescue him from capture, chose instead to allow himself to suffer crucifixion. The early saints and apostles chose to suffer too. Like Socrates, they would not surrender their convictions to save their lives and chose to allow their enemies to torture and murder them. So, are we a God who bears the cross of the sufferer and at the same time plays the role of the tyrant who tortures himself?
How could this be? Why would anyone choose to suffer? And what about the children? It cannot be right thinking to assume they would choose to suffer. But, what if children are God as much as adults? It is mind boggling just to consider this.
In his book, Journey of Souls: Case Studies of Lives Between Lives, Michael Newton, explores the possibility that when we exist as pure energy in the afterlife, we plan out our next life with the help of other souls who are wise counselors. We predestine ourselves, and, sometimes, for the sake of growing stronger and wiser, or for the sake of helping other souls to advance in their spiritual growth, some of us freely choose to suffer in the next life, in essence, to play the role of the victim, child or adult, for the ultimate benefit of improving our own or another’s understanding of our divine self. Maybe the one who chooses to suffer needs to learn about the importance of compassion, for example. Or maybe the one who chooses to be the brutal tyrant needs to learn that to live by the sword is to die by the sword. Maybe those who choose to be excessively wealthy need to learn that money really does not buy happiness, and so on.
Though Newton does not explicitly explore the idea that we are all the same God in this book, he does explore the idea that we each have a divine soul within us that is learning and growing from many lifetimes of experience and freely choosing to do so, even at the price of enduring great pain in the process. To accept Newton’s view, one must first accept the premise of reincarnation.
Regardless, I find it comforting to believe that we all have at least a part of the divine and loving universal energy within us, despite the many roles we might play on this Earth stage. I also like to believe that the more we see this divine spark within ourselves and others, and the more we make the effort to live soul-to-soul, as opposed to ego-to-ego, the happier we will ultimately be. Personally, I cannot imagine myself choosing to suffer. Indeed, I choose every day to make an effort to be happy and to help others to reduce their suffering. However, I acknowledge there have been many more advanced and greater souls than mine who, for the greater good, had chosen to suffer, and I don’t mind saying they are most likely much closer to God than I.
Photo Credit: Benn McGuinness
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