Why?

There are times in everyone's life when he or she feels compelled to ask, "Why?" At such times some turn to Spirit for an answer. It is probably true that the great majority of us who engage in spiritual practices first embarked on the Path in search of an answer to some question that ultimately resolves into "why?" Those questions include "Why am I here", "Why do I have these feelings," and the granddaddy of all, "Why did this happen to me?"

Eventually we realize that the question "why" belongs to our human side, to the mind and the small self. It is the mind that sees events happening in the world and needs to understand their causes. Only the mind is attached to concepts of causation and its implicit corollary, fairness. It is the mind that asks, "How can God/Spirit/the Universe do this to me," and that believes "goodness" should be rewarded, or that the Universe is an orderly place in which individual circumstances can or should be correlated with individual behavior.

The mind, which is supposedly the rational part of us, maintains these beliefs in the face of all experiential evidence to the contrary. We see "bad" things happening to "good" people, and vice versa, every day. We all do our very best to be "good" people yet sometimes "bad" things happen to us. We even think these "bad" things are punishment for us not being "good" enough. All this is due to the mind's need to connect every event with a cause that can be understood by the narrow logic the mind has developed, and with its corresponding need to judge persons and events as "good" and "bad".

When united with Spirit in meditation, it is possible to realize that separateness, good and bad, causation, and even time itself are artifacts of the mind and the physical universe. What we perceive as our individual selves and our lives are no more separate from Spirit than waves are separate from the ocean. There can be no good and bad souls where all souls are merged in Spirit. From the perspective of Spirit as the unified field of loving energy spanning all dimensions, individual events in the physical universe lose their significance and lines of causality fade. The foreground loses focus and eventually is seen as unreal against the background of Spirit. Nothing but isness remains. Then all questions meet their answers and are annihilated in the joy of unification with All That Is.

And so it is.

Namaste!