by Maurie D. Pressman, M.D.
Welcoming God into the Lives We Live
Sustaining the Superconscious demands practice - but it grows with each repetition.
I have a dear friend, an author, who has suffered a series of strokes. Her mind is clear, but she is unable to write, hardly able to care for herself -- and she is in pain. She is in the kind of pain that makes her pray for the release of transcendence through death. But she has learned how to raise her mind onto the upper planes of quietude and Superconsciousness. By doing this, she goes beyond her body and enters a state of joyous surrender, a kind of bliss, which releases her from the body.
To
sustain it demands practice, and the quietude of bliss within her (which
comes only in flashes and only for a moment) will grow with each repetition,
becoming longer in duration and more and more frequent. It will be that
she will live there longer and longer and ultimately forever. And so
it can be with us.
There is another, a patient of mine, who is a very accomplished businessman.
In the middle of a much-harried visit to Florida, he took fifteen minutes
for meditation. In a moment he was vaulted to a stratosphere from which
he looked down and with amusement as he reviewed the entire struggle
in which he was engaged. After that, he carried on in a more flowing
way, without the "oh-so-serious concern" about how it would
all turn out. During that fifteen minutes, he had experienced a beautiful
release of pleasure, and saw a joyous beauty in all the world which
surrounded him. He was in the Superconscious, the Supermind, which resides
both within and above. It was the Supermind to which he had surrendered.
These, the times of surrender, are the occasions when the best is produced:
the ice-skater who lets the music flow through, unselfconsciously getting
concern out of the way. The skater is lifted high above, and directed
from On-High, and one can feel the beauty of the movement while joining
souls with the skater.
Shakespeare, in the midst of his many inspired moments, saw this, and
lived up there, I believe. It was perhaps with hidden amusement that
he described all the world as a stage, and we as but actors.
And so, in all of these instances, there is a recognition of and a surrender
to the Mind beyond mind, the Mind above mind, the Mind which reaches
ever upward to join with God, in surrender to God -- to live in consonance
with and by the hand of God.
How can we incorporate this in our day-to-day character? By reminding
ourselves at every moment, that the ego is a small and separate thing
which gets in the way of joining with and flowing with the Supermind
that we are.
There are impediments: we call them neuroses. A personal example: I,
having had many realizations during the silence of meditation, have
so often later felt despair, thinking, "These meditations are small;
they are only mine." I have been the victim of my own neurosis,
which nurtured self-doubts grown from a deeply ingrained sense of inferiority.
This neurotic feeling is itself a separation from God. It is a claim
of the ego, making it and me, feel not good enough, separate, and overly
responsible, saying "I should be doing more," instead of letting
it be done as I let myself join in service to the Above.
As
another example, my patient the businessman would travel through life
so sadly, in spite of so many accomplishments, in spite of a great and
good heart. The least lack of accomplishment, or the least separation
from his ideal of the perfect performance, brought on a crushing sense
of guilt, a feeling of failure, relentless self-criticism -- all of
which separated him from the joyous field he had witnessed, and from
the realization of the accomplishments of his great love. His neurosis
was inherited from early training at the hands of a very critical father
-- and it remained into his adult years. Insofar as he crushed himself
with a sense of failure, he squandered his energy, and stood separately
away from surrender to the All, away from realizing the greatness of
his so many accomplishments.
The lady, the author who was able to lift her consciousness in spite
of her strokes, had lived a life of bristling separateness from people.
But now, she was joined with not only her higher consciousness, the
mind above, but also with a coterie of friends who loved her and whom
she loved. They were friends who served her as she served them with
the beauty of her teaching, and a closeness of heart.
With attention to how the voice of ego misleads us, awareness that we are so much more than that, and making a point of remembering to practice aligning ourselves with the Supermind which is truly an inseparable part of ourselves, we can increase our peace and comfort with the life we lead.
Maurie D. Pressman, M.D. is the author of Enter the Supermind and
co-author (with Patricia Joudry) of Twin Souls: A Guide to Finding Your
True Spiritual Partner.
Dr. Pressman is Emeritus Chairman of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Temple University Health Sciences Center. He is Medical Director at the Center for Psychiatric Wellness, clinics that operate in Philadelphia and Haddonfield, N.J. These clinics bridge traditional and spiritual psychotherapy. Dr. Pressman can be reached at 200 Locust Street, Philadelphia, PA 19106; telephone 215-922-0204; fax 215-922-3008; Email: mauriedavid@earthlink.net; web: www.mauriepressman.com.
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