As Theo had become a trainer, he asked the Elder to tell him more about that new mission he had been entrusted with:
– How would you address that yatra, the new path the soul has to travel?
The Elder – There are several ways to go through it. The greatest way, the one I consider as the noblest one, is based on Love of and devotion to God, the Supreme Lord. We give Him our heart of light with so much love and truthfulness that the Lord makes it His. Such a grace can happen at any moment during your quest for the Ultimate. When it’s time for that blessed moment, our heart is no longer ours. It belongs to the Lord. It is His, and we are undividedly His. The Lord has definitely settled down there, just like an embassy in a foreign land. We feel honoured and grateful that we now have such a Being within us. At first, we have given Him the key to our hearts. Our love alone has done that work. Then we have realized that the dimension of our hearts had belonged to God perpetually and that we had been mere unfair occupiers. Yet, His Love and great mercy had Him let us believe that we owned that heart and could do with it whatever we liked. Then the Lord had retreated very deep within, in order to give us some room and to wait for us to welcome Him as a liberator.
He asks for nothing. We are already His and have always been His, even though we may have thought otherwise.
At the very beginning of our spiritual childhood, He is very proud of us, as we are taking our first steps to Him and are asking for His help. We are begging for it, forgetting that the Lord was always there. We invite Him to His own house and He plays our game, as He has always done for thousands of years. He is waiting patiently for us to acknowledge His kind and loving Presence, until the blessed day when we realize that this territory was eternally His and when we finally give it to Him. Practically, we have behaved like noisy barbaric invaders. We have fouled that divine space with those disorderly lives of ours, which we have filled with incongruous debris. Our hearts have become sorts of caves where we stored various useless objects in order to fill the void and loneliness we felt within us. And now we happen to realize that the Lord is not only our guest but also the rightful owner, who has let us enjoy that heart we considered as ours.
So, the Lord is triumphantly back. He kindly kept us safe within his royal palace by mandating us as his princely heirs. We thus benefit from all his gifts, while we are living in this castle that he really owns. We are now going to visit with Him the thirteen rooms the castle contains, and as we do this, the Lord will restore and illuminate every single one of these rooms before leaving it to restore the next room. There, He organizes a big love celebration that will illuminate it completely. Through love, God re-conquers within us the territories we had neglected. What had we done, there? We’d better forget about it and focus on his divine presence in the recovered divine spaces. We have become guests of honour, there, and we look forward to every further step of the heart, to every star we cross, until we reach the final stage when our entire being will be his again.
Now, we live in communion with Him, since we are forever lost in Him, in his infinite love. We have forgotten who is who. The only thing we claim is his divine presence and we give Him thanks. We couldn’t care less and be happier about getting lost in Him, because we sincerely hope that we shall never go back to the times when we still believed that our hearts were ours. He was magnanimous enough to let us believe that. But now, we are just thankful for such a divine reunion. Grace is pouring down in our hearts and it keeps expanding there, launching blessings all around us.
The mystical union has been accomplished and we are again what we never ceased to be, we are His own. The sublime love radiating about the four orients of his Divine Being makes us the beneficiaries of His infinite blessings. The recapture of all the territories has begun. In his infinite goodness which he lavishes upon all of us, it is an endless quest for love, within that divine creation of His where all creatures light up again within Him.
Amen.
Having heard that inspired explanation, Theo kept silent respectfully, as he dared not break the vibration of such a sacred moment. Following a long pause during which the Elder seemed to be carried elsewhere, he thanked his master:
– I am infinitely grateful for the moment you have just shared with me.
The Elder stared at Theo and apologized:
– I had forgotten all about you, as I was only with Him. Actually, I did not know any more who we were, ‘you’ and ‘me’ having lost all meaning. In such moments, there is nothing left but His presence: we can no longer differentiate the internal world and the external world, as they even fuse together.
Theo. – Does that mean that everything really merges in God then?
The Elder – There is nothing but Him or, if you prefer, everything is in Him, and He is everything.
Theo. – And what happens when you are back from such an ecstasy?
The Elder – It gets all back to normal. His omnipresent perfume remains and it still impregnates all that is around me.
Theo. – What you are describing is the course of a devotee who practices bakthi-yoga and gets so immersed in God’s love that he/she can’t get out of it. But what happens to the other yogis?
The Elder – Sooner or later, they will have an access to God, to the Self. But some are not determined yet. Though they are part of the rays leading to the sun, they have not yet become aware of the meaning of their lives.
Theo. – A shock in their lives, a disease for instance, or a dear one’s departure, are often the opportunity for them to start awakening.
– Quite right! But even though they have been shaken, many of them tend to go back to sleep afterwards. Their souls will have had an access to their consciousness, but only for a while. They will have to seek again for a way and find the path that will lead them to the light.
But God’s patience is infinite…, the Elder concluded, smiling.
Theophile the Elder
An excerpt from Dialogs with Theophile the Elder
Theophile the Younger’s Initiation