Healing Your Rift With God by Paul Sibcy
Author:Paul Sibcy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beyond Words Publishing, Inc.
Published: 1999-07-15T00:00:00+00:00
The Ton of Cabbage
A Sufi story told by I dries Shah about a ton of cabbage puts awareness in perspective: A society of people were dispossessed of their homeland, a paradise that only a few people remembered. Those few were expert swimmers who could teach others to swim back to this paradise, an island some miles away. But knowledge of this ancestral home was forbidden in the regime, so only a few knew about it, and even fewer dared to seek out these few for swimming instruction. Still worse, when even those few seekers arrived for instruction, they came with a ton of cabbage on their backs, because they knew it was a long trip and they couldn’t see how they could survive without it. Imagine the job of those swimmers to teach their new students, first, that they had a ton of cabbage on their backs, and second, that they would have to dump their load of cabbage if they expected to swim to the promised land. Some would say that even the Hebrew prophet Moses couldn’t let go of enough of his personal cabbage to get across the river Jordan.
The cabbage is the stuff of our conditioned minds, of course, that which causes our suffering. And it is fear that inhibits our awareness of it. Our egos have been busy inhibiting our awareness from the beginning. It took me over thirty years and a spiritual breakdown to face the personal cabbage of my childhood pain, which I had carried with me all along, unaware. It is part of our survival instinct to push from consciousness that which we are not able to handle at the moment. But survival has its price. We limit so much of ourselves from awareness that we lose our own souls. We create gaping rifts with God.
Our shame and our fears of inadequacy and worthlessness also keep us in denial. In the West we are taught to shun emotional people who “make a big deal out of things.” If we acknowledged their pain, we would be tacitly approving of their openly expressing it. And that would be far too threatening to those of us who strive to ignore our own pain. So we act “normal,” pretend no one else is suffering, and keep our own suffering a secret from everyone, including ourselves. What we don’t know is that love and healing cannot enter a closed, dark container and that becoming aware of our pain and revealing it to ourselves and others is the first step to healing. What is hidden cannot be helped. Awareness of suffering brings the vast possibility of spiritual recovery.
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