Thinking Like the Universe

To the Sufis, transformation of consciousness occurs as the result of a shift in perspective from the personal to the Divine point of view--what I call "thinking like the Universe." Plato illustrated man's ignorance by the allegory of the men chained in the cave who can see only shadows on the wall. In the same way, our everyday perspectives are illusory and therefore totally inadequate to making the quantum leap into a more evolved consciousness.

We think, for instance, that it is the world that is our prison--whereas the prison is in our way of thinking and feeling. Caught in a vicious cycle of negativity, we give up any hope of being able to fulfill our ideals.

As we view our problems through the eyes of the Universe, or God, we come to realize that what we think is our problem alone is the suffering of existence that is shared by everyone.

Buddha, however, saw that the only way to break free of the mental chains that keep up bound in ignorance and misery is by attaining freedom from the personal "I." The Sufis say those commonplace thoughts and opinions blur our innate connection to the Divine. Eventually, as we view our problems through the eyes of the Universe, or God, we come to realize that what we think is our problem alone is the suffering of existence that is shared by everyone. We begin to glimpse the reality behind the words of St. Francis of Assisi: "I thought I was looking at the world, but the world is looking at me."

To glimpse the true nature of the Universe is like awakening from a clouded trance. "Imagine," says Hazrat Inayat Khan, "that you're awake and walking about amongst people who sleep; how can you communicate with them?" I recall making a visit with a group of people to a

who was in seclusion in a cave high up in the Himalayas. One person asked the

something that, to me, was very mundane. Fascinated, I watched him struggle to come down from his state of Divine ecstasy and enter into the mind of that person in order to answer his question.

But witnessing the phenomenon of life from a transcendental overview doesn't serve just to lift one up out of the trenches of existence. Broadening our attunement beyond the horizons of the individual self awakens one to the meaning encoded into existence--a kind of cognitive "super-logic" that reveals a different purpose, a larger pattern, than anything we might previously have imagined. That is exactly what a spiritual awakening is--shifting from one perspective to another, until we finally glimpse meaningfulness where our mind could not perceive it before.

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