Dear H.,
You may be surprised to receive a small note from me, as we don’t know each other. This is why I asked Y. if I could write to you, and she said yes. Y. sometimes shares with me the exchanges she has with W., in which you yourself participate when you are with them. She told me that you know of my existence, so I am not entirely a stranger. Yesterday Y. reported to me some words you spoke before her, and I felt a desire to briefly share with you my own experience on the subject in question.
First, I would like to acknowledge your humility that made you think that the interruption that occurred in the experience you were having is a message by which God wants to tell you that it is not through your efforts that you can provoke this experience, but through His grace alone.
If you permit me, I would like to add the following.
We tend to personify God and think that like a human being, He gives and He withholds. My understanding is that God is a Source that flows permanently. A light that shines without interruption. A continuous gift.
The nature of the Sun is to always shine; it is not responsible for the clouds that veil it from time to time. These same clouds that veil it from our eyes and that are gray to us, intensely reflect its light and shine on the other side.
For one who has freed himself from the dualistic vision and understood that there is only God behind all manifestations—which is the authentic belief in the oneness of God—God is both the light and the clouds that veil it. Everything is Him.
Many people who turn inward to find peace or joy think that through meditation they themselves create the experience they seek. But everything that is created must necessarily disappear; everything that begins comes to an end.
There is within us something that has neither beginning nor end. A source of peace and joy that flows permanently, whether we turn inward or not. This is why it is preferable to replace the verb ”to meditate” with the expression ”to be in meditation”. Instead of the idea of ”doing”, there is the idea of ”being“.
We make no effort to see. It suffices to have our eyes open and not have obstacles before them. The obstacles that prevent us from seeing are our limiting beliefs and the thoughts they create. This is what prevents us from seeing and feeling the presence of Him who said in the Quran, ”We are closer to man than his jugular vein“.
It is also written there, ”Wherever you turn, there is the face of God”. The veil that prevents us from seeing and feeling the divine presence that is omnipresent is our imagination. We always imagine it as fullness, but sometimes it manifests as emptiness. Consider the figure of a semicircle. On one side, there is the convex part that is full, and on the other the concave part that is empty. But both sides are part of the same figure. The same moon has an illuminated side and a dark side. And both make the same moon.
In the world of duality where we live, everything has its opposite. And opposites are inseparable. God exists here and now as much in His presence as in His ”apparent absence”. This apparent absence increases your thirst for Him. You will thus be able to better appreciate His presence, just as the fast you undertake makes you better appreciate the meal that ends it.
But even fasting has a taste and flavor for one who knows how to appreciate it. It is said that ”to fast is to feast on ether”. Abstaining from gross food connects us to a source of more subtle nourishment. Feeling the presence of God when He ”seems” absent to our ego has a particular flavor that should not be underestimated.
We must accept the alternation of our states of mind as we accept the succession of day and night. Both have their charm if we refrain from judging them. The divine presence is in both, and we must love it in its two expressions, visible and invisible.
As in a game of hide-and-seek, God is there but He hides. We must not make the mistake of seeking Him. He is always there. When we seek Him, we suppose that He is far away, and this error costs us dearly because it distances us from Him. It is not He who is not there; it is we who leave the present moment when we begin to seek Him while He is there.
We must always remember that light is at the heart of darkness, as night is pregnant with the day that is born from it. And we must not prefer the gifts to the One who gives them to us. The source is more important than the experiences we can have; they come and go, but it is always there.