3 2 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 Saints and sages inform us that, if we embed our existence in the transient phenomena of this world, we will never find enduring happiness. Swami Ramdas (1884–1963) pointed out: “We may live for thousands of years and may obtain whatever we desire of the world, but we shall never be happy so long as our hunger for earthly things does not perish.” (Ramdas 2014, 12). The emptiness that is discerned in the external world is one and the same void felt by human beings. Many people find that the endless pursuits of worldly ambitions are radically unfulfilling; indeed, they can become a serious ordeal “when you’ve gotten to the top of the ladder and find it’s against the wrong wall” (Campbell 1991, 68). The search to remedy this sense of vacancy can either lead individuals on the quest for transcendence or to pursue the gratification of endless and destructive desires. Rūmī (2004, 198) poignantly outlined our hidden longing for wholeness in the Divine: The human quest consists in seeking a thing which one has not yet found; night and day a man is engaged in searching for that. But the quest where the thing has been found and the object attained, and yet there is one who is seeking for that thing – that is a strange quest indeed, surpassing the human imagination, inconceivable to man. For man’s quest is for something new which he has not yet found; this quest is for something one has found already and then one seeks. This is God’s quest… for God has found all things, and so He is the Finder. Yet for all that God most High is the Seeker… O man, so long as you are engaged in the quest that is created in time, which is a human attribute, you remain far from the goal. When your quest passes away in God’s quest and God’s quest overrides your quest, then you become a seeker by virtue of God’s quest. The Divine is therefore seeking us all the time, yet we remain oftentimes unreceptive to this call, continually distracted and forgetful of what transcends the sensory world and our involvement in it. The sapiential traditions remind us time and time again that “He is with you wherever you are” (Qurʼān 57:4). Jean-Claude Larchet (2012, 81), an authority on the Patristic traditions of the Christian East, examines the existential malady that is attributable to our fallen condition: Man believes he can remedy this frustration by the very means which in truth is its cause: instead of recognizing that the void he senses is the absence of God in him, and that consequently only God can fill it, he wants to see therein the call to possess and delight in new sensible objects that he believes could satisfy this void. So as to avoid the pain following every pleasure, and to put an end to the deep frustration of his desire for infinite delight, fallen man perseveres in his search for new pleasures, not resting in his unbridled running after desires. He gathers and multiplies his pleasures in an attempt to reconstitute the totality, continuity and absoluteness for which he is nostalgic, believing in his delusion to find the infinite in the indefinite. 2.1 Recovery and the Sacred For the perennial psychology, it is essential to recognize that human beings were made for the Absolute and can only find peace in what transcends the psycho-physical realm. This inborn desire for the Divine was powerfully asserted by Christ when he said: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Matthew 6:21). This longing is illustrated in the Psalms (42:1): “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.” St. Augustine (354–430) similarly affirmed that “[f ]or Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee” (1959, 3). All attempts to seek wholeness in anything other than the Divine are bound to fail. As Julian of Norwich (c. 1342–c. 1416) explained: “Our soul may never have rest in anything which is beneath itself” (1978, 313). The Italian poet Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) wrote: “The desire for… perfection… is that desire which always makes every pleasure appear incomplete, for there is no joy or pleasure so great in this life that it can quench the thirst in our Soul” (1887, 119). In a letter written to Bill Wilson (1895–1971), co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) wrote about a former individual that he was treating (identified as Rowland Hazard III, 1881–1945) in a way that conveys the spiritual longing found within all human beings and how
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