General Correspondence ~ Peter

with Metta Zetty, a Spiritual Teacher

Metta Zetty describes her enlightenment experience on her website

(http://members.tripod.com/~Metta_Z/Epiphany.html)

4.11.1998

PETER: Dear Metta,

I read with interest your description of your spiritual awakening on your web-site and was taken by your very precise description. Few who have had these experiences are willing to be honest about what actually happens. I suspect it serves them better not to expose the fact that ‘I’ the self lives on through the experience to become ‘Me’ the Self who is both messenger and saviour. What saved me from this delusion was an experience I had where, like you, I had a glimpse of the perfection and purity of the physical universe, the infinitude, the sparkling paradise we live in as human beings. But, and I had a ‘but’ and I have written about it in my journal of the time:

[Peter]: ‘During this time, I remember driving up the escarpment that encircles the lush semi-tropical coastal plain where I live. I stopped and looked out at the edge of the greenery, where a seemingly endless ribbon of white sand neatly bordered it from the azure ocean. Overhead great mounds of fluffy white clouds sailed by in the blue of the sky. Right in the foreground stood a group of majestic pines towering some thirty meters tall. I was struck by the vastness, the stillness and the perfection of this planet, the extraordinariness of it all, but … and the ‘but’ are human beings – human beings who persist in fighting and killing each other and can’t live together in peace and harmony. It was one of those moments that forced me to do something about myself, for I was one of those 5.8 billion people. It was exactly one of those moments that forced me to do something about being able to live with a woman in peace and harmony. To prove it was possible.’

No longer was it then sensible to relentlessly pursue that which has failed for billions of people for thousands of years. Hope, faith and trust, when they fail, turn inevitably to despair, doubt and suspicion. I put my stock in confidence, certainty and a good deal of bloody-mindedness to try something different and the results are already beyond my wildest dreams! First, I made it the most important task in my life. Secondly, I realised that nobody could do it but me. Then I simply had to ride out the fear that arose from changing my behaviour – from actually eradicating part of myself. To live without the emotions and feelings of love defies all that we hold dear, but the facts are that love always fails, always ends in misery and suffering, or at best in compromise and bondage. Love is, after all, a well-meaning but doomed attempt to cover up the maliciousness and sorrow that is at the core of the Human Condition.’ Peter’s Journal, ‘Love’

So a different interpretation can be made from the experience you had. Acknowledging the suffering and violence endemic in human behaviour on the planet and seeing that this fear and aggression, which rages in the heads and hearts of every human being – and then realising it needs to stop, if this fair paradisiacal planet is to be free of war, rape, torture, poverty, repression, domestic violence, child abuse, guilt, shame, sorrow and despair. And the only thing ‘I’ can do is rid myself of malice and sorrow in me. To self-immolate is the only solution, the only sacrifice ‘I’ can make to put an end to this hell on earth that we find ourselves born into. To face it squarely and not merely escape into some fantasy where everything is all right as it is, you just need to ‘imagine’ a better world, fully realise it as another reality (or Reality) and swan around in its bliss.

To quote from your web-site http://members.tripod.com/~Metta_Z/Epiphany.html:

METTA: ‘‘Mistakes’, as we know them, are not possible. ‘Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.’

• Our most fundamental freedom is our freedom to choose within the present moment.
• The present moment and the human soul are a converging nexus point of the Infinite.
• The past and future are pale shadows and faint echoes of the luminescent present.
• Bliss is recognizing the absolute, complete perfection of the universe, exactly as it is, within the infinite present.
• The perfection of the universe lies within its complete integrity and wholeness. Within this larger context, there is room for all the smaller, diverse ‘imperfections’ of our daily, human experience.
• All suffering in the universe ultimately is not absurd because it is contained within an Infinite Benevolence that extends far beyond the limits of all imaginable suffering.

PETER: The first point you make in your wisdom is that ‘mistakes’ are okay. I take it that you are saying: the fact that 160,000,000 people have been killed in war this century alone is okay, that the violence, misery and sorrow, readily evidenced through TV, is okay. That if people live in malice and sorrow, entrapped by an world view made of an Ancient wisdom that says ‘you can’t change human nature’ and besides ‘suffering is good for us’, then this is okay?

The second point indicates our most fundamental freedom is our freedom to choose. So far human beings have had only two choices:

1. To make the best of it in the real world. To be the best we can, try to be kind, good, try to find a partner that you can live with reasonably peacefully. And things go on reasonably well in the world despite the sorrow and malice and you try to avoid it in others and avoid it in you.
2. For a few the compromises of living a normal life and conforming to whatever ethics or morals is felt as a lack of freedom. There is a palpable feeling of ‘there must be something better than this’. And the traditional something better is a mightily appealing and seductive fantasy wherein I don’t even have to die. ‘I’ simply have to create a nice warm fuzzy inner world that is in direct contact with the bigger Grand and Vast Oneness and then ‘I’ don’t even die ‘I’ simply merge into this imaginary world of bliss. My body and the real world are but an illusion. Having experienced this state myself I can report it as a massive delusion as I became Love personified, at one with it all, poetry and wisdom flowed from me and I had all the answers.
3. There is thankfully, now a third choice – an actual freedom from both the real world and the world of the Spirits. It’s just that it lies 180 degrees in the opposite direction to which you are going. Still, if you have any doubts about where you are or what you are doing, you may want to check it out.

I could go on but when I read the last bit where you say, suffering is not absurd, then I wonder how you got so lost. I assume that your search was for a way out of suffering for yourself and others. And now your solution is to say ‘look, don’t worry about it, the suffering is part of the grand plan, it is not real. Just close your eyes and go ‘in’ ... feel the stillness ... there, that’s better, isn’t it. Feel the bliss’ ... ‘And don’t watch TV news because you will only get upset’.

As you can tell I’m not really a fan of Ancient Wisdom. It’s had its day, as has enlightenment and all things spiritual. It’s being exposed for the sham it is.

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