8. Accepting fortune and misfortune with equanimity

Mirdad 8

The Mirdad Mysteries week 8

Accepting fortune and misfortune with equanimity

Quotes from The book of Mirdad, chapter 21 

 

How strange that you, children of time and space, are not aware as yet that time is the universal memory, inscribed on the tablets of space.

If you, being limited by the senses, can yet remember certain things between your birth and death, how much more so can time, which was before your birth and lasts indefinitely beyond your death.

I say to you that time remembers everything at all – not only that of which you have a vivid recollection, but that as well of which you are entirely unaware.

For there is no oblivion in time; no, not of the slightest movement, or breath, or whim. And all that is kept in the memory of time, is graven deep upon the things in space.

The very earth you tread; the very air you breathe, the very houses you dwell in, can readily reveal to you the most minute details in the records of your lives, past, present and to come, had you but the stamina to read and the keenness to grasp the meaning.

In life as in death; on the earth as beyond the earth, you never are alone, but are in constant company of things and beings, which have their share in your life and death, as you have yours in their life and death. As you partake of them, so they partake of you; and as you seek them, so they seek you.

Man has a will in everything and each thing has a will in man. The interchange goes on uninterrupted. But a woefully bad accountant is the failing memory of man. Not so the faultless memory of time, which keeps a most exact account of man’s relations with his fellow-men and all the other beings in the universe, and forces him to settle his accounts  each twinkling of an eye, life after life and death after death.

Aye, man invites his own calamities and then protests against the irksome guests, having forgotten how and when and where he penned and sent out the invitations.

But time does not forget; and time delivers in due season each invitation to the right address, and time conducts each invitee to the dwelling of the host.

I say to you: protest not any guest, lest he avenge his slighted pride by tarrying too long, or by making his visits more frequent than otherwise he would consider meet.

Be kind and hospitable to all your guests whatever be their mien and their behavior; for they in truth are but your creditors.

Give the obnoxious ones in particular even more than is their due that they may go away thankful and satisfied, and should they visit you again, they would come back as friends and not as creditors.

Treat every guest as if he were the guest of honour, that you may gain his confidence and learn the hidden motives of his call.

Accept a misfortune as if it were a fortune. For a misfortune, once understood, is soon transformed into a fortune. While a fortune misconstrued quickly becomes a misfortune.

You choose your birth and death, their time and place and their manner as well, despite your wayward memory which is a mesh of falsehoods with glaring holes and gaps.

The would-be wise declare, that men have no part whatsoever in their birth and death. The indolent, who squint at time and space through the narrow socket of the eye, would readily dismiss most happenings in time and space as accidents. Beware of their conceit and deceit.

There are no accidents in time and space. All things are ordered by the Omniwill which neither errs in anything, nor overlooks a thing.

As drops of rain gather themselves in springs and springs flow out to meet in brooks and rivulets, and rivulets and brooks offer themselves as tributaries to the larger streams, and mighty streams carry their waters to the seas, and seas assemble in the greater ocean, so does every will of every creature, inanimate or animate, flow as tributary into the Omniwill.

I say to you that everything has will. Even the stone, apparently so deaf, and dumb and lifeless, is not without a will. Else it would not have been, and would it not affect a thing,  and nothing would affect it. Its consciousness of willing and of being may differ in degree from that of man, but not in substance.

How much of the life of a single day can you in truth assert you are conscious of? A very trifling part indeed.

If you, equipped with brains and memories and means of recording emotions and thoughts, are yet unconscious of the major part of a single day’s living, why do you wonder that the stone is so unconscious of its life and will? And as you live and move so much without being conscious of living and moving, so do you will as much without being conscious of willing.

But the Omniwill  is conscious of your unconsciousness and that of every creature in the universe.

In redistributing itself, as is its wont at every moment of time and every point of space, the Omniwill gives back to every man and every thing whatever they had willed, no more, no less, whether they willed it consciously or otherwise.

But men, not knowing that, are but too oft dismayed by what falls to their lot from the all-containing bag of the Omniwill. And men protest in dejection and blame their dismay upon the fickle Fate.

It is not fate that is fickle; for Fate is but another name of the Omniwill. It is man’s will that is as yet too fickle, and too fitful and too uncertain of its course. Here it stamps this thing as a good and decries it there as an evil. Now it accepts this man as a friend, only to fight him later as an enemy.

Your will must not be fickle, my companions. Know that all your relationships with things and men are determined by what you will of them, and they of you. And what you will of men and things, determines what they will of you.

Be careful how you breathe, how you speak and what you wish and think and do. For your will is hid even in every breath and every word and every wish, thought and deed. And what is hid from you, is always manifest to the Omniwill.

But will of all men and all things their love. For with it only shall your veils be lifted and Understanding drawn within your heart. And thus initiate your will into the wondrous mysteries of the Omniwill.

Till you know the mysteries of the Omniwill, you must not set your will against it; for surely you shall be the loser. You shall come out of each encounter scarred and drunk with gall. And you shall seek revenge only to add new scars to the old and make the cup of gall overflow.

Accept the Omniwill, if you would turn defeat to victory. Accept without a murmur all the things that fall to you from its mysterious bag; accept them in gratitude and in the faith that they are your just and due share in the Omniwill. Accept them with the will to understand their value and their meaning.

And once you understand the hidden ways of your own will, you understand the Omniwill.

Accept what you do not know, that it may help you to know it. Resent it, and it shall remain an irritating puzzle.

Let your will be a maid to the Omniwill — till Understanding makes the Omniwill a servant to your will.