Broken Things

Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
_{Leonard Cohen (Songwriter)}

Particularly in the West, and in countries that have become influenced by Western culture, we are individualistic and self-conscious. And this is a great barrier on this path. More than perhaps anything else, our yoga is the grinding away of the ego barrier that keeps us separate from the Divine. 

This path is many things, but the journey of Sant Mat is largely that of gradually losing our individuality, our ‘I’-ness, our I’m-special-ness, our I’m-unique-ness, our notice-me-ness and finally our I-can-do-this-alone-ness. 

Over the decades many a strutting bantam, attractive young stallion or intellectually arrogant whizz-kid have slowly been broken down by life, reality or perhaps the Guru himself until eventually we just give up – surrender – and experience our true helplessness. Where the ego is, love is not. When the ego is not, only Love is.

The Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi made an extraordinary observation:

God uses most for his glory those people and things which are most perfectly broken…..God must have broken things.

Those who are broken in wealth and broken in heart, broken in their ambitions, broken in their beautiful ideals, broken in worldly reputation, broken in their affections, and broken sometimes in health, and those who are despised and seem utterly helpless and forlorn, the Holy Spirit is seizing upon and using for God’s glory.
_{The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. I}

Ultimately only the pull of the Lord is real. We have to get our ‘self’ – the ego – out of the way, so that the pull of the Holy Spirit can work its miracle of returning us to the lap of the Father. On this narrow road there is no room for two. Why do we cling to the agony of egoic self-encasement and run the risk of being ‘cracked’, when every day the Guru just says … Let go?