I'm not very inclined to trust and perhaps I am not alone in that characteristic. Be it by our own original nature or through the betrayals of other human beings, fallible as they are, or merely through the incessant pounding and apparent opposition of life itself, we perhaps all experience some measure of loss of the ability to trust as time goes by.
I do have an instinctive trust in fate, as it were; that it will all work out in the end. However, I don't mean that I believe my life will go as I wish, or even that my life will be in any way happy. I mean I have a sure sense of faith in the inevitable culmination of my destiny, in a future that may be so far and distant as to be beyond my ability to conceive. You may call that naive; I call it an instinctive faith in either divinity or simply life itself.
I work with children. In doing so, I attempt to provide them with a sense of safety, fun, assurance, and the nearly always unwelcome guidance in their interpersonal interactions with their peers. I try to create an atmosphere where they feel secure and are willing to take chances and explore.
I feel life, or God, or divinity, or destiny, fate, or what have you -- does that for me as well, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Despite the losses and heartaches of life, I persevere. I'm stubborn that way.
Here's a little statement by a seeker named Don Stevens who voluntarily affiliated his life with the spiritual figure Meher Baba. Don's talking in more depth about what I'm trying to convey and he's more articulate than I am, so I'll let his message speak for itself.
But I must say, what Don is really talking about, between the lines, is love.
SENSE OF
SELF-DETERMINATION ANNIHILATED
Don Stevens
Sooner or later, each human being must be willing to annihilate for a time his own sense of self-determination in a sense of absolute trust of another*. Only in this manner can there be the opportunity to comb out the snarls of countless accumulated actions in one's nature.
Even when a person is unhappiest, he still has a persistent sense of unconscious hope that his own deliberated actions will one day lead him to success and happiness. Usually it is only the person who has almost entirely ceased to hope who is willing to take the conscious step of annihilating his own ego in the person of another. For in annihilating his ego, he denies the very core of the "right" of free-will, of self-determination, and in that destruction there is bound to go his most stubborn, ego-centered hope for the future.
Once it is gone, he is really at sea. There is no landmark, no point of reliance or help, only that cause or person to whom he has perhaps by now given his allegiance. This is a frightening position and it is no wonder that most people would prefer to trust their own fallible but "visible" sense of self-determination, rather than surrender it to another's possible whims.
There are few people who have reached either such desperation in the successive traps of life, or enlightenment in the inner processes of the heart, to be willing to trust their fate implicitly to another being.
*Trust in or identification with another human being is not peculiar to the follower of the guru. It has its modern counterpart in the relation of patient to psychoanalyst, of friend to trusted advisor, of one who loves to the beloved. Such a relation apparently involves a very fundamental principle of nature in which the complexities of self can be attacked at their root only through the loss or lessening of "self" in the being of another.
LISTEN, HUMANITY, pp. 232-233, Meher Baba
Narrated and edited by D.E. Stevens
2004 © Avatar Meher Baba Perpetual Public Charitable Trust
