Why the World Won’t Fulfill Me, and
Why I Still Want It To
The bellow are four essays written by students of Master Santosha Ma in regards to entering
the unified field of love and being aware of what is in the way.
By Torrey Brave
‘Fulfilling me’ means that everything is here to make me feel good, and that means to me that I am the most important one, the superior one, and everyone knows it. A lot of egos
have that idea, and no one agrees with my idea that they are here to fulfill me! No one is willing to play the role of the ‘inferior one’ to my ‘superior one.’ In truth, there isn’t anyone inferior or superior! Assuming otherwise, consciously or not, is my playing the ego hierarchy game. I am always seeking to be more important, which is a completely unloving action! Santosha Ma, I have used and abused the men in Your Circle to act out my lower nature desires, and I have abused all the women by throwing them under the bus to try to appear more spiritual and more important than them. The result is so destructive of relationship, that it is only by Your Grace that we can do this work together.
I have always wanted to stand out, be more important than the others, so I could be with You, Santosha Ma, and was jealous and competitive with everyone. I never did the practice of happiness, and so I used Your Company to make myself feel better, to relieve the suffering I created by my ego-hierarchy-superior routine. This ego hierarchy game is the means I use to try to get fulfilled, but it only destroys all relationships, and creates suffering and isolation, which is the opposite of what I am truly seeking! I still want the world to fulfill me because I am not doing the practice of happiness, which is to be already happy whatever happens. You have shown me this is the Truth, and it is my responsibility to do it! I am very grateful.
By Susan Shaw
I’m older. I’m not as naïve about all my dreams of youth and what I was going to do or be. I have the results of my chasing after it all. Without your help, Santosha Ma, I would probably still be searching, thinking if I somehow mastered experience I would have succeeded in my wanting love, wanting prestige, wanting to make my mark. I wanted to succeed at being a mother and wife, and with a career, professionally in the world. I love my children but I wanted them to give me purpose and personal fulfillment, which of course they couldn’t. The reailty is, I never owned them, and they have their own lives. I did the same thing with spiritual life – big time. This was where the big pay-off would be. My approach to everything is always from a selfish point of view where I expect to get something out of it. The truth is I have a wonderful life, better than I could ever have imagined and yet I still persist in my search. Simply put, I seek comfort and momentary pleasures, am not overt but instead secretive and use passive aggressive methods to obtain what I want, because I feel I deserve them, have earned them, and am entitled to them. I still have the desire to get what I want, only I try to look good about it, appear spiritual. I’m not spiritual. I’m just an ordinary ego up to all the same tricks all others are up to, behaving in the same reactive ways. Being older is teaching me to accept more what I am given and be happy in that instead of imposing all these conditions on happiness. Why do I still chase after my fantasies, and hold onto my comforts so? I haven’t surrendered. It has to be because I haven’t allowed myself to feel the suffering of my search, to feel my disappointments, to notice they are based on unreality. I’m still selffocused instead of God-focused. I act like I don’t want to miss out on any supposed worldly goodies since I don’t seem to be making it as a spiritual aspirant, an idea which makes spiritual practice a goal instead of noticing love and happiness right now. Giving me the weight loss challenge gave me something concrete to measure and made it a competition just with myself. It made my pleasure seeking and how I was giving up and settling for a very low line so very obvious. I am still too proud and love being recognized as being a special one — that has to be looked at and pierced. I have the very best of lives but I need to come up to a higher standard, to serve you, Santosha Ma, the very best I can, and not need any ego strokes, and not be afraid to make mistakes. It is an unimaginably precious gift you offer, and you deserve everything from me in return for your incredible sacrifice.
By Neil Britto
The world cannot fulfill me. The world won’t ever do it because its existence, I as I have come to know it, is based on my misconception of it. My misconception of the world has been that it is a wonderland, a safe haven, or a place where my private potentiality can be discovered, unlocked, and used to exploit the world in my journey, to enjoy a kind of sustained upward mobility. The world won’t fulfill me though, because reality will never actually conform to my lopsided view of experience, a view where pleasure, success and comfort must be experienced more than pain, failure and discomfort – primarily, and as the definition of happiness.
Contrary to this misconception, as I age, more pain, failures and discomforts rise as a testament of my mortality, and frame the true nature of the world more accurately as a realm of suffering in which I begin to learn something more important than my sense of pleasure, of feeling good, and of a sense of fitting in. What’s more important is Love, which stands despite any of this, as Santosha Ma has taught. Why I want the world to fulfill me, is that I seem to choose to struggle in investing in a world that requires me to gracefully and happily deal with death, dying, loss, change, and discomfort, and, because of my dodged and spotty faith in Love, I seek out simple pleasures to avoid entering the truer fields of relatedness, the edge, where I meet real demand, enter into it — the muck — more fully, more willingly, and where I love and share with others within real life more freely and more by habit — to the degree where I drop the propaganda which has me selfishly tallying up the means to pleasurably pass the time as a separate ego who is either safe, or doing well by whatever standard is the latest obsession.
My remaining lack of faith has me investing in temporary distractions, the propaganda of my random desires for an easy day, a good snack; the propaganda of my random fears of a hard day; the pettiness to stand against the demands to serve in life, or endure in life; the propaganda of my momentary gleefulness as I take the various scripts handed to me by the culture and those in it as I respond to social cues, make them my reality, and take that more seriously than the investment of Love. My misconception of the world is that I have always measured fulfillment in terms of my enjoying pleasure, and have overlooked the deeper pleasure of self-sacrifice, the merits of that edge, and the actual freedom and power that Love grants in self forgetting. My misconception of the world, why the world won’t fulfill me, and why I still want it to stems from the still active belief that “I” exist more, and others exist less, which creates this cheap and false sense of love, and false sense of God, as I assert that my pleasure, my terms, my livelihood, and my success must come first, or that I am somehow a slave to the world’s loveless standard and must get by. From this cheap viewpoint, I am not informed of my true nature, and am left craven for fulfillment from a world that seems spare of it. From there, I do not get to hold to the joy of knowing that it is me who must fulfill the world,
by sacrificing my ego and loving the world as God.
