You are Everything and You are Nothing

Passage read today in Music of the Soul. Took a little processing for this to make sense to me. It seems impossible to be both.Yet from an intuitive place it makes a lot of sense. My heart understands this to mean with God, we are everything. Without God we are nothing.

I was reading an article, later watching a short newscast about Bernie Madoff, the guy who created hundreds of cascading Ponzi schemes that thousands of people including large national banks invested into. It was fascinating to read about it because it brings up so many questions:

• Why did Madoff do it to begin with? He had genuine talent and intelligence and had already made millions through legal activities.
• Why did investors fall for his schemes. The majority were not stupid people. Many were supposedly sophisticated investors.
• What does this say about human beings in general?

I think so much of this has to do with our fundamental state of neediness. We live in a time that allows us to be more self-sufficient than anytime in human history. We have jobs that allow us to get all of our necessities, if we need to do something we can’t do ourselves, we can hire someone else, we can stay in our house and be entertained, have companionship, etc.

But it means we rarely need to reach out and say “Help, I can’t do this myself.” But one need that can’t get met no matter how much power and money we have is the need for connection with God. Or at least with something that is clearly larger than ourselves.

When I (really anyone) tries to get this need met through money, through power, through human connection, they fail. And our egos tells us we just need to try harder and get more. But you can never get enough. It’s futile.

The Sufis say we get this need met by coming to God with complete humility. To say “only You Beloved can reach my heart and give it what it yearns for.”

In the world, it plays out over and over: wanting to feel like we matter through everything except by doing the one thing that will take care of that need.

The last thing I want to do is to make it sound like I have this down pat. I’m human and I think by nature I have to constantly make the decision to bring myself to the Divine rather than to do it on my own, to even think another person can do it for me.