Episode 085 - Just Thirteen

Stop Making Yourself Miserable

As you may recall, I had mentioned in the last two episodes that we are making a slight change in format for the “Stop Making Yourself Miserable” podcasts. Instead of building each episode around one particular theme, I am going to start presenting notes that I’ve made over the last fifty years that were particularly inspiring to me as I continued to go through all the ever-unfolding phases of inner growth.

For me, these living ideas are like beautiful flowers and bountiful fruit trees that align the side of the path I travel along. And again, they are not being presented as specific teachings of any kind, just simply ideas for you to consider. My suggestion is that you just take them in, maybe contemplate their meaning a little and see if they take you anywhere interesting within yourself. You may come across some pleasant surprises that might be surprisingly long lasting. You never know because the evolution of your inner consciousness truly is a gift that keeps on giving.

And one last point, which again comes completely from my own experiences with each one of these – although they may seem to be incredibly simple, they are often far deeper than they appear to be at first glance. For me, when I would encounter one of these, a natural process of inner contemplation would take place, seemingly on its own, and layer upon layer of meaning would make itself known.

This following message is a perfect example of the simplicity of the profound and the profundity of the simple. As I mentioned at the end of the last episode, several decades ago I had been reading the transcript of a press conference that had been held for Prem Rawat, who was just thirteen years old at the time.

Someone asked him, “Do you believe in God?” And he immediately responded, "I believe in the God who put a smile on every baby's face." Now that phrase really stopped me dead in my tracks and made me give it some real thought.

For one thing, I had never heard that particular idea before and the first thing I asked myself was, “Is there really a smile on every baby’s face?” Well, obviously, they’re not smiling all the time. I mean a lot of the time, they’re crying. But then I realized the deeper idea behind the question, which made me rephrase it to, “Is there the potential for a smile within every baby? And if there is, where does it come from? Might it be instinctual?’

Now back then, I had been around enough babies to know that they can break into a beautiful smile at any time, so on an intuitive level it quickly became clear that yes, there is a potential smile within every baby. So I had no issue with the idea that there is a smile on every baby’s face.

Then I started thinking about the nature of that smile and a few things quickly occurred to me. The first one is that a baby’s smile is incredibly transformative on the human beings around it. It’s actually remarkable.

You can take the most hard-boiled person in the world, who could easily win the Mr. or Mrs. Universe title for the most miserable people on earth, and put them alone in a room with a baby. And if no one is there and enough time has gone by for the adult to settle down a little, when that baby suddenly beams one of those beatific smiles at them, the adult’s heart of ice will melt in an instant and they’ll smile and start cooing at the baby in a matter of seconds.

This inherent tenderness of a human’s connection with a baby is a critical element of the highest and best aspects of our nature. And it doesn’t even have to be a human baby either. The sweetness of this reaction has been clinically observed in people when they get around babies of other species as well. We all know what happens to people when they get to be around a baby puppy or a kitten. And it doesn’t stop there. It’s the same with baby deer, baby rabbits, baby horses, all the way through to baby turtles. It just does something truly wonderful to us.

So, if an incredibly powerful smile lights up every baby’s face, the next big question is, “What are they smiling about?”

When viewed from a certain perspective, this is a truly great question. Studies have shown that babies do smile all the time and it’s also been shown that children under the age of five experience significant laughter about three hundred times a day. That’s a really lot of smiling and laughing. And the obvious and deeply profound question is, “What are they smiling and laughing about? What is it that is making them so happy? Why are they all in such great moods?”

We know that they’re not laughing at any jokes, because they’re this happy long before they gain any language skills. They’re also too young to be happy about the various external things that generally make adults happy – like money, success, prestige, power, position, etc.

Of course, there are probably hundreds of well-reasoned out reasons why they are so happy, but personally, I’m fond of this one particular idea which is rooted in Ancient Wisdom and validated by modern neuroscience. And that is that they are so happy all the time because they are still closely connected to the very essence of our consciousness.

They haven’t absorbed enough of the unconscious confusion of the external world to be over-influenced by it. And although they may have been exposed to the agitating aspects we all run into like anger and fear, they haven’t yet cemented the associated negative channels in their brain. The inherent happiness and contentment of our inner essence, existing in its state of joyful, creative genius is still who they are. And that’s why there is so much smiling and laughter in their lives.

Okay, so much for the smile on every baby’s face. Now what about the first part of the statement that the young teacher made in the press conference when he said, “I believe in the God who put the smile on every baby’s face?”

In so many words, the statement says that God is the source of the smiles on the faces of babies. Or you could say that God is the source of the inner joy that makes the baby smile. And that says something about God that is radically different from most of what I had been exposed to up until then, and it was pretty shocking to me, but in a good way.

As I said earlier, I had come upon this quote when I was still pretty young myself. To be exact, I was about twenty-two. And I had never thought of the idea of the Supreme Being in these terms.

As I’ve mentioned previously in these podcasts, during my upbringing, I was given a pretty heavy dose of what is called the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the idea of the deity that it introduced me to was a male-God who carried around a big quiver full of lightning bolts and didn’t seem to be a particularly nice guy.

I mean, half the time, he’s smiting someone for some reason, so you come away with a fairly hefty burden of fear. And that’s not to mention the guilt that you get from the origin story. You have original sin, where our great-times-a-million grandmother and grandfather got kicked out of paradise.

And then when you flip to the new version of the tale, you continue down guilty lane, by hearing that God had to have his only begotten son killed so his blood could wash away our sins.

The first time I came across the idea, it actually made me sick. But that may have been from just the idea of blood because I’ve always had one of those medical phobias. Anyway, there was this huge sign in Atlantic City that said, “Christ Died for Our Sins.” It was over a church near the boardwalk and I must have seen it at least five hundred times in my life and the more I saw it, the more uncomfortable I got.

It kind of made me think, so this is actually all my fault. I’m the one who committed the sins that forced God to kill his only begotten son, so his blood could be used to cleanse the world of the sins I brought. Jeez, this blood bath story took the guilt thing to a whole different level.

I certainly don’t want to give offense to anyone about any of this, but a whole pattern of thinking went off within me. What the hell did I ever do that was so Goddam bad that God had to kill his son so his blood could wash my sins away? And why would blood wash anything away? It didn’t make any sense to me and to be honest, it made this God guy seem a little sick. Why would I want to have anything to do with him?

When you consider all the stuff they tell you that you have to do to try to worm your way back into the Big Guy’s good graces, it didn’t seem worth it. All this praying, fasting, begging and repenting to butter up this thunderbolt bearing human-blood-sacrifice-craving character? What’s the point?

Again, this is probably all my own mishegoss, which is a Yiddish term for craziness or lunacy, and I apologize if I offended anyone, but all this stuff put up some pretty steep walls between myself and the Ultimate Power of the Universe.

So, that’s where I was. Now, let’s go back to the idea of the God who put a smile on every baby’s face. And by the way, you can probably see why the idea was so foreign to me. Beautiful, intriguing, even perhaps enlightening. But definitely foreign.

By contemplating the image of a smiling baby and tying it to the essence of the Deity, a different perspective began to take shape in my consciousness. The purity and innocence of it, along with the idea that immense joy is bestowed by God to every human at birth, was something I had never considered before.

And that was just the beginning of many new ideas for me. The concept that there is inherent good within every human being and that all the negativity was just learned behavior began to emerge. And it brought along the idea of universality with it. The image of an innocent, smiling baby experiencing the joy of the Divine within brought me a sense of hope that perhaps all the separation brought on by the world’s religious, cultural, and geographical boundaries might be able to be transcended.

Again, this was still rather early in my interest in personal growth and I was just starting to get introduced to certain ideas that were actually thousands of years old. The idea that there is pure, unadulterated happiness within us that is not tied to anything external. That there is a compassionate and loving universal power which is the source of all the magnificent goodness and beauty in the world. And that this power serves as a guiding light in life and because it is always within, it can be accessed at any time. And all you have to do is open up to it.

With the birth of all these seeds of understanding, it was like some noble, high minded and extremely powerful group of friendly strangers had suddenly come to visit me in my jail cell where I was imprisoned in the dungeon of my mind. I had been locked up there for ages and now they were telling me about this wonderful realm that existed just outside my prison walls.

Then they told me that there was no lock on the door to my cell and actually it had never been locked. I was free to leave there anytime I wanted. And it was all up to me.

So, these are a lot of the realizations that started coming to me from that 13-word sentence that was spoken by that 13 year old teacher. Not bad. I started thinking that maybe the kid had something after all.

Okay, enough for one episode. As always, keep your eyes, mind and heart opened and let’s get together in the next one.