INNER LIGHT MINISTRIES JOURNAL VOLUME 18 NUMBER 1
MARCH, 2007
THE PEARL AND THE SHELL by Jim Gordon, President of ILM
I
(from the talk, “Be Still and Know God” - 5/7/06)
recently came across a birthday card I’d gotten for my last birthday that really stood out in my mind. It contained a poem from Rumi that touched me deeply. The card had a picture of a big shell on it, with a pearl in the middle of the shell, and the poem said, “Take the pearl and leave the shell.” And really, that’s the truth of this whole spiritual journey. It’s the quest for that pearl within the shell. This body is the shell, the shell that dwells within the ocean of this creation. And this creation really is like a great body of water. It’s an ocean, and it’s deep, and at the deepest parts it’s quite dark. There’s very little light at these depths compared with at the surface and above. It’s all the watery worlds of the emotions, of the mind, of the imagination. And it is ever our quest in our experiential journey through these worlds, through these realms, to discover the “pearl of great price,” which is the soul — to truly come to the knowing of who we are as Divine. It’s a great journey. And so this one simple statement, “Take the pearl and leave the shell,” spoke so deeply to me because I’ve been on that search my whole life: to first find that pearl, and then to find a way to free that pearl from its shell so that it really does stand on its own. And the process by which this happens … it’s through our meditation. The first step in the spiritual journey is to find the place where that pearl resides. Now we know where it does reside, even if it’s only a mental knowing. It resides at the “seat of the soul,” the “third eye,” the “spiritual eye center” inside and between the eyebrows. And then the next quest is to really discover the pearl within the shell. I don’t know if you have ever opened an oyster and begun to look for the pearl within the oyster, but if you crack open an oyster you don’t find the pearl right away. You don’t even see if there’s a pearl in there or not unless you feel or dig around in the meat of the oyster to discover if there truly is a pearl there. And if you didn’t know how to find that pearl you would
open it up and throw it away, thinking, “Nope, there’s no pearl there.” And you may throw dozens of pearls away not knowing how to find them. So, that’s the key to this inner journey too. Knowing where the pearl resides is one thing, but knowing what to do to reveal that pearl is another — to open up the nature of this creation, in meditation, so that the pearl, the soul, is truly revealed, just as you would have to feel or dig around in the oyster to find its pearl. So in our meditation we have to move through all the different elements of this physical creation that is ‘the shell’, we have to move through the physical, the emotional, the mental, all of it, in order to find the pearl, the soul, that resides within this body, this shell. That is the quest. And it is a quest, a challenging journey. It is a very simple quest but it’s also a very challenging one. If you’ve ever tried to open an oyster, it is rather challenging. It’s not that you can just pull it open; it really is a challenge to pry that shell open so that you can see the inside. And that’s our consciousness as well. Our consciousness at this level is like a great shell — it is strong. And the ‘muscle’ that is holding it shut, holding it tight, is our mind — and it is very strong. And so if we go inside in our meditation to fight it, to try to open it up by prying or forcing it open, we’re in for a great struggle. But if we will go in and be patient, the ‘oyster’ opens automatically. When an oyster feels safe, when it feels secure, it will open in order to take in nourishment; it will just open automatically … you do not have to do anything but wait, be patient. And that’s how it is with this physical consciousness in this physical form. It’s better to sit in mediation and be patient and allow what is natural to take place, which is a gradual opening. But often times if we aren’t wise enough, if we aren’t attentive enough, if we don’t have a teacher that demonstrates the way to us, we will try to force that ‘shell’ open, we will try to force our way through the physical consciousness of ourselves — and sometimes we can actually do a lot of harm to ourselves rather than doing a lot of good in the sense of finding the spiritual essence of our own Divine Self. I’ve witnessed this in many different ways: by people getting caught up in the physic realms, by people ‘blowing out’ a chakra center not knowing what they were doing, and thus (BE STILL continues on page 3)