Late Night Chat with Jeff W: E&G ”The Hurdle of the Mind” June 29, 2025, live on Baba Zoom

We have some informal chat after every arti, the "post-arti party"! But once a week, Jeff Wolverton joins us for some serious mining of the spiritual depths. Join us for conversation, more readings, songs, quotes - you never know what treasures will be uncovered!

Topic: The Hurdle of the Mind

Dear folks of Baba,

Before we can enter permanently into the timeless and expansive realm of the heart, the home of Baba’s Divine Love, we have to cross the hurdle of the mind. Darwin Shaw, through his own inner experience, was very knowledgeable about the many subtle ways that the mind, in collusion with the ego, seeks to sabotage our efforts to love unconditionally. Why would the ego ever want us to be loving when, each time we express love, it loses a little more of the control over us that it has enjoyed since the beginning of time!

In this chapter, Darwin discusses some of the many beliefs and attitudes that we buy into that block our access into the realm of Divine Love. In the next chapter, Darwin goes into some of the ways to dispel these false beliefs and attitudes, which as he says, come primarily from our subconscious. The most colossal delusion, of course, is the belief that this creation as well as our ego are real. How could we think otherwise unless we receive some glimpse of something beyond both of them. Even if we know intuitively that all life is an illusion, our many lifetimes of conditioning have entrenched us profoundly in the daily experience that our ego and creation are real. Focusing on Baba, the Reality, thankfully dissolves very gradually our attachment to this world and our belief that it is real. The ego persists in controlling us by creating all manner of sanskaric clouds that veil insight into the deeper heart where Divine Love resides. In the form of what Darwin calls “the wanting machine” the ego concocts innumerable desires for the things of this world, both large and small, which continually distract our attention. Hours go by, and we suddenly realize that we haven’t even thought of Baba! As Baba has said, we are in fact already complete, but the ego keeps manufacturing “wants” that are the very antithesis of completeness! Fortunately, as the wanting machine slows down through Baba’s grace, we experience some measure of our intrinsic wholeness. In a very unassuming way, the mandali possessed a natural completeness, free of incessant wanting.

Also in this chapter, Darwin discusses many of the things we accept as facts that are not really true. We accept as an undeniable fact that we are limited and separate from the rest of life. We think that our inner growth will happen automatically without our effort. We believe we have to purify ourselves before Baba will love us; that is, we put such limitations on Baba’s acceptance of us, imposing our own conditions on His unconditional love. In buying into the illusion about time and space, we think of Baba as being of the past and somewhere else other than in this moment. Sooner or later, as we will see in the next chapter, we gradually lose some of our perpetual interest in the outer cinema of this world and become more absorbed in our inner drama with its breath-taking vistas of the foothills of the Soul in the distance. I once asked Darwin, “What is the biggest mistake the Baba lovers are making?” He replied in his unassuming, compassionate way, “They think of themselves as small, and they remain small. Think BIG! Think outside of even the conventional spiritual box.” Baba Himself urged us--“be big-hearted”.

What do you think Baba meant by being big-hearted?

The Sufi mystic Rumi has said,

“By the time the Intellect has selected the ideal camel

for the long and arduous pilgrimage to Mecca,

Love has already climbed Mount Sinai!”

In His love, Jeff