"Everything in the universe is a pitcher brimming with wisdom and beauty."
-Rumi, 13th Century Sufi Poet and Mystic

On the surface this seems an absurd statement.
Looking deeper, your response might be to say no after reviewing all the calamities of your own life, the often-vicious response of governments around the world to perceived threats to their power, the narcissistic military and industrial complex that constitutes what we call civilization, the awkward and dysfunctional personalities that you have to deal with daily, the devastation of natural storms, the cruelty of the animal kingdom, and the bloody history of our species.

Yet despite chaos, horror, and the imminent possibility of terror, I hold to the belief that the universe is friendly.

It is friendly because we are not this game of chance that we see all around us.

We are, in fact, not victims of linear time.

Our home is in the non-linear dimension. And we reside there as magnificent beings. In fact, we are an expression of an invisible and invincible force that we call God. And this God has three characteristics which are our own.

In Sanskrit, the three characteristics are known as “sat-chit-ananda.”

Sat is beingness. It is pure and absolute presence.

Chit is knowingness. It is complete and total awareness.

Ananda is bliss. It is utter and indefinable peace and joy.

This is who we are in our essence. And because we are this at a non-dual level, we must accept that reality as we know it is a massive hallucination.

On the quantum level of reality, particles are merely dancing in and out of existence. Furthermore, they are not made of anything. They are non-things.

So, on a literal level, the entire world as we know it is as real as the movies we see projected on a screen, which as we all know is nothing but a dance of light in various shades.

On the cosmic level of reality, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. We are literally dreaming the world into being; projecting it from the thoughts and feelings we have about it. Remove your mind from the world and the world itself collapses into nothingness.

The entire purpose of life is to shed the illusion by awakening our souls to the realization that we are not victims of the projection of our minds. We can, in fact, begin the spiritual journey at any time to extricate ourselves from the illusions that make us so unhappy. Somewhere along that journey, the veil of matter will fall. It is then that you will realize that the universe is friendly after all.

Saleem Rana is a psychotherapist interested in spiritual topics and personal evolution. His blog, entitled Key To Success, can be found at www.saleemrana.blogspot.com.