The true cure for loneliness is the love we feel from the Beloved, “the Force,” which runs through us. But! Can we connect to it at will? Not to my experience. Saints have said that it is only through the grace of the Beloved that we can connect to uOu. The Beloved, uOu, is a powerful love and creative force beyond human comprehension yet it’s within us! Then what do we do with our feeling of loneliness in those times when we can not connect with the Beloved, which is most of the time if not all the time? Seek psychotherapy? James Hillman, a renowned psychologist, in 1999, said, “We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world’s getting worse and worse.”
Maybe, just maybe, this is partly because we have lost the culture of being decent hosts and guests. We may have lots of entertainment available to us on various screens at home but not having human interaction has made us feel lonely to the point that the US Surgeon General, in March of 2023 announced loneliness and isolation as health crises.
The Honored Guest Project (HGP) wants to help families, couples and individuals who feel isolated and lonely. We have been given far greater responsibility to deal with loneliness at the individual level and have been blamed for creating such a situation in their lives. Meanwhile, individual counseling and analysis, as James Hillman notes above, can help only to some degree. And as mentioned there is help available to us that spirituality can provide which can be tricky. Then again what’s not tricky to put our faith into? Politics?!
As people, as a species who can form language, we desire to share our stories and potentially reap the benefit of emptying our mind from clutter. If we are lucky to have received the company of a Saint, we’ll have a different situation because Saints mainly say that in this realm of birth, death and rebirth we only need to meet a Saint to tell our stories so they can be truly heard. Let’s take Jesus, a well known Saint, popular even 2000 years later. He said something like this, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.” Father, here, is not meant as a man whom a woman may want to use his sperm to create a child.” The word Father was used due to the grip of patriarchal and hierarchical mindset. Nowadays I use the word, Beloved. Father, Beloved, here means the Force that is love and is creative in the most powerful way. In fact it’s so powerful that one can not call it powerful. Because power, as Sant Ajaib Singh had explained, can be measured but the Force that runs through a Saint or the existence of the “Shabd” can not be measured. Power has a beginning and an end but the Force or Shabd does not have a beginning or an end and can not be measured by the physical eyes and instruments of the science of physics.
I added the paragraph above to clearly state, not hide, my full intention and/or hope in this human form. As far as my intention for the Honored Guest Project goes, it is about doing something to solve a problem if not simply hoping to solve a part of a bigger problem, in a non-denominational, neither in a racial or gender specific approach. People of all races, religions and gender are welcome to seek the services HGP provides.
Guest Project (HGP) has the intention of being more than a venue for just talking which at times could have the potential to be idle or even damaging, such as talking behind other people’s backs or worse, backbiting. It is most likely very important, for someone reaching out to receive our services, to feel free to speak their heart out without strict rules. At the same time HGP’s focus is on feelings of respectful exchanges with healthy boundaries and if it comes to talks, it would be about stories that are important to be told. Stories that can be heard at the right time with the right person. HGP is about creating a healthy culture of human interaction which helps us live better through the wisdom of honored guests in our community and their supportive team.
The practical goal of creating HGP is to fund an office, run by paid and volunteer professionals, where folks who benefit from receiving an honorable guest in their homes can call and ask for such guests to visit them. Honored guests will go to homes which are decluttered or are in the process of being free of clutter. They are clean homes and the host has the very basic warmth and culture of receiving the honored guest. People who want to participate in this project/program would need to take the preliminary steps which for some folks can be completed in about a week to go through the formal assessment and for others may take longer to make preparation to receive the honored guest.
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در بیابانِ طلب گر چه ز هر سو خطریست
میرود حافظِ بیدل به تَوَلّایِ تو خوش
But we’re mere human beings, not God or Hafez. Don’t we need to break bread with one another and tell our stories in peace, as I imagine someone, an honored guest, who is very present can listen to our stories and could hear us. At the same time the Wise Ones have said and tell us that the Ones who can truly understand the condition of our soul are the Living Masters, people like Hafez and Jesus when they walked the earth in the flesh.
از کفر و ز اسلام برون صحرائیست — ما را به میان آن فضا سودائیست
عارف چو بدان رسید سر را بنهد — نه کفر و نه اسلام و نه آنجا جائیست
