Many lives have a mystical sense, but not everyone reads it aright. More often than not it is given to us in cryptic form, and when we fail to decipher it, we despair because our lives seem meaningless. The secret of a great life is often a man’s success in deciphering the mysterious symbols vouchsafed to him, understanding them and so learning to walk in the true path.
··· Tags pointing to: true self ···
The things we really need come to us only as gifts, and in order to receive them as gifts we have to be open. In order to be open we have to renounce ourselves, in a sense we have to die to our image of ourselves, our autonomy, our fixation upon our self-willed identity. We have to be able to relax the psychic and spiritual cramp which knots us in the painful, vulnerable, helpless “I” that is all we know as ourselves.
We are all too ready to believe that the self that we have created out of our more or less inauthentic efforts to be real in the eyes of others is a “real self.” We even take it for our identity. Fidelity to such a nonidentity is of course infidelity to our real person, which is hidden in mystery. Who will you find that has enough faith and self-respect to attend to this mystery and to begin by accepting himself as unknown?
The journey into the inner self is not just the important one, it is the only one. We need to listen to the sound beyond the silence.
Once you have tapped your inner self,
the one has made contact with the One sitting inside;
you have met with God.
Then what kind of fear can exist?
What is there to be fearful about,
and what worries are left to encounter?
When you go within, you become still, you become peaceful.
All the waves, those generate within you;
they all originate at the level of your mind.
They all come to a stop.
There is a light within you, and you are also a light.
Both lights assimilate into one.
The wanderer does not bring a handful of earth
from the mountain slope to the valley,
the unutterable,
but a pure word he has learned,
the blue and yellow gentian.
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. It is finding your true nature beyond name and form.
Man, indeed, describes more than he explains; while the angelic spirit sees and understands. Man judges nature in relation to itself; the angelic spirit judges it in relation to heaven. In short, to the spirits everything speaks.
The beautiful line in the Course of Miracles says, “It has taken time to misguide you so completely, but it takes no time at all to be who you are.” To be who are means who you are in your essence underneath the mind structures, the conditioned mind structures, and the only access you have to that is through the little doorway of now. And it is only here, it is only through the power that is inherent in the present moment that all those mind structures dissolve. The power of the present moment is the power of life itself, your very being. What arises in the now is presence, allowing this moment to be.
Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate “other.” You then forget the essential fact that, underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is.