Time To Walk The Talk
People work on themselves and pile up information, but time and again recreate the same problems, dilemmas, and difficulties. There seems to be a huge gap between what people know and what they live. One thing is to seek information, another to search for deeper keys that will transform us, expand us, make us better persons. When people truly seek to change themselves, classic meditation is not enough; self-help courses alone are not enough. They work only one aspect of our selves and create a kind of division. We file the information or insight away in our minds but normally continue with our worlds as they have been. At best we “reshuffle” the outer aspects of our life, including our relationships and surroundings, but we do not incorporate the insights we had gained. Usually, it is because we don’t know how.
To actually embody an insight represents taking full responsibility for each moment of life and living it the way we know that we can. We transfer the experience we have had in meditation or in a therapy group to the core of ourselves before acting. It requires changing not only the way we automatically react to things, but also the perspective we hold of life. If, on the other hand, our understanding is just mental, we impose attitudes and behaviour tantamount to brainwashing, exhausting, or hypnotizing ourselves. And this doesn’t last very long; we quickly seek another dose.
The kind of change we are talking about is not “done”; it is allowed to happen because we make space for it. It is not replacement or substitution. Understanding through the heart creates a kind of vacuum inside that helps us come in touch with a deeper part of our self, ultimately a more natural state than the one we thought was authentic. There is no explanation or process. We just know that THIS is What we are. And, for the very first time come to “love” ourselves.
I decided to write this entry because I repeatedly see my beloved and closest students forget themselves. Seeking changes and solutions outside. Our culture, both Eastern and Western, does not help us “Be” what we are.
To “be the change” implies a redefinition and an active will that chooses deliberately rather than acts accidentally. To be spiritual or meditative does not mean to become a non-entity, or to have everything under control! It doesn’t mean to turn ourselves into a passive little flower when we have a stalking lioness inside! It doesn’t mean we will stop having a temper or change our personality. It means that we will become aware and conscious and will create a bridge between that same personality we so often criticize, and the spiritual being that we know we are.
The education that provides the understanding that must accompany consciousness expansion and personal growth is missing in our world. Most teachers offer us a miniscule insight into a tiny fragment of how to work our personality-soul. But, we are not a system, a machine, or even a complex computer. We are that which inhabits it! The computer runs amok because there is no mastery of Consciousness to guide it! It is important that we understand what Consciousness is and how it functions multidimensionally, going through the silence and sometimes through a kind of black hole and arriving at Home inside yourself. It is like the children’s fables we used to read as children. We are not meant to suspend ourselves there and ignore the world. We are meant to use that essence of ourselves and, parting from that perspective know what is appropriate.
To blend the two facets of ourselves, the physical and personality aspect with the soul or Consciousness factor, needs deliberate and sustained effort. We need to want it because we crave it for itself, not to solve or to “get” anything. Consciousness expansion involves discovering the perfection of who and what we are in the here and now, no matter how much we complain and suffer about it.
There is perfection to everything, and there is a Justice that we do not see. Our spiritual work currently involves our conscious participation in life and all its aspects. We don’t value the experience of nothingness that precedes the fullness of Self. So we freak at the dip in the stock market, at losing our job or our husband, at someone dying, or about anything that we think we cannot live without. As if these things defined us or determined our life! All our meditation work or self-development courses go down the toilet. Why? Because we have not dared create that pause that bridges our Self with our self. We do not walk the talk.
The inner Self is not just another “idea”; it cannot be something added on to the doing and information that we already carry. Regardless of the success of Louise Hays and other worthy persons who teach positive affirmation, long term full living for a seeker after the truth is not a matter of thinking or doing. It implies total transformation.
The Inner Self is a separate and distinct state of being from our ordinary thinking-feeling personality self that has nothing to do with the subjective world of running commentaries, attitudes, reactions, and connections to the outer world.
Can you imagine that this inner self speaks to you? Can you switch perspectives with it? Can you embody that Self that speaks to you, and experience yourself feeling one with it? Notice the difference in the way you feel in your everyday life, the more you practice this bridging. It takes practice.
If we can consciously occupy the spaces or situations that we normally inhabit and pause long enough to remember the silence, we can replace our ordinary reactions with responses from that inner self. We allow a genuine but different and truer self; inspiration and solutions follow naturally. We are something else within this new silent, empty space and that force rushes through with authenticity to fill the personality self and its expressions in the world.
It requires discipline and time. Mostly it requires courage to sustain the emptiness we are, and then colour and live it as choice, because you at last you know what “love” is.
An example. Imagine that you were speaking to someone who was connected to you “inside”, though some kind of telephone or computer. This “person” speaks to you. Make it as real as you can, until you can “feel” that person right there, relating with you. Now gently, at your own time, imagine switching perspectives and “being” that person, embodying her or him. It may be difficult at first, especially if you do not know the energetic difference between body and mind. If you take it as a game, it might be easier.
What would that feel like? And what would it feel like to sustain that state through daily life. Start a little at a time. Walk and feel and act “as” that person when there are no challenges to face. Get used to it. Notice the differences between the way you feel as you normally do and the way you feel now. If you follow the training I am offering through the “Know Thyself” series (link) in this blog, use your awareness to observe how it affects your emotional self. Keep doing this.
Have the courage to go back and forth. In other words, allow yourself to mope and fear and whatever you normally do and feel…then go back and see how this other person would feel under the same circumstances