I saw a billboard on the way home from our vacation that said “Believe in Yourself – pass it on.” I can’t remember ever seeing a more helpful message on a billboard in my life. What a great message. It creates all kinds of possibilities. Doors open that normally stay closed. Worries disappear. Productivity soars. Enthusiasm for greatness builds with each success. There are no limits to what you can achieve.
Contrary to this, when you don’t believe in yourself, you are in for a lot of heartache. Life becomes an uphill battle. Stress, frustration, and despair become your most intimate friends.
Lack of faith in oneself is due to a lack of perception. If you can’t see the potential that lies inside of you, you are missing the big picture. It is a failure to understand the nature of your existence. It’s a failure to know who you really are.
“Who am I?” is an eternal question that we struggle to answer lifetime after lifetime. The destitute drunkard imagines himself as a destitute drunkard, and cannot imagine anything else. So that is the state of his existence until he imagines himself as something more than that.
To believe in yourself is to know yourself as free of self-imposed limitations. When we see ourselves as finite human beings, we are the victims of finite imagination. The spiritual path within is a path of infinite imagination. And the end of the path is when we find ourselves as existence beyond imagination, infinite and eternal.
Better than to believe in yourself is to know yourself. That is the ultimate goal – to know your Real Self. The Real Self has no limitations. The Real Self is not limited to your physical body. The physical body is only that aspect of its reality that is manifested as form. But there is also the unmanifest dimension to your reality. That is the dimension of consciousness, knowledge, and power.
The beginning piano player has only a finite ability to play piano. But that is ignoring the unmanifested possibilities. Piano mastery will manifest in due time if there is talent and a commitment. The mastery is there all along, but it does not reveal itself until the time is ripe. It is no different than an acorn seed having within it an acorn tree. The tree is in an unmanifested state of being, but that doesn’t negate its existence.
Too often people only focus on the seed state of things. Focus on the potentiality of being. Acorn seeds are not created to remain acorn seeds. And we are not created to remain limited. We are created so that we can become conscious of who we really are. To know that is to believe in yourself with a conviction that is beyond comprehension by the mind.
If you discover faults or weaknesses that seem limiting, those are only guideposts to point you on the way. Those are areas to work on. We are all works in progress. We are all streams making our way to the ocean. Some are closer to the ocean than others, but all eventually make it.
Over the course of my life, I have had many ups and downs. Failures and successes. What I have finally learned through all of it is that life is a workshop. Careers are workshops. Marriages are workshops. Illnesses are workshops. We take workshops to grow. If we were perfect, we wouldn’t be here. We are human beings after all. We are not computers. We are not supposed to have all the answers. All we need to be is open to growth and have a willingness to learn from mistakes. Instead of focusing on the mistakes as failures, look upon them as gifts coming from an abundant universe in the form of lessons. The wisdom of sages did not come without suffering from failures and mistakes.
We learn through mistakes. Don’t allow them to create doubt about who you really are.
We are not accidents of fate. We are the actualized intention of a consciousness that pervades existence. We are consciousness in the process of unfolding to greater and greater degrees of infinity.
Do you believe in yourself? Know that as you go deeper and deeper into the question of “Who am I?” the more self-understanding you will have. And with that understanding comes an increased level of belief in yourself. Instead of identifying with the mistakes and failures, try to identity with the process. It’s an unfoldment of life – of seeds becoming trees and rivers becoming oceans.
Believe in yourself and the battle is already won. Believe in yourself and consciousness will use you for the purpose that you were destined to fulfill.
Pass it on.
