Steve Pavlina writes: “You can’t be intelligent if you turn your back on truth and succumb to falsehood and denial.” How Much more true that is if you are striving for higher consciousness or even Self Realization.
This process of facing truth and not succumbing to falsehood and denial is a continual challenge. We so much want to identify with our successes and with what makes us separate from others. Just when we think we know ourselves we have to accept the fact that we don’t. We identify with the finite limitations of the ego-mind instead of with the infinite reality of what Emerson called the “Oversoul.” The difference in the two is like the difference between a drop of the ocean and the ocean itself.
We are blissfully ignorant of our Oceanic Infinity and ignorantly content with the false assumption that we are only drops. We are bound with limitations, but this is a limitation of ignorance – an ignorance of who we really are. And to know and experience consciously who we really are is Knowledge.
How do we get there? It’s not easy.
It takes courage to let go of the familiar and the comfortable. And it takes wisdom and understanding to see the limitations of conditioned consciousness, and to know that there are more conscious ways of living, and deeper levels of fulfillment. We have to always be willing to sacrifice who we are for what we are destined to become.
And it is always easier to stay limited than go beyond self-created limits. But go beyond limits we must, because that is the nature of infinity, and to accept anything less than that is a denial of truth. And with this denial comes self-created and unnecessary suffering.
It’s not so much a question of becoming intelligent. It’s a question of discovering it within. The Intelligence that created the universe is also within each of us. The most sublime beauty we have ever seen in nature or art is but a shadow of that beauty that is within us. Krishna tells us this in the Bhagavid Gita. Meher Baba tells us that in God Speaks.
To settle for anything less than the infinite and eternal nature that belongs to us is to embrace falsehood and is a denial of who we really are. It’s like a river that resists flowing to the ocean and it becomes stagnant and foul.
We can never become too satisfied with our lives. For our lives are created out of false assumptions. And it is our duty to shed these falsehoods, these false beliefs about ourselves, one by one. It is a continual answering of the question, “Who am I?”
What this amounts to is a process of unlearning. You have all heard the expression, “If it quacks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it’s a duck.” Well, not exactly. What it really is is consciousness temporarily assuming the form of a duck, only to be discarded when it realizes that it is more than a duck.
We are human beings, in various forms, nationalities, races, religions, for the purpose of discovering that we are more than form. That is, we take on a form to discover formlessness. For consciousness, in its essence, is formless. It is beyond opposites.
All of the forms taken by consciousness, from stone to human being, are for the purpose of experiencing limitation – not that we are meant to be limited – but for the purpose of transcending the limitations inherent in form.
In human form, we have the capacity to experience the inner realms of the subtle and mental worlds and to transcend even those experiences and find union in the Absolute Oneness that pervades all of creation. For we are that Oneness.
Fortunately, Oneness is longing for us as much as we are longing for it.
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