The First Step to Being True to Yourself (and Everyone Else)
Key Lesson: Only when the pleasure of being by ourselves either equals or exceeds that contentment that we feel in the company of others, are we capable of being unshakably true to ourselves, as well as those with whom we gather.
Touch the Timeless Truth of Yourself
When faced with the prospect of living with an emptiness that seems capable of swallowing us whole, most of us elect to do the only thing we believe is possible under such dire circumstances. We start right away working out fresh ways to fill ourselves once more. The drill is familiar: find someone or something new with which to make another beginning. Do whatever is needed to bring an end to the emptiness. There's only one small problem with these solutions: they don't work! That is unless we believe that being compelled to fill a hole in our soul over and over again is the same as being whole.
You may be wondering, "If I don't take action to end my sense of emptiness, what am I going to do? If I don't make effort, then how am I going to make myself feel whole?" From evidence gleaned from our own life experiences, the following answer ought to ring true: When it comes to experiencing an overall sense of peace, happiness, and abiding contentment, we are not created to be self-filling beings. Instead, we need to realize that self-wholeness appears by itself within us.
Much in the same way as a sun-baked field of wildflowers has as its only balm the spring rains, so, too, does each season of our emptiness have but one true solution: the stirring touch of that Celestial Life that seeded us with this sense of emptiness in the first place. Why are we created to experience such a seemingly bottomless emptiness in the center of ourselves? Because in coming to know this dark half of the Living Light's great unseen life, we might -- of our own free will -- learn to quench our thirst -- fill ourselves with those life-giving waters that are ever-streaming out of its eternal source.
Our True Self is, in part, a secret field where a never-ending cycle of ebb and flow plays itself out in passing expressions of alternating fullness and emptiness, much as runoff winter waters from great mountains rush down to fill valley lakes parched dry by the passage of summer.
But the greater part of our Original Self is to these mountains and their valley lakes as is the whole of that countryside in which these same landmarks dwell, for even though the round of seasons come and go, causing endless changes within it, nothing really changes about it. Our True Nature lives in the ever-changing, yet never-changing Now; that vast country of higher consciousness wherein we are empowered to welcome all forms of fullness and emptiness as our friends, instead of mistaking ourselves a friend of one and foe of the other.
If we would awaken to a conscious relationship with these ever-flowing forces that are the lifeblood of our True Nature, and if we are to realize that this awareness alone can free us of our fear of being empty, then what is asked of us becomes clear: we must stop trying to create conditions for ourselves through which we hope to escape the fear of our own emptiness. We must willingly slip into these seemingly dark waters of ourselves, where, if we will wait there quietly enough, we will awaken to find ourselves in the higher atmosphere of a new world. For our spiritual daring, we will gain an intimate knowledge of these invisible eternal forces at work within us; one emptying us, even as another moves into its place to fill that open space with its new and unmistakable presence. If these words sound promising, it's because they are. As this priceless self-knowledge born of higher self-awareness grows in us, we will realize that the freedom we seek is found everywhere and all at once. We will no longer fear the end of things because at last we have seen that within ourselves, the truth of who we really are is as the beginning of life.
