The Secret Teaching of the Ages

It is impossible to change the relationship that you have with the world around you without changing the relationship that you have in yourself, with yourself. Before you can become the kind of human being who never again hurts another -- either in thought or deed -- you must change the relationship you have with yourself.

This is the secret teaching of the ages. Inside of it, we learn about the necessity for a new kind of mind. We learn about the possibility of a world within ourselves that is presently guarded -- not by something that is keeping us out because it is something so elevated, powerful, and high that there's no way that we can scale it -- but because we have yet to scale the depths of our own ignorance.

We refuse to understand the pain that our own ignorance causes. We refuse to recognize that it's impossible for us to have the pain we have with other people without ourselves being a participant in it. Ultimately, we refuse the beautiful lessons that life brings to us, and instead of going through the transformation they are intended to produce for us, we become individuals who simply wrap ourselves deeper and deeper in the same nature that is the source of our suffering.

The new mind begins to discover that the reason that it continues to be a prisoner is because it continues to live from a prisoner mentality. A prisoner mentality is blaming anything outside of you for the pain you have. Was there a person who did something terrible? Yes. This planet is full of toxic, cruel human beings -- victims themselves of a pain they can't escape. Does that mean that you should spend your life running, hiding, resenting what was? That you should stay wrapped up in some kind of dark state because something in you revisits the past? No! Up to this moment, you haven't known that the pain you feel isn't because of what's taking place in the present, but is born out of something inside of you that has become a prisoner of your own past.

Something in you calls up a person, or a condition outside of yourself that reminds you of a person, and at that moment, what happens? Something in you grabs onto whoever it was that you blame for your pain, and "bang" -- bitterness, sorrow, regret, or rage results. You grant power to the nature that defeats you every time you think about what someone did or didn't do.

There is freedom in realizing -- seeing the truth of the fact -- that whatever is holding you captive right now has no right to do so. None! The split second that you see you're a captive of your own mind, you have the freedom to challenge it with the new understanding that belongs to your new, true mind -- a mind that can't be made a prisoner of anything.

Refuse to carry forward with you one more day any thought that tells you there is someone to be punished for the way you feel. Refuse to be made a subject of ignorance, to live in the darkness of days past, calling it the present moment because of how much pain there is in it. Your mind will begin to move in new ways because it is living in a broader world, and it is no longer a captive of its own past emotional content.