We all believe that our present view is the entirety of all possibilities, never suspecting that this conclusion, which almost always follows some reaction, has been painted by a nature that is responding to what has set it off.
Your negative reactions and subsequent pain come from feeling something has interfered with some certainty you have about life, challenging who and what you think you are.
The convictions about life that you currently live from are your captivity, but there's an entirely different life possible.
The inevitability of your spiritual work is to finally bring you into a place where a certain number of shocks are inescapable for you. These shocks show you that your whole life has been based on an understanding you were born and brought into through your so-called maturity, which is the manifestation of ego.
Ego/personality/false self is endlessly framing everything that happens to you through the content of what has been disturbed in you, and then seeks a way to bring itself back to peace.
No one has ever been released from their hatred, no matter how many times humans have produced so-called "peace" on this planet, because there's a nature that continues to be drawn to the darkness it sees and the sense of self that's created.
St. Paul in Ephesians 6:12: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." Our struggle is with an invisible inner "government" that runs everything in an unseen way, compelling us to then come up with our own power to overcome whatever we feel has overpowered us.
Personality never stops restructuring itself, unaware that it can't change the basis of its structure, which is a sleeping nature set against itself.
The new me that was born out of getting rid of the old me is still the old me, just dressed differently. Anything in you that wants to throw out your old life is the old life reinventing itself, which is why it keeps returning and returning.
We are here not to serve ourselves, but to discover a relationship with something that is, by its nature, celestial and divine.
We think that our ability to judge ourselves proves we are not the nature we are judging.
"Chief feature" refers to a specific nature that is gradually formed over time within you as a part of the personality, telling you who you are and framing everything that happens to you.
Each of us comes into this world with a certain set of tendencies and "parts." The life that you're given is designed to bring about a relationship between all of these parts so that you can see that they are all related, just as you are related to every other human being and all of their parts.
We unconsciously hunger for the confirmation of whatever has become a part of our personality.
Even though the knowledge in old teachings is invaluable in some respects, the poison of them is that you start to want to understand what you think something means, causing you to look at life through the very personality that has been conditioned to seek something to console itself in the knowledge of itself. And it never stops because nothing can satisfy it.
Self-observation has nothing whatsoever to do with trying to be the observer of something; it has everything to do with being watchful at all times. Self-observation begins with not trying to not identify, but being present to how painful it is to be identified with anything talking to you about what's tormenting you in that moment.
