The reason that we do what we do is because we are looking for the truth of ourselves. It doesn't matter - wanting to learn how to cook, wanting to start a new business, looking for a new relationship, wanting to learn how to write a book, surf, sumo wrestling - whatever it may be. And as many people as there are hearing or reading this... wherever you are, all over the world and in this room, that's how many ways in which something is looking to discover the truth of itself.
All said, although easier spoken than realized, is this one important idea: all seeking is the active expression of Self seeking (to discover and realize) Itself. You and I are expressions, reflections, and instruments of this higher level of consciousness - we are pure "potential" seeking to realize its (own) greatest possibility. And all of the things that we do in the pursuit of this discovery are so that we can little by little learn a bit more about the nature of this Self.
Have you not seen that the reason you go into something - you start down the road - is because there is a longing? It seems I'm just pursuing "this," I just want "that." But what I really want to do is learn something new about my capacity. I really want to discover what are the limitations, if there are limitations. I want to know what is this nature. Because have not every single one of us, at some point, entered into something and found (as we went into it and through it) that through that man, that woman, that job, that craft, that art, whatever it is... that through it, I was revealed to me in a way that I didn't know I existed before?
We hunger. We're here because we're hungry. But the fact is (and the problem exists) that there is something in us that names over and over and over and over and over again, what it is that I must get into, what I must pursue, so that I can one more time find this sense of myself anew - a new sense of myself.
But if we look at fear, which we're going to look at today, when is it that the fear appears in our life? This is going to be challenging for all of us, to one degree or another. Because most of us, honestly, we don't use our minds. We would rather have people tell us stuff, get all pumped up, pop out, do something, and then regret what we did. No, you must learn to think for yourself, not let other people think for you, even though there is a value. Certainly I'm going to give you new knowledge here today. But the new knowledge is the tool. The flowering of it comes through your action.
So I set out to discover... and I want to discover because each and every time I learn something new and true about myself, I am, in a manner of speaking, reborn. There's an integration, a revelation. Because when I learn something new about myself through whatever relationship it is, there is a revelation. Revelation is integration, because that which I did not know about myself... that you, they, them, this, revealed to me suddenly, "Ah... oh, I didn't know that about myself. I didn't know I had the capacity to see things that way, to feel things that deeply. I didn't know I had the capacity to be so angry or afraid." And you cannot separate these things, as we'll discover together.
So we do what we do. Everything that we do is to answer this innate longing that we have to find our Self anew, because it is the same Self in every one of us. And it "uses" every one of us for the ground of a discovery that can't take place any other way than through the unique compilation of who and what you are when you were born into this world. Nothing can sound out what you sound out!
How many more times in my life, in your life, are we going to pursue this sensation of being reborn through each and every subsequent pursuit that eventually brings about (when I start out) the fear, trepidation, a kind of recollection of places I've failed before? And if I managed to get through that, then there's the acquisition and then the identification with what it is that's been achieved. And then comes the fear of keeping it in place when things around me change.
So you have, at every onset and every completion of a cycle, you have this fear that appears with this longing for rebirth. And what we're going to discover is that it isn't this incessant string of being born, and born, and born... meaning the next pursuit, the next pursuit, the next pursuit. The task, and what we're capable of doing, is understanding that what we are after is rebirth itself, not the expression of it. Not the sensation of it created through acquiring something. But the actual moment to moment direct experience of what it means to be so present in this moment to yourself, that you understand you are never not being given all that you have been looking for outside of yourself.
