Our eyes and ears, thoughts and feelings, empower us to move freely through the extraordinary web of life of which we're a part. But these gifts of perception, as considerable as they may be, are more like a looking glass than they are the keys to that secret kingdom of freedom we seek. With their aid, we can almost see into, and so confirm, that innermost realm where our heart senses we belong. Yet these same significant senses have no power to help us cross over into our own timeless and free True Nature.
Nothing is more difficult than "knowing" that a grand newness awaits us, even as we find ourselves still firmly in the grip of old doubts and fears. What we do with these encounters of the truthful kind determines our success. How we proceed when denied our spiritual heart's desire is everything.
So, the next time you run into some familiar blockage or begin to feel unsuited to face some new and difficult personal challenge, don't do what you've always done before. Don't try to think your way around it. You no longer want a way around your troubles because what goes around, comes around! What you want is to grow beyond the level of that disturbance. And to do that, you must not act from it.
Don't allow yourself to be pulled down into any anxious concern or confusion over not knowing what to do about your present condition. What you really want is an insight into your situation, not a fight with it. The two have nothing in common. So make it clear to yourself once and for all: nothing that hounds you can help you.
Draw yourself back from your usual thinking. Quietly observe the me mind race around looking for the shelter of a conclusion it can recognize. Have nothing to do with its frantic motion. You've gone as far as you can go with what you know. Now it's time to know that, so that you can let what you know go, and let something unthinkable occur to you. Just relax.
Pressuring yourself to come up with a happy ending to a sad or shaky situation only goes to show you still believe that you can resolve these troubles. But if you could have, you would have by now. Besides, the me mind wants you to confuse these feelings of pressure for being some kind of proof of personal progress. It's done its job well. After all these years, you're afraid to live without this feeling of habitually prodding yourself for fear that without it, you might get stuck! The solution here is to see that, in fact, you are stuck! This powerful insight releases you from the pressure of wanting anything from yourself.
Now you've done what you can do. You've prepared the stage -- your own mind -- for the arrival of the free mind. And this royal nature will arrive. But learn to expect it in the unexpected. To paraphrase the New Testament: Be ever watchful for you don't know when -- or how -- something higher will make itself known to you.
There may come a flash of insight, a clear glimpse into some self-created cause of your own continuing inner captivity. Or, perhaps, a sudden and sweet deep sense of wholeness will sweep through you -- a quiet but profound intuition wherein you know yourself, for that moment, to be one with all of that higher life pulsating around and within you.
However that Light breaks into the darkened room of self, consider each brief illumination as an appointed messenger, a heavenly herald sent in advance of a greater freedom to come. Learn to embrace each appearance, for regardless of what may be revealed to you or about you -- these insights are not unlike the sound of the shouts of liberation heard always just before the arrival of the liberating forces. A new freedom always follows. Now, follow it!
