If you've ever been in a condition where you've found yourself in a rut -- maybe you can't stop thinking about something, maybe there's a problem that you wish you could just get past but the conditions of your life won't allow you to do it, or maybe you want to make a real change but you look at your life and say, "It's impossible, the situation I'm in" -- in such moments, apart from natural responsibility (should you have that) to those who are dependent upon you, you have to realize that if you're going to break that pattern, you're first of all going to have to be conscious of the appearance of the rut in you in the moment where Life strikes the note that makes you aware of it. You have to be attentive. You have to have the intention.
But the next thing is this (and this is where spiritually speaking the wheat is separated from the chaff): you cannot consult your mind when it comes to walking away from a rut. You're caught in a situation where you think, "I've got to do certain things in order to succeed" -- and why do you have to succeed? We don't see that it's because we don't want to be seen as a failure.
Or let's say you want to make a dramatic change of some kind -- what do you do? You start talking to your mind! Or more accurately, your mind starts talking and you fall into the dialogue. Your mind starts telling you, "It's impossible." Then the mind that created the image that first brought you into something in order to acquire it, and that now you want to break out of, now that mind says that "if you don't have this, if you don't do that, YOU will come to an end. Everything is going to be gone." And it uses fear. Fear is the enforcer of the rut. It always speaks to you in "do or die" terms. It says, "Yes, it would be nice, but..."
You have to get to the point inwardly where you look at this and you start to understand that yes, life repeats patterns, but nothing in the pattern is truly repeated. God's life is new. When you understand the fact of that and you see inside of yourself that when life strikes you and brings certain tones up -- when you have certain thoughts and it brings up certain wishes -- in those moments where that appears, it is mandatory that you look at such an instant and then you do not talk to yourself. You leap into the moment. You leave yourself.
But the difficulty in leaving ourselves is that we don't know what we're leaving ourselves for -- and that mind would rather have the familiar ache, anger, or worry than go into the unfamiliar life in which it can't know itself through an image it produced prior to its action.
It's hard for us to understand: any time the mind produces -- at a psychological, spiritual level -- an image by which it's going to act, it has created the seed of the rut. Because the minute that it acts according to the image, it becomes dependent upon keeping it in place. And then the very thing that was going to free one becomes one's anchor.
So the task becomes increasingly to recognize the truth, to see in the reflection of the waters, just like "The Ugly Duckling" -- that "Ugly Stuckling" only feels stuck because he or she remains identified with this nature that says it must go on as it is, that it must be the way it's been "or else."
Then spiritually you throw that "or else" back into the face of the "image," back into the face of "The Ugly Stuckling." You take the step. When it's a true step, it will always be a step into what is not known. No step into what is not known is taken free of fear, but when you take it, you find freedom from fear, because you understand the fear was always produced by this image and the self that required it in order to keep that rut in place.
