What is this power that can show us the truth behind the mystery of who and what we are - even as it gives us everything we need to know? A few examples from the history of human discovery prove helpful in our inquiry.
In their time, the Wright brothers watched birds sail through the open skies and "asked" nature if she would divulge to them the principles of flight. As a result of their creative inquiry, today we can fly around the world in a matter of hours.
Albert Einstein, long considered the father of modern physics, "requested" that the universe reveal to him the secret relationship between matter and energy, and the general theory of relativity was born. From this fruit came the seed of other new scientific disciplines, including seminal discoveries leading up to the peacetime use of atomic energy, superconductivity, and gravitational studies that have helped us explore and comprehend the workings hidden in the deepest regions of our universe.
The evidence is indisputable: the mind that wants to know the truth of something, and that's willing to do the work required for such a discovery, will inevitably find that for which it is searching; our highest aspirations are reflections of unrealized possibilities. All scripture, from the East to the West, confirms this timeless truth: We need only ask, and it shall be given.
But the real question before us isn't how these individuals came to make their discoveries. We already know that the birth of all things great and true requires discipline, patience, and sacrifice. Rather, what we wish to know is where did they find this elevated understanding? In what place are we to seek and search for the timeless laws that alone reveal, and then release us from, our former limitations?
The answer is surprising at first glance, but ultimately the most freeing discovery one can make: Within each and every one of us already dwells everything that will ever be known; all powers, all possibilities, are a part of our own sacred birthright. This passage from the book of Ecclesiastes adds an important dimension to this idea: "What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun."
At first, it may be difficult to even imagine such an idea - that within us already dwells all that will ever be. But we mustn't ignore this possibility. We can observe that within the acorn already dwells the mighty oak, and the butterfly is the caterpillar from which it emerges. The implication of these discoveries is staggering, and the promise hidden within them, even greater!
So let's look at a common life situation - something we've all gone through - to shed more light on these last ideas.
All of us know what it's like to be dogged by parts of us that want to drag us down. Call it what you will: some compulsion or obsession seems to follow us into all our relationships, only to wreck them in one way or another. We struggle as best we can to free ourselves from these dark states but invariably find ourselves short of the mark. Slowly but surely, one thing becomes clear: we start to see that calling upon who and what we have been to save us from our suffering is like asking a windstorm to neatly pile our autumn leaves. So, without giving up, we begin to open our eyes to the truth of our condition and, somewhere in the midst of our misery, we suddenly see our lives in a new kind of light. In this new awareness, a whole new order of self-understanding dawns; and, as it does, our old dark sense of self departs, taking its suffering along with it.
In these healing moments, where we seem to awaken from a bad dream, there comes a new understanding of something we've always known but had somehow forgotten! Revelations like these can mean only one thing: all that we need to grow beyond who we currently are is already a part of our true nature.
Sharing in the divine fullness is such that it makes whoever achieves it ever greater, more illimitable, so as never to cease growing. Because the spring of all reality flows ceaselessly, the being of anyone who shares in it is increased in grandeur by all that springs up within, so that the capacity for receiving grows along with the abundance of good gifts received.
--Gregory of nyssa (335-c. 394, Caesarea, Cappadocia)
We invent nothing. We borrow and recreate. We uncover and discover. All has been given...we have only to open our eyes and our hearts to become one with that which is.
--Henry Miller (1891-1980, United States)
