Nearly all of humanity is asleep to itself; six-and-a-half billion "sleep-walkers" who -- even as they move through life -- are all but oblivious to the reality of the invisible worlds within them shaping their lives.
It is to help us discover this unseen state of our self that authentic spiritual "exercises" came to exist and have been passed along down through the ages. Their true purpose was never to empower human beings with what the sleeping mind dreamed would rescue it, but to awaken the "sleeper" within -- the True Self -- to its unnatural state of imprisonment.
True illumination is liberation from the illusion of passing time and the world of thought that creates it.
The purpose of any true interior practice is not to help us "do" or achieve something in the world that will make our future a brighter one, but to help us see something now about our present level of being. But our wish and work to be aware of ourselves isn't just to see ourselves through this Light of higher awareness, but also to allow its celestial presence to act upon us.
As life pours itself out in the stream of passing time, and we run into challenges seemingly greater than our ability to answer -- each of these encounters "asks" this question of us: "Are you willing to change (who you have been) in order to realize a higher possibility of yourself?"
And though moments like these trouble us because of their uncertainty, here's why we should be very grateful for their continuing appearance in our lives: this unwanted experience of realizing our limitations is the only way life can ask us if we wish to go beyond them. So this unknown moment of not understanding (what is to be) is actually the beautiful seed of a new order of our being, providing we're willing to see it as such.
Unfortunately, most of us automatically resist the unknown. Whenever we can't understand the nature of some unwanted situation we fall, by default, into the hands of a nature whose answer to this ache is always the same: get negative and then try to protect ourselves from anything that can't be otherwise controlled. The rest takes place in us on automatic pilot: in the wink of an eye, we begin to see the "way out" of our situation: blame him, fix that, fight or flee. But here's what we don't see: in that moment, our guiding light is a dark reaction dedicated, in one way or another, to avoiding what that moment came to give us. This false nature takes what was a celestially planned event -- for the purpose of our further spiritual perfection -- and turns it into a dead end.
A big part of our inner work involves remembering this key idea: resisting what life shows us -- not wanting those moments wherein we're invited to see the truth about our present level of self -- ensures they will return again!
So we must learn to put the light of Truth before all things. No such effort ever goes unrewarded. Little by little the living Light reveals within us a new and higher order of strength that has no problem saying "no" to those unconscious parts of us that care for nothing and no one, not even themselves! This new "no" then becomes a "yes" to self-wholeness.
True freedom is not an achievement; it is our awakened relationship and participation with the genesis of real life. We cannot create a life without limits by trying to overcome what we think stands in our way. Real limitless living is the fruit of this higher understanding that what is in our way is part of the Way. To know this is to know that all of creation has been made for you, just as surely as you have been made for everything that happens to you within it.
