For most of your life you have been taught that you are your mind. You have been training your intellect, attending classes ad infinitum and identifying yourself somehow with what you know.
As you leave your personal history behind, you will leave behind the notion that you are your mind. (This is such an important concept in attainment of the sacred self that I have included a chapter called “Cultivate the Witness” later in this book.)
You are not your occupation. You are not engineer nor teacher nor secretary nor shopkeeper. These are choices that the invisible divine you has made as your way of fulfilling, your heroic mission while visiting now-here.
The more your position becomes defined as who you are, the more difficult it is for you to know truth and freedom. It is easier for an anonymous wanderer who has had many occupational titles to be blissfully alive and aware of his divinity than it is for a celebrity trapped in the role of maintaining a public image.
The role identification itself can keep you away from your own true higher self. It can inhibit you from knowing your higher self, since the role of occupation is the dominant force in your life.
Dropping your personal history involves shedding the notion that you are what you do. Remember this exercise in logic: If you are what you do, then when you don’t, you aren’t.
When you believe that who you are is your work, you find yourself performing your routine in order to feel important. You work even though it no longer makes sense. You perform those tasks as if somehow the divine you was involved in this drama.
As you drop your personal history, you drop this idea. You become what Stuart Wilde in his refreshingly honest and brilliant book The Whispering Winds of Change calls “becoming a minimalist.” This excerpt will whet your appetite for reading this important book:
Never go forward in a hurry. Walk slowly, speak deliberately. Never get emotional and never let people manipulate you…. There’s always another deal, always another time, and there’s five billion other people…. Tell them you have all the time in the world—because you do, you’re infinite. Remember the greatest wisdom you can develop is the wisdom of not doing. It’s the deals and situations that you avoid that help you conserve energy and remain independent and strong…. Everything you commit to will have weight.
Make every effort to remove these labels from yourself, and know that you are not what you do, nor are you the doer. You are the one who watches the you who is doing.
You are not your relationships. Certainly the love energy between you and all of those in your immediate circle is very significant, but it is not who you are.
You are an individual soul that is connected to the whole, but you are not the relationship to that whole.
Your identification with your relationship provides you with great frustration because every time there is a glitch in it, as there always will be, you find yourself feeling worthless.
Remember that you are eternal, that which is changeless. You are in a great number of relationships, all of which have validity, but they come and go just like your life here in form comes from no-where and goes to nowhere and then back to no-where. It is a relationship of coming and going, and thus it changes.
Dropping your personal history means dropping the belief that a failed relationship makes you a failure. There are no failed relationships. Every person who enters and exits your life does so in a mutual sharing of life’s divine lessons. Some have longer roles to play than others, but ultimately, you will return to your relationship to the absolute.
You do not have to ever judge yourself in negative ways because of the nature of your relationships. You can learn from them all, knowing from your observer’s position that you are the one observing it all.
You are not your country, race or religion. You are an eternal spirit, not an American or a Chinese or an African. It matters not what sort of a body you showed up in, where you arrived geographically or what religion you place after your name. There are no Buddhists or Catholics or Presbyterians in the no-where. Those are classifications made to distinguish us from one another in our present form.
Identities are found in a temporary phase in the parenthesis in eternity that we call life. Discard these names and you will identify with the realm of the spirit rather than the world of the ego. Then you are no longer willing to fight the fights of your ancestors who have tried to convince you whom to hate and whom to love. You will no longer participate in the tribal consciousness in which you perceive yourself to be better than another by virtue of your birthplace or skin color.
Your personal history has trained you in the ways of your tribe. These are limitations that you do not need to have. Let go of that identification with the labels and choose a new perspective of unity consciousness. You are united with all souls. Their packaging or location is irrelevant.
Those who are still stuck will call you a traitor and an ingrate. You will be able to send them love and not take on their guilt.
The cries of nationalism, tribalism and theism have been the source of wars and of the slaughter of billions of human beings. You know in your heart, as do all who play out this game, that this is a violation of God’s laws, that it is inconsistent with the teachings of all the spiritual masters who have ever walked among us.
Yet the pattern persists. Why? Because we hang on to our personal histories as if they were our true identities. Refuse to identify yourself with tribal labels.
Seeing yourself as a spiritual being without labels is a way to transform the world and reach a sacred place for all of humanity. Begin by making your decision to be free by letting go of your personal history.
When you let go of your personal history, you know that you are not your name, your body, your mind, your occupation, your relationships or your ethnic or cultural identity. So who are you? What is left is the invisible, intangible you, which is the heart of the message in this book.
What we have now is similar to what a seeker asked Nisargadatta Maharaj to clarify. He states to his teacher, “When I look within, I find sensations and perceptions, thoughts and feelings, desires and fears, memories and expectations. I am immersed in this cloud and see nothing else.”
Nisargadatta Maharaj, who sat on the outskirts of Bombay in his humble abode, shunning all possessions and only seeking to help those who wanted spiritual awareness, replied:
That which sees all this, and the nothing too, is the inner teacher. He alone is, all else only appears to be. He is your own self, your hope and assurance of freedom; find him and cling to him and you will be saved and safe.
What a great message for you. That inner witness is your entire being. It is the answer. It cannot be described in words, but it will become better known to you as you drop your personal history.
3
RELEASING OLD BELIEFS
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
—MARK TWAIN
My past is nothing more than the trail that I have left behind. What drives my life today is the energy that I generate in my present moments.
It is now time to begin the task of recognizing and releasing beliefs and opinions that do not fit into your new agreement with reality. Take a look at some of those ingrained beliefs and shift them out of your consciousness.
Your personal history is replete with beliefs. These beliefs are at the core of your understanding of what it is that constitutes your reality. You have used them to explain why your life has taken the course it has. Resolve to remove those that are inconsistent with the new agreement with reality that you are creating.
Throughout this chapter you will be asked to identify and then change core beliefs that you no longer want. You might wonder why one would hold on to unwanted belief systems. In Be As You Are, Ramana Maharshi, one of India’s twentieth-century sages, has this to say in response to why human beings continue to repeat self-negating ways:
Pleasure or pain are aspects of the mind only. Our
essential nature is happiness. But we have forgotten the Self and imagine that the body or the mind is the Self. It is that wrong identity that gives rise to misery. What is to be done? This mental tendency is very ancient and has continued for innumerable past births. Hence it has grown strong. That must go before the essential nature, happiness, asserts itself.
This chapter may help you answer the rhetorical question that is being posed by Ramana Maharshi, “What is to be done?”
Here are ten of the most common and difficult-to-undo beliefs that are taught in Western civilization. Examine each of these core beliefs in terms of how it operates in your life. Then consider some of the suggestions that I have offered. In the process, you will be rewriting your new agreement with reality and perhaps creating your answers to the question “What is to be done?”
Remember that your entire life is concerned with the accumulation of energy. The more beliefs that you remove from your inner space, the more room there is for new energy. Ask yourself if these ten beliefs are ones that you want to maintain or let go of. And keep in mind that if these beliefs do not serve you, they are lies that live endlessly, as Mark Twain suggests in the epigraph to this chapter.
BELIEF # 1: MORE-IS-BETTER
More-is-better is a twentieth-century disease that can obscure the path of the sacred quest. Has this belief become a part of your daily life? Where is the peace in more-is-better?
The pursuit of more confines one to a life of striving. It is impossible to arrive and enjoy life. Have you been conditioned to accept this belief? If you’ve spent a lot of life energy on more-is-better it can be difficult to halt the momentum. You need to know if it is a cornerstone of your life.
Some of the signs that more-is-better is the foundation of your life are the following: you must be busy to be fulfilled; you must make more money than you currently are making; you must get a promotion to prove your worth; you need to have more of everything. To change this, you will want to declare a halt to your constant pursuit of more by knowing that you don’t need anything else in order to be free.
More-is-better keeps us exclusively in the physical domain. The spiritual self is not allowed in our daily life. Inner energy is concentrated on accumulations, acquisitions, rewards, trophies, approval and money.
Some people experience guilt, shame and self-reproach thinking they are being lazy and worthless, and feeling irresponsible when they are not pursuing more.
We are taught the game early. Starting in school we learn to pursue higher grades, additional diplomas and external titles. There is no peace in this pursuit.
The feeling of peace is there when you are facing away from more-is-better. It indicates that your spiritual self is calling you. “The good and the wise lead quiet lives,” Euripides said centuries ago.
It is not because the pursuit of more is inherently bad that I include it at the top of this list. It is because it denies you the peace and harmony that are intrinsic to your sacred quest. You do not have to become inert to be at peace. You can abandon the idea of more-is-better and replace it with an inner serenity that does not need more in order to be acceptable.
You have received beliefs from an endless chain of people who have been willing victims for generations. When you let go of these beliefs, you will open an inner reservoir of space that allows you to accumulate a different kind of energy, which will direct you toward peace rather than toward tumult and a bypass operation.
Suggestions for Releasing More-Is-Better
Simplify, simplify, simplify. I can’t repeat it enough. Examine carefully how much of your life energy is used in pursuit of what you don’t want or need. Practice, one day at a time, the idea of saying no to more. A very emphatic “No, I will not pursue that item.”
In place of pursuing more-is-better, spend time playing with your son or granddaughter. Read the New Testament instead of chasing after another object. Go for a long walk along the riverfront rather than spend time trying to get ahead.
As you release the energy you previously applied to pursuing more, you free yourself up inside to experience the joy of being rather than the drudgery of always doing. This is freedom, the ability to choose to be rather than to accumulate.
You will discover, as you practice simplifying, that many items that you previously chased after, including money, will begin to show up in your life without pursuing them. This is one of the great ironies of life. Less is more!
Give yourself regular moments of silent contemplation. Treat these moments as absolutely essential in your daily routine. The practice of meditation or silent prayer will get you back in touch with God. As Mikhael Aivanhov put it in The Mystery of Light, “Wherever there are no limits, where Infinity and Eternity and Immortality exist, that is where God is.”
These moments of contemplation remove you from the idea that you have to have more. You will come to know that everything that you need for a peaceful, blissful, loving life, you already possess, and this awareness will pervade all of your daily life practice.
Practice saying, “I pass.” When you start to feel the pressure to go after more, just say the words “I pass.” It is freeing to let the pressure for more subside with these simple words. After saying this a few times you will feel an inner freedom. This inner space is available for your higher spiritual self.
Get back to nature. Wilderness is therapy. Give yourself time in the woods, trekking in the mountains, walking in fields or along the beach. Just being in nature is a way of letting go of the disease of wanting more.
Spend a night sleeping outdoors with your children or a loved one, or solo. Look at the galaxies and sense your place in the endless magnificence of a night sky. I guarantee you will gain a new perspective on life. You will see the beauty of the natural world and let go of your belief that things and accumulations are needed for you to feel complete.
Add to these suggestions the words of Peace Pilgrim: “A simplified life is a sanctified life.” You can be a CEO of a large corporation, the head of a bustling household, a sales representative constantly traveling, a head physician in a large hospital, a shopkeeper in a busy mall—and still live a sanctified life. It is an inner awareness that you need to have, one that stops singing the tune “More-is-better” and replaces it with “Peace-is-better.”
BELIEF # 2: EXTERNALS ARE TO BLAME FOR THE CONDITIONS OF MY LIFE
If you were raised on blame, it is a habit for you to reach for this excuse whenever you wish to explain why something is not working in your life.
You can, for instance, blame lack of prosperity on a lot of externals: your culture, the stock market, politicians, your parents, lady luck, the greed of others. You can blame illness on heredity, the flu season, bad luck, the environment. Your sour relationships can be blamed on your partners, their inability to love you, your upbringing, your parents. Your personality can be blamed on your parents, your genes, your childhood, your siblings, your birth order. Your physical appearance can be the fault of genetics, the food manufacturers, advertisers, the polluted environment. This is potentially an endless list.
The alternative to blame is self-responsibility—becoming an inner-directed person. You may not have been taught to consider taking responsibility for the events in your life. But if you are unwilling to discontinue the blame game, you will be unable to initiate your sacred quest.
When you blame something outside of yourself for the circumstances you are experiencing, you give control of your life to that outer phenomenon. Relying on externals means abandoning your sacred self. The sacred quest is realized in an inner environment of peaceful knowing. It invites you to turn around and make contact with your inner loving presence, where you will find your solutions.
The key to you is always within. It is impossible to lose the key to yourself outside of yourself when you are on the path of the sacred quest. When you let go of blaming others and search within for your key, you will always find what you need.
Instead of blame, you can choose to
know that all of the events and people who have shown up in your life have had a divine role.
In our dream state, we create all of the characters we need. From an awakened perspective, we don’t blame the characters and events in our dreams. So too we can know that the things that we do not understand or approve of are still in our life to teach us something.
Shed the fault-finding tendency. Know that you are the creator of your life and that a loving presence is with you. Your ability to be self-reliant will overtake your habit of assigning blame.
Suggestions for Releasing Blame
When you are inclined to think that someone else is responsible for your circumstances, take an instant to say a prayer of thanks for the lesson. The lesson is to become aware that you are the one experiencing the feeling.
When I am about to blame gun enthusiasts for the violence in our society, I stop myself and appreciate the reminder that it is me experiencing this anguish. I then look within myself for a way to end the violence, rather than blame an entity called gun lovers.
You can do this the instant that you recognize yourself playing the blame game.
Feel thankful toward those you’ve let anger you. Give inner thanks for the reminder that the feeling you are experiencing is inside you, not outside you.
Now you can turn your attention inside, toward the way of the sacred quest. From this focus you can comfort the angry feeling, make a choice about your connection to the person outside you, seek whatever is in this situation for you to learn and respond from your centeredness rather than angered outerness.
Most important, turn your attention away from blame to a loving presence within. Here you will find centeredness, love, solace, learning and solution—just by sitting with your attention on the inner emotion rather than blaming the other.
Your Sacred Self Page 5
