One way I go from feeling power-less to affect the large world out there – which is in the process of waking up from the longest-imaginable sleep – to power-full is to remember that my absolutely most powerful position and best contribution is to change, to refashion, to transform myself.
Never mind that I’m now beginning to understand the impact of one person’s Light on the collective consciousness. Truly understand.
Never mind that transforming myself rather than my neighbor is a fulfillment of the universal law.
Never mind even the political, as in “Be the change you wish to be.”
Let me just restrict it to the way we feel … real personal … dialing down the microscope … there.
I remain inside myself, a spirit housed in a body. I’m aware that I’m not my body. (1)
What is most important to me? I – and I believe we humans as a species – value how I feel above almost anything else I can think of. Perhaps not above the call of patriotic duty. We’d die for that. But most everyday competing attractions.
Changing myself, reforming myself, transforming myself seems to involve clearing away the obstacles to the natural me, the Self, which I already know to be pure and innocent. (Isn’t it funny. I need no reference or footnote for that statement. I know its truth.) (2)
Now, for a moment, let’s widen the view of the microscope … go up to the Mega-Macro level. We know what the purpose of life is (to know our true identity). We know that that purpose is God-given and that the universes are constructed as schools to help us realize that purpose.
We know that the heavens conspire to help us gain that knowledge. And we also know that everyone ultimately reaches it.
In fact it’s been often said that we could not reach God if left to our own efforts. Ramana Maharshi tells us:
“Your efforts can extend only thus far. Then the Beyond will take care of itself. You are helpless there. No effort can reach it.” (3)
Bernadette Roberts assures us:
“At a certain point, when we have done all we can [to bring about an abiding union with the divine], the divine steps in and takes over.” (4)
OK, if this is so, then we only need to worry about our part.
And what is that part? Let’s look at that tomorrow.
(Concluded in Part 2, tomorrow.)
Footnotes
(1) As a result of a 1977 out-of-body experience.
(2) But I will give a footnote nevertheless because I love research. I’m referring to an experience of the Self that occurred at Xenia Retreat Center in Sept. 2018. I experienced the Self as purity and innocence and never forgot it. I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning but I can remember that experience.
See “Original Innocence,” Sept. 21, 2018, at http://goldenageofgaia.com/2018/09/21/original-innocence-2/
(3) Sri Ramana Maharshi, “Question 197,” Talks with Sri Ramana Maharshi, Downloaded from https://www.ramana-maharshi.org/books.htm, 31 August 2005.
(4) Bernadette Roberts, “The Path to No-Self” in Stephan Bodian, ed. Timeless Visions, Healing Voices. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1991, 131.