The spiritual journey is the unlearning of fear and the acceptance of love.
Road to Discovery ( a painting I did in 2004 acrylic on canvas)
At around age ten, I began pondering deep questions about life. One day I was alone on a hill top over looking our small home town in Newfoundland. I asked myself a question that would interest me all through life....who am I ? This question and many other philosophical questions would seem to pop into my young inquiring mind often as a young man. I have always been this way for as long as I can remember.
For most of my adult life I followed a path, a belief system, that seemed to demand that I live a life that strived after some divine ideal. It created great fear, guilt and anxiety in my inner core. Because I always felt that I was not good enough. I was trying to meet unrealistic expectations that I had set for myself in order to meet a certain standard, to satisfy external expectations. Over a period of years this developed into conflicting assumptions and beliefs that produced a feeling of discomfort and stress, along with anxiety. This condition eventually lead to a need for a complete re-examination of these assumptions, and beliefs in order to restore a balance. This started me on a very rewarding spiritual journey down the road of discovery into what is truth. In my case the truth has set me free, but not in a way most people would think. To use a computer analogy ...Truth is like a re-programming of your entire operating system. A deleting of the old information program system and installing the new.
I have spent the past six years slowly dismantling this belief system that held my spirit in it's grip, for so long. It involved peeling back the multiple layers of assumptions to test each one for truth. Finding truth and freedom is a process of learning what is untrue and then detaching yourself from all false beliefs and illusions. Perhaps the greatest untruth is the idea that we are separate from others, nature and "God". This belief is so ingrained in our psyche and it is perhaps the single greatest root cause of our fear, guilt and anxiety. This belief, when it is looked at deeply, seems to be in complete opposition to the realization of the love based intelligence, foundational to the principles and laws observed in the universe. It has been said that fear is the opposite of love, but perhaps a more accurate statement is, fear appears when there is the absence of Love. Fear is rooted in the thinking mind, its a thought form. Love comes from the intuitive heart and is a product of divine energy. When I view God as the source of all life, love and universal intelligence, how can we be separate from this life, this love? Why would we fear life, love and this super intelligence all around us? Would this intelligence be for us or against us? It seems to be a system based on cooperation rather then competition. Its more like oneness then it is duality and it may not have the good vs evil division that we imagine.
I realized that it 's our own thoughts that creates the sense of separation. When we allow our egoic mind (false self) to control us we Edge God Out (EGO) and then we cause in ourselves a perception of separation. When we see the illusion of the false self , it will slowly dissolve and our true self once again becomes who we really are. When we live from the true self, who we really are, called many names .. Spirit, essence, the soul, the heart, the center, the core of our being, there is now no perception of separation from our creator, our source, nature and others. Today the answer to that question "who am I " becomes more like a realization that we are all one and we share that oneness with all life. If we move on in the spiritual journey, away for the personal "I " , away from false fear based beliefs, into the acceptance of a love based reality, we begin to get a glimpse of what Jesus called the kingdom of heaven :and get this, ..... he said it was within us. Now ponder that for awhile.
I end this post with some quotes from an article written by ANNELOES SMITSMAN
click link below
The Evolution of our Ego Consciousness
'Ego and its shadow dynamics can only operate where there is inner division; when we believe ourselves to be separate from Nature, the Universe and others.'
'Remember, our ego is our wisdom in reverse. Its purpose is to benefit this false self-perception, rather than the greater whole. It generates small mindedness rather than big-heartedness.'
'...ego does not have inherent existence; it arises as a result of stretching away from and denying our inner wholeness.'
Liberation isn't about breaking out of anything , it's a gentle melting into who we really are -Marianne Williamson
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