November, 2007

The Truth

Following your Heart is something you know how to do but may not always do because something else very compelling, which you are programmed to pay attention to, grabs and keeps your attention. That something is the egoic mind. You are programmed to give your attention to your mind. This causes you to identify with your mind and believe what it’s saying to you. You assume that voice inside your head is your voice and those thoughts are your thoughts. This identification causes you to disregard other input that is coming to you from channels other than your mind and senses.

There’s so much more to this moment and to you than what you are thinking, feeling, and sensing with your five senses. You build an identity from your thoughts and your emotional responses to these thoughts, but you are so much more than this artificial and limited identity. This is the false self, and you are fooled (programmed) into thinking this is who you are.

The programming that keeps the illusion of this false self going and the illusion that you are separate from All That Is rather than one with it creates a limited experience of reality. So much is left out. Your oneness with All That Is, with the Source, with the Divine—call it what you will—is obscured by this artificial reality, where this you that you think you are is central and where your thoughts and feelings take on a greater reality than they actually have.

When spiritual teachers talk about the Truth, they are talking about the truth that you are not this false and limited self but the greater Self that gave birth to this illusion. This truth isn’t something you can understand with your mind because the mind is designed to bring you a different story, which is not about oneness but separation. To experience the Truth, you have to turn to something other than your mind. In fact, you first have to turn away from the mind—the great obscurer—to that which has been here all along. Like the sun is hidden behind the clouds, the Truth is obscured by the mind and the sense of separation it generates. To find the Truth, you have to look somewhere else besides the mind and stop listening to what the mind says is true.

Turning away from the mind is not natural and not particularly easy because you are programmed to turn to the mind for answers, not only to simple things but to the deepest mysteries of life. Only by first seeing that the mind doesn’t have these answers and by following your longing to understand the Truth is the spell broken. When the time comes for you to awaken to your true nature, you become disillusioned with the mind, the longing to know the Truth becomes stronger, and you begin to look for answers, perhaps through books or teachers who claim to know the Truth.

All along, you have had the ability to experience the Truth; however, you usually overlook the oneness that you do experience because you are programmed to experience separation, not oneness. Your senses experience objects and people as being separate and distinct, and your mind is designed to notice and analyze the differences between objects and people. It automatically assumes that these differences mean that these objects and other people are separate from you. In addition, your thoughts and feelings seem real and meaningful, and they seem to belong to you. This is how you are programmed to experience life.

The deeper reality in which these seemingly separate objects and people arise and appear is the oneness that you are. All of this seeming separation arises from one substance, you could say, from an underlying substrate that is the real Reality. This reality never wavers or changes. It is ever present, but your experience of it comes and goes: Sometimes—usually only briefly—you are aware of it and sometimes you aren’t. Your awareness of it depends on what you are putting your attention on in the moment. Since, in most moments, your attention is on your mind, you experience separation; however, when your attention is on the deeper reality—the Truth—then you experience that.

The trouble is that the egoic mind doesn’t love the Truth. It becomes uncomfortable in the presence of it and draws you back to it, or tries, as soon as you begin to step into the greater Reality. For this reason, many never get beyond dipping their toe into it. The experience of the Truth is barely felt by most. Even so, even a brief experience is rich and full and serves to begin to free you from the egoic mind’s hypnotic trance. The more you dip your toe into the Truth, the easier it becomes to do it again and to stay there because it’s so rich and rewarding. Nevertheless, it can take many, many brief experiences of the Truth before you commit yourself to experiencing the Truth for longer periods of time.

A lack of forgiveness keeps us tied to stories about the past. These stories are manufactured by the ego and keep us involved with the egoic mind. They keep us stuck in the past and stuck in a certain image of ourselves (usually a negative one) that corresponds to that story. As long as we are holding onto a particular self-image, another truer and more positive self-image can’t take its place. To have a truer and more positive self-image, it’s necessary to let go of other self-images because only one self-image can operate at a time.

Stories that we have about the past tend to be charged with emotion, or they wouldn’t linger as they do. This emotion can make letting go of the self-image difficult because the emotion attached to it makes the story seem so real and true. Emotion has a way of convincing us that the stories we tell about ourselves and our life are true. Some work may be needed to diffuse the emotion before the self-image attached to a story can let go and another more positive one can take its place.

Forgiveness helps you let go of your stories about yourself and others, which keep you stuck in your particular perceptions and self-image. For example, people who have a story of victimization often see themselves as victims. They form an identity and self-image that includes the experience of victimization, and this identity determines to some extent how they respond to life. These self-images often become self-fulfilling prophecies, which draw to us similar experiences. “Victims” are often victimized more than once, and those who see themselves as “failures” often fail more than once. Forgiveness allows us to move on from what happened in the past and begin to see ourselves differently.

Your perceptions are just that: your perceptions. They are true to you but only true to you. No story can ever be true because it doesn’t contain enough of the truth. Given that, your particular perceptions are not valuable or useful. They only tell you about your conditioning because your perceptions are determined by your conditioning. Therefore, examining your stories for what they reveal about your conditioning can be useful, but in and of themselves, your particular perception of the past has no value or ultimate truth.

Forgiveness is difficult because it requires humbling. Acknowledging that our perceptions are not the truth and that they actually keep us from all we truly want—happiness, love, peace, and joy—is humbling. We can’t have our stories about the past and be happy. These stories don’t make us happy but are instead the source of unhappiness. We think that events rob us of our happiness, when in fact we rob ourselves of happiness by telling ourselves a story about an event that makes us unhappy and keeps us stuck in negative thoughts and feelings.

Forgiveness frees you from this prison of negativity by giving you a way out of your story. You forgive whatever you or someone else did so that you can be here, now, in this moment rather than in the thoughts and feelings related to some past moment.

Exercise: Forgiveness

Forgiveness begins with a simple statement, or affirmation, to forgive: “I forgive….” This will have to be repeated every time thoughts or feelings arise about the past. When that happens, you immediately replace those thoughts with the affirmation “I forgive….” Doing this will eventually reprogram your thoughts, and the negative emotions connected to those thoughts will eventually dissipate. This sounds simple, but being diligent about this can be difficult when the thoughts and feelings have become very strong.

There is really no other way out of certain painful feelings than doing this work. Calling on nonphysical spiritual forces to help you heal will also help this along, but you really have to make a commitment to doing this for yourself. The alternative is to continue to suffer. If you continue to dwell on your negative (untrue) stories about the past and feed the negative emotions, they will become stronger. The only way out of this is to do the opposite: Don’t give these thoughts and feelings your attention, and put your attention on what is good and beautiful in this moment. Forgiveness gets you out of the trap created by the negative mind, but you have to commit yourself to forgiveness as strongly as you committed yourself to the past.

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