Seeing is Freeing
Many of us find it difficult to bear what we are seeing in the world out there.
Why is difficult to bear what we are seeing? One might answer that question with something like “It hurts to see the hatred, the pain that we are inflicting on one another, the violence…” Would that be a fair summation?
What if I were to share with you a buried secret of the ages regarding that? Would you listen?
In order for our inner eyes and ears to open, we have to reach a certain point in our lives where we understand how we currently live and see things can’t be the all there is because none of it makes sense as the world seems to be growing darker.
What happens when someone accuses us of being selfish, arrogant or just plain stupid? What happens when someone doesn’t agree with our opinion of what is taking place in the world right now?
What happens when someone gets the job promotion that we had hoped to get? What happens when we find out a friend stole something from us? The answer is - instantaneous resistance, a resounding “no” to that moment.
The world we see “out there” is an unreconciled one because there is something in us that refuses to see the hatred, violence, selfishness and pain in our own nature that Love alone is trying to show us all the time.
When there is a refusal to see those things inside ourselves, it manifests itself in the outer world using people and events as it’s instrument. Our refusal to see the darkness inside ourselves is the creation of that very darkness in the outer world. That is how spiritual law works.
Using the examples above, and remembering that it is one consciousness that we all share and live from, let’s question some things.
Why resist an accusation by someone that claims we are selfish, arrogant or stupid? We are. We all are in varying degrees, in one way or another. If we aren’t honest with ourselves, we’ll remain an unchanging dishonest self.
Why resist the moment when someone else gets a promotion that we had hoped for? It happened. Any resistant response after the fact is believing we can change what just happened. The event already came and went, yet something in us wants to hold on to what it believes is a wrongdoing.
As Guy Finley so eloquently puts it “Nothing we can ever do right now can ever make “then” different. Thought now is trying to make “then” “not then” and the more we don’t want then to be then, the more it is what it is now for us.
Why resist the moment when we find out that a friend stole something from us? That event happened. We never see how we ourselves have stolen from others, whether we have stolen a conversation away from them, stolen their moment to shine because we wanted to glorify ourselves instead. The list is endless, there’s just something in us that refuses to see our part.
In order to see our part, we have to be present in the moment when it is being revealed to us – right at the very strike of that event in our consciousness.
And yes, it is painful to see these unpleasant things about ourselves. The reason it hurts in the way it does currently is because the pain isn’t being used properly as it was intended to be used - for reconciliation in the moment. If the pain is consciously suffered in the moment, it is used properly for a renewal, a transformation of sorts. Conscious pain is useful pain. Unconscious pain is useless pain.
What is it that refuses to see these unpleasant characteristics within ourselves? It can’t be who and what we really are. It is the painful past nature in us that refuses to see itself, because if those negative parts are properly observed and seen in the moment, those parts are instantaneously reconciled and can no longer exist as they were in our consciousness.
Pain, the painful past, wants to live, just like everything else in creation does.
Pain is not our enemy. Pain is our friend if we know how to use it properly.
We are so used to turning our heads the other way believing unpleasant characteristics exist in others and not in ourselves. It’s one consciousness that we all live from and all of the characteristics exist in each of us in varying degrees.
It is love that is asking us to face the truth of ourselves in every moment. We can’t face the truth of ourselves by turning away from what we don’t wish to see.
What takes place outwardly first takes place inwardly, so that is where we need to work first and foremost. We work at seeing the cause. If the cause dies, so does the effect.
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Exercise for the Week: In an unwanted moment, see if you can see a similar characteristic within yourself that something in you is denying and accusing others of displaying. Do this over and over again.