Listen to Yourself

Consciousness

Nov 18

When I say that it's time for you to stop listening to people like me, I mean it.

You have to learn to start listening to your Self but, if that is not a cultivated part of your development, it can be a little tricky.

Learning to listen to yourself is an art that is developed through some form of learning to be still. The Chinese I-Ching, says, “Keeping still is the mountain.” The Bible says, “Be still and know that I am God.” Aurobindo says, “To be capable of silence, stillness, illuminated passivity is to be fit for immortality.” But that can take years of practice before one gains a foothold.

In the meantime, there is the tendency to listen to others and to assume that the spiritually elite know what they’re talking about. If the spiritually elite do know what they’re talking about, then why hasn’t mankind become spiritualized? This is not only a legitimate question but it’s a question whose answer lies at the heart of your evolution, the quality of your life, and the choices you make about the essence of who you are and what you’re doing here.

I had the unique experience when I was around 35 years old of joining a group that was started by an author of a book I had read. I felt the intentions of the group were noble and deserving of my time. Within a year, I began to view the entire process of cultist and I left. Please notice I’m not using names and I have no desire to make any disparaging remarks about anyone. I didn’t feel duped. I was angry with myself for letting it happen.

But nonetheless, I learned a great deal. And one of the things I learned was that if you are looking for a savior, you’re going to find one. If you’re looking for someone to love you, you’re going to find someone. If you’re looking for someone to take care of you, you’re going to find someone. But you may not like the outcomes.

What you are incapable of giving to yourself, you will see as only being provided for by others and you will project onto another person that role. What you are incapable of giving to yourself, self-acceptance, love, forgiveness, safety, you will seek through others and the same old cycles just keep spinning around.

Your eyes look out; they don’t see in. Until you turn inward, you cannot hear. Until you turn inward, you cannot see. I want to give you an example of what I’m talking about as to how easy it is to accept and adopt another person’s version of reality without even noticing the apparent contradictions.

Gary Renard is an expert on A Course in Miracles, a spiritual and powerful book, and his work is absolutely wonderful. I always enjoy listening to him. He says, “And if you decided that you want out and you want to stop coming back here and reincarnating and it doesn’t mean that you don’t get to live the rest of this life…”

This issue of not being here, of being somewhere else, of needing to get out of here, has been around a long time. And if you do want out, where will you be going? If the object is to get out, then what is the purpose of the earth itself? Is the object of forgiveness to afford you a one-way ticket out of here? Are you abandoning the rest of us who are stuck here or would you like to stick around and help out?

If the object is to stop reincarnating which is what I infer from what he says, it suggests that incarnating was not your choice, that being here was someone else’s choice and that when you learn your lessons, when you eat all your dinner, then and only then can you be excused from the table. I assure you that is not the case.

You chose to be here as you have done many times before and for a sublime reason. And if you don’t want to be here, you don’t have to be here for there is nothing done to the soul that is against the soul’s wishes. And again, I want to ask you this question; if you’re not here, then where will you be? What is the purpose of being here if the true purpose is not to be here?

Granted, there are times in every individual life when difficult, contracting circumstances cause the individual not to want to be here. And that happens to everyone. No one is excluded from grief and pain. But you have to listen to your Self. When this negation of life, as espoused by numerous spiritual leaders, when spiritual wisdom describes to you that the world is meaningless and unreal and that the object is to be somewhere else, what does that say about life itself, not just your life?

Deepak Chopra said, “I enjoy the illusion of it all. I’m standing in an apartment in New York City on the 69th floor overlooking the city and I know it’s not real, but I can appreciate it.”
Eckart Tolle said, “The ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in the transcendence of the world.”
Krishnamurti said in his book, The Ending of Time, “That is the root of it. To end becoming. Of course, there is only complete security in nothingness!”

This nihilistic version of humanity which is also the doctrine of many Christian doctrines labels life as on the kind side, undesirable, and on the dark side, as a prison that God made to put you in until you adhere to his demands, in which case, if you do, you get to leave. Undoubtedly, I believe that every spiritual leader has the best intentions, of wanting to help end the suffering that so dominates this world and there are thousands of examples in the past of different doctrines that present the path to heaven. But what if heaven was here? What if the object was not to not be here but to keep reincarnating until the planet is divinized, spiritualized? And this will be accomplished through you the individual, spiritualizing your life?

As I have shared before, I have worked with three principal teachers in whom I put my trust and belief that what they had to teach me was valuable. I was not wrong. My first teacher in 1978 looked me in that eye and told me and I would never forget it, “Haydn, it’s time for you to stop being your own teacher.”

And here’s the dilemma again. If you realize that you’re crazy, not fulfilled, not capable, or developed enough to listen to your own self and that you need help, you have to choose who to listen to. And therein lies the inescapable dichotomy. You will seek outside of you the answers that can only be found inside of you for you are the microcosmos of the macro cosmos. If it’s true about God, it’s true about you. If it’s true about Jesus, it’s true about you. If it’s true about Sri Aurobindo, it’s true about you.

And I know you don’t believe that. Now, I didn’t say you have become that yet in your development, in this particular lifetime. But what if over the course of your evolution, that was the destiny that had already been established and how long you take to realize who you really are is, of course, up to you?

That would certainly change the purpose of being here which would not include not being here. That would mean that everything that happened to you was what you created and not what someone else created. And every moment, every breath becomes part of that scared journey of realizing the truth of who you are, including the difficult elements that cause you to cringe, to agonize, to regret your being here.

These are the doorways to the divine, to the realization of who you really are that lie inside of you and not outside of you. Sri Aurobindo said this about the issue of escape, of seeking nirvana or heaven:

“Thou hast reached the boundless silence of the Self,
Thou hast leaped into a glad divine abyss;
But where hast thou thrown Self's mission and Self's power?
On what dead bank on the Eternal's road?
One was within thee who was self and world,
What hast thou done for his purpose in the stars?
Escape brings not the victory and the crown!
Something thou cam'st to do from the Unknown,
But nothing is finished and the world goes on
Because only half God's cosmic work is done.
Only the everlasting No has neared
And stared into thy eyes and killed thy heart:
But where is the Lover's everlasting Yes,
A huge extinction is not God’s last word.”

Not being here is not the objective, is not the destiny of the planet. Aurobindo also said in his book, Letters on Yoga, “One does not rise up when one passes into Nirvana, one pierces a hole and goes out. It is not as many believe the ending of the path with nothing beyond to explore, it is the end of the lower path and the beginning of the higher evolution. Nirvana in my consciousness turned out to be the beginning of my realization, a step toward the complete thing.”

Like everyone, I have my favorite textures. One of my favorite movies, that apparently nobody else likes, is “Assassin’s Creed.” Based upon the video game which I’ve never played, the movie depicts the modern rise of the assassins from the time of the crusades.

This is a quick description:

Michael Fassbender plays the role of Cal, the protagonist a man who has been sentenced to death for killing a pimp. Saved from his execution, he is taken to a research laboratory which he is attached to a machine called the animus which creates a digression back to the time of the crusades. Cal’s lineage is traced back to a family of assassins whose job was to guard the Apple of Eden and keep it from falling into the hands of the Templars who wanted to exploit the apple to control the irredeemable violent nature of mankind. Cal is used by Rikkin, the villain, played by Jeremy Irons, as means to locate the apple. As Cal molds into a modern-day assassin, the viewer is presented with the dark and light, and sometimes, it’s hard to know who’s on whose side.

But there is a scene in the last regression in which Cal’s family joins him from the past.

His mother moves toward him and says, “You’re not alone, Cal. You never were.”

She keeps speaking, “Where men blindly follow the truth and law, remember…”

And Cal recalls his childhood and what his parents who were also assassins, taught him. He says, “Nothing is true.”

His mother continues, “Where other men are limited by morality or law, remember…

And Cal says, “Everything is permitted.”

His mother says, “We work in the darkness to serve the light.”

And Cal, says, confirming his purpose and destiny says, “We are assassins.”

Now, before you think I’ve forgotten what I was talking about, I’ll translate. You, too, are not alone. You never have been for you are not separated from the source. To fulfill your destiny, you will have to rise above what you have been taught, your past, what you believe to be true, above the elementary judgments of your mind, you will have to rise above your JBOPPPS.

To fulfill your destiny, you will have to move beyond the duality of right and wrong and understand that everything that happens is not right or wrong but a necessity, where everything is permitted or else it would not be available, you must learn that it must not be accepted and you must learn to make choices that reflect your true purpose and reason for being here. In other words, you learn to ascend to the vertical to gain the wisdom and knowledge necessary to return to the horizontal and transform your life and work. And why are you here? You, too, work in the darkness to serve the light. The problems, issues, barriers, failures, confusions, and regrets are your training, part of your evolutionary process. And that’s why I like the movie so much.

For me, there are so many parallels.

Plus, I think the costumes are so cool. But that’s just my opinion and that doesn’t matter.

If there is spiritual knowledge that is available to you, it exists in order to create a transformational life here. If the purpose of life is not to be here and to be somewhere else, then there would be no need for spiritual knowledge.

And if greater knowledge did not exist, then you wouldn’t have a chance of getting out of the mess in the first place. So, now I’m going to go full circle in our conversation and go back to A Course in Miracles.

The new spirituality that is being formed is not based on a 2,000-year model. Like all technology and every living thing, spirituality evolves, too. The new spiritual model will be based upon individual transformation which means in spiritual terms, unity will express itself through a multiplicity of forms, but each containing the essence of the truth. Labels will and have already begun to disappear. In speaking about these concepts, I have been asked hundreds of times, what should I read? Where do I go to find out more about this? Where I thought it was warranted, I have recommended A Course in Miracles to certain individuals. But as you already know, the bookshelves are full of options.

The author of the book, Helen Schuman, did not allow her name to be used as the author for the entire book came to her as dictation from a voice who identified himself as the Christ. She was born in 1909 and died in 1981, five years after the book was first published. Just the experience I had in being introduced to the book around 1982 was quite remarkable and it took me 7 years to read the book the first time. It took me about 4 years to read it the second time and 2 years to read it the third time.

It is demanding, challenging, and will change your life. But it would turn out in my experience to be a necessary prerequisite to being able to understand the work by Sri Aurobindo and the Mother, its implications, and how consciousness would become the object of my new work and effort.

The difficulty with A Course in Miracles is the depth in which the reader must be willing to undertake if one decides to aspire to such a task. But there is a shortcut for those who are looking for an easier route. That easier route is the workbook that is found at the back of the book. Comprised of 360 lessons, 1 each day, it is a powerful journey into greater understanding, consciousness, and growth. But is not for the undisciplined or those who are addicted to old religious beliefs.

I have located around 79 passages in the book where the voice addresses and clarifies what certain things in the Bible truly mean versus the way they have been traditionally taught. One is Judas who he described as his brother and that he was not betrayed because he was not betrayable, that Judas did exactly what he was supposed to have done and that he, Jesus, knew exactly what was going to happen because he had chosen this path as a mechanism to teach the word of God. These clarifications are powerful.

But to give you a hint of the workbook, I am going to read the titles of the first ten lessons to you.

Here they are:

Nothing I see in this room means anything.
I have given everything I see in this room, from this window, on this street, on the meaning it has for me.
I do not understand anything I see.
These thoughts do not mean anything.
I am never upset for the reason I think.
I am upset because I see something that is not there.
I see only the past.
My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts.
I see nothing as it is now.
My thoughts do not mean anything.
My meaningless thoughts are showing me a meaningless world.
I am upset because I see a meaningless world.

And you’ve only got 350 more to go.

My recommendation is simple. It is time to organize, direct and undertake a path in your life. This is but one path but it is a powerful one.

You must learn to take responsibility for your learning and to think for your Self by moving inside of your Self. If you go about the business of seeking a Savior outside of your Self, you are going to find one, so be discerning.

As the voice in A Course in Miracles says, “No one can see through a wall, but I can step around it.”

As Cal’s mother says to him, “You’re not alone. You never have been.”