Restoring Your True Self

Jan 10

Which Comes First: Being or Doing?

If I ask 10 people the question which comes first: Existence or Experience? almost everyone gets the right answer. Existence precedes experience.

Before you ever knew pain or joy or suffering or fear or victory, you existed. Before you ever experienced cold or warm or thirst or sadness or hate or love or prejudice or justice, you existed. Before you were able to see, taste, hear, touch, or smell, you existed. You had to exist before you could experience anything!

Why Don’t You Know Who You Are?

But if existence precedes experience…and it does…then why weren’t you told who you are? Existence precedes experience. It is existence that is determining what you do. But if you don’t know anything about your existence, how would it be possible to know what to do? In fact, you couldn’t know. All you could do is what you saw others do…what others told you and taught you to do…what your culture, family, and environment mirrored to you as the right path…what you felt you had to do that may nothing in the world to do with who you really are. But what you do is what you be, and if you don’t be different, you can’t do different, and yet, it is your doing and how you behave that creates your issues. So, consider that your outer, unfolding circumstances in your life are but the echoes of your inner being. Maybe that’s great! Maybe’s it’s not.

While 10 out of 10 people may know that their existence precedes their experience, it doesn’t change the fact that 10 out of 10 people function out of the experiences they had in their lives. And yet, everything in your experiences tells you that you are more than your experiences! Everything! In fact, you are not your experiences no matter what happened and no matter what they did to you.

What’s Wrong with Me?

The first sign that something’s not right is the deep sense of a terrible lack of something which no psychology, no therapy, no church, no drug, and no physical pleasure can fulfill. No matter what you do, you can’t rid yourself of that ever-present, nagging sense of that “something’s not right” feeling. This is because the unfolding of your life is based upon your experiences and not your existence. Your experiences determine who and what you think you are, but it is your existence that should determine who and what you consider yourself to be.

So, I’m going and tell you something that you’re never going to hear again in your life, and you’ll have to figure out what to do about it. There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you until you make up a story about your experiences that, as a result of your experiences, there’s something wrong with you. But that doesn’t make it real, and that’s why you can’t solve it. What’s really wrong is that there’s nothing wrong with you, and you don’t know what to do about that. That’s the real issue.

If you had used your existence to determine who and what you are, the experiences you’ve had would have been tools you used in becoming what you’re supposed to become instead of the prison cells you built.

The Way Out

The first step is simply being willing to admit to yourself that there’s something more than what you’ve come up with. You’ve done the best you could with what you know, and herein lies wisdom. Knowledge is not a function of doing. Knowledge is a function of being, and in order to be, you’re going to have to learn more about your existence….who you are, and why you’re here. Your experiences have not been able to provide that to you. Your existence does

**Admit there’s wisdom beyond what you currently know.**

In his epic masterpiece, “Savitri,” Sri Aurobindo states:

“Why camest thou to this dumb deathbound earth,
This ignorant life beneath indifferent skies
Tied like a sacrifice on the alter of Time, O spirit, O immortal energy,
If ’twas to nurse grief in a helpless heart
Or with hard tearless eyes await thy doom?
Arise, O soul, and vanquish Time and Death.”

He spells out the issue when he states:

“To wrestle with the Shadow she had come
And must confront the riddle of man’s birth
And life’s brief struggle in dumb Matter’s night.
Whether to bear with Ignorance and death
Or hew the ways of Immortaliy,
To win or lose the godlike game for man,
Was her soul’s issue thrown with Destiny’s dice.
She must disrupt, dislodge by her soul’s force
Her past, a block on the immortal’s road,
Make a razed ground and shape anew her fate.”

Is it time for you to plow up some dirt and shape anew your fate? Yes. But is it possible that there could be another destiny for your life and body other than struggling its way through time with the yoke of life on its shoulders only to end in the unannounced moment of death? Yes.

Is your will truly powerful enough to cancel out your experiences and restore your true Self? Yes. Can you start “anew” your fate and destiny in spite of your experiences and your past? Yes.

Why would your true Self of limitless power have created this little self whose world centers around ignorance and death? What is the real issue?