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Question: If I am limited by my own personal needs, which I clearly am, then what is the first step to transcending those needs; to becoming free?
JS: It always sounds very attractive and exciting whenever we speak about freedom and transcendence, but how many people know, or can accurately describe, what it means to be free? And how many people, having gotten some sense of it, have immediately begun to back away in fear, unwilling as they are to pay the price for that freedom? Namely, the end of their most treasured illusions.
Whether you believe that you understand freedom or not, it is your ever-increasing desire to be free that will ultimately lead you out of the process. Yet nobody can do anything to hasten that desire in themselves – it happens naturally, and beautifully. Life will keep on pushing you in the right direction, like a mighty river, until you finally surrender. Nobody chooses to surrender, any more than they choose their desires. It is simply a happening, an occurrence, a consequence of the process.
Perhaps you are familiar with the saying: “You are your own worst enemy.” Certainly this expression is true for most people, because they have not yet made friends with themselves. How can they possibly make friends with themselves, when they have no idea who they truly are? Their sense of self is merely a structure of the mind built by other people: their so-called friends, family, society, and countless other external influences. All of this nonsense is obscuring their true face, because they are so hopelessly identified with it. Do you know why? This is the real question, which you must explore for yourself. At the end of the day, whatever you do – or don’t do – is the very process (the steps, if you like) which will lead you to freedom; to the realisation, and to the acceptance, that you are already free.
Know your enemy, therefore. Because until you are able to befriend yourself, the journey will be a [necessarily] very slow and painful one. You may think that you are already friends with yourself, but you are not. If you were, you would clearly see the world for what it is, and not derive any sense of identity from it. So why is it that you are not already friends with yourself? What needs do you have that prevent this relationship from occurring, and from blossoming? What prevents you from being totally honest with yourself? What fears do you have that keep you from seeing your true reflection, and from embracing that ‘identity’?
Cheryl Simone:
"I have a vivid memory of when I became straight with myself. One cold, rainy night shortly after my divorce, my car had left me stranded on a busy road after work. It was three o’clock in the morning. While walking to find a phone booth in the pouring rain and thinking I did not really have anyone to call, I really grasped the starkness of being completely alone. For a time I had isolated myself from both my family and my friends. As I started to sink deeply into self-pity, something in me said, ‘Well, you came into this life alone and you will leave alone; what you do in the middle is really up to you.’ As I absorbed this aloneness, I realized that I felt very close to the edge of life. I no longer felt that I had the insulation of a family or even close friends. I realized that the insulation I had felt before was only a false sense of security anyway. In reality, anything could happen to anybody, family or no family, friends or no friends.
Somehow this caused me to become friends with myself. Before that, I was much more influenced by other people. What that act of making friends with myself meant to me was that I suddenly got extremely honest with myself. It was a defining moment for me, and from that point on, I tried to tell myself the unvarnished truth… The clearer you see yourself and the less drama you add to your life, the more your personal needs begin to evaporate."
self-realization : self-realisation : aloneness : ego : identity : transcendence :
self-realization : self-realisation : aloneness : ego : identity : transcendence :
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