OPENING OUR FIRST DOOR

The self is our entry way to understanding. It’s just that we can’t stay stuck in our self because that has a shelf life. We have to know our humanness. We need to understand our disposition. And to some degree, we need to make peace with the work we need to put in to strengthen our selves and become things can persevere, a requirement for any rewarding life. Our self has layers. We have our common human strengths and weaknesses. Then we have our unique strengths and weaknesses. And all of these travel along our individual paths which require us to adapt to the times and places we are in. Sounds like work? Oh, but it is!

To find any happiness in life, our view of the self needs to change. We must become travelers on paths. It is the old journey thing. What is personal always becomes the greatest source of our suffering. What rises from the personal is our truest, strongest and wisest self. In any good spiritual practice, we are always reaching for our better self, not striving too hard, not making it a burden, but we are seeking to grow. What we are growing from is what we see as our self.

Imagine a seed in the ground. It does not know what it really is. It may have a clue. In fact, it does have a clue, but it does not know. Years, decades can go by for some seeds, whether being blown around or dormant under the earth, waiting to become something. Seeds do not think but people do. A person says, this is just me, always getting blown around, or stuck under something. And we say this is the self, but all we know is the seed. And what if that seed was planted in toxic soil and the seed absorbs such a thing? Is that what the seed is? A human seed begins to grow and it is constantly questioning itself. Is this okay? Is this right? Am I moving too slow? And now we begin to think this is us, the one with all the questions and doubts. This is the price of being human.

The self becomes, if we allow it to, and we find we are not what thought we were in many ways, and yet we are exactly what we were knew all along in others. This is the journey of the self in a nutshell. A process of uncovering our nature, Something in us remains the same, and yet what we become can be far more interesting, alive and complete, than we imagined. Strength and resilience are non negotiable things for the self to become. A child does not complete itself by becoming a bigger child. This is a common fault of many due to the fear of aging and death. In this we cease to become the best of us. The best of us is old and wise, not young and beautiful. What becomes is beautiful through presence and wisdom. Through a deep comfort with its self. To be at peace with your self is to be beautiful. It what makes children beautiful. Trees, even old trees, beautiful. What others see is irrelevant.

My friends, nothing is going to give you more trouble than your self. But your self is the doorway to your wisdom and happiness. A doorway is not an end game it is an entry point. What is truly spiritual is beyond the self, but we enter through the self. That is how our spiritual nature finds meaning and purpose. It is the test we are given, this self of ours. How will we navigate it? What will we teach it? How will we nourish it? What risks will we allow it to take? What is that sweet balance of courage and humility that gets us to our best self? To embrace this journey, we must recognize that our self cannot teach our self everything. Wise people gravitate to wisdom in others. The wisest people to the wisdom of others that addresses their own specific challenges and often makes them uncomfortable.

The last thing I will add is that everything is selfish. It is a matter of what rewards we want for our selfishness. If our selfishness is personal, we will become a weight on others that no one wants to carry anymore. We will become disliked and alone. If our selfishness celebrates the wisdom of others, the betterment of others, we will be rewarded with friends, allies, and love. In the height of my own spiritual journey, I experienced a profound loss of self. It was intensely beautiful and I promised my self to pursue the path at all costs. Yet my first thought was, How selfish is this? Am I not pursuing this for the joy of being selfless? And do I not need some sort of self to navigate life? Am I truly selfless if I engage with life? Indeed no one can be completely selfless. That is a stone. Or a cloud. Or the sun. We all have a self. We just want our selfishness to find joy in being unselfish, which takes wisdom by the way. So get yourself together, for God’s sake. Personal selfishness has a shelf life. The wise know when the alarm rings. Those destined for bitterness and resentment do not listen to the bell. The ultimate fruition of the self is not the loss of self as some would say. It is only the loss of the ignorant self. The loss of the self that causes us unnecessary suffering. This can be such a weight lifted that we can feel like we have lost our whole senes of self. It is the weight of our blindness and ignorance. There is no rush to let go of our ignorance. It is not possible. We can’t rush to this place of weightlessness. We must go through the experiences and steps that can lead us to a place of letting go of this self that no longer serves us.