Real Change Begins With Honest Self-Investigation

 

Nothing seems harder to accept than the fact that we are responsible for so much of what proves to be unnecessary suffering. But we must challenge this involuntary, often intractable refusal to consider such ideas. The truth is that we are actively involved with unseen thoughts and feelings that compromise us. Without the self-knowledge we need to nullify this conflicted condition in our psyche, how can we hope to end the heartaches that begin there? How can we hope to heal something we won't even look at!

On the other hand, nothing is healthier for us than the beautiful process of awakening to how we have been unwittingly involved in our own suffering. We stand in good company when we consent to see these truths within ourselves. All truth teachings agree: freedom from compulsive or otherwise self-wrecking behavior begins with recognizing that we have been unknowingly serving what makes us suffer. Yes, awakening to what has been an unseen conflict in us is a challenge, but this interior work of self-realization is more than offset by the rewards gained for our efforts. Here's why:

Conscious awareness of ourselves is one and the same as living in the Now. It is the seed of a new action whose flowering is a self-wholeness that is inseparable from the higher freedom we seek. Most of us have felt, somewhere along the line of our life, a silent prompting to realize the truth of ourselves, even though we may not have recognized it as such. For instance, at some point we have all felt, intuitively if nothing else, that we are not created to live with Mental torMent of any kind -- that we are meant to be more than hapless victims forced to yield to passing conditions. This is a true intuition.

We are not made by that Great Intelligence that balances whole star systems, to suffer from the conflict that arises from an unbalanced understanding of our own essential nature! This is why if we ever wish to gain conscious control over our present nature -- along with what it attracts into our life -- we must gain what the great saints and mystics have always held in the highest esteem: true self-knowledge. But this needed higher knowledge cannot be acquired from sources outside of us; it must be gained through personal self-discovery. Only real changes in the level of self-understanding can help us effect real changes in our present nature, for the two are very much related. Change one and we change the other, including what it has been attracting into our lives.

-- Guy Finley

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