THE HIDDEN CAUSE OF ALL THINGS

 

Every man’s consciousness is constantly changing, is trapped at the knife-edge overlap of past and future, reacts rather than acts, is incomplete and partial, eternally seeks itself, for since the mere state of being throws no light on that state, consciousness learns of itself through reaction to outside stimuli. If a man comes to believe he is unsuccessful, it is because he carries the impression he has been unsuccessful, and this conclusion, once adopted, inescapably molds him into the shape of the thing he believes, locks him in a prison of his own making.

The magic by which a man becomes free is imagination. By training himself to cast up mental pictures of the thing he desires, by resisting sensual stimuli, even envisaging the exact opposite, he tends to assume a factual position in accordance with his vision, for his vision then becomes his experience, rather than the sensual stimuli that moved him before. Consciousness always assumes a form to suit its knowledge of itself, and where such knowledge breaks beyond the limits imposed by sensory experience, man begins to grow into the image of the Secret Self.

SHAKESPEARE’S Hamlet in his famed soliloquy pondered, “To be or not to be,” and thus faced squarely the primary challenge of life. Most people only exist, never truly are at all. They exist as predictable equations, reacting rather than acting, walking compendiums of aphorisms and taboos, reflexes and syndromes. Surely the gods must chuckle at the ironic spectacle of robots fancying themselves free, but still, when finally the embodied consciousness rises above the pain-pleasure principle of nature, then the true meaning of freedom is made apparent at last.

ACTION VERSUS REACTION

We exist in order that we may become something more than we are, not through favorable circumstance or auspicious occurrence, but through an inner search for increased awareness. To be, to become, these are the commandments of evolving life, which is going somewhere, aspires to some unsealed heights, and the awakened soul answers the call, seeks, grows, and expands. To do less is to sink into the reactive prison of the ego, with all its pain, suffering, limitation, decay, and death. The man who lives through reaction to the world about him is the victim of every change in his environment, now happy, now sad, now victorious, now defeated, affected but never affecting. He may live many years in this manner, rapt with sensory perception and the ups and downs of his surface self, but one day pain so outweighs pleasure that he suddenly perceives his ego is illusory, a product of outside circumstances only.

Then he either sinks into complete animal lethargy or, turning away from the senses, seeks inner awareness and self-mastery. Then he is on the road to really living, truly becoming; then he begins to uncover his real potential; then he discovers the miracle of his own consciousness, the magic in his mind.

Mastery over life is not attained by dominion over material things, but by mental perception of their true cause and nature. The wise man does not attempt to bend the world to fit his way or to coerce events into a replica of his desires, but instead strives for a higher consciousness that enables him to perceive the secret cause behind all things. Thus he finds a prominent place in events; by his utter harmony with them he actually appears to be molding them. He moves effortlessly through the most strenuous action, the most perilous times, because his attunement with the mental force that controls the universe guides him to perform the work that needs to be done.