THE HIDDEN “I”

To be conscious is to be conscious; there are not different kinds. The “I” that is in your neighbor is the exact same “I” within you. It may appear to be different through being attached to different sensory experience, but that is only because it has allowed itself to be conditioned by such experience. In point of actual fact consciousness is never the result of experience but the cause instead, and wherever we find it, it is primarily aware of existing, of being “I.”

There is only one basic consciousness in all creation; it takes up its residence in all things, appears to be different according to the things it enters into, but in essence is never changed at all. It is intelligence, awareness, energy, power, creativeness, the stuff from which all things are made. It is the alpha and omega of existence, first cause; it is you. “Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature. Everything is made of one hidden stuff,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. He pierced the veil, perceived behind the sense-enamoring dance of nature’s myriad forms the workings of the one mind and one intelligence from which all life and aspiration spring. There can be no inner peace or surety of action without this basic spiritual knowledge. The man who lives isolated from the roots of his being has cut himself off from the source of all power and dwells alone and without resource in a hostile and threatening world. Let him once perceive the true nature of life and his relationship to it and he soon sees that the world always reflects his thoughts.

THE MASK

The surface mind or sense-self or ego is the villain of the play that is being enacted on the human stage at present. Man as a form of life is sufficiently evolved so as to understand his separateness and uniqueness. He looks in the mirror and understands that the reflected animal is he. He is concerned with the appearance and welfare of this animal and ponders its relationships with the world and others. He does not truly understand what he is, only that he is conscious and confined within a particular body, and the experience and knowledge he acquires, together with his disposition as to their use, he labels “I,” and thus he is deluded into calling a ghost by his own name. Hidden behind this ghost, obscured by its struggles and fancies, is the Secret Self, which even though hidden, ignored, or misunderstood, nevertheless moves all things on the chessboard of life according to their natures and aspirations. We are never ego or sense of self. These are masks we don as we play at the parts we find in life. What we truly are is not a changing thing, but is whole and entire, powerful and serene, limitless and eternal. It springs from the inexhaustible source of life itself, and when we learn to identify ourselves with it, then we have hitched a ride on a power so far beyond our tiny temporal selves that our lives are changed in the most amazing manner.

THE IMPRISONED SELF

“To be what we are and to become what we are capable of being,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “is the only end of life.” But when we stultify our divine birthright in manacles of mental and spiritual limitations, then we have no alternative but stagnation and pain. As long as we are responsive solely to the stimuli that impinge upon our senses from the outer world, we have no choice but to be victims of every circumstance. Locked to the senses, we reel under each stimulus, now aggressive, now afraid, now joyful, now sad, now seeking death, now life, but always our inner serenity and equilibrium are in the hands of something we neither understand nor control; and so we are puppets, pulled by invisible and unknown strings, swirling in the maelstrom of life like scraps of paper in the wind; and if perchance we garner knowledge enough to perceive our helplessness, then we often are overcome with such depths of sadness as to make effort against our bonds an almost unimaginable thing.

But the moment that we pause long enough in the headlong rush of life to see that we are not moving in accord with or in response to our own decisions but rather in reaction to the world around us, then we have taken the first step toward freedom. Only one who knows his slavery can aspire to be free, just as true freedom is possible only to one who has experienced chains. Our hates, loves, fears, envies, aspirations, deceits are for the most part products of circumstance, of false and limiting codes and mores—more often innate terrors of mountains that are molehills; and the solution to all of them is to stand fore-square before them, daring them to do their utmost, exposing them for what they are, thus foreswearing allegiance to the cupidity of the deluding and blinding ego which forever keeps us thinking we are greater than others and less than we truly are.