As we go through the motions of daily life, should we allow ourselves a beat amidst ceaseless mental chaos, we can touch upon a stillpoint of realization, an equilibrium wherein the temporal oscillation stops, as we engage an uncommon, depolarized, demagnetized clarity.
The pushing and pulling of our intentions and aspirations, our desires, and our manifestations coalesce, and we see something resembling a path toward that true, authentic Self. What’s real emerges, if only for an instant, and a calmness settles our conflicted spirit as contrasting ideas momentarily wash away. Suddenly, we know something fundamental and essential. We remember that we’ve always known it. How has it been so readily and consistently hidden from us?
How can days, weeks, months, and years pass as we battle within ourselves with ideas, beliefs, comparisons, ideologies, philosophies, and meanings borrowed — or impressed upon us — from everywhere else?
It may be by design. It may be a cosmic joke. It may be part of the natural process that this realm affords us in this lifetime’s transient expressions and manifest experiences. It may be forces beyond our capacity to quantify opposing us at every turn, confusing, disorienting, and distorting our perceptions in order to grant us merely the superficial, repetitive, unimpressive, dispassionate rigmarole existence we’ve grown accustomed to — an existence we quietly, desperately abhor and detest.
Social and societal acclimation certainly play into this paradigm. Where we are born and raised, where we grow and mature, and to what extent we are indoctrinated and inculcated through institutions most definitely shapes and defines our journeys, both within and without. Those whom we are influenced by along the path inevitably etch something of their presence onto our narrative, whether we’re conscious of it or not, and those we either criticize or admire become co-authors for whatever increment of spacetime we share, offer, afford, or invest in them.
Too often, we may forget to be aware of our thoughts, programs, and conditions — the terms and parameters we’ve carried forward without nearly enough scrutiny and debate. We live by default until something upsets the momentum, something that we magnetize toward ourselves in order to make the unconscious conscious, to address and illuminate the subconscious automaton, that quiet overriding phenomenon. It keeps us safe, surely, but being safe doesn’t necessarily mean being truthful or alive. A course correction is upon us again, if we’re ready to receive the gift and the opportunity.
In time, we discern the all-important stillpoint. “This is who I am. This is what I want.”
There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction…that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance
We see that we are not broken, weird, or incapable. We recognize our capacity for our own personal kind of greatness, and that, at least for the moment, it doesn’t matter one whit what anyone thinks about it, nor does it matter what the mental chatter may very soon re-introduce into our consciousness about it.
You feel a smile come across your face as the music from within your heart floats unabashedly to the surface. What a glorious moment this is!
Our uniqueness is our reason to be.
Regardless of profits or pain, we suffer when we do not pursue what is within us to create and introduce into this realm. That is perhaps the greatest challenge in this life, for it may take a lifetime to realize our chosen path had little to do with our conscious awareness.
Be awake.