Your Birthright...

On one hand we are made to live out our physical existence in the world of passing time. This is the world we are all familiar with. It is the realm in which we experience the birth and death of everything from the most mundane of our interests -- those passions that come and go -- all the way up to and including our lives themselves. Our physical being is carried along in an invisible stream of time whose never-ending twists and turns bring us headlong into the uncertainty that this level of self must seemingly endure. But we also have another nature -- one that entitles us, if we will claim this celestial birthright, to live in another world through which this stream of time runs. This other world is the invisible realm of the timeless Now.

Awakening to this timeless birthright of ours grants us the precious gift of being able to see that our present worries and fears are nothing more than the negative results of mistaking ourselves to be something far less than what we are in reality.

Our True Self is, in part, a secret field where a never-ending cycle of ebb and flow plays itself out in passing expressions of alternating fullness and emptiness, much as runoff winter waters from great mountains rush down to fill valley lakes parched dry by the passage of summer.

But the greater part of our Original Self is to these mountains and their valley lakes as is the whole of that countryside in which these same landmarks dwell, for even though the round of seasons come and go, causing endless changes within it, nothing really changes about it. Our True Nature lives in the ever-changing, yet never-changing Now; that vast country of higher consciousness wherein we are empowered to welcome all forms of fullness and emptiness as our friends, instead of mistaking ourselves a friend of one and foe of the other.

If we would awaken to a conscious relationship with these ever-flowing forces that are the lifeblood of our True Nature, and if we are to realize that this awareness alone can free us of our fear of being empty, then what is asked of us becomes clear: we must stop trying to create conditions for ourselves through which we hope to escape the fear of our own emptiness. We must willingly slip into these seemingly dark waters of ourselves, where, if we will wait there quietly enough, we will awaken to find ourselves in the higher atmosphere of a new world. For our spiritual daring, we will gain an intimate knowledge of these invisible eternal forces at work within us; one emptying us, even as another moves into its place to fill that open space with its new and unmistakable presence. If these words sound promising, it's because they are. As this priceless self-knowledge born of higher self-awareness grows in us, we will realize that the freedom we seek is found everywhere and all at once. We will no longer fear the end of things because at last we have seen that within ourselves, the truth of who we really are is as endless as the beginning of life.

-- Guy Finley