What if everything you believe in is a lie? How could this be you ask? How can I have lived a lifetime, no matter how short or long, worked so hard and learned so many of life’s lessons and have someone tell me what I have come to believe is a lie? Well, let’s talk about that.
Did you also in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny? How did that work out for you? You were convinced by the people (most often family members) that you trusted the most in your life that they were absolutely real. How could you not when presents were under the tree, money was under your pillow, and eggs were hidden around the house?
What happened along the way that swayed your belief in these fantasies? There is a one-word answer for this…awareness. That’s right folks, as your awareness grew your beliefs changed. I am just guessing here but I bet some of you thought that one word would be knowledge. But here is the kicker; gaining knowledge is not the same as attaining awareness. You can have an IQ of 170 with all the knowledge to win Jeopardy every day but not be aware of the simplest of things.
Let us ponder that last sentence and put it into context with one’s beliefs. Let us use a college student whose major is history for example. Let us assume she is studying at one of the best universities in the world and has at her disposal amazing reference sources and world-famous professors. We will call her Sue. Sue has worked extremely hard for her straight A’s and has learned to have complete faith in her instructors to provide the best possible answers to her queries. As her status grows in the community and others begin to seek her expertise her belief in the knowledge that she has gained becomes resolute.
But has she gained “awareness” of the lives she has studied in books? Now she may have the knowledge of the struggles the first settlers in America may have gone through. She may have even spent time working at a historic site churning butter and dressed as a Pilgrim. But through all her efforts, she has not gained a single ounce of awareness of what went through the minds of these brave and often desperate men and women who risked everything to start a new life in an unknown land. No book or lecture can create this awareness and no life experiences she may yet have, even if they are similar in nature, can give her that awareness. Why do you ask?
Because the truth is subjective. Each one of us will experience truth from our own perspective. You may believe lobster is the best food on the planet and I may believe it is a gift from Satan. Neither of these opinions is true, but we both believe them to be so. You can believe Fox News is the best cable news station and I could believe MSNBC is. This does not make either opinion true; it just makes it our opinion. What it does make it is our truth, well maybe. We must first wrap our heads around the fact we have a way too much clutter up there.
You see, we live in a world of duality…night and day, left and right, right, and wrong, up and down, wealth and poverty, good and evil, love and hate…you get the idea. If we stand back to back and someone tells us to point to the left, we will be pointing in different directions. If you are in the Arctic and look up and I am in the Antarctic and look up, we will be both be looking up in different directions. How could we both be right, or left? Simply put because the physical universe is one of illusion. Like any good illusion, it convinces you that what you see is real. The ironic thing about this is that to find the solution to the magic trick most of us delve into more mysteries of illusion with eyes wide open and minds closed.
How do we as humans, apparently trapped in these physical bodies, see beyond these illusions? Let me ask you a simple question which I ask each of you to ponder. If God (proving this to you in some way without a doubt) came to you and said, “I have one command for you, BE HAPPY”, could you? Would you even know how to?
Let me take this one step further. Can you be happy for a single moment? That does not seem like such a hard thing to do. Does it? Right now, this very moment, can you be happy? And the next moment, and the next? See where I am going with this? It is much easier to attain a transformative state of being by living in the now. We as soul have been blessed with two tools to wend our way through the illusions, ATTITUDE, AND ATTENTION.
What we place our attention on and the attitude we take towards this will determine how successful we are at discovering the truth within ourselves, as ultimately this is the only truth we can know. This is not an easy path and most humans would rather be slaves to the beliefs and conditions that surround them in their daily lives. It is the meek that inherit the earth. It is the bold that inherit heaven. It takes the willingness to step out of your comfort zone and strength to let go of everything you hold as true in order to break the barriers established by the illusions you have been a slave to all your life.
Are you ready to begin a journey of discovery? Are you willing to make hard choices that may shake you to your core? Have you ever had A-HA moments of enlightenment that have seemed to come from nowhere? When you choose the freedom that comes from never knowing what the next moment may bring, each moment in your life is one of wonder. Can you imagine what that would be like?
Good, because that is the first step to gaining awareness. I would ask that you ponder this short article and then revisit it in a couple of months and see if your point of view on this matter has altered. Please leave any responses as they are all welcome to the discussion. There will be more regarding this matter in future posts. This may all be a lie.