Now is the perfect time to eject a big part of our personas and open ourselves up to what we could be, not necessarily what we have become in the eyes of the world. What is a persona? It is a mask, a sort of pretend self that we adopt for the purpose of navigating the world and giving a positive impression. Building it is a major part of our domestication as humans. Although we are under the illusion that this persona is an improvement, it is not authentically who we are, just as wearing a tuxedo or ball gown and arriving in a chauffeured limo is not necessarily who most of us are either. In fact, the old persona is now no longer an advantage, but more like some old outfit of worn-out dirty clothes we have been wearing for a long, long time thinking they are fancy and beautiful. We have gotten so used to them we haven’t noticed that they are threadbare, stinky, and torn in places. Our old worn-out shoes are in no better condition but we are so attached to them we don’t notice they are not serving us anymore. Instead, they are now hampering us with holes, cracks, flapping soles, and are no longer serving to keep out the cold and wet. The old persona is made up of dated perceptions, memories, fears, resentments, complaints, old conditioned patterns and habits, stale ways of thinking and responses that have been repeated thousands of times over. They contain prejudices, judgments, suspicions, frustrations, and doubts both about what we out-picture and what we consider to be a more preferred rendition of who we are. If we look closely this old battered persona contains deeply set patterns of self-deprecation, arrogance, greed, self-destructiveness, impatience, martyrdom, and stubbornness, the seven universal fear patterns human beings in general suffer from. This old worn-out package actually sows the seeds of suffering and deep discontent, and actually offers no real advantages at all.
Why is now the perfect time to dump the old persona and welcome something fresh and new? Because the paradigm is changing on this planet in a huge and dramatic way, signaled by the collapse of all systems and ways of thinking that have prevailed for thousands of years. The disaster that is the world at this time is simply the scales falling from our eyes allowing us to see what we have allowed the world to become and how it is unsustainable and will no longer work. You may disagree but if you truly understand responsibility and telling the truth, you will see the signs everywhere of what we have tolerated and allowed to happen. A few examples might be racism, ignoring the suffering off others, rigid nationalism, tolerance for war as a solution, the attempt to crush and deprive women of their rights and freedom, promotion of economic inequality and the list goes on and on. Yes, we have been the architects of all this if we consider what we may have been responsible for doing in our distant pasts. It is the harvest of ignorance and selfishness over many centuries of allowing authorities, nations states, governments, religions, and many other influences to control us and define what is reasonable to believe in and behave like. In most cases each of us have been the architects of this legacy, we just conveniently don’t remember our unacceptable behavior of the past. Now it is time to take enormous strides to set all this right.
Martyring ourselves and protesting are how we have attempted to create change in the past but these too are outdated and ineffective for the most part in today’s world. So, what does work? First of all, it would be best to clean ourselves up and no longer tolerate the old clothes, the old personas we have been carrying around. Perhaps we need to do the hard work of taking a good look at ourselves and seeing that we can’t change a thing without cleaning up our own acts individually. What has to go? Blame, complaining, judging, pointing fingers, feeling helpless, discouraged, alone, and failing to see that Spirit or call it what you like, is within, around, enfolding, protecting, and supporting us at all times if we just take notice. If we take notice that this massive force underlies everything we see, hear, sense, and feel we wake it up within ourselves and as a result become capable of that which we thought was impossible. In other words, we are God’s expression pretending to be weak, limited, ignorant, separate fragments at the mercy of everything around us. Time for us to really wake up, not become woke, politicized, vengeful or filled with rage.
If even a small percentage of the human race takes responsibility, all will rapidly transform in a good way. The good news is that this is taking place as we speak. We just need to join the movement that has already begun. In other words, the hardest work has already been done by a small corps of enlightened masters who have been laying the foundation. Thanks be to them. They have been doing the heavy lifting. Now it’s our turn. What do these enlightened masters, shamans, and mystics believe that allows them to be free, access their true power, and form the spearpoint of humanities paradigm shift?
First of all, they have no illusions that they are victims or martyred by external forces. They know that the outer world exists, but more in dream form than concrete fixed form. They know that this dream world, not so different from our night dreams, is here for us to learn and benefit from and not happening to us. That is why they are fond of saying, “There is no one actually out there.” What seems to be out there is actually projected from our collective minds based on our ideas of what the world is, not what it actually is, which is a moldable dream. They would say that the world appears to be many separate objects, that are mostly in opposition to us. But if we simply notice our “I am-ness,” our “being”, our continual awareness, then we find we share this consciousness with what pervades the entire universe and is in fact only one undivided life stream. When we see, sense, or feel anything that appears outside of us, we are only meeting ourselves in the form of Spirit. Ultimately, we are all only one thing, simply beingness, and this being is fundamentally in a natural state of unconditional love. In eternity there is no time, only an eternal moment of now, and in the infinity that we rest in, there is no over there or over here, there is only this with nowhere else to go.
These understandings are so simple that we consider them to be impossible to understand and while indeed they are impossible for our analytical minds to decode, our intuition knows quite well.
Let’s decode this for a moment. If we all are participants in spirit then ultimately there is no problem, just a current dream depicting what we thought we became. Oops, time to redream the dream and make it more authentic. Since we are dreaming that we are stuck in linear time, then we can redream it in a relatively short period, say 50 years or so and render the old paradigm of war, awfulness, hate, and destruction moot and enjoy ourselves instead. Being the temporary experience that the physical plane is, we will still wear out these bodies periodically, gladly trading them in for new improved models. Then we can spend our pretend time expressing ourselves creatively and enjoy the beauty and awesomeness of the physical plane that at the end of the day is clearly impermanent.
Even if you understand none of this, it is actually very good news. Nothing is as it seems and in today’s world that is a very good thing. No matter how dark it appears to get, it is always filled with light from within and that light is continually ever radiating outward to claim everything you can imagine and all that you haven’t yet imagined. It’s all good. The tyrants are beginning to fall within and without. Why wouldn’t they?