The Light Within

As we begin to understand the vast and deeper reality of who we truly are, our Divine infinite nature, we learn there is no need to judge or label one another. We dive into experiences with one another in which we play specific roles in order to learn together, but it is not who we truly are. If we change our beliefs and utilize faith, we can support the manifestation of the experiences we seek. We connect to the light and power within to align with our Higher Selves, trusting in ourselves and faith in God as we participate in this creation. As we do this with an open mind and heart, we create a dialogue amongst us in which together we listen and learn to unfold many truths, and over time this insight builds up to a greater wisdom and purpose to our life. This wisdom encompasses our greater truth of compassion and support of one another that becomes our way of being.

For a while I have been in a spiritual process with help of my allies (or guides) in which I am always learning. Learning and education have always been important in my life as I grew up in a family of doctors and scientists (yet spiritually based people) who valued learning and education. It often felt like a competition of intellect. In a way, the need for both scientific and spiritual exploration is in my genes, but has also developed throughout all my life experiences. It is this desire and need to know everything and be able to explain the world that drives a continual search for more knowledge, and also drives how we interact with each other. My way of life and spiritual process unfold new insight and truths through all types of experiences, like the expansion of conscious awareness that I shared in the Spiritual Process blog.

In my own personal experiences and by witnessing that of others, this need for knowledge and to assert one’s intellect is important to who we are, and we defend it at times when it feels threatened. Basically, it is part of the ego that many of us (including myself) share and can relate to. There is value to the ego as it serves a purpose, but exploring one’s own ego can help understand one’s behaviors and feelings and how this sense of self developed, which helps improve or expand upon this self-perception, and allows better personal experiences starting from within. I will share a little about my own journey. Part of my ego is based on this need to be an intelligent intellectual person that brings value to whatever field I get into (mostly professionally) which developed because of my family’s expectations and background. When I let go of these expectations and everything I was taught that I need to be, I was able to let go of fears and insecurities that built the protective walls and ways of defending myself and my ego. Closing my heart limited my interactions with people, and closing my mind limited my potential to learn from them and gain the wisdom and support from life that I had been seeking. Awareness of this brought about the changes I needed to improve myself and my life, I could see the world and people differently than what I had learned when growing up by opening my mind to new beliefs and my heart to affection and deeper connections. Thus began a different type of reality and the perceptions that supported meaningful and compassionate relationships, and in which I could carry myself through life with both confidence and the capacity and openness to learn something new.

One of the biggest challenges for me growing up was feeling different from others and having my own unique viewpoint that was difficult to explain or convey to others, I didn’t have the words for it and often felt shut down when I wasn’t understood. This misunderstanding turned into feeling undermined or undervalued, as did my opinions of what I had to offer, so I began to either conform to the expectations of others, or rebel, depending upon how I felt at the time. I often felt I was in a place of being corrected by others, and the attempt to convey my own knowledge turned into correcting others, just by trying to assert myself and not knowing how. This wasn’t desirable or pleasant and felt like isolation, and I wanted to move away from this competitive nature to something else that felt like sharing or togetherness. What helped was remembering that we build upon each other’s experiences in our own unique ways by being our authentic selves, in a way that is shared just by being together and aware of our oneness. Every person has their own unique view or perception about what is going on around them and with each other, and what we see from each other is only a small part of who we are and what we are actually experiencing inside. There is an inner part of our being that is vast and beyond words to describe, and we can experience it by feeling it as we do during meditation. We have an inner reality apart from what is expressed on the outside. It’s as if we each have our own language unique to us, as well as a language that we all share, and just like translating a language there are parts that become missing or changed when we try to read each other, or express our inner world… thus the importance of not judging one another by our limited perceptions. We can respect that there is far more to every person than what we are able to see, however, what we do see and how we perceive it is serves a specific purpose. It allows for a specific experience together to happen, and we can take this perceived experience as a gift that is created for us, we can give it meaning and explore it on deeper levels to reach a greater overall understanding from these experiences.

What we see and experience with one another are reflections of ourselves, or small parts of ourselves that we share, and taking these perceptions of one another as self-reflections can help us learn about ourselves and bring meaning into our life that gives rise to a greater spiritual understanding and wisdom. It is a wisdom that sees beyond just facts alone, to incorporate all the knowledge and information we receive from our life experiences and merge them into a greater wisdom that holds true the intention to love and support one another, which is what life is all about. What we are learning from life is the wisdom of how to support one another, relate to one another with compassion and greater understanding, versus a learning to develop a database or inventory of knowledge for specific purposes to draw upon. Instead of the need to explain or assert myself, I can incorporate my learned knowledge into my way of being, and my way of being can meet my life’s purpose as I learn through this greater wisdom. There can be a specific life’s purpose that is unique to each person, but we also all share a purpose that is for the greater good. It is to be this wisdom by using everything that we learn from one another to further love and support one another. This intent and purpose bring another level of understanding as well as experience of this universe. As I began to see myself and all people as the same light, the parts of my ego that created separation began to dissolve.

Recently in my class we talked about the difference between debate and dialogue, and I wanted my relationships and life in general to change from an ongoing debate to that of a dialogue. Debate is standing firm in one’s opinion and asserting it while defending it against anything that could compromise it, the expectations are to begin and end the conversation in the same stance or viewpoint. I could relate to this feeling of being in defense mode. My past inability to shift my view to that of another’s or to incorporate new information or learning from them came from fear and insecurity, especially when I felt my ego might be compromised, or feared that a longstanding belief or concept of value to my life might be threatened. It also came from fear of being undermined or misunderstood, or other fears that we can gather from our unique past that confine us. Inside myself I knew what I meant and that it was valuable, because of my personal experiences it made sense to me but maybe not to others who had different perceptions and experiences. We have to realize that everyone’s viewpoint and personal intellect is of value and is legitimate, we just may not be able to fully understand it, because we are not them, but we can remain on a compassionate and empathetic level to share in the parts of the human experience that are common to us all. It is here that we can build upon wisdom at a higher vibration and expand our conscious awareness.

Everyone has a worldview that is entirely unique to them, shaped by their own unique experiences and perspectives, and there is value it trying to learn from one another’s. There is no right or wrong, there are infinite ways of thinking and seeing the world, and ways of perceiving as well as types of experiences. Therefore, there are infinite truths and knowledge that come from each unique one of them. Instead of debating, we can move to a dialogue, in which we listen to one another’s experience and wisdom with an open mind with the willingness to learn, and understand the value each of us has to offer. No one’s tower of knowledge and wisdom will be destroyed by listening and incorporating new information, instead we only expand and build upon our own set of ideas, concepts and beliefs.

During conversations, many of us listen to one another with the intent to respond. We are often searching our mind for a good response instead of really focusing on their words and what the person is trying to tell us. I recognized where I was doing this, I was more concerned with what response I would give than what the person was trying to convey. My intent was usually good, as I would search for a response that was supportive to their situation or validate their input, however I realized that by doing this I wasn’t validating or supporting them because my mind wasn’t fully present in their dialogue. I wanted to learn how to be present in the conversation and find a new way to share in the experience or insight that they were conveying. Growing up in a place where our conversations were largely intellectually based and exploring the mental realm, the intentions were to learn and debate rather than share in an experience together. To change these dynamics, I had to learn to move my focus away from this mental aspect and into the emotional realm. Even when we misunderstand one another intellectually, we can always share and relate by empathy and feeling. I changed the intent of my conversations from debate to dialogue, a dialogue that shares in an experience with one another by way of a deeper, emotional connection. I shared this in more detail in previous blogs, but it began by moving towards compassion and connecting to my own light and power within, while recognizing it in others. Once I began this process, a different experience of the world began to manifest with deeper connections and truth unfolding, and answers to questions I had been seeking developed.

I also recognized what parts of myself were in defense mode as if looking for something that didn’t match my own views or aspirations, as if I was afraid what they would say would tear it down, or other outcomes such as to be judged or undermined that were based upon my own insecurities. I realized I was looking for my own validation, because we all want to be heard and validated. When we begin to do this for one another, to really hear and validate one another, our relationships become supportive and we begin to receive this same validation and encouragement that we all need. The point is to support and build each other up, to see and relate to the best parts of one another, while empathetically understanding and reconciling the difficult parts without taking them on personally. It was important for me to recognize where my ego played into my interactions and relationships. The need to defend my ego (and fears of it being compromised or misunderstood) really drove a lot of my interactions and limited my experiences, both by my ability to learn something new as well as to deeply share in an experience with someone. By recognizing the interplay of my ego and what drives it, I could begin to change this by looking at my self-perceptions and worldview, most importantly by looking at the true intent of the universe including those around me. Really this meant to start seeing us all as the same light and in the same light (we all carry the same light within), and we are all sharing in this human experience that is based upon a common supportive and loving intention. I began to share in this intention, of love and support for one another, beginning by changing my idea of what knowledge and wisdom really means.

The more open and willing I became to learn from others and from life, the more insight I began to receive, and my understanding of that which I wanted to explore became greater. Not only could I shift my conversations from debate to dialogue, but I could change the nature of my life experiences. The more I learned to see the universe as a loving and supportive place, the more experiences supporting this true nature of life and relationships developed that reinforced this perspective. I could find what deeper meaning lay behind my experiences and relationships, and the meaning I found gave me more insight and purpose to my life. The more I believed in the meaning and messages I received from life, the more they manifested before me. We can all change our ego to incorporate our Divine purpose in the world, with this meaningful intent to love and support one another through deeper connections, knowing we are all one and the same light.

We are all in this human experience to build something together, we can merge our unique experiences together to form a greater wisdom of ourselves individually and as a whole. We can focus on our commonalities rather than our differences. Just as our soul comes into our life to learn from our unique experiences and then merges back into the light once we complete our life purpose, and all our knowledge and wisdom merges and incorporates into this greater wisdom of oneness, we can do this with one another on Earth. Just as we are building on our knowledge, we are also expanding our understanding into a greater wisdom based on this oneness, it is for one another, to love and to support. Therefore, wisdom must come from learning from one another. Rather than trying to explain our knowledge or teach others, we can share it just by being this wisdom for one another in our everyday lives.