Our Inner Guide
Called to Higher Things
There is a voice, an energy, that calls us to higher things—experiences that open us to who we are beyond a body and beyond the identities we’ve gotten deeply mixed up in. What it offers is a path out of confusion, doldrum, and the aimlessness of a seemingly mad world. It invites us to an ever increasing and unfolding experience where peace, sanity, and fulfillment are hallmarks—where we know what we are and what we are here for. But what good is it if we can’t discern its calls, if we mistake it as yet another part of the incessant clutter of our minds.
Overcoming Conditioning
My whole life I’ve had a knowing of my purpose. Like many, I sensed it as an energy as well as in thoughts. It was also reflected in the world around me—others acknowledging it before I could. But inside a mind dulled by the conditioning of well-meaning adults, schooling, workplaces and every corner of our human experience, I thought the guidance I was offered wasn’t specific enough or tangible enough. I judged what I received, as it spoke of how to be a vehicle for what I concluded were ephemeral qualities: joy, peace, openness, and healing and the like. Those qualities seemed to lack any “realness”.
What I didn’t understand is that I had been taught to vest reality in the hard and fast things—matter, the physical, the world. And that in truth, while we speak of the perfected qualities like joy and peace as aspirations in our world, we’ve hardly invested much energy in understanding them on their own terms. We, at best, use our human sense of things to try and know what are ostensibly divine ideas—ideas which perhaps have magnitudes more importance for us than we know.
Much of us rightly wonder why our guidance and light would seem to be so difficult to discern, so hidden, or so confusing. Or why the treasures of its thinking and ideas would escape us. The short answer is, in reality they don’t—they are ever available, awaiting recognition. But what good is reality if in our experience we are confused. Many of us are swept over by menacing ideas that shrink our identity, tear at our worth, and promise us that all will end with a basket six feet under or in a fiery furnace depending on our preference. Equally so, we are often held in a vice grip of attempts to attain or retain the good things of the world, which frequently come with the insidious fear that their impermanence will give way to loss. We live our lives managing this complicated headspace and subsequently world space. We simply drown innocently in conditioned beliefs that seem to have no off button.
But there is an off switch. And theoretically, that switch could go off on all such belief all at once, as there is nothing but belief to keep it on. For most of us though, we take conscious steps moment to moment to step back from the conditioning, making way to hear more clearly our true Self, our real voice. In hearing it, we feel peace and garner courage. In following it, we can see our world change—our literal experience change.
Practicing Radical Non-Judgment
First things first though. We don’t add fuel to the fire one bit by judging ourselves for where we are at in this process. It is utterly counterproductive and just keeps us stuck. We do what any good parent would do—we parent ourselves with love, daring to open the closet door in the darkest of nights to find that what we thought was there really isn’t… and we say… "see my love… you are safe”. We may have to open many such doors, as the innumerable ideas we hold act as a hallway of doors that have seemed to capture pieces of our energy behind each. We open and see nothing is there and our energy is returned to us. Of course this is all happening in our experience. In truth, nothing ever left us, we just believed it did. There are many tools we can use to support us as we dare to surrender our world and make room for the one guide we’ve longed for all along—our Self.
Making Friends With The Self
To the point of this writing however—how do we know the voice, the energy of our real Self? Sometimes it comes in thought or an image and sometimes it comes in a feeling or even a sense of relief or peace, signaling to us that we are on the right track or offering us the very path we should take. It can be as simple as the thought to sit down, stand up, turn left, stay still, read, write, sit in silence, eat a specific food, or say specific words. It’s voice is marked by not leading us to a road of despair. It leads us only to the good of our Self, our peace. It may in fact lead us to open the doors in the halls of our mind and surrender our thinking, which may seem frightening at first, yet ultimately will be our release. It’s voice is also marked by a complete and utter lack of judgment if we choose not to follow it. So truly, in its eyes, we can’t make a mistake.
