Illusion to Reality

It doesn’t sound pleasant when we hear people telling us that whatever we do we are doing it for ourselves. It gives us a meaning of selfishness and ill-intent when such words are directed at us. I may even retaliate or defense myself if I am told that way. But the truth is… I am that.

If I react to a comment, I can be sure there is a part of me that attest to the reality of who I am. I hate that part of the statement that tells so bluntly about me. I am angry because you have exposed that part of me that I am so unwilling to deal with. That is who I am but I am so unwilling to address it and I carry that pain with me wherever I go.  I thought I have buried it deep into the abyss of the mind and expect it to decay and rot into disappearance and carry on with my day to day living.

But the truth is, I am carrying it day by day, moment to moment. I am not aware, obviously. My actions never lied. My actions tell me so. I am maneuvering a machine that is geared towards approval and support instead of entering into spaces that I could foresee conflict and disagreement. I thought that is normal and sometimes I also thought that is being timid. And those are the times where I will bulldoze myself into those spaces with trepidation, expecting courage to overcome my fear and yet, hidden at the edge of my mind, there is an overwhelming hope that the outcome will be to my favor. Isn’t that selfishness again?

There are moments where I am “in charge of a situation” – having the ability to articulate my answers to questions that seems complex and unanswerable to a lay person. I feel great and elate. I may also feel that at that moment I have the ability to “conquer” what is in front of me, to “slay” whatever that is directed at me. Do I hear myself at that moment? No I don’t. I am only following and believing what’s in my thoughts. I don’t questioned what comes up in me. I am drowned in my own obsession as I feed my own selfishness. Where I am standing tall, I am standing on the foundation of selfishness.

Where I am standing low, I am also standing from the space of selfishness as there is a payoff for me in that space. If I am in equal with someone, I can be sure somewhere in the abyss of the mind, there is also another hidden agenda. In reality, there is no difference between superiority, inferiority or equality – they are just façade of the same stuff – unworthiness infested into selfishness.

It is a disease of the mind, a cancer that spreads in different forms to attract attention to feed itself. Listen deeply, and you will understand what I mean. If unworthiness is my core and selfishness is my action, does selflessness matters anymore than selfishness? Does doing good any difference from doing bad? If doing good is motivated by the ill of the mind, what good is really there for me except to feed the hunger of the ego?

Or is there something that I did not see, something I have missed, something so profound that I have misinterpreted entirely of what the Masters have to say? Surely there is something greater than what I am seeing. Surely there is a potential of true wisdom and love emanating in me, only if I am truthful with what I am not, to see who I am. In that space I am sure to view selfishness and selflessness, with love. Until I truly come into that space, I can be sure I am constantly feeding the ego, at different levels and degrees. Aren’t we all self-centered?

Is the movement clockwise or counter-clockwise? Observe a little more longer and you will see how your perception changes. Are we choosing what we want to see, or the mind is conditioning us what to see? Do we really have a choice? What about the things we see around us – is it real? Or “real” only to our own perception, in other words, our own imagination? If that is true, can we really trust what we see?

The mind make us see things according to its own conditioning rather than what it is. Imagine the numerous uncountable ideas fed into our mind each day and in return the mind make conclusions for us to experience – be it see, hear, taste, touch, smell or think. And that colors us from what we experience. Not one moment of experience is genuinely new as they are all colored by our past perceptions. When we are not aware of this reality, we took what we experience as ultimate truth. Herein lies our righteousness. Or would I say “wrongeousness”, if ever there is such a word? How can we arrive to Truth when we are not aware of this False?

Until and unless we see the illusion of our perceived reality, we are on a merry-go-round trip, never left our seat of ignorance. It does not matter if we are not aware of our ignorance, but when we wake up to our misperception, the journey forward is a non-return trip. A long trip of undoing the entire entanglement of disillusion of the self.