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They
denied your uniqueness, they rejected your differences;
how could they have taught you to be loyal to yourself?
For this reason the work will be difficult. You will
have to fight against years of deeply rooted
conditioning. It will seem that you are fighting against
yourself, when you are actually working for yourself.
Now some harmful attitudes, poisons which the world has
injected in us all, have become part of you. You defend
them as if you were defending yourself. You defend your
image, but you don't realise that your image is not
yourself.
You may
think you are a Communist instead of seeing yourself as
an individual who shares some ideals with Communism. Or
you may think you are against Communism and have become
so deeply identified with the idea that if you met a
Communist you wouldn't feel at ease. However, when you
were a child you weren't a Communist, you weren't a Fascist, these are clothes you put on later, when nobody
taught to you to be yourself. You become your ideas, you
become your football team, and your real Essence
disappears…
Around
your roots poison weeds have grown, fed by years of
conditioning. It will be difficult to eradicate them,
because they are dangerously entwined. You are the only
one who can do it, and nobody else can do it for you.
Close your eyes together with me and feel how short your
life is.
Get
closer to yourself, stay with yourself, and start to
sense your body. These hands and arms that always do what
you ask them, obedient servants. Have you ever been as
aware of your body as you are in this moment? You have
dressed it in thousands of different ways, but feel its
nakedness only now. Start to look for what your clothes
don't beautify, but only hide. Now begin to observe your
thoughts. How many thoughts you have thought! You
identify yourself in so many of them! Leave them all,
and observe them while you sense yourself. They are your
products not your boss.
Now
observe your emotions... terror and ecstasy alternate
with each other, suffering and joy, like a wheel, giving
you sublime instants and endless suffering. Go beyond.
Try to see beyond your emotions, they are your product
too, they are not yourself. This is the most difficult
thing. It is possible to abandon an idea, but it is
impossible to leave behind emotions that were born
inside you. You identify too closely with them. However
if you could see them, even before you express them, you
would understand that it is possible to live an
existence of freedom, and not of slavery. Existence.
Instead of enjoying tenderness and allowing ourselves to
plumb the depths of grief, in order to understand the
message it is giving us, we reject the emotions that
hurt us and we become deaf to ourselves. Or we shelter
under the poor gutters of negative emotions, just
because worry and anxiety are the only routine
procedures we know to face our problems. We are so
rooted in our usual emotional ways that we don't even
wonder if there may be a different way to face them.
Changing would mean too strong a transformation for us
even to consider.
And so we
are unable to hold onto even positive emotions. Good
news can't cheer us up as much as bad news can bring us
down.
Stay
sitting down, with your eyes shut, and see all this:
means, instruments, things we often don't use because we
are too wrapped up in the movie of life. Try to get up
from that role of passive spectator, get onto the scene
and go beyond, go backstage. Try to make yourself the
director. The director of your body, of your emotions,
of your thoughts. Come back to yourself definitively and
forever.
This is
new birth: a new relationship with ourselves. However,
there is a risk that these will remain just printed
words. It is more than a risk, it is a certainty. When
you will raise your eyes from this sheet you will forget
your intention, believe me. This happens because in a
person’s life new births should happen every day, every
day the intention should be reasserted. Because everyday
we have to fight against the mechanical degeneration
into which the world is falling, and us with it. And the
work, if we are alone, is of titanic dimensions. That's
why it is helpful for searchers to join work groups
where they can use those aids which can make the Great
Work a bit lighter.
Alone it
is almost impossible.
G.Q.
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