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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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