If you realise that there is no other, it means that as a human being, you will find enormous strength in yourself, as yourself, writes ANDREW COHEN
Most people who are interested in spiritual freedom prefer to be followers. Very few are willing to make the sacrifices that are necessary to be free.
If you take a serious look at the human condition — the human condition means all of us — you’ll see that in the end there is only one condition and we are all a part of it. There is one person who exists and that person is who we all are. There is only one body, one heart and one mind. There is only one perceiver, and that perceiver is you.
Many exclaim, ‘There is only one.’ What they are referring to is a vague ‘one’ that is supposed to exist everywhere. But if that is what one truly believes, does one have the guts to take it seriously? Indeed, if there is only one, then that would mean that there is only you. Very few are willing to take it seriously.
When you allow this kind of contemplation to begin to manifest within you, you will suddenly feel things getting very real. A whole imaginary world will fall away. And then the question will arise: if there is only you, what are you going to do about the enormous crisis that you seem to be in? Will you allow yourself to fall back to sleep? Will you pretend that it all really doesn’t matter? Or will you discover that you, through the realisation that there is no other, have the ability to change it all, simply by taking responsibility for the fact that there isn’t anybody else who you can ultimately rely on to do it? If there is ever going to be any significant change, it will depend on you.
I came to a point in my own life when I realised that I could not rely on anybody else. No longer convinced by what I was hearing from others, I knew that if I wanted to figure it out, I was going to have to do it on my own. When I accepted this, when I no longer shrank away from it, but came to a point where I finally accepted it, this decision brought with it a lot of peace, because I stopped looking outside myself for crucial answers. I no longer needed to look anywhere else for security or reassurance. I knew then without a doubt that it was up to me.
When you arrive at this point in your own evolution, you take yourself a lot more seriously. You begin to take seriously the possibility that you can know, that you can figure it out, that you can find your way.
If you do realise that there is no other, it means that as a human being you will find enormous strength and inspiration in yourself, as yourself. You will stop looking outside yourself, because you will begin to feel that strength and inspiration welling up from within.
When you realise that there is no other, it wakes you up from the dream of individuality. It wakes you up from the nightmare of self-importance. You suddenly discover that you exist as part of a vast and enormous whole, and therefore, it becomes obvious that everything that you do, always does and always will affect the whole. Most can’t bear to come to terms with this. But if you realise how significant your awakening can be, you will find that you don’t have any choice. You won’t have any choice because you will have given up the idea that you ever had a choice.
When you begin to take yourself seriously, it means that you also take the situation that you find yourself in seriously. That is when you peer beyond the sense of individuality, beyond the illusion of separation and isolation, and begin to take seriously the realisation of the fact that you are that one without a second. You then experience the great paradox. On one hand, you are a human being who seems to be insignificant, just one among billions. But on the other hand, in the same instant you know without a doubt that you are that one without a second. Very few want to go that far.
Understand that the entire process of spiritual evolution, transformation and awakening, is not a personal matter — it’s an evolutionary matter. When evolution occurs within one individual, it means that the race as a whole has evolved. So the only point is: can, will and does evolution occur, or not? If you are not willing to take it seriously, it won’t happen.
You will slip and slide along with all of the others just slipping and sliding along in an unconscious soup where everybody is blindly following each other’s lead. That is why it is so important that the individual be willing to take themselves and the possibility of their own transformation deadly seriously. If it’s true that there is no other, then you have to be that one without a second.
■ Follow Andrew Cohen at speakingtree.in