Part 5: Understanding

Your guide can help you understand yourself, but not by analysing and presenting you with a diagnosis. There is no need for this, for your guide’s understanding is complete and needs no reduction into an explanation. Your guide sees you as you are, and this apparently simple accomplishment is a wonderful gift, for it is human to find it difficult to truly know yourself. 

For a start, you have many layers and you come to know yourself layer by layer. Then to be human is to deliberately set out to identify, at least for a while, with a fraction of yourself. Add to that any tendency to assess yourself according to the views of others or your own inherited or created standards, all of which can only create distortions, it is unsurprising that your idea of who you are is just that – an idea.

None of this is wrong. All of these characteristics have served useful purposes. But they have acted as containers that restrained your freedom of movement and cramped your being to some degree. Many now long to stretch, to find wings. You may have watched a fledgling at the edge of the nest. It clearly knows that something new is required and it is aware that its wings may do more than keep it balanced, but there is more yet, unnamed and unknown, even though witnessed in its parents. The leap of faith, the lived experience of flying comes next and no amount of description or observation will substitute. Your guide is like the experience of flying. In connecting with your guide you are spreading your wings. As that connection moves into communion, you begin to fly. 

Knowing yourself is like flying: description is insufficient. Much of understanding yourself is the willingness to let go of defining who you are. Of course it continues to be useful to have shorthand terms for different roles you play, but they need not bind you. Every characteristic you observe in yourself is only a kind of role, adopted for a while and then, sooner or later, abandoned. Understanding yourself involves moving beyond these temporary definitions. In doing so, it may feel that you are leaving the known for the unknown, moving from a greater to a lesser understanding. 

Your guide is introducing you to the unknown range of yourself. It is as if in flying the bird discovers that it is also the sky. With increasing familiarity and skill the sky becomes an extension of the bird, until one day it is so at home that it draws no distinction between sky and self. Your guide undertakes to help you come to know this immensity of your own being. It takes time, for it is your intention to embody more of your beingness within the compass of this human life, and the adjustment that this demands is most comfortable if spread across many moments. Each moment presents a fresh opportunity to know a little more of the immensity, and while your time in this life is finite, it still offers many moments, as many as you need. For there is no expectation that this life should be the end of all growing. You are a living being; growing is your nature and you grow through many process and states, of which being human is just one.

Though it may not always have felt so, you grow in every moment. Every experience, even those times when you may have felt thwarted or stuck or even pushed backgrounds, growth was happening. Now your guide comes forward to help you develop new ways of growing. So long as you have experiences you will grow through them, but this is not the only way of growing. 

Growing through experience is a feedback process. You send energy out into the Universe; the Universe shows you how that energy manifests. You then adjust the energy you send out, with the overall aim of creating a life you find increasingly joyful. However as you continue to explore this process the realisation comes that, after all, it may not be quite what it appears to be. For it depends on the belief that you and the Universe are separate. If you release that belief, you may find that new ways of learning begin to open up. Once you recognise your continuity with the Universe, then you may learn more directly.  

The familiar back and forth of learning by experience is subtly changed by an appreciation that all experience is available to you, and that from this infinite array of choices you are continuously choosing and continuously refreshing what you choose. Beyond that another understanding can develop: that you are all experience that is and that you have created a focus (at this time your human presence), so that you may explore the totality of the All That Is. You may relax into knowing that all experience comes from the Source of All and that you are of the Source also.

Learning by experience tends to bring with it rules and definitions. You compare different outcomes and seek to derive guiding principles that you can apply to future events. Whilst useful, it can lead to a tendency to ignore the unique wonder of each moment. Knowing that you are all experience, that you are the sea of consciousness as well as a drop within the sea, helps to free you from fixity. Familiar ideas can still be useful and used, but there is an easier recognition that you are choosing to apply them rather than assuming automatically that they must apply to this moment because they applied to the previous moment. 

You are learning to release attachment to patterns of thought and belief so that you may discover a deeper understanding, like the bird leaving the secure, but increasingly cramped, nest to find the liberation of flight. In doing so, you fly into the unknown, but, like the wind beneath your wings, you find understanding supports you.