The Celestial Curriculum

Meditation 

“To learn who we truly are, we must learn who we are not.” Sara Robinson

The Greatness Within
All human beings, unless they’ve been irreparably damaged, have a sense of their own greatness. 

Whether we admit it or not, we know we were born to fulfill a special destiny no one else can fulfill. 

     In one sense our spiritual studies have provided us with the great relief of knowing that we are exactly the same on a psychological level.  Nearly all of us live with a fear of inadequacy that leaves us anxious, stressed, and exhausted at the end of most days.  This inadequacy may be expressed differently, according to our essential nature, but we all fear being unprepared for meeting moments which seem to be bigger than we are.

     A paradox exists, however, because while we are all the same in terms of how we interact with the world, we are also completely unique.  There is no other person on the planet exactly like you.  Think about that for a moment.  Let that thought sink in. 
     Why would you have been created exactly as you are—unlike any other human being on the planet?  You are here to realize your true greatness and fulfill your potential in the grand scheme of creation.  You have a job to do, and you’re in school to learn how to do it.

The School of Life

     This school is open 24/7 to everyone who is willing to learn.  There is one teacher, one student, and one teaching fulfilling a celestial curriculum designed to prepare each of us to realize our true purpose in life. 
     In scale our Work here is a special type of school for advanced aspirants whose life experiences have brought us to the point where we realize a need for a particular type of instruction designed to take us to the next level of consciousness.  The real teaching isn’t a set of facts I memorize and bring to you to learn.  It is something shared between us.
     The Presence in me is making an active exchange with the Presence in each of you—collectively and individually—so that together we can begin to see the truth of ourselves.  We have learned that you can’t be someone who knows and is learning at the same time.  So, we are learning to be watchful, rather than willful to make room for new knowledge to inspire us.
     Today we’re going to examine three lessons from what I’m calling the "celestial curriculum" to discovering the greatness within:  surrender resistance, make mistakes, and drop self-talk.

Surrender Resistance

     We have talked a lot about resistance as a natural opposing force.  Its nature is descending, rather than ascending, and its ally is our personality formed from our conditioning and experiences as a buffer to protect us from our sense of inadequacy.
     Resistance makes learning impossible, because the divided mind or personality that thinks it already knows can’t learn anything.  It meets a moment knowing what it wants and doesn’t want.  Desire sees its object and goes for it.
     There’s only one problem with this scenario, false desire only serves to perpetuate itself.  It cannot grow outside the limited boundaries of what it knows.  Truth cannot be identified or served within the confines of a divided nature. 
     This is the true meaning behind Matthew 6:24, when Christ says “No man can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other.”  If we truly wish to know and serve the greatness—the Christ—within, we must surrender the parts of us which continuously produce and follow self-generated desires.  We will never know our true purpose, if we continue to provide ourselves with false purposes.
     Sadly, most people live out their days in pursuit of false purposes and don’t even recognize it.  They work hard all of their lives to gain powers, possessions, and the approval of others and live lives of what Henry David Thoreau called "quiet desperation."
     You and I have awakened sufficiently to see the necessity of dropping all of this and following a different path.  We’ve learned to question and watch resistance and its accompanying negative states, rather than react and engage.  We’ve also learned to suspend judgment, realizing that all of us are doing the very best we can in every moment according to our current level of understanding.

Make Mistakes

     One of the reasons we so often go into resistance is we don’t like to make mistakes.  Why is this?  Because making mistakes only increases our fear of inadequacy, which is the central force behind our personality or divided nature.
     As spiritual aspirants we have begun to develop a comfort level with mistakes.  It’s become a necessity.  If we’re going to be watchful, rather than willful, we must be willing to “see” things about ourselves rather than “be” identified with them.  This means we must watch as opposed to identify with the parts of ourselves that are keeping us from experiencing our true greatness.
     Here’s a little story about the importance of making mistakes: 
     There was once a communal farm where students learned the essential laws of growing food for sustainable living.  Each gardener in training worked in the master garden as well as on a little plot of land where he could experiment on the techniques learned.  On this particular farm, students were asked to leave the classroom each day and come back and share what they had learned.  One student shared every time they met.  Invariably, she would come to class admitting that she’d gotten the lesson wrong and something in her garden had become diseased or, even, died.  The master gardener would point out where she had gone wrong, and even though she was a little embarrassed, she would always go back and try again. Witnessing this humiliation, the other students became reticent about sharing and rarely did so.  They simply let the young woman make her mistakes, receive the correction, and they tried as best they could to learn vicariously.  After a while a couple of the students got up the courage to approach the young woman and asked her why on earth she continued to share each day, knowing she would be corrected.  The young woman smiled and said, “Well it’s kind of a secret.  You see, the master gardener is really my mother, and she told me that the only way to learn something new is to make mistakes, and I was allowed to make as many as I needed to become a master gardener.”   
     This woman knew that learning comes at a cost and was willing to pay the price for a new life. 
This story has an additional, hidden lesson as well.  It’s so easy to become irritated and resist our “teachers,” whether they take the form of a person speaking in a classroom, an unwanted incident, or an unpleasant relationship.  Think about it.  If you were driving down the road, breaking the speed-limit to get to an appointment, and someone ran out into to road and yelled, “Stop!” you’d likely be scared and irritated by the disruption.  You’d roll down your window to give the man a piece of your mind…until the man told you that there was a six-car pile-up just around the corner.  Then, how would you feel?  You’d be grateful for the warning, wouldn’t you?  This is how we must approach our spiritual work.  We must learn not to resist the people, places, and conditions in life that are there to show us things in ourselves we don’t wish to see.  Part of true greatness is the ability to develop an inner teacher who keeps us from making mistakes.  This is the meaning behind Isaiah 45: 2: “I will go before you and make the crooked places straight.”  Our inner Teacher--the Christ/Light/Truth within--will show us the Way, if we are willing to live in Awareness.

Drop Self-Talk

     The last key idea we’ll be examining today on our journey to greatness is the necessity of dropping self-talk.  We must learn to let go of our habitual tendency to "live by consensus," going along with what our divided nature is telling us about the conditions we meet in the moment.
     Let’s look at this pattern to see if we can glean some truth.  First, we meet a moment.  It can be the simplest scenario.  We walk into the office and pass our boss in the hall, and she gives us a blank stare, instead of greeting us with a pleasant expression.  We immediately go into resistance (reject our feeling of inadequacy), because the moment doesn’t meet our expectation.  And by the way, harboring any kind of expectation is an invitation to pain. 
     The next thing that happens is we begin to tell ourselves what just happened:  “My boss is so rude.  She doesn’t like me.  I wonder if I’m about to lose my job?”  When we begin to self-talk, the feeling of rejection crystallizes, and we become identified with the false “I” that wants the approval of his boss.  Here’s another important truth we need to understand:  we’re afraid of anyone we want to like and approve of us.  If we wish to be free and experience true greatness, we must let go of our need for approval.
     Let’s summarize:  we experience an unwanted moment, go into resistance, and identify with the “I” that has a belief about how it should be treated by its boss.  The next thing that happens is separation.  We’re no longer whole.  It’s us and them, this and that, and a war has begun. 
     And, do you see how it all began?  We engaged in useless, perhaps unfounded, self-talk.  For all we know, our boss could have just had some terrible news.  Perhaps she’d had a call that her mother was dead, her house had been foreclosed on, or her spouse was leaving her.  Who knows?  And this little mind of ours created a story that has now made that person our enemy. 
     If we’re honest, we’ll admit that we do this all the time.  So, how do we break the cycle of self-talk?  We must have our attention firmly rooted in the present moment, so the light of awareness can remind us of the necessity of breaking this pattern of "living by consensus."  If our attention is firmly directed on all of the thoughts, emotions, and sensations running through us in the moment, we will still “feel” the rejection, but we will not engage it.  As self-realization author Guy Finley says, “The feel is real, but the why is a lie.”

Exercise:  Don’t Turn Away

     Each of these necessary elements—surrendering resistance, making mistakes, and dropping self-talk—requires that we stay present to ourselves and brings us to a very important exercise called “Don’t Turn Away from Yourself.”
     Over the next week, try as best you can to focus on one or more of the elements we discussed and do all you can to remain watchful.  Try not to turn away from your intention to discover your true greatness.   If you see that you have, correct your mistake, and turn right back around and face yourself squarely. 
     Little by little with practice, you will begin to relish the experience of living fearlessly and will no longer allow your false self to prevent you from the greatness which is your true birthright.

Acknowledgment:  This talk was inspired by many of the ideas shared by Guy Finley at his live talk entitled "Being True to Yourself Begins Here" at The Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, NY on 09/11/11.  I am grateful for all of the wisdom shared by this inspired speaker.  Go to www.guyfinley.org to access more of his teachings.