Who am I? Name, position, profession, nationality, etc. These reflect the parts we play, the things we do. Who is the one playing all the parts?
Who actually am I? ‘I am a soul’. Every time we revise our spiritual identity we peel off a layer of falsehood, of illusion. I learn of who I am, knowing myself thoroughly.
The soul has five core qualities: peace, love, happiness, wisdom and purity.
My purpose? We have many roles in life. When we identify with any role too strongly our capacity becomes limited. There is, for example, the role of the friend. As a friend I share happiness with you, only the moment you are not nice to me you are no longer my friend and I no longer share happiness with you. If instead I identity with the one playing the role of the friend -the eternal soul- then I move beyond limitations; there are no conditions to my giving. I give like the sun does to the earth, and clouds may come between us only I shine just the same. When we give conditionally we drain our energy. When we give unconditionally we increase our energy. In a role my part is conditional, as a soul my part is unlimited and I know true freedom.
Being me? To strengthen ‘I’ all we need to do is focus on and nurture our true qualities. We can re-create ourselves. Our personality is the result of the mix of and the way we express our five core qualities. Take the quality of love, for example, this love may be expressed as friendship, caring, in contemplative prayer or compassion. Then peace, this may be expressed as clarity of mind or as the power to discern. Recognising. experiencing and expressing these qualities within ourselves we come to trust ourselves and our inner knowing. The possibilities of what we can accomplish open up and become limitless.
Seeing you? The more secure we are in who we are and in expressing our core qualities the more we are able to ‘see’ another, i.e. to see these qualities in them. The greatest charity is to not doubt anyone even in our thoughts; just have good wishes for them and know that they will find their way to peace and happiness.
Seeing clearly? We tend to think what we see with our physical eyes is what is. Take an incident though, if you asked all the people there to describe what happened would they all give you the exactly the same reply? We notice different aspects. We interpret what we see differently. We see through different ‘filters.’ To truly ‘see’ we need to see without a filter and judgements. To see without filters ‘see’ with the awareness ‘I am a soul.’ This enables us to see the difference between truth-falsehood; reality-illusion and what is beneficial-harmful.
Some practices:
1) In the morning make time to think about something beautiful. Get lost in these thoughts. Doing this gives us a lot of inner strength to face the day ahead.
2) In the evening sit and clear your mind of all the events of the day. 20 good things may have happened, only what do we tend to get caught up in? The one negative thing? If you had a white sheet of paper with a tiny dot in the middle what do focus on?
3) Focus on who you are and not on what you are not. Usually when we want to change something about ourselves we say, for example, I shouldn’t be angry/ I wish I didn’t get angry. Does this work? Instead nurture in yourself the opposite of what you don’t want to be, for example, to overcome anger contemplate peace.
