BEING AUTHENTIC

In being authentic, you become an unassuming presence, like a wildflower simply allowing life’s splendor to arise glowingly, without applying any defensiveness or effort to display your intrinsic beauty. The flower’s loveliness rests in its faithful innocence. In this humble unpretentious way of being, life becomes so very easy; you merely yield receptively to the illumining allure of your inner sun. Slipping without effort into that inmost honesty so that transcendental light is then allowed to rise up and nourish your inspirations and creative incentive that you might need to uplift and steward any given moment into its highest expression. That illumining power is the causal dynamism of our one shared Self that invariably guides all life, everywhere, into its summit expression. It is the secret shining face of our one high Self, too often resting hidden and untapped beneath the defensive mind’s ego-driven maneuvers.

Your return to authenticity begins when you learn to give yourself to its subtle call when you hand yourself over to its gentle invitation, and you unpretentiously ready yourself to receive its life edifying guidance. Once you’re there, resting in a willing state of genuine sincerity, it can set your nature ablaze with an immortalizing bliss light, a dharma enlivening current, that gives you both your direction and incentive to help you bring your world into greater harmony, healing, and right order.

Clearly, there’s a special art to this kind of receptiveness, an exquisite spiritual virtuosity, that’s been silently waiting for you to discover, enliven and ultimately unfold through your consciousness-ascending journey. That discover is not easily made through your search for it. That talent is already there inside you. The exquisiteness and potential of this art were seeded into your life at birth. Through an allowing focus and then through your willingness to act, you can open those doors that lead to those higher Self-Realizations that ultimately result in your enlightenment.

This art begins when you learn to mindfully use your inborn skills of inward listening and feeling, turning those delicate keys inward to consciously unlock those doors. It helps to learn that those keys are not born of effort; they are as light as a feather, bearing absolutely no weight upon your heart. In letting go, reducing effort, undefended feeling, with sincere unprejudiced listening, your divine intuition matures, and your way is assured.

Ask yourself, who is really moving you right now? Who is really causing your breath to flow, your blood to surge, and your thoughts to form? —In your enlightenment, you’ll come to realize there is but one Being, one ultimate Perceiver, one Actor dreaming the theatrics of life behind all that appears real in life. You’ll discover your true Self-Realizations when that one ultimate Perceiver, shines through your presence, unobstructed by your ego preferences.

While there are extraordinary teachers on this small blue planet today, too many spiritual teachers have missed this simple truth. They put their students on a path of pursuit and achievement, to become someone more than they are, to become that “spiritually correct person.” Pursuing another more suitable or sought after identity, rather than using the faults life provides as the means to self-empowerment, sidelines the fact that their students are already the Divine beings they are seeking. This search for the sinless, perfect person, while hoping to take on a greater or more ideal spiritual identity is one of the principal missteps that our religious world has been enforcing for thousands of years. It is the fight for identity that is always toiling at the root of humanity’s suffering. Putting our world’s sincere followers into a pursuit of an unattainable perfection is the path to exhaustion, not enlightenment! No one in life, no devotee or master, can ever achieve a state of impeccable perfection in a physical time-dependent existence that is limited by a linear unfolding of a truth that can’t ever be fully expressed. No, the answer rests in our authenticity, not our imagined identities.

Excerpt is taken from a 2007 Aaravindha Himadra lecture