Practical teaching on the art of personal transformation.

TRANSFORMATION THROUGH SELF-AWARENESS
by Theodore J. Nottingham

You and I are not simply men and women who pay our bills, bring up families, experience joys and sorrows and finally pass away like a dream that suddenly ends. We are much more
than this. In our bodies that grow old, our spirits are made in the image of the Creator. We are not simply our picture on our driver's license or our social security number. We are the spiritual children of the eternal Creator. But we limit ourselves to our nationality, our
gender, our age. Nationality, for instance, can be a very narrow and dangerous thing. The French national anthem has a verse in its chorus that says: "May an impure blood soak into our fields." And of course this impure blood is anyone who is not French. This is not the mindset of a child of God. Evelyn Underhill stated: "For practical purposes, we have agreed that sanity consists in sharing the hallucinations of our neighbors."

When we are quiet and alone, without distractions, we can taste another quality of life. We can discover a vision of spiritual reality. The poet William Blake put it this way: "To see a world in a grain of sand, heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and
eternity in an hour." We have all known such brief moments, but usually we limit our awareness to the physical reality. We find in the Christian tradition a very strange saying:
"let the dead bury the dead." Surely these words do not refer to the dead in body, for a dead body cannot bury another one. Christ was speaking of the dead in soul. A perfectly healthy body can have a dead soul within it. And what is a dead soul? One that has closed itself off
to the source of its being, with no spiritual sensitivity or understanding. How does this happen to us?

First, we take ourselves entirely for granted. Consider our emotions. When we feel depressed or angry, we simply believe that to be who we are. And yet we all have this recurring wheel of emotions that varies from the greatest excitment to the most morbid depressed feeling.
According to whatever stimulus comes before us, to whatever happens in our outer life, the wheel turns and we have no choice but to manifest that emotion, however destructive and
unpleasant it may be. It happens so quickly that we seem to have no other option than to turn into that emotion. And yet, we do have a choice. It is possible to separate ourselves from negative experiences, to not be tyrannized by them. For if we take these emotions for granted, we come under their rule. We then live in a petty world of reactions, founded on a consciousness focused only on ourselves.

One of the key insights in spiritual awakening is that it is we who attract our lives and bring so much misery upon ourselves. While it is true that we have no choice but to be subject to such emotions, we do have a choice as to how we respond to them. We can release them through violence and ugliness, or channel that energy into something positive and not let them have their way with us. The poet e. e. cummings put it this way: "To be nobody but
yourself in a world that is doing its best night and day to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting." This struggle begins with our own uncontrolled reactions. For when someone speaks or behaves in a way that we resent, we usually respond with great bitterness and carry terrible memories of the person.

But there is another way: we can notice that we are violent and bitter and that is different. The observation of our state lets in light, a consciousness of what is inside of us so that we do not simply behave unconsciously and automatically. We can then recognize that no matter who is to blame for the circumstances, we are to blame for being negative. The cause is in ourselves and not in the other person, because we have a choice and a responsibility to
the universe not to release the poisonous energies of negativity. We also need to realize that self-love does not admit the more unpleasant part of ourselves into our consciousness.

Worse still, we projects it upon others. The faults that we dislike in others are most often found in ourselves as well. Cleansing, then, requires that we honestly confront what we are like.

Such observation does not place value judgments on what it witnesses. Otherwise we run the danger of falling into repression rather than discipline. Repression is ashamed of reality while discipline confronts and masters it. Repression says of such things as hate, anger and
envy: "I could never have such feelings." Discipline says: "Yes, I do have those feelings at times, but I'm not going to let them run and ruin my life." The repressed person never accepts himself as he is but is always trying to hide everything that does not agree with the false image that he has built up and is so desperately defended and cherished. The disciplined person has accepted himself, because he or she knows that they are accepted by
virtue of being alive.

Just as we must be aware of the great outer world, so must we develop an awareness of our inner world. There is a vast psychological country within us, with many dangerous neighborhoods as well as entryways into regenerating peace. We have travelled through them all. Each of us has been mean and hateful, which are dark places in our being. If we pay attention to where we are in ourselves, perhaps we won't fall so easily into those quicksands within us. Why is it that we cannot seem to control our states? The philosophical and religious traditons have a name for these states and for the reason why we have no control:
they call it sleep.

In the New Testament alone, we read: "Awake, O Sleeper, and arise from the dead and Christ shall give you light." In the letter to the Thessalonians, we find these words: "So then let us not sleep as others do, but let us keep awake." The apostle Paul says: "It is high time for you to wake out of sleep." And Christ is recorded as saying: "Watch! Do not sleep."

Certainly what is meant here is not literal sleep, but the self-centered consciousness that keeps us from experiencing that liberation called by so many names: "the Kingdom of
Heaven," "Satori," "cosmic consciousness," or even "peak experiences." As different as we are now from when we were sleeping in our beds, so is that state of self-centeredness different from the possible state that we can all attain.