The Search For Truth And The Main Illusion That Prevents It

Today I would like to discuss a significant obstacle in our search for truth and personal development that is so effectively ignored and simultaneously encouraged that we have virtually lost any significant chance of success.

As we already know, in the search for the reality of our Being and its cultivation to higher levels of development, we must first eliminate all our illusions. We live in our opinions and subjective views which leads us into negative emotions. Negative emotions are the main cause of loss of energy and wasting life and must be eliminated in order to progress to higher levels. That is another subject, but for now a foundation principle for today’s talk.

Our goal is to obtain an objective view of all things. For example, it is impossible to truly understand another person and still disagree with them. Either we understand or we do not. If we understand that person, be they right or wrong, we must agree, because we truly understand them. To say that we understand but disagree means we do not understand them or even what understanding means.

To understand is to know exactly what the other person sees or believes. If we can see that, then we will truly understand them because we are talking about the exact same thing, and therefore we must agree. If I say that the music is so terrible it gives me a headache, you may say you understand but disagree because you like that music. This means you do not understand me at all since it does not give you a headache. If you felt the same sensations as I do, then you would understand. Until that happens, you can only imagine that you understand, and lie to yourself thinking that you do understand. This is one example of how we do not even know the meaning of the simplest words in our language and live in imagination rather than reality.

It may not be realistic or true, but if you truly understand me, you will see and feel the same sensations and so you must agree. Understanding means seeing the same thing and thus the reality of the subject as it is being discussed.

Our lives are built upon false images. It all starts when we are fed this desire as children, and our lives are turned away from reality and into fantasy through no fault of our own. Once that aspiration for living a fantasy life has begun, it gets ingrained into our being and the images of desire change, but we still aspire to be something we cannot be. And so we live a life entirely lost in chasing an illusion.

Young children are fed stories of super-heros. We tell them the stories at bedtime, buy them toys and costumes so they can pretend to be their heros. Life as a child is all make-believe and pretend, which is a good quality that nature has given us, however that creative nature is fed with the wrong material to work with. Pre-formed images of super-heros flying through the sky, running faster that a bullet, stopping a speeding train and so on limit our creativity by giving it an impossible image.

Our natural creative nature is blocked from developing because instead of the child being forced to create their own ideas, they are fed with pre-packaged ideas and then encouraged to allow their creativity to express itself through the image of that character rather than its natural unlimited potential. We are speaking now of generalities, exceptions will discussed in a moment.

Our creative capacity lies in an aspect of our being, referring to the different centers we discussed in other lectures, the intellectual aspect of the emotional centre. In this talk, it is not necessary to go into the detail about the centers and their aspects other than this one.

Emotions are the source of our creative energy. But energy alone without direction and focus is merely dispersed without achieving any tangible results. The intellectual aspect of the emotional centre gives a direction and focus for the creative energy. It is the driver of the car.

If we are fed with pretending to be Superman or Wonder Woman, then we will use our intellect which has learnt the traits and abilities of these storybook people and feed that data to our emotional centre which will then give us the feeling of being those characters. This will be very fulfilling since the essential nature of a human being is to create and now we are creating, sadly though, a false image of ourself. If an adult took on such a false image and believed it as strongly as some children do, they are normally committed to an insane asylum. Such is the power of the emotional centre to believe so strongly and dangerous when fed wrong information to work with.

The exceptions are those few individuals in history who did not absorb or get exposed to fairy tales as children or for some other reason delved deep into the mysteries of life, or of how a musical instrument or paint is used for example. They used the power of their emotional centre to fuel them with its intellectual aspect to learn the technical attributes, or scientifically study why a plant is green for example. The emotional centre, which is the source of intuition and creativity mixed in the material knowledge and discovered chlorophyl, or penicillin, or how to make the most beautiful music or paint the Mona Lisa.

All creativity is from the emotional centre but must be guided and given a direction from its intellectual aspect. The reason is quite simple. The intellectual aspect requires will power and mental effort, focus, to function. The intellectual aspect gives a focused direction for the creative and intuitive energy of the emotional centre towards the subject that it is focused on. This combination is the alchemical mixture that turns lead to gold, or in more accurate terms, a lump of human animal into a creative genius.

But this is lost in the world of pretend which we are fed and trained into living in our early days. Now the problem is that although as an adult we feel we are beyond pretending to be a super-hero, we still are lying to ourselves and living a life of pretend.

Our teenage adolescent years are spent lost in this imaginary world, however we change from thinking we can fly to imitating the movie and music stars of the times. Then the concept of image and looks takes its hold, again supported by the marketing and famous people.

In this world as a woman you are forced into using makeup, fancy hair styles and sexy cloths,  all very attractive to men. Men also have to work on themselves with the right cloths, hair style and building up their muscles. Even though we all know that when the makeup is washed off the reality is something quite different, men still chase after the image, colour and glamour of a well made up woman. Hence that makes women live in this pretend life spending large amounts of money and time in preparing to go outside to attract a suitable man.

But still the makeup sells, men desire falseness and women live to be false, so what can we expect if our most basic need of life, love and companionship is based on a false image.

And so we progress through life from one stage to the next, perpetually trying to be something we are not. Even as adults, we desire and dream of being like that famous person we hear about. Either in sports or musical abilities or great wealth and a master of business. As you see, we are filled with desires to be someone else, do what another person can do, but ignore that we simply cannot.

There are an infinite number of reasons why we cannot be like the hero we admire, and each case is individual so impossible to list, but it is not hard to find if we take an objective realistic view. Certainly we can improve ourselves, increase our skills, perhaps even to a very high level, but the point is if we are trying to make ourselves into the best we can be are we taking into account our current state of being. What are the realistic possibilities of the level we can improve to or are we just trying to be like that movie star overnight. I may want to be taller, but that is simply not possible.

As long as we live our life in self-lying by denying that we are virtually fully focused on desiring to be like someone else, even if that is Buddha, Christ, or any other mythical personality, when we do not even have any proof that they existed other than books which were written hundreds of years after those people supposedly lived, then how can we ever expect to attain knowledge of our Self.
?Even the living people of our times who we aspire to be like are only images to us. One student said that he aspires to be like Bill Gates. I asked what does he know about Mr. Gates other than the man owns a large block of shares in Microsoft and is very wealthy. Is there anything else that you know for a fact? Do you know if Mr. Gates suffers from severe constipation? We do not know much about the inner lives of these people, do they sleep well at night? Yet we aspire to be like them, and give up our soul in that pursuit.

Yes indeed we have sold our soul, given up our chance to find God if that is our aspiration, by idolizing and desiring to be like another person, living a life of make-believe. If we do not work to become one and only one person, our own self, then we have nothing.

Exercise

Start with honest self observation and write down on paper your discoveries of each time you have a thought or desire to be like someone else. Begin to accept the reality of your being as you are and take yourself as a block of wood to a carpenter, or stone to a mason, or a canvas that already has a painting on it to a painter. Looking at what you are at this moment, skills, knowledge, abilities, what can you make of yourself.

The mason will not make a statue out of the canvas, nor the carpenter make a boat out of the stone and burn the cuttings. However the mason can cover his work in progress, or his food while he stirs up dust and the carpenter can have a good anchor for his boat.

There is nothing greater or higher that a person can achieve in this life than to be themselves. But first we must stop trying to be someone else and look at who we are, our skills and abilities, then cultivate that as best we can. Planting corn seeds will not yield a cherry tree.

In this way, we will attain a balanced and peaceful inner life, a successful wordily life, and perhaps raise the spiritual and evolutionary level of our Being.

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