Escaping the Illusion’s Web: Part One of Five
Escaping the Illusion’s Web – Why you’re trapped in your current life and how to change it.
If a genie suddenly popped out of a bottle and offered to answer to any question that has been troubling you, what would you ask? That was pretty much the situation posed to thousands of metaphysically oriented people recently when they were given the opportunity to solicit the aid of higher consciousness.
Not surprisingly, the majority of the questions concerned personal predicaments. Here’s a fairly representative example: “I have been on a spiritual path for fifteen years. I am a vegetarian. I meditate and do yoga. I am a healer and am always offering myself in service to others. Why can’t I have the perfect relationship? Please help me. Thank you, Mary.”
Mary is typical of the many Light Workers who responded. She feels stuck, disempowered, and more than a little frustrated by the condition of her life, and she wants (almost desperately) to find a way out. This presents a curious dilemma, for in the perception of higher consciousness, Mary’s problem has already been surmounted – only she hasn’t yet realized this, so she herself continues to perpetuate it.
Within the laws of the illusion created by the Veil of Forgetting (the energetic barrier that separates each human incarnating on Earth from knowing who he or she truly is), problems arise purely out of preference. When you find yourself in a less than optimum situation, it is because the condition as you perceive it clashes with how you would like things to be. If you could look from a higher perspective, you would recognize the perfection of your circumstance, the great care and intent expended in its creation, and the lesson it offers for your growth. And you would realize that the answers you seek are already with you. But while this may be lovely theory, it has little value unless you can do it.
It’s always tempting to ask an expanded intelligence to intervene and fix the problem for you, but this also means giving your power away. Given the choice, wouldn’t you prefer to learn how to resolve problems by yourself? There is a wonderful saying attributed to the Chinese: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. It is in this spirit that we offer the following information.
The key to the solution is embedded right in Mary’s question, hidden so cleverly in plain view that the questioner rarely sees it. Her question, like almost all the others we received, is centered on the pronouns “I,” “myself,” and “me.” “Of course,” you might think. “After all, who else but I is experiencing the problem, and who else but I wishes to know the fix?” Beware, however, of truths that seem self-evident. They often turn out to be glib but false axioms that you-like most humans experiencing the world behind the Veil – assume are immutable.
As Albert Einstein delighted in reminding his associates, it is impossible to solve problems at the level of their creation. What this refers to is not the need for more intelligence and information but rather an increased awareness, or consciousness. It is simply another way of expressing one of the universal truths of Creation: What you see depends on where you’re looking from. A problem persists only as long as the person experiencing it clings to his or her existing viewpoint.
There is no area of conflict on your planet today – personal, national, or global – that is not rooted in this simple principle. One faction wages war against another only because of differences in the points from which they view. There is no objective right or wrong; there is only perception. The solution is not compromise, for compromise can cripple the spirit and most often results in mutual dissatisfaction and covert resentment. Resolving the issue requires that both parties let go of their personality viewpoints (expressed as belief systems) and rise above the level of conflict to meet in a new field where both are seeing in a new way.
It is the same with an individual’s problems. Therapy and processing only help you adjust to what is an unpleasant circumstance. The real solution is to let go of the viewpoint that keeps you stuck and expand into a greater level of consciousness.
“So,” you might ask, “can I become more conscious?” The response is “Yes and no.” Why such an evasive answer? Because the question holds the very glossed-over, self-evident assumption that lies at the heart of your difficulties. Which I are you speaking about? If you think there is only one, then there is much to reconsider.
Despite what you think, the I that you know yourself to be is not a limited, fixed entity. Rather, it extends from your lower egoic self (the part that identifies with your day-to-day experiences) through your soul self to God. In all Creation, there is in fact only the One manifesting itself in infinite expression, of which your “little I” is a wondrously significant part. Imagine that the total you is an infinite continuum of I’s – similar to the way the light spectrum emerges from infrared at its lowest portion and extends through the seven visible colors until it disappears once again into ultraviolet. When you use any first-person pronoun (I, me, my, we, our) to refer to the totality of yourself (or yourself plus another), you unconsciously limit your focus to the red (lowest) portion of the continuum, dismissing all the other colors. This is precisely the part of you that created the problem and now has fallen victim to it. The higher aspects of your being – the points of view from which your dilemma would resolve in the twinkling of an eye – are out of the equation.
What you experience when you perceive yourself in the throes of a problem is simply radical separation-disconnection from the knowledge of who you really are. To resolve the issue, all you need to do is reconnect with who you really are. Paradoxically, however, in order to intentionally connect or unify you must first intentionally disconnect or separate.
