Student Is Ready

Posts Tagged ‘authentic’

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for
and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”

It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like the company you keep
in the empty moments.

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

Eckhart Tolle wrote – “Don’t seek the truth, just cease to cherish opinions”.

The above is a quote from Eckhart’s book “A New Earth”, and I thought it’d be good to discuss what this quote means (from my understanding).

Firstly, “Don’t seek the truth”, why would we be encouraged to not seek the truth?

On the surface it doesn’t make sense, after-all we all have this sense of what’s true and false (what’s right and wrong), but the issue is that the truth for one person may not be the same truth for another. When we perceive certain circumstances that combine to match the reality we have come to know as real, we call them – True.

The issue is that when we get caught in taking a stand for Truth, by default we make someone else wrong. Religions tend to be full of this type of thinking, where one person’s religion is the real thing while others believe in false prophets, you’re right and others are wrong!

In reality, your belief is true for you and my belief is true for me, but the mind has difficulty in dealing with everyone being right. It needs to create a separation to strengthen itself as an identity and it does this through making others wrong in some way.

So this becomes the main issue as to not seek the truth, it’s generally the mind looking for something to hang its hat on so that as an identity, you can say, I’m right (and they’re wrong!). There’s no freedom in that and in fact this is what war is based on.

The second part, “just cease to cherish opinions”. To understand this, lets look at what an opinion is. An opinion is simply a thought that from the persons’ perspective and/or experience is true or the “right” course of action to take.

By not cherishing the opinion, you put a gap there where you see it as a possibility that may or may not be true but it really doesn’t matter, you can simply allow it to be there without hanging your hat on it.

The implication of all of this can be summarised as follows:

You don’t care about seeking this thing called “The Truth” and the opinions you hear (both yours and others), don’t really matter, this leaves you with no “thing” (nothing) to hold on to as “you”. Therefore the mind can’t run the show and your authentic essence then has as opportunity to shine through.

I found an excerpt from one of the Abraham-Hicks workshops that also gets what we’re talking about:

“Forever, physical humans are saying, “give me the truth, give me the truth.” And we say, there are all kinds of truths. Choose the truths that serve you. Now, there are a lot of people that would feel great discomfort with that. But the thing that we want you to hear about it is: there is a truth of cancer, and there is a truth of wellness. Which truth serves you? You can activate either of them within you, and make it your truth. Truths are created; they aren’t static. They aren’t conditions that exist that then it is your obligation to identify and catalog. You are the creator of your truths–and what you are living is your truth.”

Angelo Campione

Student Is Ready