If we’re honest enough to look, we start to see that as a human personality we are a long, long way from being free. The personality is being jerked around by the conditioning of the past and the circumstances of the moment. This package through which I operate was, in many ways, set up to be the way it turned out before I got to be born and grow into it. Given the whole setup of what I came into—parents, culture, and so on—it was pretty much inevitable that my psyche would come out this way. The kinds of thoughts and feelings I have in response to particular events, the way this body and its personality respond to circumstance, were pretty much established before I was even born. I’m not talking about the details. There may be seven thousand different lives I might have lived if I’d taken this path or taken that path. Fundamentally, however, these would all have come out to be versions of the same basic theme. The idea that as a human personality we are living out of free choice is seen to be illusion. A pretense. We begin to wake up to this illusion, see through it, at the very least to question it.
When we recognize the abject slavery that the human condition really is, where pretty much everything we experience in that identity is simply reaction to triggers and the product of conditioning, we start to say, “Hey, I wonder if there’s more than this?” What a blessing to get how limited the typical experience of human expression as personality is. Perhaps we go off in search of someone who might be the more, or some mission to join. But that’s not what we really want. I am not just talking to people new to spiritual experience here. We’re all just beginning to recognize how enslaved we are in this apparently inescapable treadmill of existence, and we can’t get away from the compulsion that there’s more to life than this.
Some lucky lives hit that wall enough and find, through whatever means, another reality. Probably we find someone that has discovered this other reality and then we begin to make the switch. We come to know a presence that isn’t actually conditioned by heredity or circumstance. The presence that always was and is and forever will be here. An experience of self that is inner to the experience of human personality.
It is an astonishing discovery. As this conviction in the freedom we thought we were living shatters, and as the slavery of personality experience is seen for what it is, the astonishing discovery is that I am the unborn self that has always been here and forever will be.
The decision I apparently made as a teenager to be a certain way in the world, and have been diligently refining ever since, has not gone anywhere. I still have a human personality. It basically responds to events in much the same ways it did before I awakened this other reality of the being.
When we live out of personality identity, we are constantly trying to improve the personality to make it look more like God, look more like Superman or the ideal woman, whoever it is for each person. “If I could get to be like that and live like that, then I would be happy.” The astonishing discovery I am speaking of takes us into a different place. “Oh, you mean I’m all right as I am?” Yep!
We accept what is, exactly as it is. This doesn’t mean the triggers and conditioned tendencies of the human personalities fool us. The familiar but isolated sense of self, generated by all that, is seen for what it is. It is simply included in a larger experience of self. In the sight of the one I Am, everything about that familiar but isolated sense of self is accepted exactly as it is. Because the one I Am has no need to perfect its outer clothing in order to feel good about himself. I do not need to change my personality in order to fulfill my mission.
Now that’s a switch! It’s a problem for the human ego, which likes to have excuses. “You mean I can’t put it off until I have achieved a certain level of purity, a certain level of mental clarity or a certain level of proficiency in some way? You mean the revelation of God on earth is available to me now?”
One would think it would be an easy sell. Right now, free of charge, you could be the revelation of God fully! One would think people would just grab it. But we can’t give it away! Because it’s a responsibility. It’s an absolute commission. It’s a place to live from that is without excuse. This is why we knock our human bodies and human personalities, capacities, so much. We all do it. We look in the mirror, physically or metaphorically, and say, “I don’t amount to much.” That is simply avoiding the truth of the matter, which is that your, and my, personality is acceptable exactly as it is, and that means you have no excuse.
The divine self is fully expecting your human personality to reveal its spirit now, in your condition, exactly as you are. There is nothing about you that should change, no prerequisite or qualification that you need to get through and be tested on or be approved for. The spirit of God is expecting to express itself right now through all of us, exactly as we are.
Next time you look in the mirror, see how deeply you can get that. None of the excuses you are telling yourself about yourself are valid. There are people in your world who are looking to connect with the spirit—and you, exactly as you are, are capable of being that connection for them. Nothing about you needs to change. In fact, there are specific reasons why everything about your human personality and capacity is perfect the way it is. Specific reasons why it’s the way the spirit wants it to be.
Pick your favorite what’s-wrong-with-me thing. I have fear. I have shame. I have lust. I have laziness. Pick your favorite—vanity, a dimple. To the spirit of God, that’s exactly what we want. Not that you would put out your vanity or your fear or your shame on others; not that you would use it as an excuse. You use it as a point of connection.
While there are ranges of how much they know it, and how desperate or how serious they are to find that connection in you, basically every human being all the time is coming to you to touch the spirit of God. If a human being comes to you (knocking on lectern) and basically says, “I want you to show me the glory of the spirit of God,” it doesn’t help them too much to come to Superman. It doesn’t help them too much to come to the Bionic Woman. They want to come to a real, live human being who’s experiencing the same emotions, the same limitations, the same challenges that they are. They want to hear from someone like them that it is possible to live as the evidence of the presence of the spirit of God. It is possible for you, in the condition that you live in, in the circumstances that you live in, exactly as they are; it is possible for you to find the presence—to find the presence and to reveal the presence. That’s freedom.
Everything that arises in your personality, no matter what it is, can be used in the expression of the spirit. As we awaken to this, we’re not so fussed about trying to adjust the experiences of the human personality. Does it matter that much what circumstance comes to me tomorrow? Obviously, I seek to use the circumstance as effectively as I may, that the one I Am be revealed in the way I live. It is a creative act, living in the current of the spirit. So our capabilities and opportunities develop as we go along. But the effort is transferred away from trying to arrange the circumstances to be suitable and trying to arrange my capacities to be suitable, that I might perchance adjust my disastrous human personality enough to let a little drip of the spirit come through. That’s pretty much where a lot of people are focused, actually. Most of the time it’s futile. We try to rearrange the human conditioning to make it look more like God, and it ends up looking more like the devil.
No. Effort is transferred out of “I’m trying to arrange my circumstances and my personality to be suitable” into “I am that I am.” Now that’s choice. That’s making the only choice that we have to make. All the other choices we think we can make are largely just us fooling ourselves by justifying our responses to the triggers of circumstances and the inheritance of conditioning—pretending that we’re driving a car that is in fact pretty much on automatic pilot.
Every human being has this opportunity to make this choice, which is the acceptance of the responsibility of the truth. I am that I am. In that place, nothing can stop you, and everything, absolutely everything about you and about the circumstances in which you find yourselves, is perfect, is just a setup to let the truth of who you are be revealed, be expressed, be seen, be known and do what you’re here to do.