Some think that there is only light, and once you put the darkness down, indeed there is only light. But the distance between the two is a long, long road and unlikely to be attained in even a handful of lifetimes.
If it is your thinking that you are now only light, then that is where the delusion begins. The moment that you realise that you are full of darkness; that is where the truth begins.
Truth is where the journey begins. Acceptance of the ugliness of the ego is where progress begins and that is the moment when you first attract the help of the universe.
The effort it takes to dissolve one ounce of ego from who you think you are, takes more energy than trying to climb Mount Everest with one leg, one arm and one lung. So, don’t even kid yourself that you’ve started. If you begin your journey into light from this perspective, then surely, you will make progress up the mountain.
The Kingdom is like a woman carrying a jar full of flour.
Whilst walking on a long road, the handle of the jar broke. The flour streamed out behind her on the road.
As she did not know it, she could not be troubled by it.
When she had reached her house, she put the jar on the ground;
She found it empty.
Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas
In the teaching above, the flour is your ego that you wear like some bedraggled raincoat. Because you have been wearing it for so long, it has become a part of you and you cannot experience the difference between your ego-self and a Divine expression of life. Essentially, we project ourselves into the world as our ego-selves until we begin to see that there is someone else inside the raincoat and that the raincoat is not actually who we are.
As the flour streams out of the jar, it is like the raincoat dissolving and falling to pieces with age and eventually dropping from your shoulders. The Divine you is revealed. But indeed, this is a long, long road. Lifetime after lifetime your ego streams away a little at a time as you learn to tread life’s highway of teaching.
The more you work to become aware of your ego, how it works to gather reflections from others in order to feed its own illusion of self-delusion; how it is an essential being in its own right and not a part of your Divine self, then you can begin to see it in action, feeding the needs of itself.
If, like the woman above, you eventually arrive at your Divine self, all your flour having left your jar; your container, your life, then all you will be is you. You will be you but without thought of the identity of who you were or are now. If you think that you have made it and gone beyond ego, then you haven’t.
It is only when you can stand in the state of being-ness without any identification to any particular thought about your journey, then you have made it, and then of course, it doesn’t matter.
In the line from the teaching above that speaks about the woman reaching her house, this refers to the heart opening fully and the inner light beaming forth into this world. That is the point at which you become light and you will no longer be troubled by the process of dissolving the darkness that maintains the ego structure.
Let us try and put this into simple terms. If you are certain that you have made progress in dissolving any aspect of your ego, then you probably haven’t.
If you ‘know’ what the struggle would be like in trying to climb Mount Everest with one leg, one arm and one lung, then you are on your way to making some progress.
Unless there is a moment of Divine Intervention in your life, then the journey, indeed will be long, but with daily effort, progress will be made and in that process, you will begin to understand the nature of darkness and how much of it is in every atom of your being.
Humanity is nothing more than a virus consuming the face of a beautiful mother who tries endlessly to support it. When you can see that and feel the pain of it, then you are on your way.
I wish you all a wonderful journey into understanding the challenge of duality we are blessed with, on our journey into light together – For we are all ONE!
With my deepest love and blessings.
David
