your uniqueness

After life puts enough cracks in your assumed sense of identity, you start to see more clearly by the light that shines through them. The light is you, of course, the real you. But for now let's point it back onto your original notions of who you are, or who you were.

Let's give a name to all those notions as one lump sum. Let's group all those concepts into one final concept and call them the personal self. Let's say, when we use the term personal self, what we're talking about is everything you mean when you refer to yourself as someone or something that is individual and distinct from all other things. Your uniqueness.

There's nothing wrong with uniqueness. In fact, it's quite beautiful. No one is trying to take that away from you necessarily, but rather to offer you a vantage point from which it becomes that much more spectacular. We must question it to arrive there.

The crucial question is when does that sense of uniqueness occur? This will be a lot to take in, but give it a try. You put an emphasis on the importance of your individuality only when the inner phenomenon of psychological resistance is happening. I'd like to say that again. Maybe more than once. It's a biggie.

As soon as we resist the flow of life in any way our individuality occurs. As soon as we don't want something that is happening (that is, we resist it) the sense of being separate and distinct is the direct result. The personal self is a resistance pattern.

How can that be true? We prize the personal self. We invest everything in it. We chart the entire course of our lives perfecting it, listening for it. I dare say inventing it. Let me ask you this question: how can it really be you if it requires all that adjustment, refinement, devotion, and attention? The real you is much less needy than that. It is never in any danger.

But in case you're not convinced, here's another way to look at things. What happens when you refuse to feel something difficult? You become someone. You know exactly who you are suddenly, or for a while you need to pretend you do, and you go about clarifying the details to everyone else, including yourself. That's the personal self. It appears because resistance to something difficult is winning the day and expressing itself as your precious identity. Once you permit yourself to feel the difficult thing instead of resisting it, all the insistent personal selfing evaporates.

What happens when you like something you feel? You want more. You want it to go on indefinitely if it can, or recur frequently. You want it to last. But life doesn't work that way. Your attempts to arrange for sustained or maximum goodness, while shrewd planning on one hand, are also an expression of resistance to how life really proceeds. Nothing goes on indefinitely. It can't. Nor do familiar pleasures recur easily over long periods without unpredictable factors altering them. Your attempts to have it otherwise are resistance to life's nature. The personal self you set up to deny change and nail down lasting good is an expression of this resistance. It is the resistance expressing itself as you.

Are you willing to see that? Maybe not. A resistance pattern as entrenched as the personal self is not quick to cough itself up as a hairball. Instead it resists attempts to reveal it, such as this one. It calls the writer crazy. It says he writes poorly, incomprehensibly. Accuses him of being on a soap box.

Were the writer identified strongly with his own personal self, he would resist that resistance by telling you he isn't crazy, he doesn't write poorly, he isn't on a soap box. Then he'd climb onto the closest one anyway and plead for you to understand how what he's saying is in your best interest, the only road to real happiness for you, an opportunity to know who you are for a change, to drop all the false notions that you take as real by accident and at the expense of spiritual well-being.

But the author isn't going to do that because he can't. He isn't really the author any more than you are really the reader. Those are personal selves. They occur because of resistance. They aren't worth the quantity of belief that makes conflict over them possible. They are spirit having fun, pretending to be people.

That's all the personal self is. It is spirit having fun, pretending to be a person. You. You are spirit having fun, pretending to be a person. You only put it the other way around and believe you are a person and not spirit, or a person before spirit, because that's what spirit wants for the sake of having more fun.

For a limited amount of time, spirit takes increased joy in seeing how well it can fall for its own ruse, and believe in itself primarily as a person. In many cases, it takes this phase of the fun all the way to denying spirit exists at all. Then the next phase begins, wherein spirit rediscovers itself, because nothing is more fun for it than that. That's Enlightenment! That's good fun!

I promise you, from that vantage point, your uniqueness is more beautiful, natural, precious, and, believe it or not, effective than you ever dreamed possible in your wildest, most daring aspirations as a personal self. You are ever so much more. You are spirit being everything. Look at that glorious wisp you singled out as you! It can see itself everywhere.