Unfolding Now (eBook)

From Chapter 2: Learning to Be Real Learning to be real is a full-time job. It doesn't work to just practice it at certain times. But to make that kind of commitment, you have to love and appreciate reality. You have to want to be real at any cost. You have to love being real—,even if you don't like what you're feeling or who you think you are in any particular moment. That kind of love is the most powerful motive—,the real inspiration—,for our inner work. If your longing for reality is lukewarm or if it comes and goes, where will the passion and inner support come from to sustain yourself as you learn to be real? The more you are in touch with your love of being real, the more you will be inspired . . . and the more you will be fired up to do the work. But what does it mean to be real? Being Yourself You can't be real if you are not yourself. You cannot be something other than what you are and be real. Observe and you will discover that most of the time, you are not real because you are not yourself. So what are you then? Who are you being? What are you doing? Most of us are being and acting out an image of ourselves—,an idea, a picture, a concept. If, in this moment, you are an image of who you truly are, you can only be distant from yourself. And most of us are even further away from our real self than that, because we are an image of something other than what we are—,for example, an image of our body or an image of how we were as a child. And the unrealness becomes greater still when we are being an image or picture of someone else altogether, such as of one of our parents. So what is the practice of being real? It is the same as the practice of being oneself. To be real means, 'I am not an idea of myself. I am not pretending to be myself. I am not being in reaction to something or someone or their image of me. I am being what I actually am.' But it is not as though one can just stop being unreal and start being oneself. After all, who knows what that actually means? How are you going to try to be yourself? It is not as though you have many selves on a shelf, and you can take the real one down and put it on. The good news is that no matter how distant you are from yourself, something in your experience in any given moment expresses who you really are. You can wander far from your realness—,you can even become disconnected from it—,but who is it that is far away or is disconnected? It's still you. Whatever your experience, wherever you are, whatever you are perceiving, is connected to what and who you really are. If you reflect a bit, you will notice that you are always experiencing something. There is always an impression, always an awareness, of something happening in the moment. Right now, a number of things are happening, and you are aware of them. As you are reading this sentence, for example, you are seeing, comprehending, and perhaps also thinking, feeling, sensing the pressure of your body on a chair, or hearing sounds around you. So we are always someplace in the experiential field. That place is always changing, but we are always someplace in the field of myriad possibilities. There's nothing esoteric in that, it is merely what we are experiencing every moment. You can recognize from your own life that the only time you are not experiencing anything is when you are in deep, dreamless sleep. So the moment there is consciousness, there is experience. This applies whether the experience is special (according to your value system) or quite ordinary. Think about what's going on while you're having breakfast. You are...