AM I INSIDE OF SOMETHING OR SOMEONE? HAS SOMETHING OR SOMEBODY GONE INSIDE OF ME AT SOME TIME?
Keys to understanding what enters and what exits our lives, what we accept and reject.
Two questions that have been asked of me so many times: Why are we always outside of everything? Why can’t I find my place? I have always answered them superficially because I did not want to get involved. Now the time has come to understand, and for this reason I have allowed these questions to enter into me, so I can be able to deliver answers to them from a place inside of myself.
Exiting (or going outside) and entering (or going inside), are two verbs that allowed me to develop a symphony of words that I want to share with you so that you can use them in a concert that can be heard in your consciousness. To read this article something will have to exit you if this melody cannot enter. The same thing happens to many people; some part of themselves must leave so that what has been waiting for so long can enter.
For many years I have been saying: “The only way out is inward” “If you truly go inside, you will be transformed”, “The only way to enter inwards is by leaving what has enslaved you”, “You must leave and then re-enter , because then you become part of the whole ”
TRUTH IS SPONTANEOUS
I am in Posadas, Argentina, crossing the international border, there are two parts, one side is where you exit from Argentina and the other is where you enter into Paraguay; that is, you have to leave one country and enter another at the same border. One of the people in the group from our organization, called Liana, is not allowed to enter Paraguay, they say: “You must leave to re-enter”. In the language of understanding, which comes through the signals, they were saying something deep: “If you do not get it right, you are not allowed to enter” or “When you leave a place badly you have closed off the entrance to another place”. This is something that doesn’t just happen at a border between two countries, it happens every day in our life. We have closed off the entrance to everything we want because we have not been able to leave the place where we came from.
An example: Being in the past is being trapped inside a prison; from there it is not possible to enter a present or future which is different from the one we are living now. Every day that passes we are leaving behind one more day of life, but we remain attached to everything that has happened, every day the prison is bigger and with greater fortification, with a chain of security that lets us move very little; only up to a certain point and within a very short distance. Freedom is not possible for those who have not been able to leave their past. To be in the past is to be inside a coffin, is to be dead in life.
Looking back, we can see that there are many places that we have passed through without entering or exiting, always remaining outside, like spectators, as tourists who travel through life without entering it, without feeling or tasting it, passing through it in a distant, indifferent way and with the feeling of not being a part of it, or of not wanting to belong to it. Having life is not synonymous with being alive, they are different things. Someone who does not enter into life will not be able to leave satisfactorily towards death. A person who does not leave the coffin cannot live, and someone who does not live does not want to die.
You can leave your past right now, understanding that you have to enter a new future, but not the repetition of the copy-paste of a past that you reject and that continues creating a future as tortuous as the one you already know; but, rather, leaving it behind in complete harmony, having understood it from the deepest place in your heart.
THE LIE OF BELIEVING WE HAVE ENTERED
We arrive at any place, situation, job or relationship and we believe that we have entered, but deep down we always remain outside, deceiving ourselves that we have gone inside. This is one of the self-deceptions that we use in order to stay on the outside, to exclude ourselves and put ourselves to one side, so as not to bind ourselves intimately with anything or anyone, to maintain the secret idea that there is no place worthy of and perfect for us, to assert ourselves in the belief that it is dangerous to enter. Thus, we spend our lives looking for our place in the world, a place that does not exist, simply because we have been internally cancelled out by our own warped idea of ourselves and of others.
The belief of what we are is the border within which we live and develop ourselves. Depending on the type of belief we have about ourselves, the life which we live will be created. Rethinking that belief is rethinking all of life. That belief has been very well elaborated, it is something that no one wants to release, but if we released it, we would be free to enter into everything we desire from the bottom of our hearts.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF A FRUSTRATED EXIT
We arrive into life, but that does not mean that we enter into life and existence. Leaving the birth canal does not mean that we enter somewhere else; many people are still inside their mother, they have not yet left and thus they are not in any other place; or rather, it is the mother who is always everywhere, so wherever we go, there she will be because, unwittingly and inevitably, we take her with us at all costs. If we dare to look closely at the issue, it is not really us who are living our life, but it is our mother who uses our body to go everywhere. The mother is the link between existence and life, to remain trapped in her mean not to have left existence nor to have entered life. It is staying on the edge, trapped at the border.
A large number of people, when leaving the womb of the mother, are not only outside of the mother’s body but they are already outside of everything, because they have been inside a womb that did not welcome them; the fetus captured the notion that the mother did not want them and understood that they should not have arrived. It is the expulsion that arises through the perception from the womb of the mother’s rejection. These people, before leaving their mother, are already outside of everything.
And there is another group of people who, being wanted by their mother, when they leave the mother’s body enter another space called life, existence, their own body separate from the one that brought them to life; but in a few years and due to a host variables – of a of more or less traumatic nature – are then canceled out, left outside, unwanted, rejected and excluded.
Whether we have not yet left, or we have entered a system that oppresses us, we are already enslaved all our lives to having to fight in order to enter anywhere, taking on the threat of being expelled at any time; abandonment can come in all kinds of situations, so we live in a alert state of constant danger, and in turn in an obsessive attempt to get inside, doing anything to achieve it.
THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS OF EXITING AND ENTERING
For different reasons, before or after birth, when leaving the mother’s womb we enter into our own body, because there is no longer a dependency through an umbilical cord; the body becomes a house, but it is still empty and soulless because we feel that we still do not exist as a being independent from our mother. We need to feel that we are someone in order to enter a world where each human has a belief about what is. Without that belief you cannot enter the system. But that belief is a lie that will only allow us to enter another, bigger lie. If we do not constitute our own personality we are not inside this great lie. The creation of the self guarantees us to be inside society; the ego relates us to all the beliefs of others about themselves, gives us the sense of unity from the mental construct of identity.
Inside we are full of all kinds of things that have been put into us in the process of personality creation. The discomfort we feel inside makes us go out in search of something that fills us; we feel that our own house is an inadequate place, we abandon it, little by little, and in the end it becomes desolate, disorganized, cold and very uncomfortable. When the emptiness of solitude fills all our interior space, conflict is assured. In the abandonment of oneself, the question arises of: “Who am I? Where am I? What has happened?” This is the beginning of the spiritual search for so many desperate people.
If I am not inside of myself, of my body, of life or of existence it will be very difficult for me to enter any other kind of space; in reality I am always outside and I have the ingrained idea that I cannot enter, that I do not want to enter , that I do not deserve to enter, that this place is for others, and that I must remain outside of everything.
Being outside is one of the most deeply rooted perceptions in the human mind. The feeling of exclusion or expulsion comes from a very elaborate idea that started with rejection, experienced in very different ways and at different times before and after birth; but once we are outside this idea is consolidated by building an identity that makes us feel something deep: “I am a nuisance”, “I am not welcome”, “Life is not for me”, “I do not deserve a place in the world”. We are faced with the slavery of the tyranny of everything we have perceived in our past.
UNDERSTANDING IS ENTERING AND BEING ONE
Last night we had dinner with Alberto Moreno, a Paraguayan who knows the Paraguayans and their region very well. He told us that it is a shame to see how they treat the river in Asunción, that they throw garbage in there and do not take care of it, while in Encarnación (where we are now) it is treated almost as sacred. I proposed the possibility of understanding why this happens. It was a passionate conversation in which we came to see the need to get inside of other people to be able to understand them in their acts; for it is vital to contemplate without judgment or criticism; there cannot be disqualifications because that is what leaves us outside and does not allow us to enter into understanding others and their behaviors. Coincidentally in Asunción, as in so many great cities of the world, on the one hand there is much more therapeutic and spiritual searching because they are in a bad place and need to enter inside themselves, and on the other hand it is full of people who need to go on vacation or to places far away from where they live.
If you feel bad in the place where you live, it is logical that you are going to mistreat it and want to flee. Alberto said: one day I will go to see and contemplate the people who throw garbage into the river, I want to understand. It is at that moment that the intention to enter into another person or situation emerges powerfully; observing it, feeling it, understanding it, because it is the only way in which we can interact with it in order to inspire it to make a transformation. Understanding puts us at an internal point from which we can support and accompany any process of internal evolution.
Our team of facilitators from Argentina and Uruguay sometimes go to the Rio de la Plata with large bags and collect the garbage that has been unconsciously thrown in; it is because we see and understand the river, it hurts, we cannot be indifferent, and that opens the possibility to do something; not criticizing those who mistreat it, but doing something in pursuit of the health of the river. Both those who damage and what is damaged can be understood. It is the way to help both and to reverse destructive situations. Understanding the parts and the situation means going inside and to the core.
ENTERING any thing, person or feeling is a very deep issue. We are afraid to enter, submerge ourselves, feel and be part of, because it is the prelude to love, so we prefer to stay outside. In the same way EXITING from any relationship, emotion or situation is something much more delicate than we imagine, because depending on the way in which we leave we will be facilitating, making difficult or conditioning another new entrance.
If we remain outside, in the end we will convert the external into a comfortable and known area, familiar and at the same time distant from everyone and everything, that will leave us outside of life. But if we enter, we will have to surrender; it is in this act of renunciation and unconditional surrender where love for the internal arises. That is why I say that everything that goes inside is transformed, because the entrance implies an opening and an understanding. Everything that comes out after entering will re-enter again, but in a refined way, and it will also come back with greater power.
THE MIRACLE OF LOVE
Dalí said: “War is not a political conflict, it is a biological phenomenon, an ancestral ritual of cruelty and cannibalism”. For me, the resistance to surrender is not a political conflict between the characters who want to dominate life, it is a phenomenon of survival from a mental idea that comes from original perceptions. We should not speak of original wounds or original traumas, but of original perceptions, because that is where the ENTRANCE of everything that will condition us for life is. The trauma has entered and does not want to leave, it has acquired a form, an identity, a force and a place of power.
The power struggle in which we live, without our realizing it, is an internal war between limitation and potentiality, between what I am not and what I am, between the past and the present, between what conditions me and what I want to release. Our soul wants to go inside, to take its place, but that internal place has been possessed by the external, there is a border that is like a wall and there are guards who defend it, they do not let you in even though you are the owner of that place. This inward struggle manifests itself in our external life, in everyday life, with others and the outside.
Whatever we see and do not like, that we reject, judge or criticize is confronting us hard to look at ourselves at the point where we are outside of ourselves and of what we see. What is disgusting is not the external but rather is the internal attitude of not wanting to enter to be part of something.
To be outside is to be in duality, to be inside is unity; when you go outside you become two, when you enter you become one. To deal with any issue from the outside is to do it from the I-you, external-internal division. But to approach it from within is to feel that you are that thing, that it possesses you because you have merged with it, so everything you think or do, being one with it, will create a transformation from within.
Being outside gives us a place of false power to criticize what is inside, it is a power that comes from resistance. But when we truly go inside, another kind of power – that comes from surrender – arises, which has the ability to change everything from a place of understanding. That is why I state that we go inside from love, and go outside from judgment. From love we are always welcome everywhere, love is the free entry into existence; judgment is the code that closes all doors. If you have tried to enter at any time without having surrendered, pay attention to the moment when criticism, complaint, attack or prejudice is activated, because you will be expelled by the energy of rejection, there is no access to those who do not surrender; from love you are already inside. In reality we are all inside, but the rejection that has come from outside has not passed to be able to occupy its vital place. From this understanding comes the inevitable moment to recover the place of power that grants us love.
At birth and in taking their first intake of breath, a baby allows existence to enter into them; in death and with the last exhalation of breath, every living being exits life to enter into existence again. It is the strange process of love, going in and out, inhaling and exhaling, enclosing and releasing.
Alberto José Varela
TO GO DEEPER INTO ALL OF THESE TOPICS AND PROCESSES, YOU CAN ATTEND THE CONSCIOUS SCHOOL®
World tour begins in Buenos Aires on Monday 25th February.
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