Following God is governed only by the totality of Love, which is beyond definition. Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave, puts people into a cave whose only reality from their infancy was the light of a fire, and that’s all they ever saw: their reality was limited to the shadows on the cave walls. Finally one person is released, and he goes outside and sees the sun, animals, vegetation, and comes back and tries to tell the people in the cave that the shadows are not real: that there is a reality and a sun with real and colorful butterflies and real ponds and real people. And the preachers of the cave stone him to death. Why does this happen? Because within a controlling society, there are no guarantees that the people will want to hear what you have seen. There is no promise of a success because success is a worldly term defined by that controlling society. And now the question becomes: what does success mean if it does not follow an accepted agenda from the world in which you have come?
For what reason are you taking the next step? Are you taking it to achieve laud and glory in that previous world from which you came? Or are you taking it to move to a new and different level of experience? Once having asked the two-part question: “Who I am” and “Who I shall become,” then you move against the challenges of becoming what you wish to be. You can’t know if you will succeed in achieving what you wish to be. Will you be Michelangelo? Will you be Socrates? Will you be the next example of greatness in your own right? Nobody can know. Did Socrates know that he was Socrates? Did he know if he succeeded or failed? Nobody knows. But what you can know, is whether or not you have achieved a sense of your own being and your own competence to move toward what you want to be.
Finding God is the acceptance of a process that is out of your control. Will what you want to be now be what you want to be after you’ve experienced becoming it? Or are you taking a set of steps each leading ever deeper into yourself? The hardest part of the journey is when ever you can answer “Who I am,” because you then have to answer “Is this where I want to be?” which may need to be re-defined; and this sets forth another set of steps to re-discover “Who you are” as God is calling you to be.
What’s at Stake
- If you do not ask “Who I am,” you cannot lay down a path to follow and you remain in chaos.
- Unless you find a path that reveals new and different levels of experience, limited social definitions will always measure your value.
- If you don’t walk your own journey, you become a slave to other people’s ideas of success and failure
Difficulties
- Upon stepping away, you will be challenged to return to the prior world, chastised for your foolishness of having left it.
- Once you start walking, your great failures may be your great successes, because what you have perceived or thought that you wanted to succeed at may be a residual of where you once were.
- There are no promises of success
- What you study or know may or may not have any value
- Your inner joy and satisfaction may or may not be met.
- There is no guarantee that the world will want to hear what you have seen.
Have Faith
- There is only one real failure: not pursuing the path. Everything else is a success.
