Social controls are not your enemies, rather they teach you to change your perception. Having the experience of touching ‘I Am’ opens the door of perception, and on each touch your choices become larger. And with the knowledge of that experience, you can then question what it is that you are doing against a different order. Upon seeing from this new place, you can now make choices that reflect the love and value of self and start building your relationship to the world in a more meaningful way.
If you never open your perceptions, you will never be able to think for yourself, and you will ultimately be left with a meaningless life.
Difficulties
- The first step into a new perception is the most difficult because one surrenders familiarity and security.
- The sense of belonging with others is lost, which really doesn’t exist anyway, but people think it does.
- You have all the choices all the time, but what happens is the pattern of making choices not to choose. You make choices not to perceive, perpetuating the choices of imprisonment and limitations.
- Choices are always there, but they require perception. Every time you brush I AM or I AM WHO AM, which is the name of the divine by what ever terms you want to take it; every time you brush that, your choices become larger. But my larger choice may mean that you may not necessarily choose what society expects you to.
- There are places which society has and needs, because it can’t let the whole world go into confusion. The divine chaos requires divine order.
- In the story of creation, there is darkness and there is a void and there is chaos. And the story brings order out of chaos. It allows our minds to understand that within the chaos there is an order. God said “Let there be light.” “Let there be land.” Well what are the ancient people really talking about? They’re talking about bringing order to the chaos, because chaos is an unlivable circumstance. And discovering That I Am is returning to the chaos to find new order.
- What threatens people is often the monk or the nun who has made the choice to withdraw from the world because an illumination is seen that he or she never saw or experienced before, and they will pursue it for the rest of the time of their being. That process forces others to question what they perceive and the choices they’ve made, and it’s why people don’t want people to make those kind of choices. Somebody who is materialistic will say, “But the monk is not wealthy, he has not achieved what the world has called him to.” Jesus didn’t become Augustus, and Socrates went to sleep.
