Creative Guidance-IASbaba, Inspirational & Educative Articles
The First Step:
The first, and perhaps the most important thing we need to understand as humans, is that we are completely a product of our conditioning, our thought processes, our desires, our lifestyles – the way we think. Almost all of it comes from our environment and our interaction with that environment. That environment is the place where we took birth, our parenting, our education, our friends, family, relatives, culture, and religion.
We are products of all these influences that have shaped us. To be able to move in any direction, in any meaningful way – to accomplish anything that is worth accomplishing – we have to first recognize that we are something different from our thought process. Somewhere deep down there is someone, there is something, which is real; above and beyond what we keep thinking about throughout the day.
The first step toward self-realization, to moving toward something higher and deeper, is to realize there is a difference between you and what you are thinking. You can safely assume that the majority of people think they are what they are thinking about throughout the day. They simply assume, Whatever thoughts I am occupied with, whatever desires I am occupied with, that is who I am. I am the one who is chasing those desires. I am the one who is running away from those fears. I am the one who’s angry. I’m the one who’s frustrated. I’m the one who’s happy. There is no separation between I am and my thinking.
That is why it is so hard to convince people that there is something above and beyond their daily routine of thinking and accomplishing their desires – just seeing to it that whatever they are dreaming and desiring is accomplished. Apart from that, there is something more. It is extraordinarily difficult to convince an individual because it takes a lot of courage to stand apart from our thought processes and look at our lives objectively.
It is very easy to assume our thought process is our reality; it takes courage to look at this daily process of thinking, dreaming, desiring, and say, “Maybe I am something more than this. Maybe I’m something different. I am simply occupied with these thoughts at this very moment – today, at this time in my life, because of what I have been doing over the last few days, because of what I’ve been thinking over the last few weeks.”
The first thing this does is give you the ability to make a change when it is necessary to make a change. Why is it so hard for us to see? To introduce a totally new thought process seems so alien, so different, that the mind immediately rejects it. Moving toward something different is what the quest for self-realization is. As lofty a quest as it appears to be, it is actually taking simple baby steps in the right direction. It’s that simple. It is not about accomplishing something great.
