BE YOURSELF ( Archived) (21)

HealthyLiving: When you are little your parents won’t let you be yourself. They have different ideas about eating the whole chocolate cake or drawing on the walls with crayons. Later on teachers keep you from being yourself. Then teenage peer pressure takes over, and finally, once society has imposed its demands, freedom is more restricted still. Alone on a desert island you might be able to be yourself, only guilt and shame would pursue you even there. The inheritance of repression is inescapable.

The whole problem is one of boundaries and resistance. Someone imposes a limit on you, and you resist it in order to break free. Thus “being myself” becomes a relative thing. Unless someone tells me what I can’t do, I have nothing to push against. By implication, my life would be shapeless. I would follow one whim after another, which itself is a kind of prison. To have a hundred wives and a feast on the table isn’t being yourself, it is being your desires.

When boundaries and resistance both melt the problem comes to an end. To be in unity, you cannot have limitations. You are wholeness; that is what fills your perception. Choice A and choice B are equal in your eyes. When this is true, desire can flow where it will. You are not your desires. Being yourself no longer has the slightest outside reference.

Doesn’t this deprive you of choice? Both yes and no. A person will want to dress and talk a certain way; there may even be decided likes and dislikes. Yet these are karmic holdovers from the past. All and Nothing doesn’t erase the necessities of this world, and in fact the great mystics do preserve the trappings of ordinary life.

To be really free, there is no option except to be yourself. By being yourself you open the door to what is, the never-ending play of cosmic intelligence curving back to know itself again and again.

Adapted from How To Know God, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2000).

Zuleika: I've always just been myself. My parents are people who didn't try to mold me to be anything. They allowed my spirit to soar. They married outside their own race when that was not typical or accepted. They have lived a life that often went against the grain of tradition, but they have always been very positive and people have tended to like and accept them. No one ever tried to force me into box of conformity, not my family, not my husband, not my kids. I feel sorry for people who have felt they were not allowed to be themselvs. They end up spending their lives trying to compensate for that, like listening to some pseudo religious/spirtual guru telling them how to think and how to live and feeling all the time like live is always a matter of swimming upstream. Sad.

Zuleika: I've always just been myself. My parents are people who didn't try to mold me to be anything. They allowed my spirit to soar. They married outside their own race when that was not typical or accepted. They have lived a life that often went against the grain of tradition, but they have always been very positive and people have tended to like and accept them. No one ever tried to force me into box of conformity, not my family, not my husband, not my kids. I feel sorry for people who have felt they were not allowed to be themselvs. They end up spending their lives trying to compensate for that, like listening to some pseudo religious/spirtual guru telling them how to think and how to live and feeling all the time like live is always a matter of swimming upstream. Sad.

HealthyLiving: Kudos to your parents!

I have learned that true FREEDOM is obtained in not quenching others in their desire to do whatever it is they want to do. Even if what they intend to do will bring them sorrow... they must walk through it and obtain their own experience, to grow and learn. We must allow them to do so. I think it's called, "The School Of Hard Knocks".

HL

bollywood: You cannot escape from the "self" . As long as you identify yourself with "self" you are bonded . true freedom is liberating yourself from the "self".