The Struggle Within

“When you see through the eyes of the soul, life becomes a richly sensual experience and an extraordinarily exquisite dream...Dance when you are broken. Dance if you have torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you are perfectly free.” Rumi.
I love everything Rumi. But the reason why I quote the above is because of the first part of the first sentence; “When you see through the eyes of the soul…..” To me, a lot of life’s work is about the struggle to shed the outer shell, the form, the ego, and arrive at a place where we see only from the ‘eyes of the soul.’

It is our carefully constructed ‘personality’, and our perception of who we are and how we define ourselves through our outward allegiances and alliances that keep us distracted from an inner universal spirit. These outer shells and layers are what make us less than we are capable of being. Our make up is our break up. And it is our own undoing.

We create our own prisons. The people we attract- friends and companions, the events that unfold in our lives, our marriages, divorces, our affiliations; everything is designed to learn from, but not to keep dwelling on. I believe the desire to be with one’s own stillness and look from the eyes of the soul (and not the ego) exists within each one of us. And it waits for us to break our behavioral constructs so that it may be allowed its nascence.

And we begin to realize how everything that surrounds us, that we have gathered and carefully selected to define ourselves is taking the shape of shackles. Hand-cuffs we have lovingly wrought with misery and misconceptions of ourselves. So that we may safely stay imprisoned in the business of complaining and fighting our shallow selves and thereby keep feeding the bottom less ego. A cycle perpetuated by ignorance and fed with blindness. All this so we can stay safe in the familiar misery as opposed to drawing on the courage within to ‘break on through to the other side’ as Jim Morrison sang so powerfully; to where the unfamiliar resides. The only side where Truth exists, the rest then seems all noise.

And then we start to seek that place beyond the body, the impressions, the self imposed limitations where the sages and the saints speak of a limitless universe. Resplendent with jewels of simplicity and openness and love. In that realm of spirit, there is no he, she or me. There is only the vast, expansive Knowing. That silent Presence. That calming elixir.

We should try as often as we can to draw on that courage within to sit in the company of our spirit, and look through the eyes of the soul, it is the struggle I choose to be involved in. As I try to stop defining myself by my own impressions of who I am. I have begun to realize that we are not just our limbs, so then why do we use them to tie ourselves down? We are free floating, expansive spirit. We are the breath of the Eternal. Everything else we have fashioned is our own trickery, our game to keep us tripping over and fooled. Our thoughts, our patterns and our behaviors are all traps we have placed for ourselves to sabotage our own spiritual growth. So that we continue to stagnate in this illusionary world.