Creating a New You

The new age movement is awash with ideas of creating a new you

Words like growing, learning, expanding, creating, and co-creating are all the rage. But there’s something very shallow about creating something that can be re-created again and again. It points to the non-reality of it all.

I can think the thought, “the stove is off,” all the while the house is going up in flames. You can hold absolutely any thought, including ones that have absolutely no ground in reality. If you accept “the stove is off,” you have only indirect thought-knowledge. If it is really important to you to have absolute, direct knowledge, what must you do?

You must go and see for yourself, look for yourself, or even touch the stove yourself.

In the same way, thought ideas about yourself can be absolutely anything, with absolutely no ground in Reality – that is why they can change moment to moment. Indeed they must change because they don’t satisfy. They don’t satisfy because they are not Truth. Only what is Real does not change, only what does not change is Truth.

When you get tired of believing yourself a chameleon, and of the next story line about yourself, and the next; when you get tired of another new fiction, then you are fit for the unchanging, eternal Truth. Only Truth will satisfy and end the constant effort of changing and seeking.

There’s nothing wrong with improving the changeful – so long as you don’t mistake it for who you are. A better version of who you think you are is still not who you actually are, and being satisfied with the next version and the next, you overlook the only thing of true and lasting value. This may sound like bad news to some who aren’t happy with themselves, but to those the good news is that you are not who you think you are. You are not the limited, changeful things you know in your experience; you are infinitely greater.

Instead of creating a concept of yourself again and again, use that energy to seek and discover the Truth about you, once and for all. You can do this, because it is an undeniable truth that you already are. You can eliminate ideas about yourself, and you can dismiss all the temporary things that change, but you cannot dismiss or eliminate your self.

What is it, exactly, that is seen changing? What is it that you refer to as you? Are you your body? Your personality? Your job? Your role? Your position? Your thoughts? Everything comes and goes in your unchanging presence. All of these you are aware of, so they cannot be who or what you are. There’s You, and there is what you are aware of. Any “new you” cannot be you; it is just another passing, changeful phenomena that you are aware of. So…

Who are you?

Any thought about who you are cannot be who you are. Thoughts are within you; you are not within thought. Burn through the false, illusory, unstable, unreliable notions until you come to the ground of Reality, until you are left only with That which cannot burn, cannot be tarnished, cannot be changed, improved, or created anew because It always is. Throw the rest away.

(TOP: Fire Photo credit: By Sebastian Ritter (Rise0011) (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons)