The Great and Ancient Secret – Part Two

Knowledge of the Ancients

Although modern scientific investigation has demonstrated how little our eyes see and ears hear, and how our brain is responsible for creating a virtual world enabling us to survive and move around reasonably well, those things have been known for thousands of years. In 500 BC Buddha was teaching that the world around us that we take to be so real is actually an illusion. Even that far back it was understood that our senses do not show us the ‘real’ world. People have sometimes felt threatened by that statement, but all it is suggesting is that we see or apprehend so little of what surrounds us and we exist as, that we arrive at a misleading impression of i

Some past cultures gave an enormous amount of time to exploring what really is the situation of the human being. They realised that the natural human person is the result of the past – or what we are calling evolution. Who we know ourselves to be is limited if we remain in our natural condition. Also, in this ‘natural’ condition we are largely victims.

This situation of being a victim is a central and key point so time will be taken with it.

We are all born victims of circumstance. But we need not remain a victim.

Your ‘natural’ response to your environment is to be influenced by it. A disturbing event would stimulate you to feel fear, a calming event to feel pleasure. Your moods are usually influenced by what happens to you. So being in prison would in general be more depressing than being free. Being rejected would cause more pain than being admired or loved. People go through extraordinary emotional pain when someone they ‘love’ leaves them or dies.

Our emotions and feelings about ourselves are like a keyboard that is played upon by people and events. If we are praised or rewarded our self confidence and therefore performance will usually be enhanced. That is fine except it means we will usually depend upon the world to create our moods and our sense of our own value. This makes us victims. We may not be dependent on a drug, but on praise, success, money, being admired or wanted. Without them we may experience the lows the drug user does on withdrawal.

However, the ancient explorers discovered an extraordinary possibility. This dream of Ed’s explains it.

I was in a prison with several others – all in one cell. It felt as if I had been in the prison for years. I was standing near the bars angry and shouting about the injustice of my incarceration.

As I stood raging I suddenly realised that all my anger was having no affect on the world. I was the only one suffering it. I saw that the peace and freedom I wanted from release I could have now by letting go of my anger. I would then be in peace, and would be free of my own negative emotions. So I let go of he feelings I had about my judges and gaolers, and a change came over me. In the following years I learned to drop the other ideas and emotions I tortured myself with. Then one day I woke and was filled with joy until my bliss filled the cell. In this way all had changed for me. In a strange way I was now utterly free even though in prison.

The greatest prison of all, the greatest of torturers, is our own thoughts, emotions and our concepts or ideas. While Ed felt angry and held the idea he had been wrongly accused, he was tormented and trapped – imprisoned in his own ideas and emotions. To have received a public apology and released would have changed his feelings, but he would still have remained a passive victim of events. Instead he found in his dream the greatest freedom of all – a blissful freedom – the release from his ‘natural’ mind and emotions.

Return to Base

What the ancients realised is that our past, our culture, our childhood and events in it, have all shaped us in a particular way. Mostly that leaves us victims of events and our own thoughts and feelings. We call that natural. Listen to people around you.

They see it as natural to feel depressed, to fear death, to constantly live in stress.

The ancient explorers of human nature saw that as natural. But they also saw that whatever the forces of nature were that had produced us, they also held in them infinite possibilities. If you doubt this look around at the creatures and life forms that have arisen from those early single celled life forms.

Whatever you have become because of the shaping influence of the past and your present life, you still basically have infinite potential. Science is on the verge of demonstrating this in a physical sense. A recent news release said that the ability of zebrafish to regenerate nearly any cell type is helping U.S. scientists mimic cell loss that occurs in diseases such as Parkinson’s and diabetes. Researchers demonstrated evidence that the zebrafish’s regenerating ability repaired its heart within two months after the removal of 20 percent of it. “What we are pinning everything on is the idea that humans also have this capacity, but it’s sort of locked up,” said Jeff Mumm, a biologist at the Medical College of Georgia. “The forefront of medicine is not what humans are limited to, but what biology can do,” said Mumm.

‘It’s sort of locked up!’ That is exactly what the ancients found in regard to our infinite potential. But their main finding was not in the physical realm, but in that of transformation of self. They found a way of releasing human potential that lifted the person beyond depression, pain, and the limitations of their sense bound body.

Unfolding this potential gives you a direct overall view of who you are in the scheme of things. Perhaps this can be explained by saying that mostly we consider things from what we feel, who we are at this day, this week, this time in our life, along with our needs, fears, demands and difficulties or opportunities. But, if you imagine that you are somehow enlarged so you not only know your life here and now, but at the same time you experience all the years of your life at once. This massive awareness leads to amazing insights from the very depths of you, into who you are, what you are and what you are actively pursuing. But the unfolding takes you beyond even that, and to your personal experience is added everything else.

This has been described as the perception that the universe is a totally integrated and unified whole and that you are part of it. You know that the whole cosmos is a unity and you have a place in it that is meaningful. Self-boundaries are lost as you become integrated with the rest of existence; however, self-identity and individual awareness persist.

In these further spaces of awareness people have found access to the motivations, fears and responses that lie behind their waking success or failure. They have a gateway to the roots of creativity and innovation that can enrich their everyday life. The processes of the body, usually beyond control, can be influenced to improve health.

That is all part of the Ancient Secret.