Intellectual understanding and knowledge are not the same as our perception of the world and our conscious experience. We can learn and gain knowledge all we want, but it won't change our lives until we practice, embody, and live by those lessons. We need to live authentically, according to our beliefs and desires. Reading about and intellectually understanding something is insufficient; knowledge is useless without implementation.
Your Unique Truth, Story and Purpose
We need to act according to our inner convictions and stop reacting to external events. We need to live our internal truth and experience each present moment, trusting that our natural, effortless state—our true self—will be revealed. We can't plan our lives and expect them to unfold as wished; living our truth means embracing who we are. If you plan your distant future and strive towards it, your state of being will naturally separate from that plan. Your purpose is who you truly are in the here and now.
Realization is a matter of feeling as a result of knowing. What we feel as real is what we experience and remember—our past memories of ourselves in relation to the external environment. We often remember events that have had a significant impact on our lives, both positive and negative. Feelings became beliefs because we intellectually justified them. These impactful events and our experiences that we feel as real change our internal beliefs and self-concept.
Our feelings are actually our state of being, influenced by our self-knowledge, self-concept, and everything we've associated with ourselves: past memories, beliefs, and conditioning patterns of our mind. We may resist our new self because of our past self, our old habits, and everything we've associated with our former identity.
You may avoid eating alone in restaurants due to negative past experiences. But if you try it, stepping outside your comfort zone, you'll likely experience those negative feelings again—discomfort. When we repeatedly feel and accept such a state as our own ("I AM uncomfortable"), it reinforces our self-concept, unless we maintain faith and persist in our true self. Therefore, our perception of the world is determined by our state of being and self-concept.
Expanding your state of consciousness can alter and override beliefs and conditioning patterns accumulated throughout your life, aligning them with your new state. By changing your perspective and seeing things clearly, you might no longer feel uncomfortable eating alone in a restaurant. All it takes is faith in your true self, which is unconcerned with the opinions of others and remains centered within itself. Indeed, you can imagine how your true self would feel in that situation.
The Significance of Small Cycles
Your current state of being, your "small cycle," can change when you adopt a higher perspective. You expand your consciousness and see things in a different way. Your perception will change.
You can’t strive towards that higher perspective with effort. You can’t expand your consciousness from the perspective of your body. You need to find a cause within yourself that will expand.
"Nothing can rise higher than its source. Every effect has a prior cause."
A river flowing downhill cannot rise higher than its source; it cannot spontaneously flow uphill. The source only appears highest if you imagine it to be so. You cannot force or hope the river to flow uphill if it's already flowing downhill.
Imagination is the creative source of all. If you cannot imagine something, it does not exist (in your reality). Everything originates from this creative source. All things are possible for those who can imagine them.
We cannot elevate our consciousness from the perspective of our three-dimensional self-identity. We must lift ourselves to a higher perspective, seeing everything from that vantage point.
You must lift yourself to the perspective of your higher self. Embodying this higher perspective will change your limiting internal beliefs. Expanding your state of consciousness will alter and override your self-concept.
When we embody our higher self, we align our reality with our true self.