Looking for your True Self (II)

Xuefeng

August 5, 2012

In our real lives, we all play roles defined by our plots, such as government civil servants, judges, police officers, businessmen, teachers, thieves, hooligans, and so on. These are not our true selves, but unconscious roles that have been arranged precisely for everyone according to the conscious needs of the plot, so if someone were to ask who you are and you answered that you are a mechanical engineer, that would be wrong.

Look into a mirror. Do you see yourself? The image that you see has to be wrong because all forms are seen inaccurately; you cannot see yourself by the image of your form. The one in the mirror is not your true self at all, but only a false representation. Compare your images at the ages of eight, eighteen, and forty-eight. They are completely different because they are all illusions; none of them are really you.

Look at the people around you; some are giving impassioned speeches, holding guns tightly, making films, singing and dancing, handling official business, fighting and quarreling, catching thieves, selling goods, and some are preaching. All are just acting and role-playing; none are their true selves but most are biological robots who are running according to their programmed procedures.

Your true self is completely free. When you feel unfree, you are not your real self. You have to go to work on time to make a living, do business to make money, be a police officer to catch bad guys, or do your job according to your superiors. Then, you have to maintain the support of your parents, buy a house and a car, get married, and have children. When you make choices, you have to consider the wishes of your family and others around you and you have to remember traditional ethics and customs. Ultimately, you can never be your true self. You have to consider the expectations, demands, and constraints of the people around you as well as the cultural values and customs that society adheres to. You want to go one way but you have to choose another. If you do not, then you will have too bare guilt and pain within your heart, be angry, assume a feigned manner, pose as a person with high morals, and say words and do things against your will or worse, you will face immediate problems with your food, clothing, shelter, transportation, birth, illness, and death. So, you would not have been living out your true self, but only playing the role that you have to play according to the program which has been designed as a social plot.

You want to be free in your heart but you must live within constraints because you are trapped within the program; put into the plot. Cattle are driven into sheds, pigs are driven into pens, and people are driven into circles of other people. Those who are supposed to dig holes, dig them; supposed to fly, fly; supposed to be herbivores, graze on grass; supposed to be carnivores, eat meat. All are hard-pressed to escape from the bonds of the Three Realms but can only be bound by the Five Elements. The script requires that ninety-nine percent of the people do not to know the truth because if it were widely known, then the play could not be performed.

A news story reported of a migrant whose wife had affairs at home when he was at work and eventually gave birth to a child. He did not know the truth and raised the child into adulthood, but as the child grew, he developed less and less like him, so he had a paternity test run. The DNA test result proved that the child was not his and threw him into a whirlpool of pain and trouble. Once the truth was known, a comedy became a tragedy. King Oedipus in ancient Greek mythology and legend married his own mother unknowingly and innocently, and took her as his queen. Had he not learned the truth, he might have enjoyed his warm family, but when they learned it, the queen killed herself out of shame while Oedipus blinded himself and went into exile.

Once a truth is learned, its consequences can be terrible. What would you do if you learned that you had protected something that you should have destroyed or that you had tried to ruin something that you should have been grateful for? It would be useless at that moment, even if the pain and repentance broke your heart. A pig could not live for even a day if it knew that the reason it was bred in captivity was to be slaughtered for food. If ninety-nine percent of humans knew who they really were, then our whole social system and order would collapse and the human world as we know it would no longer exist.

How do we find our true selves?

Continue to “Looking for your True Self (III)”.