When We Look Outside For Heroes

WHEN WE LOOK OUTSIDE FOR HEROES

When we look outside for heroes, the real impulse that is coming from Self is a reaching inside ourselves for mastery. But mastery takes work and concentration and practice, practice, practice.

I have been called ‘smart’ when what I am, is very willing to work hard to acquire a skill and knowledge. And I keep at it until I achieve mastery. How much easier it is to look outside for someone else to ‘do’ it for us! But that means that our own inner hero, our Master(y), remains forever stunted.

When we look outside for redeemers or saviours or rescuers, the real impulse that is coming from Self is a nudge towards our own inner rescuer. It is a distortion of the message from Self that says, “You are not living in alignment with your True Self.” The ego distorts this into confusion, helplessness and dissatisfaction, emotions the ego knows very, very well!

The ego knows this emotion so well because most of us live disconnected from Source for much of the time – or all of the time! When we are disconnected, or more accurately when we are not listening ( because we can never be fully disconnected ) then we unknowingly invite in a whole host of malcontented emotions: feeling ‘not good enough,” insecure, not accepted by others, resentment that we don’t ‘fit in’, jealousy of other’s apparent good fortune, bitterness over what comes to us in life because we are unaware that it is due to our negative frequency and so on. All of this turns our focus onto anything that is not the way we want it to be in life. There we find ample justification for nurturing our suffering, for continuing to feel cheated, or discontented, or unfulfilled or some cousin of these emotions.

We suffer because in our deepest Selves, we know what we want to live in this life and the true Self is totally aware of every compromise, every fearful step back, every failure of courage and every failure to listen to the loving guidance that is always available to us and indeed, sustains us, without our ever realizing it does so.

Essentially what becomes clear is that whatever we look for outside ourselves is a road to disaster, to an unhealthy dependency on someone else to do what we ourselves are responsible to do! If we look for a hero, we need to commit to becoming the master of something. If we look for a saviour we need to address the things in life that are not in alignment with who we truly are and we need to extract ourselves from those people and situations which keep us small and undeveloped even if it takes times and patience and costs money. If we look outside for someone to accept us we need to look inside and discover who we are and we need to consciously accept that. We can change what we don’t like but judging it or condemning it is a prescription for getting stuck in it!

When we want someone else to support us financially or to gift us with a portion of their money we need to learn to be financially independent. It won’t come easily! If it were easy we would have accomplished it already. It is because we don’t know how to accomplish financial independence that we want someone else to give us money. We have to bite the bullet and acquire a skill we don’t have at the moment. Perhaps the skill is one of learning to acquire more money but it might also be the case that the skill we need is to learn how to live within our means. Money loves to flow but it also loves those who manage it competently.

When we are dying for a partner to love us and keep us company, Self is telling us we need to deeply love ourselves and be with ourselves ( which will usually attract a partner, ironically enough! ) Since ego does not understand this, it believes only love seduced from an outside source has value, it twists the message until it makes sense to itself. Unfortunately the truth gets lost in the translation and we suffer loneliness until we learn that loneliness is the ego-mind translation of the message to learn to love ourselves on deep and meaningful levels.

A major life skill and one that is absolutely vital in the process of Self-Realization, is to learn that whatever the ego thinks has to come to us from an external source, is already inside us, just waiting to be discovered and cultivated. Every impulse to look externally for any satisfaction or fulfillment is a distortion of the original impulse from Source to go inside and get in touch with a quality of beingness that we are ready to explore and develop and live. In fact, when we get that yearning feeling, it should set off alarm bells that our true Self is telling us “Your next step of development is to uncover this quality within yourself and grow it until it becomes second nature to you. You need to embody this quality of beingness at this stage before you can take your next step of growth.”

The trick is to simply understand that until we reach a certain level of consciousness, impulses from our true Self are grabbed by the ego mind, which cannot understand them as they are. The ego mind then works on the impulse until it fits into concepts with which the ego mind is familiar, in which form they are then delivered to your thoughts. We can learn to take the ‘dumbed down’ form the ego mind feeds us and trace it back to its origin through quiet meditation or even simply making our mind available to the true Self. In that state, we receive a more complete understanding of the message coming from Self.

Remember that Self does not push you into behaviour that is self-destructive or which will create increased dependency on anything outside of yourself. If you have any urge toward such behaviours, you can be assured it is the ego-mind which has compressed the original beautiful guidance into a form it understands and which will almost certainly lead you to repeat past behaviour that was ineffective at best, and was often downright harmful to you and/or to others.

Instead of acting on impulses, cultivate the wisdom to examine urges and untwist them until you see clearly the real, brilliant and loving guidance that is always there for you. Everything you truly need is already there in seed form inside you. Learning to cultivate qualities inside ourselves does not make us a hermit, alone and unloved – which is what the ego will tell you will happen. When we cultivate the qualities of deep self-love, inner peace , resourcefulness, financial stability and so on, we become those qualities and then we often attract better health, better relationships, more financial opportunities, more adventure in life and a life that is far more satisfying than it ever can be when we are dependent on others or some external circumstance.

Whatever you yearn for from an external source, then, is something you need to uncover and cultivate within yourself. Trust that it is there and trust that it is loving guidance telling you that this is your next step.