Close Encounters of the Truthful Kind
Close Encounters with Crisis Can Bring Healing
Any of us may have a close encounter with crisis; forced through these close encounters to find the way back to health and balance. Even though the truth is never further away from us than our wish for its awakening and self-healing insight, there are distinct moments in life when it comes closer to us. Unfortunately, almost all of these important, potentially life-changing close encounters or moments are entirely missed. This is because what is wrong with us, our false nature, sees what is true as an attacking enemy.
Never are the healing powers of the truth so close as when a crisis is at hand.
A crisis always precedes any real inner advancement. This is because real spiritual growth is a process of removing self-blocking thoughts and feelings. The reason a crisis must precede each new level of authentic self-unity is that the crisis, whatever it may be, points out where we have been holding on to a particular belief. It is a shaky pretense or some flattering but deceptive self-image that is in conflict with reality.
Where there is conflict there is always pain
And by the time this unconscious kind of psychological or emotional pain reaches the level of our consciousness, we generally experience it as some kind of a crisis. This explains why a crisis is a close encounter of the truthful kind. What we call a personal “crisis” is really that moment when some previously invisible conflict within us becomes temporarily visible. We can state this same idea in another way.
A crisis arises when some inner lie we with which we’ve deceived ourselves is revealed to be just that: a lie.
Let’s take an example or two of these close encounters.
Maybe a man pictures himself as always being in control of his own life, but now he’s suddenly aware that he can’t stop drinking — or talking — or endlessly worrying. He has reached a turning point.
Perhaps a woman has always thought of herself as being loving and kind, but all at once she begins to notice how critical and cruel her thoughts are toward others. She sees that she only does things for others to have them think of her as being kind, and this fills her day with resentment. She has reached a turning point.
In both instances where the terrible cost of living from lying but flattering self-images has suddenly become conscious, the only alternative that the false self as the author of this self-deception has is to start blaming everyone and everything for the unhappy circumstances.
This maneuver is almost fail-safe for the false self. By seeing to it that everything outside of it is constantly laid to blame, it keeps us fighting with life instead of learning from it. It is really very cunning.
The more we take the side of defending what is wrong within us, the more the truth that exposed this unconscious wrongness appears to be against us.
The truth never causes pain. The only pain in a crisis is the false self’s resistance to the truth. A crisis only becomes a breaking point when we fail to use it as a turning point.
It is possible to transform a crisis into a personal turning point in your life. We must wish to see the lesson in the crisis, rather than allowing the world to convince us it is against us. This higher wish, followed by our willingness to endure a new kind of pain, gives birth to a higher consciousness in us that belongs to our true nature. This elevated consciousness never has to solve a crisis because it never has one in the first place.
Excerpted from The Secret of Letting Go, by Guy Finley, Llewellyn Worldwide.
