Dear younger me, I would tell you yet again that you are the God of your Universe. Yet your life experience often ends up feeling like a disappointment--a potentially sacred opportunity gone bad. Instead of taking charge and living large and free, you end up enslaved to a dysfunctional cult of just one member.
You were born with the opportunity to play, explore, and create on earth as a liberated child of God. I know, you hate the word “God.” So, let’s define It as the wisest, kindest, bravest version of yourself. I would tell you that this is the God to whom I pray. This is the entity that has the power to transform your life. This powerful and peaceful version of yourself is waiting to unite with you. It’s ready to play, explore, and create a quality life experience with you.
Your cult of one limits your adventure and the exertion of free will. Just like any cult, you have collected stories, rules, beliefs, customs, expectations, identifiers, and all kinds of requirements. All of these are fear-based. These rules and regulations provide some comfort—an illusion of security and control in an uncontrollable reality. But the limitations confine you. The safety and protection of prison walls are still prison walls.
The cult presents itself as your personality, which includes your thoughts, emotions and even the condition of your body to some extent. You developed a personality to make sense of a weird world. To be sure, a personality is necessary to navigate this realm. But it isn’t real. It’s a costume you wear, and nothing else. And while a costume is great fun to wear on Halloween or other special occasions, it would be strange to wear it and believe it every day.
As God of your Universe, you have dreams inspired by your own innate wisdom. Wisdom knows your skills, passions, interests, and potential. But you are afraid to pursue anything because your internal culture has convinced you to follow fear instead of inspiration, as cults will. You’re afraid to try, afraid to take a risk. You are afraid to change, even as you yearn to transform your experience. You’re left in the sorry position of reacting to life in the cult, instead of acting as God over your life.
All of this is fine and dandy if you can happily live your life pretending to be something you aren’t—satisfied, comfortable, and fulfilled. But you, dear younger me, are not happy. Wisdom tells you something is not right, and you feel it in your anxiety, discomfort, dissatisfaction, and depression.
The personality and all its stories, rules, beliefs, and customs dissipate the moment of death, as if it never happened. In this sense, it never did happen. Therefore, it isn’t happening now, except in your own perceptions. Your certain death and the denial of The Fact urge you to wake up to this moment.
There is liberation in this moment. In fact, it's the only moment of liberation. This moment is when life happens, when choices are executed, when fear is managed, when freedom can be experienced. There is no other moment. To open to this critical moment, you must examine everything that closes.
As with all cults, your internal culture demands your attention and participation. It isn’t going to release you readily. It will likely try to sabotage your efforts with all kinds of negative self-talk. To be fair, the personality is as much a confused victim of itself as anything. It had a job to do. It developed to protect and define you during your tender years, when you were trying to make sense of a crazy and beautiful world and find your place in it. It was so effective and enthusiastic that now it’s like the guard who has taken over the castle, to mix in another metaphor. For security, the Queen has been subjugated to the authority of the guard, locked away for her own so-called protection.
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates reportedly said when he was on trial for “impiety” against the religious powers of his day. He chose (and was granted) the punishment of death, rather than be limited in his exploration of life. It is through exploration and examination that you can overcome your own zealous cult to create a top-quality life experience.
It's been said that if your life sucks, you suck. You know it’s true, but it’s not true in the way you think it’s true. There is nothing wrong with you. And it’s not your fault. You are perfect and perfectly sucky. But you can learn (and unlearn), grow, adjust, and adapt so that your personality serves and supports you as you play, create, and explore in a life worth living. In fact, the personality would love nothing more than to hand the wheel over to a confident, competent you-God. The personality would love to sit back and enjoy the ride. After all, the personality is the schmoozer, the doer, the tool, the guard. It really doesn’t want to be in charge. It wants to support the Queen. Together they make a powerful and benevolent kingdom. Or queendom.
The path to liberation is within you, and nowhere else. You are the teacher, the student, and the subject. Keep turning your attention within, and ask your God-self (your wise, courageous, and kind self) to guide you, for its always ready and available, when you are.
Examine all the aspects of your personality that keep your life feeling restricted and dissatisfied. Watch how fear degrades your life experience. I know it sounds like an awful prospect. You’ve been avoiding yourself through every conceivable distraction. You’re afraid to look but looking heals. The light of the sun sanitizes.
Use the moment as a home base, a safety zone. Return to it religiously and check in with how you’re doing in the moment. The quality of this moment is the quality of this life. Can you open to liberation in this one, sweet moment? If not, can you study what closes, and why, and how? As you study what closes (fear), you will begin to untangle the misunderstandings and confusion that have restricted you in knots. This process is called awareness.
Like every cult, yours is desperate to keep you as a member. It might rebel and make this practice uncomfortable. But each success will bring new confidence, as you face and manage fear.
I would tell you to take an active interest in how you are “doing” life, so that it isn’t doing you. Assume your rightful authority over your life. The only thing you have to lose is your self-confinement. You deserve and would enjoy a life worth living.
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