Written by: Bill O'Brien, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The sacred literature of the world, as well as the language of psychological progress, all describe the same journey to wholeness, to pure consciousness.
The end result is a relationship to our Unconscious Selves that is more of a peer connection than a servile one. In the language of the Christian gospels, for example, at the Last Supper Jesus tells his disciples, who have now been in spiritual boot camp for three years, “No longer do I call you servants; now I call you friends.” Rather than seeing this as a Christian moment only, if we view it as a universal description of spiritual adulthood, we can claim it as our own, regardless of our religious beliefs, if any.
The Sufis were the mystical sect of Islam. The major names of the Sufi poets that have come down to us from the Late Middle Ages are Rumi, Hafiz, and Kabir. Hafiz has a playful way of saying the same thing as Jesus: “You have been invited to meet the Friend/No one can resist a Divine Invitation/That narrows down all your choices to just two: We can come to God Dressed for Dancing/ Or/ Be carried on a stretcher to God’s Ward.”
And Carl Jung, the great 20th-century Swiss psychologist and discoverer of the Collective Unconscious and its positive contents, when asked if he believed in God, answered, “I don’t need to believe, I know.”
The first step along this path, once basic mental health is sound, is what I call the Undoing. What needs to be undone is our cultural conditioning. Much of our life experience needs to be viewed as simply the result of how we are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the result of the family, the nation, the race, the religion, the gender where we found ourselves at birth and during the years of growing up.
In other words, it was all relative.
At the same time, we discover that we are not solely our Egos. They are a relatively minor, if necessary, aspect of ourselves, much, much smaller than the Unconscious. There is a popular illustration of this as an iceberg where we see how much vastly larger the Unconscious, or True Self, is than the Ego Self which is like the mere tip of the iceberg, the visible part above water.
The journey to Pure Consciousness is the journey of discovering and integrating the contents of the Unconscious, realizing as you do that there is nothing there but Love.
As Rumi says, “Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." And elsewhere, "That which you seek is seeking you."
Bill O'Brien, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Bill O'Brien has decades of experience helping individuals and groups expand their awareness of the capacities of their inner selves, their full, or divine, potential. He utilizes a range of methods to expand consciousness from meditation to self-knowledge techniques to guided imagery to shamanic healing methodologies such as Illumination and Soul Retrieval. With his Consciousness Coaching, experience is the touchstone. The goal is drawing up into conscious awareness the infinite contents of the individual unconscious. Bill spent twenty years in the Jesuit Order before launching out on the great adventure of the discovery of the Self. His Wisdomkeepers reach a worldwide audience. He is the author of "Wise Guyde: The First Forty-Five Columns" available on Amazon. His mission: feeding the spiritual hunger of the world by healing and elevating human consciousness.
