Self-Realization Is In Every Moment

Recently, I was talking with a teacher and friend about self realization. He made a simple comment that the soul is the sum total of all of our experiences. It struck me how this meant that every experience adds to our soul, and there is no experience that can detract from it. Since we share experiences with many other souls, that would mean that our souls overlap. 

Anywhere our experience overlaps, our souls would also overlap. And since we overlap with so many other souls, ultimately all souls are connected through this sharing of experience. So whenever a particular soul has a profound experience of awakened consciousness, or self realization, their experience of the totality of consciousness by definition includes all experiences and all the apparent souls out there.

Every experience is actually an experience of self-realization. In each and every experience, we are realizing a capacity or aspect of our soul, and by extension, an aspect of our true nature as being. Since all there is, is Being, every experience is an experience of being. Every experience adds to the totality of our understanding and realization of our true nature. There is no other possibility.

This is a dilemma if we believe there is a better, truer, more spiritual aspect of our Being that we want to be realizing. What if my anger is part of my true nature? What if my greed, lust, fear, sadness, confusion, and pain are all part of my true nature, along with all of the love, peace, and joy that are also part of being? In hoping and waiting for a better experience, we may be overlooking the significance of our present moment experience, just as it is. It isn't that sadness and greed are equivalent to peace and joy, but every experience has significance, since every experience is an experience of our true nature.

The experiences that we may reject because we think they aren't the correct experience may actually be made up of the same peace, joy, and love we are hoping to have. We think of this world as a world of opposites, or dualities. But if we look more closely, we find that the so-called opposites are really just different amounts of one thing. Light and dark are an example: There is no such thing as dark, only light existing as photons. There are no “darkens.” You can’t buy a “flashdark” and point it at things and make them disappear. However when there is little or no light, we call that dark, even though there is no such thing. Similarly, the only thing that exists is our true nature, which is filled with joy and love. If we are experiencing little or no joy or love, we may call that sadness or fear, although those are really only the relative absence of joy and love. And of course, there is often some joy in sadness and some love even in fear.

What if every experience is a unique jewel of our multifaceted Being? What if every experience adds to the abundance of our soul and moves us toward the greatness of our true nature? What if what you are experiencing right now is unfolding your self-realization in the most amazing and unique way? Perhaps there isn't some special experience of self-realization that is the way to realize true nature. Maybe every soul’s realization of true nature is meant to unfold in a completely unique way so that every soul’s experience can also add to the experience of the One Being that all souls are a part of, just as every experience adds to the richness of your soul.