Another Choice

How to link?

In our physical consciousness and our identity as defined by our parents, our society, our aptitudes and our features, our character and our trajectory we are thus, more or less effectively and with more or less willingness, inserted into one kind or another: we are assigned to it, for the duration of our stay. It is only when one steps back and out of it, either through the brutal action of circumstances outside of one’s will, or through one’s own persistent difficulty in adapting, that one begins to approach the matter of one’s freedom from this determinism. Yet, when this inner breath comes in and propagates – mysteriously – in our habitual nature, this stepping back occurs without a thought: it becomes self-evident that one can be this, as one can be that.

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Likewise, what we call “temperament”, which must be qualified whenever we wish to describe or define one of our outer natures – one of our personalities -, seems to lose all currency when one rejoins this source. Of course, there remains a sort of more pronounced affinity with one of the main avenues of elaboration in the world – knowledge, action, expression, detailed perfection – but without any exclusivity or self-limitation in one’s becoming.

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Throughout the numberless vicissitudes of the journey, the consciousness develops particularly where a sustained progress obtains in any given domain or direction.

Leaden and swamped as we are by the ordinary condition of the human creature, the occasions for progress that present themselves in our lives are most often linear: they require a perseverant pursuit in one single direction.

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