by Dr. Michael Bernard Beckwith: LET’S SAY THAT RIGHT NOW you have in your pocket a rosebush seed that you’ve forgotten about.
Then one day while doing your laundry, it falls out of your pocket onto the floor. Out of curiosity, you plant it in a small container. After it grows roots and sprouts, you transplant it into your garden. With the proper conditions of sunlight, water, and plant food, what started out as a tiny seed, then a sprout, matures into a rosebush with exquisite blossoms. Obviously, within that seed the perfect pattern of a rosebush existed all along.
Within all beings there is also a seed of enlightenment, a perfect pattern of self-realization awaiting the proper conditions to emerge. Ralph Waldo Emerson, when describing the nature of the human being, was fond of using the word endogenous. “Man is that noble endogenous plant,” he would say, “which grows, like the palm, from within outward.” Endogenous means “originating internally.” (It is the opposite of exogenous, which means “originating externally.”) As human beings, we cultivate our consciousness from within and project it outwardly into the world of effects.
Everything about us—how we pick up a pen; how we drive; how we eat; how we maintain our environment; our posture, clothing, and voice—is an outer reflection, an advertisement of our inner state of consciousness. This means that as an endogenous being you forge your own identity and destiny. Time comes to you in the form of experiences, as opportunities to make new choices and thus burn old seeds of karmic tendencies in the bonfire of self-actualization. It’s up to you, and only you, because you are the answer to the question of when you will wake up to your true nature.
Evolving Our Mind-Sets and Heart-Sets
Mind-sets are comprised of our beliefs; heart-sets are our feelings. When our mind-sets and heart-sets become aligned, our desires begin to manifest. Our mind-sets and heart-sets inform our motives, the impetus for our actions. One method for evolving mind-sets and heart-sets is to ask empowering questions. Disempowering questions such as “Why me? Why now? Who can I blame for this?” obstruct our evolutionary progress. In contrast, empowering questions take us directly into the heart of our situation: “What quality is asking to be activated within me? What must I release from my mental or emotional patterns to shift this situation?” Such questions press the reset button within our mind-sets and heart-sets, creating an opportunity for us to activate our more expansive, compassionate, joyous, and wise aspects of being.
Every problem is a question trying to be asked. Every question is an answer seeking to be revealed. Every answer is an action seeking to be expressed. Every action is a way of life endeavoring to be integrated into your experience. Your inner Self yearns to respond to empowering questions such as: “Who am I, and why am I here? What gifts have I shown up on the planet to cultivate and deliver? What must I do to take the next step in my evolutionary growth?”
You are being asked to do away with placeholders of negativity at the table of your consciousness and to replace them with placeholders of confidence in your fundamental goodness, your talents, skills, gifts, and your challenges, which are all invitations to bring forth healing and wholeness. What this means is having the willingness to let go of the knots you’ve tied yourself into through worry, doubt, fear—mind-sets which have no evolutionary or transformational value. For example, some of you will begin reading this accompanied by worries. As you become absorbed in the subject matter, your worries recede into the background of your awareness. However, when you walk away into another room of the house, your mind will go on a hunt for your earlier worrisome thoughts. “Now where was I with trying to figure out how I’m going to….” You will mentally search for the negative placeholder that is storing your concerns. The point is that our worries and problems cannot be solved unless we evolve beyond worry, because our problems cannot be solved at the level at which they occur.
