Most people only exist, never truly are at all…

“…Shakespeare’s Hamlet in his famed soliloquy pondered, “To be or not to be,” and thus faced squarely the primary challenge of life.  Most people only exist, never truly are at all…

…We exist in order that we may become something more than we are, not through favorable circumstance or auspicious occurrence, but through an inner search for increased awareness.  To be, to become, these are the commandments of evolving life, which is going somewhere, aspires to some unscaled heights, and the awakened soul answers the call, seeks, grows, expands.  To do less is to sink into the reactive prison of the ego, with all its pain, suffering, limitation, decay, and death.  The man who lives through reaction to the world about him is the victim of every change in his environment, now happy, now sad, now victorious, now defeated, affected but never affecting.  He may live years in this manner, rapt with sensory perception and the ups and downs of his surface self, but one day pain so outweighs pleasure that he suddenly perceives his ego is illusory, a product of outside circumstances only.  Then he either sinks into complete animal lethargy or, turning away from the senses, seeks inner awareness and self-mastery.  Then he is on the road to really living, truly becoming; then he begins to uncover his real potential; then he discovers the miracle of his own consciousness, the magic in his mind.

Mastery over life is not attained by dominion over material things, but by mental perception of their true case and nature.”

– U.S. Anderson, The Magic In Your Mind (Book Review)

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Image: Winter Sun (Leonid Afremov) inspired by Michelle’s Post

18 thoughts on “Most people only exist, never truly are at all…”

  1. I can’t begin to tell you how inspiring this post was to me. I’ve put it in a word document to print as soon as I take the laptop over to the printer. Then I am putting it on my wall to read every day. It just may be the thing that gets me out of the funk I’ve been in for awhile now. Thank you so much for the inspiration.

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