The Intra-past
It’s not others or circumstances that make us aware in the first place, although they can help to trigger the process.
It is you who is giving awareness to yourself. It is you who is open to becoming aware. All it needs is that you start with giving yourself the gift of honesty and self-compassion to become one with the humantime of your intra-past.
To be properly in the intra-past, some alienation from others, and a self-alienation from the inter- and extra-past, is necessary. Of course, you want to stay social and cooperative with the ones close to you in your life, although with time the nature of these relationships may transform as your awareness regenerates. Separation from yourself and others means, in a psycho-spiritual way, that you let go of your identity, which is based on social conformity and cultural beliefs that would be misbeliefs in a different culture. You also have to let go of attachment to others’ judgments, which are opinions only and have little if anything to do with truth.
By distancing yourself from the idealized role you have learned to assume during all the years of education, socialization, and enculturation, you begin to see who you really are.
Young children don’t need to learn what honesty, fairness, empathy, and compassion are. It’s amazing how children from the beginning know how to love fearlessly; an ability that many grown-ups seem to have forgotten. You don’t need to recall specific events; rather contemplate yourself as a young child, as a newborn, and even as an expected baby before conception that has made its way to its birth without fail, without any support from society, without cultural rules or the advice of any experts. That way, bring yourself into contact with the life animating force from which you came.
As you came from it, you are it. You come from what you were part of before. Each of us is one specific human-type cell of the whole cosmic energy body.
It’s impossible that you are not of your origin. If you got this, you’ve established the foundation of intra-past awareness.
A child does not care about history; it does not have much of it anyway. And yet it is not a matter of age to know what’s right and what’s not. Young children take other people without reservation, regardless of their past, indifferent of their inherited fame, and unconcerned of their economic status. Children, before being taught otherwise, don’t care about how other people look except for their more or less friendly expression. They don’t care about race, size, fashion, and accessories. Children start to interact with whoever is genuinely interested in and willing to on a psychological level. What a clear expression of that all life is connected.
Like water that always flows together again is life finding life unmistakably to unite in love again.
That’s our natural tendency to live life. It’s the only desire, if we stay aware of it, whose pursuit can make us feel truly alive. No possessions or status can substitute for it. Don’t believe any stories that destroy your confidence in connecting to your life source and any other human beings with whom you share the same.
There is a tragicomical saying that, unfortunately, hits the nail right on the head: A banker, a worker, and an immigrant are sitting at a table with twenty cookies. The banker takes nineteen cookies and warns the worker: “Watch out, the immigrant is going to take your cookie away.” As the ones in power don’t want to give up their privileges, people are kept fearfully in survival mode. Survival concerns are best stirred up by propagating a materialistic view on life.
Our immortal soul’s drive is not about survival; it rather needs freedom from the mind’s concern to solely survive.
People with the concern to survive don’t aspire to thrive. They are not motivated to be as fast as they could, for example. To survive before the chasing bear, being only the second slowest is sufficient to ride out. And that’s how people socially compare and construe their story of being relatively OK.
As we deserve to be not judged by our past, we should not judge others according to the labels they are given.
The socio-economic status of people doesn’t tell us much about their human qualities. Try to see people’s soul regardless of social personality appearances. Don’t waste your thoughts on interpreting equipment, façade styles, and fashions. They are not relevant to our true self, and they are gone as fast as they came. We are not our social personalities. Clinging to our social identity and old ways of thinking about ourselves makes us in any case matter less than we deserve. Artificial rules that protect selfish interests are not natural laws of life. Yes, actually money grows on trees.Just, the land where the trees grow has been misappropriated. Even worse, our memory, our awareness of this land of abundance that once had belonged to all has been taken too. Now laws ensure that the treasures don’t need to be shared anymore at all.
Children are dependent on the care received from their parents and other adults in the culture they are born into. For them, inter-psychological learning, the influence of other people is unavoidable. Their survival depends on following their caregivers. Such dependencies should not exist anymore later on in life though. An adult person can re-build her or his identity intra-psychologically.
It is of intra-past intelligence when you realize the possibility, even the necessity of your socio-cultural independence. Intra-past awareness allows you to free yourself from backward-related definitions of your person by others.
It is an awareness-unintelligent trap to let one being defined by others opinions and beliefs.
When I moved abroad and ended up being on myself in a completely different culture, there was nobody and nothing anymore that would have supported and validated my identity at that time. For my new environment far away from my former social networks, jobs, and possessions that had defined me to a significant extent for a long time too, I then was left to be just an unknown foreigner. Therefore, I could not and did not have to live up to any story anymore. What an opportunity. I’ve realized how foolish it had been to build one’s personality too much on the unstable ground of externals. Meanwhile, having left most of the external things and values behind, there has remained one true identity-giving source: The inner self. I’ve found my true self when mentalizing back to before I had grown into an adult body, before I was associated with a certain social status, and before I started to hold on to a variety of achievements and acquisitions. Now literally as an alien in a foreign country, I became aware of what was left, what will always be left, and I mentally returned to the core of whom I am: The consciousness that is all and my origin of life.
For all my life I was looking for happiness. Now I found meaning. And when I accepted meaning, happiness became meaningless. That’s when I started to really enjoy life again.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said more than a hundred years ago that history should be banned from school. I agree in the sense that the common issue of glorifying the past and using it to legitimate and reinforce established power structures, for example in politics, is hindering real improvement.
The world needs new solutions to old problems.
A spirit-based awareness to overcome ego-based identification is needed. Rather than closing down for victories, humanity needs to open up for progress.
Just because things are our culture, they are not necessarily good. Good is what increases awareness.
By definition, culture is a set of widely unconscious norms and beliefs, artifacts, and institutions of only a particular group of people that have developed over generations. It fosters in-group bias that tends to over-favoring the own culture and negatively stereotyping cultures other than the own one. In a way, promoting in-group adhesion is following the economic principle of making things scarce. In that sense, the source of affection, praise, friendship, and love is made reserved to the own group and therefore is increasing the group’s perceived value. However, differing viewpoints and new solutions often come only from a cross-cultural, broader and more diverse perspective that is free of group interests. Of course, not everyone can have a cross-cultural background, nor is it affordable or practical for most people to leave their environment, to travel extensively, or to live in another destination for sustained periods of time. Nevertheless,
Everybody can develop an intra-past awareness that is sufficiently culture-free and independent to heal from limiting and hateful beliefs
and to give access to what is real: Pure energy and love that has the executive intelligence to change everybody and everything.
