Breaking the Shell

"If you want the kernel you must break the shell." -- Meister Eckhardt

We don't much like to talk about what's uncomfortable in our lives. Or if we do like to complain about it, it's to project it outward and blame it on others. It usually never occurs to us that these uncomfortable places are the shells that hide the Truth in us. And we certainly don't want to admit that these shells are our own creations, or that our greatest fear is the loss of them.

Sometimes we call these shells identities. Sometimes we call them stories. Sometimes we call them viewpoints, or perspectives. Usually we call it all ego. But we never, ever take full responsibility for it. We'll grasp for other opinions and viewpoints, look for other ways to talk about it and escape our discomfort... but we don't really want to break the shells. We don't really want to change. We don't really want to know the Truth.

Accepting our own attachment to the shell we call self is one of the final steps in Awakening. To really see the depth of our own compulsion to identify with a fiction and cling to it... this is the cracking of the shell. Often a dark night of the soul can follow this, which is simply a last-ditch effort to remain identified with what isn't real, to continue to pretend to be finite and lacking, or lost and misunderstood. It's all made up. There is no self that has ever been separate or lost. There is no sinner, no victim. Ever. And the ocean of infinite Awareness that is revealed as the shell breaks open is the Allness of God, Truth ItSelf. What is revealed is our very own Self... eternal, perfect, and forever free.

So if you find yourself telling the same stories with different trappings, engaging the same types of people with different names or faces, having the same experiences with different surroundings, it's simply because it's your fiction, your creation... it's the projection and reflection of your ego identity, your shell. Who you think you are is reflected in your projected experiences. This may be experienced as good, or it may be painful. There isn't any difference. Because if you think you are anything less than One with God, if you are identifying yourself as needing to be or become anything other than Self, then you are simply fantasizing and building a harder shell and defending against the Truth of Being. And that is always, and will always be, uncomfortable.

So the uncomfortable places, the things and people we avoid, the fears of loss or lack or abandonment we run from, the changes we refuse to make, the relationships we cling to, the truth we avoid telling... these are our own ego-tools for self-enhancement, the illusory substance of our fictional shell-selves. They are the defenses we use to keep spinning, spinning, spinning in the shell without becoming aware of it. Because once we become aware of the depth of our own self-deception, the imaginary shell simply vanishes.

"The choice you fear to lose you never had." -- A Course in Miracles; Chapter 27, Section III, 7:4