Impossible?

Whether physically, mentally or spiritually, we can only grow and progress if we reach beyond our grasp. We need to extend ourselves. A good starting place is to remind ourselves that anything we can imagine is possible. The imagination is what has transformed our world and transformed the lives of everybody living in it. No matter how impossible a dream you imagine might seem, you have the ability to realise it if only you will understand nothing is impossible. Impossible is a word associated purely with physical life. The spirit knows of no such word. As the great Albert Einstein once said, “Unless your first idea is impossible you will achieve nothing new.”

Impossibility is in the mind. We place unnecessary restrictions upon ourselves because we listen too closely to the voice of the ego instead of to the ‘still small voice’ from our inner self. Just think for a moment about what our lives would be like now had individuals not defied their ego when it whispered “impossible”. We would have no fires in our homes, no running water, no glass in the windows, certainly not telephone, radio, TV or computer. There would be no motor cars or aeroplanes, buses or taxis. In other words we would still be living in caves.

Just imagine if Alexander Graham Bell had given up after ninety-nine unsuccessful experiments and not moved on to number one hundred that gave us the telephone. What if the Wright brothers had refused the challenge to build a machine that could fly? What if NASA had told President Kennedy that putting a man on the moon was just a wild dream and quite beyond human ingenuity? In his great poem “If”, Rudyard Kipling says, “… If you can stand quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail in monumental mockery … Then you’ll be a man my son.” Conventional wisdom or fashion has held back human progress in all fields, including the spiritual. Only when an individual has been courageous enough to defy it has the next stride forward been made.

How has conventional wisdom restricted spiritual progress? In this field, conventional wisdom is the established churches, temples and monasteries throughout the world. For differing reasons, each of the established religions refuses to encourage people to believe that they are eternal spiritual beings WITHOUT EXCEPTION. They always hedge their claims for immortality around their desire to increase and or retain members of their particular faith. Consequently it is only when an individual appears who is blessed with exceptional powers of the spirit, that the misleading nature of the claims of those religions is exposed. What happens then? Fear! In their fear, partly of the unknown but chiefly of losing their power and control over people, the religions condemn the person concerned and eventually succeed in having him or her killed.

Fear is another tool of the ego. It is one of the strongest ways in which it exerts its control over each one of us. When Franklyn Roosevelt said “We have nothing to fear but fear itself,” he was stating a truism. Refuse to be cowed by fear or “the impossible” and we set ourselves free of the cloying attentions of the ego. We become, as we should be, spiritual beings living temporarily in a physical world but with all the enormous powers of the spirit at our finger tips: Power to co-create with the Great Spirit Himself, because there is a portion of Him within us all. Our centre, our true self, is pure spirit and is indistinguishable in the power it can access, from God or the Great Spirit, Infinite Intelligence, or any one of a hundred names we have given the Creator over millennia. We are not only immortal we can be all powerful too but in the highest sense of that word. Restrictions on our access to that incredible power are only those imposed by love and concern for its effects on other people. Only when we are sure others will be adversely affected should we pause in our pursuit of new knowledge. Even then, the wider view urges us to continue.

We all know the arguments put forward against the use of atomic energy in warfare and many roundly condemn those scientists involved in the Manhattan Project. However, remember Hitler had also embarked upon the same project and how far should we blame the inventor for the use to which others put his invention? One person or a group of people should surely not be held responsible for the immoral actions of others in the way their invention is used. Humanity has always looked at ways to use new inventions as weapons first because we have not evolved far enough beyond our animal beginnings. We have listened too much to the siren voice of the ego. The invention of gunpowder produced the firearm and the bullet but it also produced the beautiful spectacle of the firework display. Atomic energy has produced many medical benefits that would not have been possible had Einstein foreseen earlier the use to which his discovery of relativity would be put or Oppenheimer refused to invent the bomb. The internal combustion engine was responsible for the tank and the bomber but also for the motor car and the airliner. The use of gas, both manufactured and natural, gave birth to the unspeakable horrors of Belsen but also to preparation of our Sunday lunch.

No, we should accept no restrictions on the power of the human mind to invent and imagine but we should insist upon the same freedom where spiritual knowledge is concerned. Those having religious power, mostly know of the great power of the spirit but refuse to speak about it openly because they say people are too undeveloped to use such knowledge wisely. This in my view is pure humbug. Without the opportunity to extend our spiritual grasp by learning of these powers, how will we ever develop the moral responsibility to use all Gods gifts wisely? That our spiritual evolution as human beings lags so far behind our physical and mental evolution is not only a tragedy but also a condemnation of generations of manipulators who called themselves ‘spiritual leaders’. Restriction is negative and negativity produces darkness. Only when we are allowed to see the positive benefits of freedom, true freedom with responsibility, will we progress spiritually beyond the primitive stage we are at and release the light of the spirit into the world in its full glory.