Holding yourself back because you think that by acting freely in the fullness of your power and ability, you might sin against the laws of God and bind yourself to the earth or even to the lower planes. Fear of sinning and falling makes you afraid to spread your wings and fly to the heights, afraid to do anything apart from what seems safely and totally within the sphere of activity of Light-seeking and Light-serving. Thereby you bottle up and suppress everything within you which could make you happy, and which is urging for expression through you and out of you. Thus you step out of yourself and begin to look at yourself as the enemy of your own Light-salvation. You consider yourself the enemy and fight against yourself. You thereby fight against everything that can help you develop to the fullest the fullness of what you could or should be and make you happy. You become a prisoner of self, someone who has enchained and imprisoned himself or herself by himself or herself.

This is a terrible condition of consciousness, because the only thing that can free the prisoner is a change of consciousness, a new thought, a new consideration about how to live one’s life, be one’s self and go one’s path. But JUST THIS VERY new thought cannot break through within the consciousness of the prisoner of self, because the very basis of this consciousness is the suppression of such a thought. This bound consciousness IS the living expression of the fear of this thought; it is the living expression of the urge to prevent just this very thought from breaking through from the depths of the sub-conscious and becoming the new consciousness, greater SELF-consciousness.

The only thing that can help one out of this condition is the severe Love of the Light, the Grace which reaches one upon the bridge of one’s longing for true living. This Grace however manifests usually not in indulgent divine caresses, ironically, but as a gridlock of painful experiences which drive one to the end of the self-chosen path, at which end-point one finds – instead of fulfillment, salvation, completion, paradise and joy – inner emptiness, despair, confusion, doubt and self-doubt, a sense of betrayal and the feeling of being even further away from one’s goal than at the start of the journey of the earnestly-meant striving. Desperation and futility seize one’s soul.

At this point, one stands before the opportunity to awaken into a new conviction, fructified by a new, higher, freer, truer thought. To let go of the fear born of indolence and vanity, of egotism: The self-seeking fear that wears the false countenance of humble selflessness.

You have to become honest – to yourself, about yourself. Honest to the world about yourself. Who you are. What you are. You have to free yourself of the fear of failing and, even more accurately, of being seen to fail – which is vanity. The ugliest fruit of this vanity, the deepest sin, is the inglorious ambition to impress God. And, in consequence, to impress those who one supposes to be God’s representatives on earth. This is not necessary, as it only distracts one from God’s true nature – the height of naturalness and authenticity itself. It separates one from the inner state, the condition of self-consciousness, needed to be in contact, via homogeneity, with Paradise.

It is better to be yourself. Your truest deepest realest self. Because Paradise is inside you.

– Che Chidi Chukwumerije.