Hello,
This is Don Joseph Gowie,
And in the next few minutes I would like to share the essential truth at the heart of my new course,
The Grandeur Within.
It points to what people everywhere are searching for,
Namely the fountainhead of peace,
Joy and strength that resides in every human heart,
There from the day you were born.
You carry within you a grandeur every bit as majestic as a snow-capped mountain piercing the sky or a river flowing to the sea.
Human beings across the world have sensed this inner majesty for millennia.
Plato in his masterpiece,
The Symposium,
Tells of an ancient time when humanity was mighty in strength,
When the thoughts of their hearts were great,
So bold in spirit that they dared to scale heaven.
That grandeur has not been diminished or destroyed.
Still,
People rarely find this fountainhead of peace and joy because of the fear and shame conditioning they have undergone since childhood,
Reinforced throughout adulthood,
All of which has led us to seek this power and beauty everywhere but inside ourselves.
Here is the essential truth about you.
You were born whole.
You were born radiant,
And you have remained so,
Although you have failed to see it because it is blocked,
Obstructed,
Obscured from sight.
What would it take to see this finally?
Just two things.
First,
As Anthony DeMello asserts,
Is the ability to listen.
Are you able to listen?
If you are willing to listen,
You are likely to begin to see it.
Now,
As Anthony DeMello points out,
Listening is not as easy as you might think.
Why?
Because we are always listening from fixed concepts,
Fixed positions,
Fixed prejudices that block listening.
The kind of listening DeMello is referring to means being alert,
Being watchful,
Holding the intention to listen with a fresh mind,
Without prejudices,
Without judging,
Without fixed formulas.
That is what the grandeur within you asks of you.
To pause long enough to catch even the first glimpse of what lies within.
Long enough to feel again the truth you knew as a child,
Before the world taught you to doubt yourself,
Before it prescribed who you should be and what you should want,
Before fear and shame and trauma obscured the power and the beauty at the center of your being.
The second thing is to look at the facts about what you are,
Facts grounded in science,
Not the comforting cliches modern culture often substitutes for the truth,
But to take in the evidence that now confirms what all the great mystics and avatars who have stood the test of time have been proclaiming for thousands of years,
That beneath the stress,
Beneath the sense of unworthiness,
Beneath the false beliefs,
There is an unbroken core of happiness,
Virtue,
Love,
And creativity.
Make no mistake,
You were created biologically wired for joy.
You were created inclined towards honesty,
Fairness,
And altruism.
You were created with the directive to form deep connections to others,
To the world around you,
And to all that is.
Add to all this the fact that you were born a creative genius,
Literally.
You have been endowed with a mind capable of creative insight,
Imagination,
Intuition,
And integration that is capable of bringing life on earth a little closer to heaven.
Your essence,
In fact,
Is love itself,
Which is the highest form of intelligence in the world.
These are not traits to acquire.
They are innate capacities waiting there for you to remember and invoke.
This is what landmark research has shown in the last 20 years.
Yet early in life,
Most of us were conditioned away from this truth.
We learned to see ourselves through the narrow lens of fear,
Shame,
And comparison.
Without realizing it,
We traded the grand life a loving universe created us to live for the small life society conditioned into us,
Blocking the inner light that once shone so easily within us.
We can reverse that conditioning.
It is easier than you might think.
Let us take a step towards reversing it right now.
At the sound of the chime,
I invite you to see yourself as spirit.
Just for a moment,
See yourself as set free of any problem,
Condition,
Or constraint.
See yourself as whole,
Without limits.
Spread your proverbial wings and rise.
Imagine yourself this way.
Simply believe it.
Your very nature is unconditionally joyful,
Virtuous,
Loving,
And creative beyond measure.
Let it be true.
The research evidence proves it is true.
For the moment,
Just let it be true.
Now step back while staying in touch with this feeling of your spiritual nature,
And gently bring into awareness the self-negating,
Fear-provoking thoughts that habitually cloud your mind and close your heart.
Ask yourself,
Which do I want to believe?
The facts or the mind-made fiction?
Each delivers a different experience of life.
Which experience do I want to have?
William James,
The father of psychology,
Saw how belief creates the actual fact.
Nearly a century of psychological investigation has established the power of belief to manifest as reality.
But you do not have to rely solely on belief to awaken.
Now and again,
We all have had a direct experience of the grandeur within us.
I invite you to recall moments when your deeper nature broke through.
Times when you and the present moment became one and the same.
Times when suddenly you felt alive,
Fearless,
Free,
And your heart filled to the brim with joy.
Moments when all was well.
Those moments happen,
And they are not random accidents.
They are the grandeur within calling you home.
There is no evidence more compelling than direct experience.
Those experiences provide the proof that the Self,
Capital S Self,
Is very much alive within you.
When we listen to those moments of awakening,
Something begins to shift.
We start to sense that what we have been seeking,
We already possess,
And that it is available,
Not in the future,
But here and now,
If we would only be it openly.
Then we begin to see the false beliefs that have blocked us all along.
As we come to understand these illusions for what they are,
They fall away,
Leaving us to be ourselves.
That's when the grandeur happens.
This movement from a false Self to our true Self is at the heart of my course,
The Grandeur Within.
