When you start your journey towards the spiritual there is an interference that comes in the form of negation even though you study and learn of all the positive elements in life. To negate is to deny the truth of something, to bring out the negative response to a truth. What is the reason for the negative within us? Why is there this part of ourselves that negates and denies the truth of something? The pursuit of the spiritual is the desire to refine one’s knowledge and come to know and experience a more in-depth understanding of life. We experience many levels of understanding as we go on in the spiritual journey of life.
Sometimes life throws tragedies and difficulties at us and we have to struggle to overcome these. How we deal with them depends on our positive or negative outlook. If we are used to the negative we will see everything wrong with everything all the time, with ourselves and with others. As be build on the negative we actually deplete our energy, become restless or depressed. Prolonged negation will begin to create a shadow self.
A part of you that grows to the proportion of doing things that are detrimental to you or others. This growth is subtle and not immediately obvious. It is more serious than we realize. Yet it is hard to define. I call it a shadow self because it is me. The shadow self is not someone or something outside of me, it is a side of me that negates. I could not understand how there was so much goodness in truth and wisdom, but all I could see was my negation of myself.
I have nothing, I am nothing, no one hears or knows me, I am going nowhere. This is a negation of all I am. The books I read helped in some way but did not last as the shadow self would return time and again. The real help came from a higher source, an intelligent source. There is no easy way to help yourself through a method in a book about a course that you take.
My help came from enlightened ones, the Adept Teachers that had walked the same path as I walk on. Their wisdom gave me the thread of understanding necessary to build and repair the old negation habits I had in me for centuries. Those who have experienced these things are able to teach through their experience. Your shadow self lurks inside of you until you deal with it.
There is a very simple answer to change negative to positive. It is so simple that when you realize it you may laugh or cry with relief. It is the oldest and most often talked about subject in the earliest of sacred literature. It is the simple action of love, love for self, yourself. When you love yourself unconditionally, without any qualifications or have-to-have, then you can love yourself and you will know a spiritual milestone of the purest magnitude. In the quiet refreshment of the energy of love for self, you will feel something clean and free from impurity rising within you and your shadow self will not return.
The love for self brings compassion for yourself and then you are able to have real compassion for others. But it begins with you. Love for self, yourself.