The Leisure to be Your Own Self

“You find peace
not by rearranging the circumstances of your life,
but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.”
― Eckhart Tolle

Aware. Awakened. Enlightened. Mindful.

Many ways of describing a person who is tuned-in with the Encompassing.

Each is a flashing profile, catching a brilliant glimpse of what it means to grasp the possibility of being self-possessed.

Looking over the ages and all of the sages that have spoken about how human beings flourish, you can see them combatting again and again two vicious patterns: self-obsession and self-abnegation.

The Golden Mean betwixt these two grasps the authentic expression of self-realization (what Karl Jaspers calls “Possible Existenz”). That expression is the act of self-possession, of taking on your ownmost singularity, of being held by and holding up mindfully your “I am.”

Yet it is not an “I am” that conquers or disdains all else as unworthy (self-0bsession). Nor is this “I am” a thing under subjugation to all else, a mere slave of no import whatsoever (self-abnegation).

Self-possession is your proper response to the lifeworld, to this Beautiful Order. In the propriety of being “I am”, you flow-out of a situation, the composition of a call & response reality where all else that is not “I am” makes you and you make all else.

But coming to such self-possession… that takes training, time, and tenacity. If you cannot give up the gratifications that end in self-obsession or the obligations that end in self-abnegation, how will you achieve the leisure to be your own self?