Some people will go to the ends of the earth to find enlightenment. But the truth is that it can be found in your own back yard. In the wonderful children's story The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy looked for happiness in far away places. But at the end of her adventures, she discovered that happiness would be back in her home in Kansas.
I've said it a thousand times, but I'll say it again: conscience is your closest link to God. Enlightenment is discovering, and then living in God's Light of Truth. It shines within, but we have all fallen away from it into the ersatz reality of the imagination. We live in thinking and fantasy, and submerge ourselves in emotions.
When we are lost in thinking, we are separated from the Light. This Light is intuition: a way of knowing without words. For example, sometimes you just see injustice, or sometimes you get a sense that something is not right about someone. When you heed the wordless warning of intuition, you are protected and safe. Other times you may have been delicately nudged in a certain direction that was right for you, and you ended up where you belonged, doing what was right for you. This wordless knowing is intuition--your soul perceiving and knowing in the light. When you obey this guidance without images or words, it leads you safely to where you are supposed to be.
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But we are all led astray by temptation, tease and challenge on the outside. We doubt our intuition and listen to the loud voice of the worldly tempters. These tempters, who come in various guises, tempt you to be ambitious, to study, to grab for knowledge. If you are not the ambitious type, then they mock, ridicule, and ostracize you. They make you feel like the ugly duckling, and your resentment of them then tempts you to prove something to them or grab for what you have been denied.
For worldly approval, we cop out. But this puts us in conflict with intuition. Deep down we sense in a wordless way that living and moving and having our being in a simple guileless way will permit us to be our real self. And deep down we also know (though we doubt it) that all the blessings and benefits, true success and prosperity (without guilt) can be had by living properly and not being ambitious.
We all have to learn our lesson. Years later, we discover that we turned our back on our true lodestar. We groan and mourn our errors and wrongs. We want to turn back and return to honor, simplicity, innocence, and courage. We want to live rightly. We want a second chance to be a good husband, wife, son, daughter, parent or friend. Like Dorothy, we want to go back to Kansas, But we don't know how.
Luckily there is a way back. it involves once again grasping with firm conviction the beautiful truths you once knew and loved as a child. It means standing for principle, even if it means losing the favor of the world.
Most of all, it means realizing that what now feels like conscience is God's Light of Truth still delicately pursuing you to gently call you back. It only feels like conscience, instead of intuition, because you strayed from in and have conflict with it. Give in to conscience, and your soul will begin to be purged, and you will be on your way back to all the good you ever hoped for. It begins right here and now as you read these words.
