The Tiny Self

1) you are somehow the problem, 2) the answer is within you, and

3) you need help from a higher power.

Every master's lesson, every parable or spiritual riddle, every confounding question is intended to bring up the limitations of our own wisdom, our own power, our own tiny self. Compare that, if you will, to the Western educational approach of parroting answers, passing tests, and getting grades, which make us think we do know what is important and, therefore, we are important. Information is seen as power, as opposed to the beginner's mind, which wisdom deems absolutely necessary for enlightenment. Jesus called it "receiving the kingdom like a little child" (see Luke 18:17).

To submit to being taught means accepting the wonder and largeness of truth (the bubble of Love that holds us all) and our own smallness in relationship to it. Eventually we must learn to hold the paradox of our finite self held within the eternal and infinite (bubble of ) Love.

(Through initiation rites,) Sacred cultures could tell individuals they were not that important because they knew they were inherently and intrinsically very important. Secular cultures like ours keep telling individuals how special and wonderful they are--and they still don't believe it--and thus have to run faster and faster!    ~R. Rohr