Reaching Your Core Self
by Jeffrey Pierce

This is a continuation of the excerpt, Finding the Stars

Let's begin this journey with your insight, not my own. After all, every change - whether to our own lives or to the world around us - has to come from within.

Think about your version of the Divine. It doesn't matter if you call it God, Goddess, The Universe, Allah, or if you don't call it anything at all. Imagine that one night, in the midst of a dream, you find yourself spending time with your version of the Divine. It's just the two of you. After a few hours together in the Dreamtime, you have truly connected with your concept of the embodiment of divinity, not as some amorphous theory, but as an actual individual.

With that concept in mind, take out a piece of paper and write down the characteristics that describe your vision of the Divine. Perhaps the first word on your list is "compassion." Maybe your list starts with "patient" or "strong." Take a moment before you read another word and actually make that list.

Got it?

Then we're ready to move forward.

If this book was a presentation being given to an audience of 100,000 people, I would have you share your list with those around you. As you begin to share your vision, you're given the task to find one person that has written down exactly the same characteristics that you've listed on your own paper.

Chances are, you would never find that person. Every list would be different. Should you find a match, you would also find a person that was very much like you in every way that matters - perspective, thoughts, beliefs, hopes, and fears.

This doesn't mean that there are 100,000 different gods and goddesses out there. Our experiment doesn't indicate that there are right and wrong ways of viewing the Divine, that some people listed the correct characteristics and some failed the "God Test."

When you meditate on the Divine, when you make your list, you aren't describing God. The Divine is beyond any of our comprehension, a concept that we will look at in detail in coming chapters. It's the "What does God look like?" paradox. Very few of us would describe God as being someone of the opposite gender and a very different ethnic group. While I passionately embrace diversity and have numerous African American friends, my version of the divine is not an African American woman - just as you would be hard-pressed to find an African American woman who saw the divine as a bald Caucasian man. Each time we define God, we limit the divine. If God is male, then God is not female. If God is what I see when I write the characteristics down on my list, then God is not what you see when you look at the Divine.

The question is not, "Well, what is God like then?" but rather, "What is it we're seeing when we make our list?"

What you're seeing is you.

That's why every list is different. That's why you connect with the person who has the list that is very similar to your own. We can't even begin to comprehend the immense diversity of the Divine, so our fallback position is to define it in such a way that it is familiar to us. What we should be doing is striving to draw closer to the Divine, not to force it to be more mortal and flawed.

The easiest way to do that is to discover who you are. That's why we begin this journey with your own answers. Your list of characteristics describes your own core.

For most of your life you've been taught, sometimes consciously taught, to be less than you truly are. Much of the journey ahead is going to be devoted to teaching you how to see beyond the lies that have been forced upon you and allowing you to embrace your own power and beauty.

What would you give to live as the list of characteristics that you wrote down? The secret isn't in teaching you anything other than to trust yourself, to allow you to set your own course and to navigate that course with your own internal compass. You will not end up like me. In that auditorium filled with 100,000 other people, you will not end up like any of them. You will end up with all of the power and beauty that is represented on your list - and that uniqueness is exactly who you truly are at your core.

Now imagine that each person in the auditorium filled with 100,00 people did the same thing. Imagine that before you walked out of those doors, that each of learned to truly embrace yourself as a unique creation of the Divine and that you saw unique facets of divinity reflected in every pair of eyes that you met. When you left the auditorium, you would live the lives you wanted to live, pursue the passions that you wanted to pursue, and decorate your life with the colors, sounds, and emotions that are uniquely your own. We will still butt heads from time to time; with that much diversity, the pieces simply don't always line up.

But imagine what the world would be like if we all fully lived our list.

That's the secret. That's how we save the world. Every chapter beyond this one is simply instruction and insight - the tools to employ to gain perspective where you're not seeing clearly; how to bring your life into alignment with your core self; how to live fully in each moment; how to embrace your beauty; how to appropriately wield your power.

By the end of this journey together, your list will change. This isn't because you were wrong or that you have altered who you are, but simply because you see more clearly than you did before you embraced the lessons before you. One of my students once referred to it as "corrective lenses for the soul." I like to think of it as taking off thick corrective lenses when our natural vision is clear. It's a falling away, not a process of adding to you. From my perspective, you are a unique expression of Creation; the appropriate role for me, as a traditionally trained shaman, isn't to mold you, but to set you free.

As we move together on the path ahead, we’ll reclaim our power. We’ll discover love. We will ask hard, probing questions and instead of relying on another person’s answers, we will measure, we’ll analyze, we’ll investigate, we’ll intuit, we’ll feel, and we’ll learn. The truth we’ll find won’t come from anywhere but from within ourselves. We’ll not only find answers to our questions, but we’ll develop the tools to continue to explore and learn for our entire lives. And those lives, as we engage in active spirituality, will become richer, deeper, more powerful, and thoroughly saturated with love.

Thoughts? Comments? You can contact us at connect@oldways.com or interact with Jeffrey, Briana, and the Old Ways community on our Facebook page.