JOHN MCINTOSH
Cars honk at every corner of the city as the favorite sports team emerges victorious at the end of the season. Parents beam as their child receives the highest honors upon graduating from school. Management applauds the outstanding achievement of their corporate department for the year. Special interest organizations march, bursting with self-importance as they herald their unique visions. Pride is fostered and worshiped as a highly desirable ‘sacred cow’ to be worked toward and embraced at all costs.
Few children have dodged the chiding of their parents encouraging them to ‘make us proud’ … and this in many cases has been a thorny influence that has colored their entire life experience to the last breath as their final gasp may have been: “I just wanted to make my parents proud of me”. It could have been as a brilliant success in the career their parents chose for them or as a dictator of a country … the driving influence was there with its icy clutch around their throats.
Pride stands at the zenith of ‘separation’ proclaiming the great gulf between its topic of achievement and the rest of the pack. There are few things more stubbornly held fast to by the false self than pride with its powerful influence to salve the constant itch of ‘unworthiness’ that chaffs away at everyone until they have crossed the bridge into the Freedom of Who They Really Are. When one has made the NO MATTER WHAT choice to be Free, they must be ‘ruthlessly authentic’, leaving no stone unturned that insidiously masks the false self in the cloak of the ‘made-up’ respectability most hold so dear.
Nevertheless, while one ‘sleeps in the dream of separation’ believing they are a separated individual entity called ‘me’, as a stepping stone to unity consciousness and from there to actual ‘Unicity-Awareness’ [the ‘unbroken’ Awareness that there ‘is’ only ONE SELF and they are IT] … pride has a ‘temporary’ value.
-image by Solveig Larsen
SELF DISCOVERY books by John McIntosh
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