I am myself unlimited.
As long as I am myself, I am unlimited.
We often like to think about ourselves in terms of our limitations. In a sense, it is our limitations that define us — the things that delineate us from the world around us. Separation.
Our limits stand out to us because there are so many things, we want that we cannot have. We identify with the fleeting desires, thoughts, impressions, and emotions of our minds.
I want money, I don’t have enough. I want fitness. I want sex. I want the most delicious food. I want the world to myself.
The only problem is that to achieve these things, I must work. I could do it, I think, except I just seem to lack the energy. There is not enough time. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know enough. If only I had the energy, time, and knowledge!
It would seem I am limited, captive to my own insufficiencies and circumstance. Somehow, that seems wrong, however, is being who I am a cage? A limitation? While our fleeting desires, thoughts, impression, emotions and so forth, are part of us, they are not all that we are.
In hermetic philosophy, the mind is represented by the moon, and the soul by the sun. The mind, like the moon to the sun, only reflects a tiny portion of the soul at any given point in time. As the earth orbits the sun, revolves around its own axis, and wobbles in precession, and as the moon orbits around the earth, revolves around its own axis, and wobbles in precession — the part of the sun’s light that it reflects shifts. So too, our minds shift continuously as they reflect different parts of our souls’ light.
We change, but we remain the same; this is the riddle of personal identity philosophers have been trying to answer for millennia. Who are we? What are we? The soul, as we think of it, has historically been an answer to that question. The soul is immortal, eternal, infinite, complete. It is the essence of who we are, not just now, but through the days of our lives and beyond, reaching far into the past, into that timeless place of mystery and abstraction we occupied before our birth. And far ahead, into the future that lies beyond the darkness of death.
The soul is neither here nor there, yet simultaneously everywhere, stretching beyond the very fabric of this mortal, physical existence, holding in its embrace every emotion, interest, thought, action and experience of which we are capable.
We are not limited. The perceived limitation that prevents me from achieving the professed object of my desire is the rebellion of a soul that finds itself neglected.
When we try to crystallise the emotions, thoughts, and desires of a moment into an identity to form our lives around we isolate ourselves from the very force that animates us. The shallow things we sought in a moment of heightened desire — money, sex, drugs, status, whatever it may be — lose their lustre. And so, we might lose our drive to obtain them, or we might obtain them and not understand why we are not satisfied.
In alignment with our souls we lack nothing, and everything we desire is ours.
Not results, certainty, and comfort.
Not sex, nor money.
Not to have more, but to be more myself, and that is more than enough. I am myself unlimited.
4th of May, 2021
