The Outside Is the Inside, and the Inside Is the Outside (6/8)

(Continued from last time)

★When you (the inside) change, your surroundings (the outside) change

To deepen your understanding here, let’s give one more concrete example. Say there’s a woman who is fed up with her husband nagging her, nitpicking over every little mistake she makes.

When someone like that puts this way of using consciousness to work, she can notice the fact that what she felt toward her husband was actually an event like facing mirrors, and realize that similar feelings were actually in her own heart too. So she no longer needs to spend her conscious energy trying to change him, and she can use her consciousness effectively instead of wasting it.

Instead, if she makes a point of using her own conscious energy to evolve her past habits of thought, words, and deeds, then even though she never tried to change her husband, there are stories of his nagging stopping before long.

What does that mean? The other person really does change a little, but the big point in this first stage of change is that, even though she’s being told the same things as before, her heart has grown big enough that she no longer takes them as nagging but receives them as advice given out of love, so she comes to feel, “He’s stopped saying nasty things to me.”

Why does that happen? Because when your consciousness evolves, the diameter of your soul (your vibrational sphere of consciousness) grows larger, so small things no longer shake you. And in the first place, what you don’t do yourself is no longer reflected in the outer world, which is the world of the mirror, so real, practical changes also start to happen, with the other person changing.

What you need to be careful about here is that people with a habit of reflection who blame themselves for everything tend to get the angle of their thoughts wrong, and so they tend to end up bullying themselves.

Reflection is fine when it’s plainly clear that “I was in the wrong.” But when you can’t tell no matter how calmly you look at your heart, and you crush your heart thinking, “How hopeless I am,” that is really nothing other than “misusing reflection.”

It’s a mistake people tend to make when they don’t know the truth of the soul: that human life has repeated reincarnation, being born and dying, hundreds and thousands of times, and that you are here now because you chose to be born as the culmination of all that.

Looking at the movements of the hearts of individual people living on the Earth, if the destiny of this life appeared only as the result of thoughts, words, and deeds in this life alone, they could clearly sort out the causes and effects of all kinds of things. But the truth is that more often it isn’t so. So many people are struggling in a bottomless-swamp state of mind (suffering) because they can’t find the cause, amid discord in relationships and pitfalls of destiny that make them think, “Why do I have to go through this?”

In such cases, you don’t need to know the exact cause. It’s enough simply to watch that destiny pass by with a light heart, thinking, “Ah, something I’ve carried over from the past is fading away by appearing like this. By appearing like this, it’s trying to fade away.” (To be continued)