by Jim Ivy
Growth is inevitable. It usually leads to shedding things outgrown. This is quite apparent when it comes to children; they almost immediately outgrow the things you just gave them: that stuffed Teddy bear, that adorable flowered dress, the high chair, their favorite books. When was my child ever that small?
Do you remember the feeling of outgrowing your clothes? As adults, it is not something we experience often. When we do it is usually horizontally rather than vertically.
Outgrown clothing is difficult to get into. It is constraining and limiting. It makes you fidgety, squirmy and irritable. Even the thought of it causes discomfort.
But then there is the experience of the next size up: JOY! complete comfort bringing with it a sense of expansion, of growing and maturing. A new level attained.
The more aware you become, the more you can see that this is true for all aspects of life. The idea may not be as obvious as clothing, but your consciousness, and the world you perceive, can be outgrown as well. If you have not already become aware of this limitation to your universe, one of the first realizations you have during The Avatar Course is how tight fitting you have made your life and the world around you.
Why is this constraint so unpleasant? Because at our purest essence we are every possibility and limitless. Full of all potential. But through years of enforced mannerisms, fears of failure, reinforced conditioning, all weaknesses we choose to believe, we limit ourselves by restricting our own potential and scope.
And we’ve managed to fool ourselves, as well as strengthen these beliefs, by displacing our responsibility of the limitation. “Every time I try, I fail. It never gets done. It will always be this way. If I only had (the time, the money, the education, the chance)...”
When we no longer claim ownership and take responsibility for what we are creating, the ability to create what we would prefer is lost. The creation now owns the creator. We become trapped in a reality that appears too big and out of our control. No longer able to shape our creation, we can only react to life rather than live it deliberately. All by our own doing.
But think about it, only a highly aware being could do such a thorough and complex job of tricking itself. In order to manipulate the mechanism so well, we’ve got to know how it works. We must have constructed and developed the mechanics involved in order to use them. We’ve just lost sight of our potential by building layers of limiting beliefs that distance ourselves from this awareness. It’s like being in a maze of your own construction and not even knowing you are inside it.
So that limitless being is there in all of us. It just needs to be awakened. We may occasionally stumble upon our limitless self accidentally, catching a glimpse here or there, but to view the world as source and creator, we need to act upon it deliberately with the awareness of the experience. This is the Avatar path: to re-discover that limitless potential and re-familiarize ourselves with the world from this vantage point. And once you’re here, the view is breathtaking.
Avatar doesn’t tell you how to live, what to believe, or where to go. It is the one-size-fits-all-forever solution, with special non-shrink fabric, that allows you to re-establish yourself as the creator of your universe, shaping it as you prefer. The gift of limitless expansion that Avatar offers means that the only limits from here on are up to you. You can outgrow your limits and attain the highest level. As Harry says, “We are bound only by the boundaries we choose.”
Jim Ivy has been a Star’s Edge employee since 2001.
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