THE OVERCOMING OF ONESELF

[Ms Tercy Lonan]

54. THE OVERCOMING OF ONESELF
Gurudev has awakened us to the pearl of great price, the supreme value. He has shown us a
sublime and higher ideal to live for which brings a great, lofty significance to our life. There is a
deep meaning and a lofty, sublime purpose behind life. Life is not existence, not striving, not
survival; life is attainment, it is achievement, a glorious culmination.
When this is understood and realised, life becomes worth living. Each day becomes full
with deep significance and meaning. Each day becomes an adventure, as it were, in the overcoming
of oneself and the overcoming of seemingly adverse circumstances which are, in truth,
opportunities to help us to overcome ourselves.
Such overcoming is indeed the greatest of all victories. Overcoming others may not be too
difficult. Status, power, authority, wealth, superior personality, domination, strength—ever so
many factors—can help one. And there are also urges to overcome others, such as ego-trip,
prestige, self-satisfaction, a peculiar type of irrational, illogical sense of achievement. But all these
factors—which in the ultimate analysis are hollow, non-productive and negative—are not there in
the overcoming of oneself.

There is no question of privilege in the overcoming of oneself. One is only too conscious of
how hollow one is. More than anyone else in the whole world, one is only too acutely aware of one’s
own defects, one’s own drawbacks, imperfections and insufficiency. The whole world may see a
golden image. The golden image is aware of its clay feet.
Where there is introspection, there is humility. Where there is deep and sincere
self-analysis, there is a true appraisal of one’s own inadequacy. And out of this appraisal, out of this
realisation of one’s inadequacy, springs the urge for overcoming, for working diligently, for
perfecting oneself.
If, lacking introspection, analysis and humility, one sees only all that is good in oneself, then
all evolution, progress, self-overcoming and self-improvement comes to a stop. One becomes
complacent and self-sufficient. There is no greater risk and danger in the spiritual life than such
complacency and self-sufficiency. It is a great bar, a hurdle that has to be overcome.
Out of this realisation of what one truly is springs forth a great desire, a great determination
and strong resolve: “No, I shall overcome—not anything outside of me, but everything inside of me
that needs to be overcome. It will be ‘do or die.’ I shall overcome and I shall succeed come what
may. For that is the only purpose for which life has been given to me. I shall not rest until I have
succeeded, for I know that the perfection that has to be achieved is already within me. I have to
rediscover it; I have to uncover it; I have to activate it; I have to manifest it. This is what life is.
Therefore, I have not far to seek, but I have work to do!”
Seeking, questing are words used for lack of more suitable words. They are words taken
from the context of the external space-time dimension of one’s life, where, when one loses
something, one has to find; one seeks here, there, everywhere. Lacking other terms, we make use of
these words also in regard to the mystical inner dimension of our spiritual being, even though they
do not convey within the same meaning that they convey in the outer dimension.
There is no seeking. There is nothing that is lost. Everything is found. Only we are not aware
that it is there. There may be a finding, but there is no seeking. If an old grandfather has pushed his
spectacles up on his forehead and then hunts all over for them thinking he has lost them, he needs to
discover or be told: “You have not lost them. They are right there.” Even so, you have only to
rediscover, to remember, recollect, remove this Self-forgetfulness. That is the situation in the
spiritual life.
Therefore, indeed, this is a mysterious inward journey, an attainment of a thing which has
never been non-attained. For you are the Being whom you are seeking. You are already That which
you want to be. But great effort is required to discard the persistent wrong idea that you are
something else.
And the essence of this is the word persistence. You have to persevere and you have to
persist. If you stop breathing, in a short time you will cease to exist biologically. Even so, to put an
end to Self-forgetfulness, to the alienation of oneself from one’s own true, essential, eternal
Self—to discard the hollow, erroneous wrong notion of a spurious, transitory, non-existent
identity—effort should be kept up in an unbroken stream of a newly awakened consciousness.

In the depth of your own newly awakened self-awareness (where time stops and you are
permanently yourself) this parallel, inward, unseen stream has to be there—dynamic in its
continuity, non-stop in its unbroken flow—at all times, even while eating, drinking, sleeping,
working, or resting.
Towards this end are all teachings. And they call it the highest knowledge. The highest
knowledge of a being is knowledge of one’s own Self. Therefore, one needs to be awake among
sleepers, vigilant among the heedless, ever active among the slothful, living in a perpetual dawn and
day where night has no place.
And, in this effort great overcoming is necessary to push away the persistent recurrence of
habitual contrary thinking in the wrong direction. That is all. The awakened higher self has to stand
in contradiction and opposition to the petty lesser self which rules the interior at present due to the
momentum of past habit carried over through births.
There should be the cessation of this stream of error and the springing up of the fountain of
truth which must rule the interior in an unbroken stream ever moving towards its source, the great
ocean of satchidananda, that is here and now.
May the grace of the Supreme and the loving benedictions of the Master grant you the gift of
this life of ever-awakened awareness, so that your life may be full of light, so that you may really
live!