"We are here to become the best version of ourselves that we can become".
I found this quote while reading Tomorrow's God By Neale Donald Walsch. For me this is a very provocative quote. It is a fascinating process to try to touch into the sense of that. Try. Close your eyes and try to feel, to sense, to image, to remember your best self. Hopefully, it is not too distantly far from who we are this moment or yesterday. Of course we all have our moments where we are unwarrantedly cross with others, where judgement or bias enters in - but hopefully it is not hard for us to remember moments where we acted with kindness, generosity of spirit, compassion, courage, humility, love, resolve, ___________ or whatever those traits are that we feel would edge us towards our better selves.
It seems both interesting and challenging to try to pull together all those snippets of memory, of lived experience, those traits and gifts into one simultaneous and ongoing expression of self. That I think would be to be "the best version of ourselves" that Walsch calls us to, or more correctly that the Creator calls us to.
This also reminds me of the quote (erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandala for many years):
"We ask ourselves: who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to manifest the glory of God that is within us; it's in everyone. And as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
I have appreciated the way it talks about how we keep ourselves small and challenges so boldly "what can it possibly serve?" As Richard Bach also conveyed this idea in Illusions: "Argue for your limitations and they are yours". Yes, why do we keep ourselves small? Why do we argue for our limitations - justifying them and claiming them like a familiar worn out sweater, claiming them as insurmountable.
It strikes me that there are two problems: one being a psychological one and one being a spiritual problem. Psychologically we have had messages laid on us early and reinforced often so we both have negative self image, but also messages limiting what we believe is possible about change. (These things are addressable through therapy.) But the spiritual problem is that we see the job of change or growth as all our own work and we do not see or acknowledge the role of the creator in that growth. We may not have a personal relationship with God, or may not see God as a source of strength available to us, or maybe even as a sympathetic source (See earlier posts about images of God). Or we may have beliefs about original sin or our own "fallen nature" that get in the way.
As Walsch says: Here is a central tenet of the New Spirituality: the purpose- and the greatest opportunity and gift- of life is to re-create yourself a new in the next grandest version you ever held about Who You Are. And you can do it every single moment of Now....It is not a question of whether you "have what it takes ," but of whether you take what you have- and then use it.
