True Identity

My nephew (his father and I have been friends since we were 11 years old.  He’s my brother from another mother) sat at the breakfast table yesterday.  I asked, “Christian, what do you want for breakfast?”“Soup.  I want soup!” He answered loudly while fidgeting on the chair.“What kind of soup do you want, baby?”“The wet kind,” He answered as a matter-of-fact.Well, of course, I thought.  What other kind would there be?  At 3-1/2 years old he knows what he wants and how he wants it.  Most children at that age have very little filtering system.  As children we think more concretely.  It is somewhere in between eight and eighty that we lose the finesse of being honest about what we want and how we want it.  A lot of times we have no clue of what we really want.Reading a book called Soulshaping by Jeff Brown some time ago, I came upon a sentence: “Never confuse conscious effortlessness with conscious laziness.”  Just that sentence brought up a huge amount of questions inside of me.  I began to think, “how do you know what you want if you don’t know who you are?”  Confusing our conscious wants without realizing the conscious consequences is a mistake we all make.  And out of pure laziness we expect our wants to materialize and fix everything.  Our identity morphs into our surroundings, environments and deviate from our truth.It is always difficult to battle with resistance from our human perspective.  Our ego’s main job is to make certain that we continue to fight.  What we want is not always what completes us.  We seem to depart from our original wants and then blame the universe for not getting what we think we deserve. Somewhere, somehow, in our busy lives we have detoured from the simplicity of our plans.  We make excuses but not follow through.  We expect, with arrogance, that the world owes us things.  The truth is that until we can reach the essence of our identity we cannot know what we want.  Whether it is soup, a family, a car, or peace, we cannot reach what we do not know.These are the nuts and bolts of living a life in separation versus unity.  Our wants can’t be met if we don’t know who we are.  We don’t sit long enough to take accounting of our desires.  We think that needs are the same as our wants.  What we need and what we want are in constant battle with our Spirit.  God speaks through our strengths the most compelling way.  We spend our lives not feeling the truth of who we are, and not really knowing consciously what we want.  Whenever we do come in alignment with our desires and the Divine, then we must take a look at the reflection and realize that whatever we manifest is exactly who we are meant to be.  The illusion of control, law and science melts because life just is.  We learn to see the world as it is, not how our perception creates it from our egotistical wants.Christian’s father, my darling brother, said that when he was in the army his mentor said to him, “Now Frank, when you get to the fork on the road keep going.”   He said at the time, in his early twenties, that this did not make sense.  But, now he knows he has to be true to himself and let intuition guide him to which path he must take.  May you find your true self at the end of the fork so you can pick the one Spirit has laid out for you!