Richard Harvey - Your Essential Self: The Inner Journey to Authenticity & Spiritual Enlightenment

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

Your Essential Self: The Inner Journey to Authenticity and Spiritual Enlightenment 2013 by Richard Harvey.

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First e-book edition 2013

E-book ISBN: 9780738736853

Cover art: Woman: iStockphoto.com/Aleksandar Nakic

Cover design by Lisa Novak

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To Xanthe, Skip, Lily, and Gabriel, for their love, their lessons, and their freedom. Always remember your essence is divine.

Acknowledgments

My gratitude and deep respect go to those committed souls who have sought the unknown with me. I write this out of respect and admiration to them and in awe of the mystery that guides us in the endeavor to realize our potential, our truth, and our divinity.

To those seekers and friends whose dreams, narratives, and anecdotes have been drawn on for this book, thank you.

To my readers group, who examined, commented, and contributed to the manuscript over many stages of changeparticularly, Duncan Bell, the late Aspen Edge, Julie Kaloczi, and Eric Krohnand to my friend and collaborator Rev. Robert Meagher for invaluable fine-tuning at the end. Their time and attention has given invaluable and inspiring support in the shaping of Your Essential Self . Also to my wife, Nicky Harvey, who tended this book from conception to realization and who has contributed to it and to my life in more ways than I can express.

To my vigilant and well-informed editor, Brett Fechheimer, who gave such careful comments and attention and through whose guidance I was able to create a more approachable, accessible book; to Angela Wix; and to all the team at Llewellyn, my heartfelt thanks.

To this wonderful reflection of the Divineordinary life in the world of thought and feeling, past and future, loss and rebirth, reflections of light, unselfconscious beauty and luminosity I cannot stay here long, but how much I learned while I was here!

To my teachers, alive and dead: may the resonant truth of their wisdom, insight, and understanding reverberate long after this book is dust. For not leaving us to wander, I extend deep gratitude and reverence to them all. And, finally, to the great silence, mouna , the sense of presence, the Divine within.

Contents

STAGE ONE: The Process of Self-Discovery

. The Basis for an Inner Practice

. Identity, Separation, and Division

. The Dynamics of the Inner World

. Relationships

. Stages of Transition

. A New Revolution in Awareness

STAGE TWO: The Transformation into Authenticity

. Becoming Who You Are

. Responding from the Heart

. Stabilizing in Transformation

. Ways to Realization

STAGE THREE: The Source of Consciousness

. Becoming the True Self

. Realizing Our True Nature

. Perpetual Illumination

Prologue

What Is Your Essential Self ?

Awakening to your essential self is an idea that has been around since human history began. It can be found in most or all religious and spiritual traditions, as well as modern New Age thinking. Simply put, its the idea that human birth is a paradoxical experience. On the one hand we grow, mature, and adapt to become part of the human world; on the other, through the indoctrination of conditioning, we forget where we have come from and who or what we really are. So being born is awakening into this world, but falling asleep to a deeper reality.

This book is about how we can awaken to our essential self in this lifetime and live to our full capacity and potential as a human being. Human beings are animalistic, compassionate, and divineinfinitely more splendid, amazing, and diverse than we can imagine. Most of us spend our lives in the first levelthe animalistic level. Sometimes we rise to the second level and truly love, and feel compassionate. Fewer still make the heart the abiding center of their lives and even rarer is the human being who longs for the truth, for the eternal, and for the divine, and sees human life as a unique and precious opportunity for discovering the divine being that inheres within the psychic body-form.

Human beings mostly live at a fraction of their full potential. Try as we might, money, relationships, possessions, and prestige cannot fill the inner void. Potential and fulfillment, like satisfaction and joy, must be authentic and real. In fact, they must be inner . We have a deep integrity about life and a great curiosity. Human beings have been questioning and questing for thousands of years. At the forefront of their field of interest is the search for their true nature, for something that is deathless. Some call it God, or Brahman, Allah, YHWH, or Great Spirit; it is changeless, omnipotent, omniscient, and immanentmore here than we areand it is our human destiny to awaken to it.

This book charts the course of awakening to your essential self in three stages. The fulfillment of these three stages of human development is within our innate capacity, and it is attained through a single, connected process of awakening .

The first stage, The Process of Self-Discovery , describes how we explore, understand, and finally transcend our small sense of self through identifying and shedding restrictive life conditioning and emotional and behavioral patterns, becoming whole, and fulfilling our personal potential.

The second stage, The Transformation into Authenticity , describes how we can reach the state of permanent change and personal authenticity by stabilizing in the personal changes we made in the first stage and empowering ourselves to relate authentically and compassionately to other people and the outer world. This stage is the flowering of personal inner work.