Whenever I look at the sufferings of life and the darkness of the world, I think about how all this suffering and darkness before us is a bitter sneer at everything we, as beings capable of thought, could be but are not.

The dark and corrupt back alleys of cities, and poverty and injustice in the world, will remain as long as the dark alleys of our hearts and the unawareness, poverty, and darkness of our minds remain.
Every war in the external world is the consequence of a battle left unfinished within us, and everything we could have been but are not is only bitter testimony to all the consciousness we have withheld from ourselves.
We are free to choose between the splendour of being human and the horror of being human, and our refusal to choose—our avoidance of awareness and knowledge—has made the human being the most dangerous creature we know.

There is no question about how much evil and suffering we are capable of creating in the world for ourselves and other beings: it is already before our eyes and has already been done. The unanswered question is how far we might be able, through the development of our consciousness, to bring a better world into being.
Countless generations of us have passed, and continue to pass, into non-being as unrealized capacities. In each generation only a few of us honestly set out to discover and realize the Self. It is these few who keep alive the faint sparks of what we may one day become and carry forward the history of the evolution of consciousness.

Among all the beings of the world, we are the beings most intensely in the process of becoming. And when we look at ourselves, there is something stranger than intelligence that determines our fate: “our freedom to choose greater consciousness and the realization of the Self.”
We are free in our “becoming,” and we can choose to learn and become realized, or to bring our lives to an end unrealized.

The darkness of refusing consciousness, of not travelling the path of knowing, and the fear of realizing the meaning of our humanity stands before us. We see it continually—every day before us, staring into our eyes—as a bitter reminder of the splendour we could embody but do not.
All the ugliness and suffering we see in the world are the outcome of the lives of countless generations of our mothers and fathers in the past, and of ourselves today: we who die unrealized and leave behind in the world all this suffering and darkness, which is nothing other than the accumulation of the dark side of each of us.

Every human being who undertakes the journey of consciousness, passes through the darkness within and the darkness of the outer world, awakens the luminous side of the Self and the more beautiful possibilities of the world, and stands courageously, honestly, and freely for the realization of “everything that the self and the world can be but are not,” shakes the silence of the world and the pillars of darkness.
Every paradise realized within a human being transforms the image of the world and of consciousness, and from the fingertips of every heart that is no longer a hell, the splendour of humanity will grow.

Aydin Areta