The Mask & The Self
Thaken from Elisabeth Haich
INITIATION
'Watch the people around you. You'll notice some are constantly talking about love and goodness, wearing sweet smiles of smugness, and trying to show others on all possible occasions that they are "loving" and "good". But only on the outside! They wear the mask of love and goodness; but when it comes to deeds, they reveal their selfishness—because they are selfishness.
'Another person may never talk about goodness and never think that he wants to be "good"; yet everything he thinks, says and does comes forth out of goodness, because he himself is goodness!
A PERSON DOESN'T THINK ABOUT WHAT HE IS; NOR DOES HE FEEL IT; SIMPLY BECAUSE HE IS WHAT HE IS!
He doesn't need to speak about it; everything he thinks, says and does is the expression of what he is, the manifestation of his own being!
'Now comes the most difficult task of all: concentrate on yourself. First reflect and consider what you are, then feel what you are, and finally you must be what you are!
'For you to have become conscious here on earth, you have had to leave your true self and enter into your intellect and feelings. So far you have only been able to think and feel what you are, but you have never yet been able to be what you are! Observe the people around you and you will see that they are not their real selves. On the contrary, they are always identifying themselves with thoughts, feelings and roles they are playing here on earth. They have "fallen out" of their real selves and become pretenders, people living in a world of make-believe. Only in the eyes of very small children can you still see the sparkle, the light of real being. As its intellect awakens, the child begins to identify itself with its outward person, getting more and more removed from its divine, true self. And all the while the person, as we think about him, is only a mask through which the true self—the great invisible one—looks out at the world. The person cannot be more than an instrument for the manifestation of the self.
But people get so attached to their mask that they cannot free themselves from it any more. The true self is king and master, the person is only his servant. But the sons of men abandoned their self and, descending from the throne, identified themselves with their mask, with their person. They make a king out of the servant and separate themselves from their true being.
They force their higher self into exile, into the unconscious. The intellect causes this separation, and by means of concentration exercises and a purposeful effort to become conscious and aware, the intellect can be an instrument by which we get out of this separation and back to our true self.
'In the past you have concentrated on various things. From now on, your one and only task is to concentrate on yourself, progressing through the three
161
phases of concentration until you achieve complete identification with your own true self, until you really are your self. It is your task to reach the state of being which can only be described, in the first person, as "I am that I am". But watch out! It's not enough for you to think what you are, nor to feel what you are; you must be what you are in your own true inner self!
