If you have attained ultimate perfection, you do not need to change. If you are completely happy, you do not need to change. If you are already fulfilling your potential and your life’s highest purpose, you do not need to change.
Yet who can say that he or she is already utterly perfect, happy and fulfilled?
No-one.
If we are not yet absolutely happy and fulfilled, and we aspire to be so, then something in us must change. Change is the indispensable agent of progress.
As humans we at once desperately need change, and yet we fear and resist that very change which is necessary for our greater happiness and fuller perfection.
These two contradictory forces – the yearning for, and fear of change – are natural and inherent tendencies in us all.
Fear of change arises from our established, finite consciousness, to which change poses a threat. Our present ego fears that change will see its supremacy threatened or worse, extinguished altogether.
The yearning for change comes from our spiritual heart, aspiring for the infinite light, bliss and freedom of our soul. Our heart senses and knows that to attain to the infinite, demands that we first transcend the boundaries and bondage of the finite, embodied in our thoughts and desires, notions, prejudices and fixed ideas.
This process involves a fundamental realignment of our perception of our selves: from our present notion that we are a finite, material being with some spiritual tendencies, to the realisation that we are first and foremost a spiritual being, a soul, inhabiting and experiencing but not defined by a finite world and life.
Expansion of our consciousness by recognising, challenging and ultimately transcending the mind’s limitations – which is the very purpose of meditation – is the only way to effect lasting change, within and without.