“you are not really a person at all. You are most certainly having the experience of being a person, but in the bigger picture it’s not who you are.” Rhonda Byrne
Well that’s just ridiculous! Of course I’m a person. Look! Here’s my body, and my hands typing on my computer. And words come out of my mouth when I speak. And, well, It’s just obvious that I’m a person.
And so there you have it, right there – the greatest secret in the quote, and the response of the mind in the subsequent lines.
At the beginning of the book Rhonda rightly says that most people overlook the discovery of this secret, “not because it’s difficult, but because it’s so simple.”
Think about it…
Have you ever worked for a company where you kept trying to simplify things? Maybe saying ‘right, we’ll just focus on these 3 priorities this year’ and then finding yourselves still doing 20? Or starting with a lovely simple process and then finding that, once interested parties have got involved, it became a 20-page instruction manual and 3 new computer systems!
It’s that propensity of the mind to go towards complexity and the creation of new that leads it to lose sight of the simple, and the foundation from which it is existing.
The mind is like a creatively branching tree. It begins with one thing and then can’t help but extend and diversify and create more. It’s very cool how it does that. And yet it is also the cause of suffering and the greatest barrier to seeing the hidden-in-plain-sight secret for what it is, because the mind, enamoured by its creations, goes off into the branches to look for the answer of who I am and what the world is, when the answer was always right back at the simplicity of its source.
Why would we even care about understanding this Greatest Secret?
What’s the point?
For sure it’s not essential to life. Millions and billions, of people go through life never considering this. But for those that it’s interesting to, they discover the space of lasting peace and happiness they’ve been looking for their whole lives. What they’ve been trying to find in jobs, people and possessions, even in wellbeing habits and practices, but to no avail, is found to have been right here all along.
If this is interesting to you, and you’d like to know where lasting peace and happiness are, absent of stress and overwhelm, begin that exploration by considering that what’s ‘real’ doesn’t come and go. And therefore what you really are also doesn’t come and go.
What is that? What, in your experience, in the experience of being a ‘you’, has never come or gone, never changed, never been impacted by any events in your life?
Tell me what occurs to you!
With love, Helen
If you’d like to continue this exploration into The Greatest Secret I have 3 — increasingly deepening — options for you:
- Sign up on Patreon to follow my posts about the book, and be prompted by reflective questions to check out what the book says in your actual experience
- Buy the book and sign up on Patreon so you can read along with the posts and questions so you get a richer experience of the book
- Get a last place in the book group before we begin the live group this Thursday 8pm UK. You’re so very welcome there! This is the richest and deepest option of all as we share our observations and realisations together, live.