Going Beyond the Darkest Hour

After many setbacks in our lives, we inevitably reach the point of our darkest hour. This is the moment that we feel powerless to move forward in our lives. In other words, in the book, Let There Be Life, it's

         "Because it'll mean that the pain has become so unbearable that I can't take any more. It's the darkest hour just before I see the dawn of light."

Many of  us believe  in this darkest hour folklore, because of our illusions. We associate darkness and light with suffering and enlightenment.

This association makes it easy for us to believe that whatever happens after we reach our darkest hour is the light or enlightenment. Unfortunately, both the darkest hour and the light are illusions created from our beliefs and values.

Our illusions exist to give us hope that something magical can happen to eradicate our pain.  Similarly, hope is responsible for our powerlessness. It confirms the existence of the darkest hour.

For many of us, when we feel defeated or powerless, we believe we need hope. So it's not uncommon for us to seek solace in hope or to daydream about a better situation. Unfortunately, our hopes are limited by the beliefs and values we have about ourselves and the outside world.

Meanwhile, some of us perceive the darkest hour from another perspective. In this perspective, the darkest hour represents the opportunity for us to begin our inner-mind work.

In other words, it's the point where we all must come voluntarily if we desire to overcome the illusions in our lives. This means that whatever decisions we make during this time, we must make them with enlightenment on our minds.

Too many of us turn to outside sources to help us with our darkest hour beliefs. This is precipitated by our conclusions that we must curse our own minds for having put us in this position in the first place. These illusory conclusions are responsible for our distrust in our minds. So we seek solutions from others.

Our illusions, the beliefs and values we have embodied, are responsible for the decisions we made to create the darkest hour. They also hold the key to our freedom from the pain of the darkest hour.

While this seems like a paradox, it is not. When we understand that we are the  creator of our illusions, we are able to go beyond our creations and enter into the enlightenment part of our minds.

The key to enlightenment is first discovered in our beliefs and values. This is the starting point for all humans who have achieved enlightened minds.

There are no shortcuts or magical formulas for understanding how we create pain in our lives. There's only awareness, responsibility, and the willingness to go beyond what we have been taught by others.

For us to go beyond what we have been taught by others require our awareness of the existence of something (enlightenment) in our minds that's greater than the illusions we have created in our lives. This awareness confirms that enlightenment is in our individual minds and not in the minds of others.

So we must awaken our minds to become aware of self-enlightenment. This awakening begins with our Powers of Mind.

Powers of Mind produces both clarity and confusion. So we must work to understand how to use our minds to create clarity rather than confusion.

Powers of Mind is a gift of enlightenment wrapped in our beliefs and values. To see our gift, we must remove the wrappings.