By Harold Boulette
“You will have noticed, as with practice your familiarity with the state of Recollection has increased, that the kind of consciousness which it brings with it, the sort of attitude which it demands of you, conflict sharply with the consciousness and the attitude which you have found so appropriate to your ordinary life in the past. They make this old attitude appear childish, unworthy, at last absurd. By this first deliberate effort to attend to Reality you are at once brought face to face with that dreadful revelation of disharmony, unrealness, and interior muddle which the blunt moralists call ‘conviction of sin.’ Never again need those moralists point out to you the inherent silliness of your earnest pursuit of impermanent thing: your solemn concentration upon the game of getting on.” ~Evelyn Underhill
Recollection can result in this reevaluation of priorities, just as Ms. Underhill wrote. This is not just ordinary recollection, of course. Remembering where you left your car keys won’t have this effect, nor will remembering the name of your third-grade teacher. The type of Recollection Underhill is talking about is the recollection of your true nature: who you truly are, where you came from, what is the purpose of your live, that sort of thing. Mystics and adepts call this “showing your real face.” In this case, showing your real face to yourself, not necessarily to others.
Don’t confuse this with simple introspection: looking at your subconscious motivations, beliefs, and filters to understand why you behave a certain way. That is a useful thing to do, but this is something far beyond that. This isn’t remembering what town your physical body was born in, but where your soul came from. This isn’t remembering what country your ancestors came from, but remembering the spiritual realms that are the source of your spirit and soul. This is a kind of Recollection that cannot be done with the mind; it must be done by awakening the spirit and soul.
Underhill tells us that when we do achieve this state, our daily pursuits will seem foolish and pointless. If you are over thirty-years-old, you have probably experienced seeing high-school kids on a TV show, or even in real life (so called), getting all worked up over something as silly as getting a pimple or having the teen pundits declare the designer of your new jeans “so last week!” and you laugh and can’t believe you ever got worked up over such silliness. When you achieve this higher level of consciousness that Ms. Underhill calls Recollection, you will feel just as foolish about the things you worry about now, as an adult living in the material world. You needed be embarrassed about it, it happened to all of us. Is is so easy to get caught up in the silly running around in circles that is so much a part of the material world, the world of illusions. In truth, however, those foolish pursuits were probably a necessary step on your way to enlightenment, so there is no need to regret them, or regret the lost time, just move on now that you are in a better place and have a better understanding of the world. And if you haven’t reached that state, start working on it now. It really is very freeing and very enlightening to reach this state of Recollection.
This article was previously published on the Solar Wind blog.