” ‘We are not in the world, the world is within us.’ The first time I heard this, I was puzzled. How can the world be within me? How could it be possible that you, another human being, could live inside me? It took a long time to understand that what is actually inside me are the thousands of qualities and traits that make up every human being and that beneath the surface of every human is this blueprint of all mankind. The holographic model of the universe teaches us that each of us is a microcosm of the macrocosm. Each of us contains all the knowledge of the entire universe. If you examine one human being you will find a hologram of the universe. This universal blueprint resides in our DNA Every aspect of the universe is contained within each of us. The forces that comprise matter throughout the cosmos are found in each atom of the body. Every strand of my DNA carries the entire evolutionary history of life. When you understand that you contain everything you see in others, your entire world will alter. Our goal is to find and embrace everything that we love and everything that we hate in other people. When we reclaim these disowned aspects of ourselves, we open the door to the universe within. When we make peace with ourselves we spontaneously make peace with the world.
“Once we accept the fact that each of us embodies all the traits in the universe, we can stop pretending that we are not everything. Most of us were taught that we are different from other people. Some of us consider ourselves better than others, and many of us believe that we are inadequate. Our lives are molded by these jugdments.
The key is to understand thate there is nothing we can see or perceive that we are not. If we did not possess a certain quality we could not recognize it in another. If you are inspired by someone’s courage, it is a reflection of the courage within you. If your think someone’s selfish, you can be sure that you’re capable of demonstrating the same amount of selfishness. Although these qualities will not be expressed all the time, we each have the ability to act out any quality we see. Being part of the holographic world we are all that we see, all that we judge, all that we admire. Regardless of skin color, weight, or religious preference we share the same universal qualities. All humans are the same in this essential way.
“Renowned Ayurvedic doctor Vasant Lad says, “Within every drop is the ocean and within every cell is the intelligence of the whole body.” When we grasp the enormity of this we can start to see the vastness of who we are. Men and women are created equal in that they share the same full range of human qualities. We all have power, strenght, creativity, and compassion. We all have greed, lust, anger, and weakness. There is no trait, quality, of aspect that we don’t possess. We are filled with divine light, love, and brilliance, and equally filled with selfishness, secrecy, and hostility. We are meant to hold the entire world within us; part of the task of being fully human is to find love and compassion for every aspect of ourselves. As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. Most of us are living with a narrow vision of what it is to be human. When we allow our humanity to embrace our universality, we can easily become whatever it is we desire.
“In Love and Awakening, John Welwood uses the analogy of a castle to illustrate the world within us. Imagine being a magnificent castle with long hallways of thousands of rooms. Every room in the castle is perfect and possesses a special gift. Each room represents a different aspect of yourself and is an integral part of the entire perfect castle. As a child, you explored every inch of your castle without shame or judment. Fearlessly you searched every room for its jewels and its mystery. Lovingly you embraced every room whether it was a closet, a bedroom, bathroom, of a cellar. Each and every room was unique. Your castle was full of light, love, and wonder. Then one day, someone came to your castle and told you that one of your rooms was imperfect, that surely it didn’t belong in your castle. They suggested that if you wanted to have a perfect castle you should close and lock the door to this room. Since you wanted love and acceptance, you quickly closed off that room As time went by, more and more people came to your castle. They all gave you their opinions of the rooms, which ones they liked and which ones they didn’t. And slowly you shut one door after another. Your marvelous rooms were being closed off, taken out the light, and put into the dark. A cycle had begun.
“From that time on, you closed more and more doors for all kinds of reasons. You closed doors because you were afraid, or you thought the rooms were too bold. You closed doors to rooms that were too conservative. You closed doors because other castles you saw did not have a room like yours. You closed doors because your religious leaders told you to stay away from certain rooms. You closed any door that did not fit into society’ standards of your own ideal.
“The days were gone when your castle seemed endless and your future seemed exciting and bright. You no longer cared for every room with the same love and admiration. Rooms you were once proud of, you now willed to disappear. You tried to figure out ways to get rid of these rooms, but they were part of the structure of your castle. Now that you had shut the door to whatever room you didn’t like, time went by until one day you just forgot that room altogether. At first, you didn’t realize what you were doing. It just became a habit. With everyone giving you different messages about what a magnificent castle should look like, it became much easier to listen to them than to trust your inner voice: the one that loved your entire castle. Shutting off those rooms actually started to make you feel safe. Soon you found yourself living in just a few small rooms. You had learned how to shut of life and became comfortable doing it. Many of us also locked away so many rooms that we forgot we were ever a castle. We began to believe we were just a small, two-bedroom house in need of repairs.
“Now imagine your castle as the place where you house all of who you are, the good and bad, and that every aspect that exists on the planet exists within you. One of your rooms is love, one is courage, one is elegance, and another is grace. There are endless numbers of rooms. Creativity, femininity, honesty, integrity, health, assertiveness, sexiness, power, timidity, hatred, greed, frigidity, laziness, arrogance, sickness, and evil are rooms in your castle. Each room is an essential part of the structure and each room has an opposite somewhere in your castle. Fortunately, we are never satisfied being less than what we are capable of being. Our discontent with ourselves motivates us in our search for all the lost rooms of our castle. We can only find the key to our uniqueness by opening all the rooms in our castle.”
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