The parable of the palace

Imagine that your interior is like a fairy-tale palace with wide corridors and thousands of rooms. Each room of this palace is extraordinary, each has its own unique qualities, and each is an integral part of the palace in its entirety. No one is more or less than another. Like a child, you fearlessly explore every inch of your palace, welcoming every aspect of yourself that manifests on the outside without shame or prejudice, touching each one, experiencing it, and releasing it again. Your palace is full of light, love and wonder. You lovingly embrace each new room, whether it is an attic, a bathroom or a basement, whether it is like this or like that. Each room is unique. Think back to your earliest childhood, when every day was a miracle, and stay there for a while...

Then, one day, someone enters your palace, someone you have welcomed with an open heart and accepted unconditionally. In the newcomer, you recognize the queen mother and the king father. They tell you that one of your rooms is not right, that it cannot belong in your palace! They suggest to you that if you want a "better" palace, one worthy of their love, you should close the door to this room and not open it again. And because you want their love and acceptance, sooner or later you will lock this room within you. And then another and another and another... As time goes by, more people come to your palace with their views about different rooms - some are acceptable to them and some are not. And so slowly you close one door after another, and although you are growing physically, inside you are getting smaller and smaller. You have closed off your beautiful rooms from the world, put them in shadow, and so have hidden them from yourself. Since then you have been closing more and more doors for various reasons. You close them because you are afraid of losing someone's love, because you long for attention, for recognition from someone you look up to, because you fear condemnation, rejection, loneliness, because you are ashamed of your nature...

Those days when your palace seemed a magical place and your life was full of miracles are gone. You no longer care for every room with the same love, you despise some of them, you would like to close them for good, but as if on purpose they keep coming back to you. When you remember it, your face twists in disgust. Yes, you don't like yourself like that, you make that face at yourself. You try to think of ways to get rid of the rooms you don't want and to get the ones you've idealised. You need to work on yourself, you need to spruce up your palace even more, preferably in a way that everyone you care about likes. Your fairy-tale palace becomes a row house with a standard number of rooms, legible, classified and understandable, from which you watch the other row houses on the street where you fit in and compare yourself to them.

It came so creepingly, through the love of caregivers you trusted implicitly, through your desire for their attention and their acceptance, that you don't even notice the turn from natural to increasingly unnatural, from profound to increasingly superficial. From experiencing things unconditionally as they are, you have salami-sliced your way to setting conditions under which you will be happy. It's become a habit, and it's, as they say, an iron shirt. You traded freedom and love of a palace without boundaries for security and acceptance from those around you. But you soon find that you are no longer living in a few small rooms where you have learned to shut yourself off from the truth about yourself, and you feel so comfortable. A fucking comfort zone. You've closed so many rooms that you've forgotten they were once a beautiful palace. When someone tells you that, you don't believe them. You've come to believe you're just a small, inadequate two-bedroom apartment in need of a lot of repairs. You believe you're small and broken...

The truth is that the two-room apartment, the townhouse, and the palace with thousands of rooms do not really exist. They are just different contexts in which you are able to view yourself in this strange reality. You are neither big/nor small, you are the creator of this reality, which right now is being made small and broken. Why? Because of ignorance. Because you have a "light out" inside of you. And that's why you don't know who you really are. You have adapted by splitting yourself and hiding the shadow part of you, the part you have not taken on, from yourself. Even though the palace does not really exist, nor does anything of who or what you have thought you are up to now, you have no choice but to let all that you have repressed within yourself, that you have hidden from yourself, emerge into consciousness, to re-emerge, to accept, to re-embrace and understand, even if it means going through great pain and fear. Even if it means losing the love of your fellow human beings by being honest and starting to come out of your boxes, by stopping meeting expectations. In reality, you never had it and therefore you cannot lose it. Everyone is only capable of loving to the degree that they love themselves. Therefore, what you thought was love until now was just a barter. The one who truly loves you wishes you happiness and rejoices in your rebirth into inner freedom. It is only by opening yourself fully and letting all those locked chambers emerge within you, by accepting yourself in your wholeness, that you can let it all go, that is, give it freedom, and in so doing give freedom to yourself. You need to go through that painful process of self-disclosure and subsequent self-release without flinching in order to truly find yourself. It is not enough to rise above the fact that this is not you, that you are everything and nothing at the same time. While this is true on some level, it is an intellectual trap that many seekers fall into, and the root of it is the fear of the darkness within. If a being is intertwined with the past on an unconscious level, if he has repressed the past's injustice and pain, it is not enough to tell himself that the past is an illusion, that the past does not really exist. If you have made karmic agreements with other beings in the past, then the past is still alive for you. You have a debt from the past, and it is constantly reminding you in the present, thus influencing your thinking and actions, whether you admit it or not. The more you ignore this karmic debt, the more strongly it is reminded to you by various means. The past does not exist only for a free being who has gone through the whole process of being born into a new reality. A reality in which he becomes a creator without clinging to what he must or wants to be...