Every man and every woman is a star, as I keep

An eye cannot see itself without using a third party form of perception, a mirror accommodates this for if an eye were to see itself directly it would cease to exist!

When we look directly at the sun we find ourselves struggling with physical pain and possible blindness as we observe an unrestricted variation of the same energy that creates the matter that every molecule that the observing body is made up of. We can equate this to the emotional pain we feel when we try to see ourselves directly because the self we see is never the same as our idea of self and this solidifies our feeling of separateness.

To make it even possible to try and understand the relationship between these two selves we create a filtration system (mirror) that will allow us to identify with the process. In essence we take the very same light we create and restrict it, bottle it and push it to points creating matter or the material world. That way we have something to compare to saying 'I don't know who or what I am but I know it is not this'.

But we are not the light! The light is simply the releasing of the material world, allowing it to return to balance; this movement can be seen or felt as the current of love. Spiritual practice is not finding one's 'self' but the releasing of the reference points that have created the idea of 'self'.

A star is one such idea of self whose act of identity exists in this simple process of catch and release, but it too does not release its light in the same way it has found it. It goes through its life processes of nuclear fission such as turning hydrogen to helium etc.... The sun too cannot see itself other than to see how its light alters the movement of the universe as a whole. If it could see itself directly, it too would cease to exist as such (the identity sought after). To try and find ones 'self' is to have a preconceived idea as to what the self was or was not to begin with.

This is why it seems so difficult to embark on the journey of self discovery as it starts to become a process of accepting the points you refer to as 'I' or 'myself' as inevitable instead of dissolving into the fact that these points never existed in this moment until you brought them here to 'accept'

For example you might have regretted an act of desperation that led you to an activity that drastically distorted your idea of bliss and happiness such as hurt somebody you love. My former position, as is most spiritual practitioners currently, was everything was part of who you are and if you can find happiness in this moment those events are as much a part of this happiness as all the greatest moments of bliss, in fact my postulate was this 'self' that was happy is a sum total of all actions and experiences of your life in which includes a perfect balance of negative and positive points. The truth is all of these points or their emotionally equivalents exists here and now in the form of the material world in front of you to which you are the perfect balance.

What this ultimately means is you must alter your perception of this moment in order to accept the last, constantly fishing through your memories to find good ones to outweigh the bad. This is the same as looking into the sun separating experience into piles in the same way as separating matter and light by saying what was formerly matter is now a light (creating a self to release)