It’s very possible to speed up the progress of your life-quest. Indeed, when you take the reins to do just that, a major hurdle is crossed. The quest becomes more a part of you than before.
Don’t wait for the world around to slowly drag you into the Light. It may not happen! Question things. Embrace the quest for self-improvement. Actively seek what needs to be learned. Examine your own failings. Cultivate virtue in your life. Study wisdom from the past with an open but critical mind.
An excellent place to start, one which will help you every step of the way, is to eliminate prejudice.
We all have prejudices. Don’t bother to deny it. It comes from how our minds work, making quick conclusions and applying them elsewhere. Sometimes that is proper. Burn your finger once, and you will properly assume that fire presents a painful danger. You will be careful how you handle it in the future.
But holding on to prejudices against people, be they a different gender, race, ethnicity, faith or sexuality, ignores the fact that every person is a unique individual – and that’s just wrong.
Prejudice that feeds bigotry presents a huge stumbling block. You can’t progress beyond it. If you try, it becomes a weighty albatross strung around your neck that you can’t hide from others. It not only slows you down, it steers your quest into error, resulting in a string of wrong conclusions.
Eliminating prejudices isn’t easy. They are often inserted into our perspective early on, usually by people we love: our parents, our local community or friends. They become so much a part of us that they merge with our identity, becoming part of every thought and inclination. We end up defending them as we would any worldview we accept as distinctively our own.
How can we change that?
In Chivalry-Now we have a slogan: SEEK THE KNIGHT WITHIN!
Somewhere beneath our accumulated prejudices and mistaken self-images, there is a center of authenticity calling out for our attention. It expresses itself through a generalized frustration, and occasionally by pricking our conscience with discontent. It tells us that we are not whom we should be. There is so much more to us than what others see. There is a hero waiting to be born, freed from the shackles of wrongly held beliefs. Indeed, that liberating second birth, and everything that follows that enriches the meaning of our lives, is what freedom is all about.
Eliminating the burdensome chains of prejudice leads to that liberation. First you seek the Knight within – and, once found, and with a little hard work, you then become that very person, which is your most pristine self.
Every quest results in both discovery and a personal metamorphosis inclined toward virtue. Eliminating prejudice is a very effective place to start.
Whether or not you start is up to you
