by Swami Kriyananda

The first attitude fundamental to "centering" is self-acceptance. You are who you are. Make the best of it, and envy no one for what he or she is. Don't draw comparisons between you and others: Encourage yourself, rather, in your efforts to attain your own highest potential.

Self-acceptance will come progressively as you try to live up to the highest that is in you. Unless you are already in superconsciousness, you cannot but recognize the fact that an inner conflict exists between your soul's call to the heights, and the siren call of temptation to the depths. You can't laugh off soul-longing, though you may try.

Soul-conscience is not something imposed on us from without. It rises spontaneously from within ourselves. Often in history, soul-conscience has pitted individuals against society-it brought Jesus Christ to the cross, and Socrates to the poisonous cup of hemlock.

Hamlet's mother said, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." One might as justifiably say, "That person doth laugh too much, methinks." Be careful, if ever you find yourself making too much fun of anything or anyone. What you denounce in others is a clue to the faults you have in yourself. Make sure, then, that you are not merely hiding from some failing in yourself.

True conscience is innate. It is the silent voice of the soul. To achieve self-acceptance, you must be clear in your true conscience. Such clarity comes only when we accept that our higher Self is our eternal reality.

Needless to say, one doesn't achieve this degree of self-acceptance in a single leap. So long as you sincerely resist your lower impulses, and strive toward your own inner heights, your conscience will be reasonably clear, and you will find yourself able to achieve that measure of emotional and psychic relaxation without which it is not possible to find rest at one's center.

Self-acceptance makes it possible for one to view others also in their own higher nature, and to accept that potential as their own reality. Only from within will it ever be possible for you to know others truly. When you relate to their center from your own, you will find that they, too, respond to you from that center in themselves. Soul speaks to soul, and recognizes itself in an infinity of manifestations. This was what Jesus meant by the words "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

My guru, Paramhansa Yogananda, lived always at that center. Wherever he went, he attracted utter strangers to himself. Friends of mine a few years ago stopped at a gas station. The attendant, an older man, recognized a photograph of Yogananda on the dashboard of their car as he was cleaning the windshield. Deeply moved, he related how "that man"-about whom he apparently knew little or nothing-would stop for gas at a station in Highland Park where he had once worked. That contact, casual though it was, had had a profound effect on his life.
When it comes to understanding things rather than people at their center, as Nijinsky did during his observation of the ski instructor, you will find the doors of innumerable mysteries unlocking themselves for you. Any undertaking, indeed, to which you apply your mind will come out successfully.

I've tested this principle many times, and in many ways. It is no abstraction, nor is it a question of individual talent. It is, simply, a practical application of the truth, "center everywhere, circumference nowhere."

Kindness

Acceptance leads to the second attitude necessary for finding your own center: kindness. To achieve that clarity of conscience which is the companion of self-acceptance, you should practice kindness also toward yourself. You'll never overcome your failings by hating your shortcomings, nor by hating yourself for indulging in them. Of course, you shouldn't allow kindness to excuse them. In true kindness to yourself, you should work, rather, to strengthen yourself in virtue. Seek always your own highest potentials. If this means being stern with yourself occasionally, so be it. But never be judgmental.

Kindness is necessary also for understanding other people. In fact, without it, there can never be acceptance of them. By kind acceptance you will find yourself intuitively aware of them at their center.

Kind acceptance may be a more difficult concept to visualize in connection with inanimate things. As a means of achieving such understanding, relaxed acceptance rather than kindness may be an easier concept to grasp. And yet, because consciousness is inherent in all things, to feel kindness toward things also need not really strain the point.