We Are Surprised At Who We Really Are

(Found here)

“…As we advance in the spiritual life and in the practice of systematic self-examination, we are often surprised by the discovery of vast unknown tracts of the inner life of the soul. They seem like great plains stretching out in mystery and wrapped in mists that sometimes for a moment lift or sweep off and leave us looking for one brief instant upon great reaches of our own life, unknown, unmeasured, and unexplored. Men stand at such moments breathless in wonder and in awe, gazing upon these great tracts upon which they have never looked before, with kindling eyes and beating hearts; and while they look, the mists steal back until all is lost to sight once more, and they are left wondering whether what they saw was reality or the creation of their fancy.

Or sometimes they see, not far-stretching plains that fill the soul with an awestruck sense of its expansiveness and of how much has been left absolutely uncultivated, but mountain peaks climbing and reaching upward until lost in the heavens. Those peaks echo with the voice of many streams whose waters fertilize and enrich the small tracts of the soul’s life that have been reclaimed and cultivated and that many a man has thought to be his whole inner self, even though he never asked himself where those rich streams had their source. Now he sees how their source lay in unmeasured heights of his own inner being whose existence he never dreamed of before. In one brief instant they have unveiled themselves.

He looks again, and they are shut out from his eyes; there is no visible token that he possesses such reaches, such heights of life. The commonplaces of his existence gather in and crowd upon him. The ordinary routine of life settles down upon him, limiting and confining him on all sides. The same unbroken line measures his horizon, such as he has always known it. The same round of interests and occupations crowd in upon his hours and fill them. The pressure of the hard facts of life upon him are as unmistakable and as leveling as ever, bidding him forget his dreams and meet and obey the requirements of the world in which he lives.

Yet the man who has caught but a momentary glimpse of that vast unknown inner life can never be the same as he was before. He must be better or worse, trying to explore and possess and cultivate that unknown world within him, or trying — oh, would that he could succeed! — to forget it. He has seen that alongside, or far out beyond the reach of, the commonplace life of routine, another life stretches away, he knows not where. He feels that he has greater capacities for good or evil than he ever imagined. He has, in a word, awakened with tremulous awe to the discovery that his life, which he has hitherto believed limited and confined to what he knew, reaches infinitely beyond his knowledge and is far greater than he ever dreamed.”
~Basil Maturin