Gordana Biernat is a writer, speaker, and wisdom keeper. Her upcoming book #KnowThe Truth: Why Knowing Who You Are Changes Everything is set to debut in Sept 2017. She is one of Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul100 teachers, and shares her messages of wisdom daily with her 280,000 followers on Twitter . Her purpose is to help people realize how powerful and unique we all truly are. Gordana holds Masters Degrees in Art History and Art Sciences, Psychology, and Communication and Media at Lund University in Sweden.
At eleven years old, you had an epiphany that you said changed your entire life. Tell me more about this experience.
It was a profound experience for me. As a child, late at night while in bed, I used to daydream about things I wanted to figure out and understand. On this particular evening, I thought about the shape of the Universe. It was mind boggling to me because I couldn’t grasp how something could be eternal or infinite and yet have boundaries, so I tried to imagine an outer edge somewhere of the Universe. The harder I tried, the more the Universe expanded in my mind. All I could see were more stars. I thought, my imagination is infinite, but the real sky would probably give me some clues. I jumped out of bed, ran to the window and looked at the stars in the night sky. And then it happened. I realized that the stars in the sky were the same as they were in my mind. My imagination and the Universe felt like one and the same thing, and I knew at that moment that they were made of the same stuff.
Although I realized, at the age of eleven, the ancient universal truth of “as above, so below,” I couldn’t share it with anyone because I was raised in a family where girls had no rights to speak up or even to have these types of thoughts. As a girl, I was expected to do my chores and mind my own business. So, I kept most of my wonderings to myself.
And it’s amazing how the Universe always answers when you are silent and take your time to listen. What the Universe showed me that night was that the Universe and I are ONE. My mind and the spirit of the Universe are ONE.
As the Universe is the creator of its world filled with galaxies and stars, so I am the creator of my world with everything in it. This profound realization of my oneness with the Universe put me on a path of self-illumination spending my life pursuing dreams of raising consciousness in the world.
There is a chapter in your forthcoming book #KnowTheTruth called “Who Am I and Why Am I Here?”. I found it interesting because I feel this question is an overarching problem in our society and you have a great take on self-discovery. How can we as a society answer this question?
We would need to “jump out” of this physical reality to fully grasp who we truly are. But if we think about why we are here then it becomes easier, because the why is connected to our desires and what we came here to explore. In other words, figuring out who you mean exploring what you love to do. So, as a society, we need to allow ourselves to daydream more. When we daydream, we are in a state of self-exploration playing with our desires and dreams about who we are and what we want to become.
Daydreaming is an important way of getting to know ourselves which, in my opinion, is crucial because consider this:
If you don’t know who you truly are, then every action you take is an unconscious action.
On the other hand, the more you explore what you like, love or desire in your reality the more you are aligned with who you are and why you are here. When you are acutely aware of who YOU are, your actions become conscious. An action coming from consciousness cannot be based on ignorance. If we all spent a few minutes a day to daydream, visualize and explore what we love to do, it would raise consciousness and self-awareness in the world. As simple as that!
In your book, you talk about the concept of oneness and how to explore it. I found it fascinating when you describe how finding oneness starts with thinking about where I “begin” and YOU “end.” Can you go into more detail about that?
When I was a child, I couldn’t wrap my mind around this concept of everything being ONE. I kept asking myself; How could I possibly be ONE with everything else when obviously I was the ONE experiencing everything else? How can I be ONE with someone while at the same time experiencing them as outside of me and other than me? If I am ONE with everything then what is outside of me? If I am ONE with everything then where do I “end” and where do you “begin”?
Read the rest of the interview at mikeliguori.com.
Originally published at medium.com