Books

Book Reviews:

Enough Already  by Alan Cohen

The God of All Comfort by Hannah Whitall Smith

How Much Joy Ca You Stand? by Suzanne Falter  Author Video

√The Untethered Soul by Michael A. Singer

• Interview with Oprah
• Audio Book
• Animated Summary

Excerpts I assembled from the book:

(I did not include the Introduction.  You can listen to that in the link to the Audio Book above)

PART I - Awakening Consciousness

Chapter 1 - The voice inside your head

Eventually you will see that the real cause of problems is not life itself.  It’s the commotion the mind makes about life that really causes problems.

Your thoughts have far less impact on this world than you would like to think.  If you’re willing to be objective and watch all your thoughts, you will see that the vast majority of them have no relevance.”

If so much of what the voice says is meaningless and unnecessary, then why does it even exist?

• When there’s a buildup of nervous, fearful, or desire-based energies inside….That voice talks because you’re not okay inside, and talking releases energy.
• When you’re not particularly bothered by something, it still talks…It is actually narrating the world for you….the narration makes you feel more comfortable with the world around you….makes you feel as though things are more in your control.  You actually feel like you have some relationship with [what you are seeing]…..there are myriad things that you see at any given moment, yet you only narrate a few of them.  The ones you discuss in your mind are the ones that matter to you.  With this subtle form of preprocessing, you manage to  control the experience of reality so that it all fits together inside your mind.  Your consciousness is actually experiencing your mental model of reality, not reality itself….If you can’t get the world the way you like it, you internally verbalize it, judge it, complain about it, and then decide what to do about it.  This makes you feel more empowered….As long as that’s what you want, you will be forced to constantly use your mind to buffer yourself from life, instead of living it.

True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection.  This is done by constantly remembering that you are the one inside that notices the voice talking.  That is the way out.  The one inside who is aware that you are always talking to yourself about yourself is always silent.  It is a doorway to the depths of your being….Come to know the one who watches the voice, and you will come to know one of the great mysteries of creation.

Chapter 2 - Your inner roommate

Your inner growth is completely dependent upon the realization that the only way to find peace and contentment is to top thinking about yourself.  You’re ready to grow when you finally realize that the “I” who is always talking inside will never be content.

When a problem is disturbing you, don’t ask, “What should I do about it?”  Ask, “What part of me is being disturbed by this?”….If you want to achieve peace in the face of you problems, you must understand why you perceive a particular situation as a problem.  

Once you clearly see the disturbed part, then ask, “Who is it that sees this?  Who notices this inner disturbance?”  Asking this is the solution to your every problem…The process of seeing something requires a subject-object relationship.  The subject is called “The Witness” because it is the one who sees what’s happening.  The object is what you are seeing, in this case the inner disturbance…..This is the essential difference  between a spiritually minded person and a worldly person…..Worldly means that you think the solution to your inner problem is in the world outside.

No solution can possibly exist while you’re lost in the energy of a problem.  Everyone knows you can’t deal well with a situation if you’re getting anxious, scared, or angry about it.  The first problem you have to deal with is your own reaction…..The only permanent solution to your problems is to go inside and let go of the part of you that seems to have so many problems with reality.

There really is a way to let go of the part of you that sees everything as a problem….Who is it that sees all this?….You are the one who’s in there noticing these things.  Once you take that seat of consciousness, you can get rid of these personal disturbances…..Just be aware that you are aware of what is going on in there…What you’ll notice is that you’re watching a human being’s personality with all its strengths and weaknesses…You might actually say you have a “roommate.”  

If you would like to meet your roommate, just try to sit inside yourself for a while in complete solitude and silence…But instead of finding silence, you’re going to listen to incessant chatter….Right on cue, there’s your roommate.  

There are two distinct aspects of your inner being.  The first is you, the awareness, the witness, the center of your willful intentions; and the other is that which you watch.  The problem is, the part that you watch never shuts up.  If you could get rid of that part, even for a moment, the peace and serenity would be the nicest vacation you’ve ever had.

But first you have to realize that you’ve been locked in there with a maniac….Your roommate can ruin anything you’re doing without a moment’s notice.  

Spend a day watching every single thing your roommate does….You have to watch this if you want to be free of it.

The way to catch on to what your inner roommate is really like is to personify it externally.  Make believe that your roommate, the psyche, has a body of its own…Just imagine that another person is now saying everything that your inner voice would say.  Now spend a day with that person.  

How would you feel if someone outside really started talking to you the way your inner voice does?….After a very short period of time, you would tell them to leave and never come back.  

How many times has that voice been wrong about what was going on or what will be going on?….When you’ve sincerely tried these practices of self-observation and awareness, you’ll see that you’re in trouble.  You’l realize that you’ve only had one problem your entire life, and you’re looking at it…Now the question becomes how do you get rid of this inner troublemaker?  The first thing you’ll realize is that there’s no hope of getting rid of it until you really want to….Once you’ve made the decision to free yourself from the mental melodrama, you are ready for teachings and techniques.  

You will eventually catch on that you have to distance yourself from your psyche.  You do this by setting the direction of your life when you’re clear and not letting the wavering mind deter you.  

As it is right now, your life is not your own; it belongs to your inner roommate, the psyche.  You have to take it back….This is your life—-reclaim it.

Chapter 3 - Who are you?

Who am I?  Who sees when I see?   Who hears when I hear?  Who knows that I am aware?  Who am I?

If you try to just give honest, intuitive answers, you are simply going to say, “Me.  It’s me.  I’m in here experiencing all of this.”  That’s about the best answer you’ll have.  It’s actually pretty easy to see that you’re not the objects you look at.  It’s a classic case of subject-object.  It’s you, the subject, that is looking at the objects….We can very easily generalize by saying that if you are the one who is looking at something, then that something is not you.  So right away, in one fell swoop, you know what you’re not:  you’re not the outside world.   You’re the one who is inside looking out at that world.

You just have to pay attention and realize that you would still be in there experiencing feelings even if all the outside objects disappeared…. But who would be feeling these things?  Again you say “Me!”  And that’s the right answer.

You can become so absorbed in beautiful inner feelings, or frightening inner fears, that it’s hard to focus on outer objects.  In essence, inside and outside objects compete for your attention.

Eventually, you will begin to realize that the outside world and the flow of inner emotions come and go.  But you, the one who experiences these things, remain consciously aware of whatever passes before you.

The question is, who is using the mind to form thoughts and then manipulate them into ideas and judgments?….You are very aware of your presence of being, your sense of existence, without the help of thoughts.  When you go into deep meditation, for example, the thoughts stop…You come back and say….I was in a place of complete peace, harmony, and quiet.”  If you are in there experiencing the peace that occurs when your thoughts stop, then obviously your existence is not dependent upon the act of thinking….You are not your thoughts.  You are simply aware of your thoughts.

What would it be like if your awareness didn’t exist?  It’s actually pretty simple—you wouldn’t be there.  There would be no sense of “me.”…There would no longer be an awareness of being.  And without awareness of being, or consciousness, there is nothing….So now if I ask you, “Who are you?” you answer, “I am the one who sees.  From back in here somewhere, I look out, and I am aware of the events, thoughts, and emotions that pass before me.”  If you go very deep, that is where you live.  You live in the seat of consciousness.  A true spiritual being lives there, without effort and without intent.  Just as you effortlessly look outside and see all that you see, you will eventually sit far enough back inside to see all your thoughts and emotions, as well as outer form….You go so deep that you realize that’s where you’ve always been.  At each stage of your life you have seen different thoughts, emotions, and objects pass before you.  But you have always been the conscious receiver of all that was.

You are behind everything, just watching.  That is your true home.  Take everything else away and you’re still there, aware that everything is gone.  But take the center of awareness away, and there is nothing.  That center is the seat of Self….That is the seat of the…Judeo-Christian Soul.

Chapter 4 -  The lucid self

There is a type of dream, called a lucid dream, in which you know that you’re dreaming….That’s very different from regular dreams, in which you are fully immersed in the dream.  This distinction is exactly the difference between being aware that you are aware in your daily life, and not being aware that you are aware.  When you are an aware being, you no longer become completely immersed in the events around you….When a thought is created in this state of awareness, instead of getting lost in it, you remain aware that you are the one who is thinking the thought.  You are lucid.

When you are seated in the awareness of Self, you are lucid.  Where are you when you are not seated deeply enough inside the Self to be the conscious experience of all you are experiencing?

To begin with, consciousness has the ability to do what is called “focus.”….The essence of consciousness is awareness, and awareness has the ability to become more aware of one thing and less aware of something else.  In other words, it has the ability to focus itself on certain objects.

The best way to learn about consciousness is through your own direct experience.  For example, you know very well that your consciousness can be aware of a wide field of objects, or it can be so focused on one object that you are unaware of anything else.  This is what happens when you get lost in thought.  You can be reading, and then suddenly you’re not reading anymore.  It happens all the time.  You just start thinking about something else.  Outside objects or mental thoughts can catch your attention at any time.  But it’s still the same awareness, whether it is focused on the outside or on your thoughts.

If it concentrates enough, your sense of awareness loses itself in the object.

When you concentrate on the world of the physical senses, it draws you in.  Then your emotional and mental reactions draw you in further.  At that point, you are no longer sitting in the centered Self; you are absorbed in the inner show you’re watching.

You also have emotions that are your norm:  a certain amount of fear, a certain amount of love, and a certain amount of insecurity.  You know that if certain things happen, one or more of these emotions will flare up and dominate your awareness.  Then, eventually, they will settle back down to the norm….you are so preoccupied with controlling your world of thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that you don’t even know you’re in there.  That is the normal state for most people.

Imagine that movies are made that not only engage the five senses, but also make your thoughts and emotions synchronize with what’s happening on the screen.  With this movie experience, you’re hearing, seeing, tasting, and suddenly you begin feeling the character’s emotions and thinking the character’s thoughts….Imagine going to that movie and getting plugged in….There would be no object of consciousness that is not synchronized with the experience…Once the movie gets control of the thoughts, it’s over.  There is no “you” in there saying, “I don’t like this movie.  I want to leave.”  That would take an independent thought, but your thoughts have been taken over by the movie.

As scary as it sounds, that is your predicament in life.  Because all of the objects you’re aware of are synchronized, you get sucked in and are no longer aware of your separateness from the objects…Unless you’re fully seated in witness consciousness, you’re not back there being aware that you’re the one watching all this.  That is what it means to be lost.

The lost soul is the consciousness that has dropped into the place where one human’s thoughts, emotions, and sensory perceptions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell are all synchronized…When the consciousness gets sucked in, it no longer knows itself as itself.  It knows itself as the objects it is experiencing.  In other words, you perceive yourself as these objects.  You think you are the sum of your learned experiences.

Remember, your self-concept is just a collection of thoughts about yourself.

What differentiates a conscious, centered being from a person who is not so conscious is simply the focus of their awareness….All consciousness is the same….It’s just there, aware that it’s aware.  The difference is that when your consciousness is not centered within, it becomes totally focused on the objects of consciousness.  When you are a centered being, however, your consciousness is always aware of being conscious.  Your awareness of being is independent of the inner and outer objects you happen to be aware of.

What if consciousness were to focus on itself?  When that happens instead of being aware of your thoughts, you’re aware that you’re aware of your thoughts.  You have turned the light of consciousness back into itself.  You’re always contemplating something, but this time you’re contemplating the source of consciousness.  This is true meditation…In the highest state, the focus of consciousness is turned back to the Self.

When you contemplate the nature of Self, you are meditating…It is the return to the root of your being, the simple awareness of being aware….You are now aware of who you are.  You have become an awakened being…You simply stopped projecting your sense of self onto that particular object of consciousness.  You woke up.  That is spirituality.  That is the nature of Self.  That is who you are.

As you pull back into the consciousness, this world ceases to be a problem.  It’s just something you’re watching.  It keeps changing, but there is no sense of that being a problem.  The more you are willing to just let the world be something you’re aware of, the more it will let you be who you are—-the awareness…the Soul.

You will begin to have deep experiences within your own center of consciousness.  These will be deep, intuitive experiences of the true nature of Self…..instead of just focusing so intently on this one human being’s thoughts, emotions, and sensory world, you can pull back and see everything.  You can move from the finite to the infinite.  Isn’t this what they’ve been trying to tell us—Christ, Buddha, and the great saints and sages of all time and all religions?

“Who am I?”….Ask it ceaselessly, constantly.  Ask it and you will notice that you are the answer.   There is no intellectual answer—you are the answer.  Be the answer, and everything will change.

PART II - Experiencing Energy

Chapter 5 - Infinite energy

The truth is, every movement of your body, every emotion you have, and every thought that passes through your mind is an expenditure of energy.  Just as everything that happens outside in the physical world requires energy, everything that happens inside requires an expenditure of energy.

For example, if you concentrate on a thought and another thought interferes, you will have to assert an opposing force to fight the interfering thought.  That requires energy, and it can wear you out.  Likewise, if you have a thought that you’re trying to hold in your mind but it keeps drifting off, you have to willfully concentrate to bring it back.  When you do this, you are actually sending more energy to the thought in order to hold it in a given place.  You also assert energy to deal with your emotions.  If you have an emotion you don’t like and it’s interfering with what you’re doing, you just push it aside.  You do this almost instinctively so that the unwanted emotion doesn’t come up and disturb you.

Where does all this energy come from?….if you look at the times in your life when you were in love, or excited and inspired by something, you were so filled with energy that you didn’t even want to eat.  This energy we are discussing does not come from the calories your body burns from food.  There is a source of energy you can draw upon from inside.

The only reason you don’t feel this energy all the time is because you block it.  You block it by closing your heart, by closing your mind, and by pulling yourself into a restrictive space inside….There is no light.  There is no energy.  There is nothing flowing.

That is what it means to be “blocked.”  That is why you have no energy when you’re depressed…Although various energy centers exist within you, the one you intuitively know the most about opening and closing is your heart.  Let’s say that you love somebody, and you feel very open in their presence.  Because you trust them, your walls come down allowing you to feel lots of high energy.  But if they do something you don’t like, the next time you see them you don’t feel so high.  You don’t feel as much love….Depending upon how closed you are, you either feel tremendous disturbance or overwhelming lethargy…If you then find out that your loved one didn’t do anything wrong, or if they apologize to your satisfaction, your heart opens again.  With this opening you get filled with energy, and the love starts flowing again.

This flow of energy comes from the depth of your being.  It’s been called by many names.  In ancient Chinese medicine, it is called Chi.  In yoga, it is called Shakti.  In the West, it is called Spirit.

You should know about this energy because it’s yours….it’s unlimited.  You can call upon it any time you want…Energy doesn’t get old, it doesn’t get tired, and it doesn’t need food.  What it needs is openness and receptivity.

Now you have to decide whether or not you want this energy.  How high do you want to get?  How much love do you want to feel?  How much enthusiasm do you want to have for the things you do?

There is a very simple method for staying open.  You stay open by never closing.  It’s really that simple…..You can actually train yourself to forget how to close.  Closing is a habit, and just like any other habit, it can be broken.  For example, you could be the type of person who has an underlying fear of people and ends to close when you first meet them.  You could actually be in the habit of experiencing an uptight, closing sensation whoever somebody walks up to you.  You can train yourself to do the opposite.  You can train yourself to open every time you see a person.  It’s just a question of whether you want to close or whether you want to open.  It’s ultimately under your control.

The problem is, we don’t exercise that control.   Under normal circumstances, our state of openness is left to psychological factors…Impressions from the past are still inside of us, and they get stimulated by different events.  If they were negative impressions, we tend to close.  If they were positive impressions, we tend to open…A smell can make you open or close, and so can seeing a car of a certain color, or even the type of shoes a person is wearing.  We are programmed based upon our past impressions such that all kinds of things can cause us to open and close.

The more you learn to stay open, the more the energy can flow into you.  You practice opening by not closing.  Any time you start to close, ask yourself whether you really want to cut off the energy flow…You just make a commitment to explore your capacity for receiving unlimited energy…At first it feels unnatural since your inner tendency is to close as a means of protection.  But closing your heart does not really protect you from anything; it just cuts you off from your source of energy.  In the end, it only serves to lock you inside.

What you’ll find is that the only thing you really want from life is to feel enthusiasm, joy, and love.  If you can feel that all the time, then who cares what happens outside?….So you learn to stay open no matter what happens.  If you do, you get for free what everybody else is struggling for:  love, enthusiasm, excitement, and energy.  You simply realize that defining what you need in order to stay open actually ends up limiting you.  If you make lists of how the world must be for you to open, you have limited your openness to those conditions.  Better to be open no matter what.  

How you learn to stay open is up to you.  The ultimate trick is to not close.  If you don’t close, you will have learned to stay open…When your heart starts to close, just say, “No, I’m not going to close.  I’m going to relax.  I’m going to let this situation take place and be there with it.”  Honor and respect the situation, and deal with it…Do the best you can.  But deal with it with openness.  Deal with it with excitement and enthusiasm…In time, you will find that you forget how to close…you will just embrace life with all your heart and soul…Just relax and open, and tremendous energy will rush up inside of you.

If you really want to stay open, pay attention when you feel love and enthusiasm.  Then ask yourself why you can’t feel this all the time…You throw love away all the time.  You feel love until somebody says something you don’t like, and then you give up the love…You can either close because you don’t like what happened, or you can keep feeling love and enthusiasm by not closing.  As long as you are defining what you like and what you don’t like you will open and close.  You are actually defining your limits.  You are allowing your mind to create triggers that open and close you.  Let go of that.  Dare to be different.  Enjoy all of life.

The more you stay open, the more the energy flow can build.  At some point, so much energy comes into you that it starts flowing out of you….What is more, the energy affects other people. People can pick up on your energy, and you’re feeding them with this flow….You become a source of light for all those around you  

The most important thing in life is your inner energy…if you’re always inspired and filled with energy, then every minute of every day is an exciting experience…You do this by just relaxing and releasing.  You do this by not buying into the concept that there is anything worth closing over…Nothing, ever, is worth closing your heart over.

Chapter 6 - The secrets of the spiritual heart

You are not your heart.  You are the experiencer of your heart.

You can be experiencing great feelings of love while in the presence of someone, until they say something you don’t like.  Then your heart closes toward them, and you simply don’t feel the love anymore.  We have all experienced this, but what exactly is causing it?  Since we all have to experience the heart, we might as well understand what’s going on in there.

What is it about the structure of the heart center that permits it to close?  What you will find is that the heart closes because it becomes blocked by stored, unfinished energy patterns from your past…As events take place in this world, they come in through your senses and have an impact on your inner state of being….When you take in the world through your senses, it is actually energy that is coming into your being.  Form itself does not come into your mind or heart.  Form stays outside, but it is processed by your senses into energy patterns that your mind and heart can receive and experience.  Science explains this sensory process to us….Your eyes are cameras that send electronic images of the world into you.  This is true of all your senses.  They sense the world, convert the information, transmit the data through electrical nerve impulses, and then the impressions get rendered in your mind…..But if the energy patterns that are coming into your psyche create disturbance, you will resist them and not allow them to pass through you.  When you do this, the energy patterns actually get blocked within you.

To better understand  what it’s like to have these energies stored within you, let’s first examine what it would be like if nothing was stored….For example….While you’re driving you see trees, you see buildings, you see cars, and none of these make lasting impressions on you…..When you have no personal issues with them, impressions process freely.

This is how the overall system of perception is meant to work.  It’s meant to take things in, allow you to experience them, and then let them pass through so that you’re fully present in the next moment….Moment after moment, experiences are coming in and you’re learning and growing.  Your heart and mind are expanding and you are being touched at a very deep level.

It’s a phenomenal system when it is working properly…That is how an awakened being lives in the “now.”

But that’s not what happens inside most of us…inevitably, something comes in that doesn’t make it through

You’ve got yourself a problem here.  There’s a blockage, an event that got stuck.  All the subsequent experiences are trying to pass through you, but something has  happened inside that has left this past experience unfinished.

What happens to that experience that didn’t make it through?…..At some point, you’ll have to stop focusing on it in order to deal with something else….Life must now compete with this blocked event for your attention, and the impression does not just sit in there quietly.  You will see that your tendency is to think about it constantly.  This is all in an attempt to find a way to process it through your mind.  You didn’t need to process the trees, but you need to process this.  Because you resisted, it got stuck, and now you have a problem.  You see the thoughts start up….Thought after thought goes on inside.  It drives you crazy in there.  All that inner noise is just your attempt to process the blocked energy and get it out of the way.

Long term, the energy patterns that cannot make it through you are pushed out of the forefront of the mind and held until you are prepared to release them.  These energy patterns, which hold tremendous detail about the events associated with them, are real.  They don’t just disappear.  When you are unable to allow life’s events to pass through you, they stay inside you and become a problem.

As you willfully struggle to keep these events from passing through your consciousness, the energy first tries to release by manifesting through the mind.  This is why the mind becomes so active.  When the energy can’t make it through the mind because of conflicts with other thoughts and mental concepts, it then tries to release through the heart.  That is what creates all the emotional activity.  When you resist even that release, the energy gets packed up and forced into deep storage within the heart.  

You didn’t know what to do, so you resisted the energy, and it got stored in the heart where it could fall into the background and not be bothersome.  While it may seem like it’s done, like it is all over and gone, it really isn’t.

Everything that did not make it through you, from the time you were a baby all the way to this moment is still inside you.  It is these impressions that encrust the valve of the spiritual heart.

You can certainly see the potential for impressions to build up to the point where very little energy can make it through.  If they build up sufficiently, you will find yourself in a state of depression…. Eventually, everything appears negative because the world of the senses must pass through this depressed energy before it gets to your consciousness.

But even if you aren’t prone to depression, your heart still gets blocked over time…Depending upon life’s experiences, it can open and close quite frequently…What is the cause of these frequent changes in the state of the heart?….it is related to the same stored past impressions that caused the blockages.

The energy that’s stored there is real, and it interacts with the flow of current thoughts and events.  The dynamics of this interaction cause the vibrations that are stored to get activated, sometimes years later.

The point is that past impressions do get stimulated, even old ones, and they affect your life.  Sensory inputs from today’s events dig through all the stuff you have stored through the years, and they restore the exact past patterns associated with the incoming events…Suddenly, clashes of what you experienced when the original event took place rush into your consciousness—the thoughts, the feelings, sometimes even the smells and other sensory input….All this information is stored into a tiny energy bubble within your heart.  Years later it gets stimulated, and instantly you are experiencing the feelings you felt in the past.  You can actually feel the fears and the insecurity of a five-year-old when you’re sixty.  What is happening is that unfinished mental and emotional energy patterns are getting stored and reactivated.

Of all these impressions, the only ones that get blocked are those that cause either problems or some extraordinary sense of enjoyment.  Yes, you store positive impressions too.  When a wonderful experience happens to you, it doesn’t make it through because you cling to it.  Clinging means…I want to keep reliving that moment.  Play it back for me over and over again.  Clinging creates….. positive energy.  Hence two kinds of experiences can occur that block the heart.  You are either trying to push energies away because they bother you, or you are trying to keep energies close because you like them.  In both cases, you are not letting them pass, and you are wasting precious energy by blocking the flow through resisting and clinging.

The alternative is to enjoy life instead of clinging to it or pushing it away.  If you can live like that, each moment will change you.  If you are willing to experience the gift of life instead of fighting with it, you will be moved to the depth of your being.  When you reach this state, you will begin to see the secrets of the heart.  The heart is the place through which energy flows to sustain you.  This energy inspires you and raises you.  It is the strength that carries you through life.  It is the beautiful experience of love that pours through your whole being.  This is meant to be going on inside you at all times….unending inspiration, unending love, and unending openness.  That is the natural state of a healthy heart.

To achieve this state, simply allow the experiences of life to come in and pass through your being.  If old energies come back up because you were unable to process them before, let go of them now….just open, relax your heart, forgive, laugh, or do anything you want.  Just don’t push it back down.  Of course it hurts when it comes up.  It was stored with pain; it’s going to release with pain…The alternative is to be willing to let it go when it gets stimulated.  It only hurts for a minute and then it’s over.  

So, you have a choice:  Do you want to try to change the world so it doesn’t disturb you, or are you willing to go through this process of purification?…learn to be centered enough to just watch this stuff come up.  Once you sit deeply enough inside to stop fighting the stored energy patterns, they’ll come up constantly and pass right through you.  They’ll come up during the day and they’ll even come up in your dreams.  Your heart will become accustomed to the process of releasing and cleansing.  Just let it all happen.  Get it over with.  Don’t process them one by one; that’s too slow.  Stay centered behind them and let go.  Just like the physical body purges bacteria and other foreign matter, the natural flow of your energy will purge the stored patterns from your heart.

Your reward is a permanently open heart…You live in love, and it feeds you and strengthens you.  That is an open heart…Allow yourself to experience every note the heart can play.  If you relax and release, this purification of your heart is a wonderful thing.  Set your eyes on the highest* state you can imagine and don’t take them off.  If you slip,  just get back up.  It doesn’t matter.  The very fact that you even want to go through this process of freeing the energy flow means you are great.  You will get there.  Just keep letting go.

[*Jesus Christ]

Chapter 7 - Transcending the tendency to close

All that goes on inside also has its foundation in an underlying energy field.  It is the movements in this field that create our mental and emotional patterns as well as our inner drives, urges, and instinctual reactions.  

When looking at these patterns within yourself, as well as in other living species, it is not difficult to see that the most primal energy flow is the survival instinct….there has always been the day-to-day struggle to protect oneself.  In our highly evolved cooperative social structures, this survival instinct has gone through evolutionary changes.  We now experience the daily need to defend our self-concepts rather than our bodies.  Our major struggles end up being with our own inner fears, insecurities, and destructive behavior patterns, and not with outside forces.

Nonetheless, the same impulses that make a deer run away urge you to run away.  Suppose somebody raises their voice at you or talks about an uncomfortable subject.  These are not physically threatening circumstances, yet your heart starts pumping a little faster.

You withdraw, close down, and pull back behind your protective shield.  What you are actually doing is closing down your energy centers….You know exactly how to close down the centers to avoid being too receptive and sensitive to the different energies coming in and causing fear.  

When you close down and protect yourself, you are pulling a shell around the part of you that is weak…You are protecting your ego, your self-concept.  Although a situation may present no physical danger, it may cause you to experience disturbance, fear, insecurity, and other emotional problems.

The problem is that the part of you that gets disturbed is way out of balance.  It’s so sensitive that the slightest little thing causes it to overreact.  You are living on a planet spinning around the middle of outer space, and you’re either worrying about your blemishes, the scratch on your new car, or the fact that you burped in public.  It’s not healthy.  If your physical body were that sensitive, you would say you were sick…Because we’ve developed this hypersensitive psyche, we constantly use our energies to close around it and protect ourselves.  

You will get to a point in your growth where you understand that if you protect yourself, you will never be free…If you close and protect yourself, you are locking this scared, insecure person within your heart.  

Ultimately, if you protect yourself perfectly, you will never grow….Life becomes stagnant when people protect their stored issues….There are all these rules about things that are not supposed to happen outside because they could cause disturbance inside….They see life as a threat.  A good day means you made it through without getting hurt.  

Real spiritual growth happens when there is only one of you inside.  There’s not a part that’s scared and another part that’s protecting the part that’s scared…. Because there is no part of you that you’re not willing to see, the mind is no longer divided into the conscious and subconscious.  Everything you see inside is just something you see inside.  It’s not you; it’s what you see….There is simply you watching the dance of the psyche.

In order to reach this state of awareness, you must let your entire psyche surface.  Every little separated piece of it must be permitted to pass through.  

Closing creates tremendous work.  Once you close, you have to make sure that what you protected doesn’t get disturbed.  You then carry this task for the rest of your life.

Every place you go there’s someone or something trying to disturb you, trying to get your goat.  Why not let them have it?  If you don’t really want it, then don’t protect it.

The reward for not protecting your psyche is liberation…Because you got rid of that scared part of you, you don’t ever have to worry about getting hurt or disturbed.  

Spiritual growth is about the point at which you start to feel your energy change.  For instance, somebody says something and you start to feel the energy get a little strange inside.  You will actually start to feel a tightening.  That is your cue that it’s time to grow.  It’s not time to defend yourself, because you don’t want the part of you that you would be defending.  If you don’t want it, let it go.

The moment you see the energy getting imbalanced inside, the moment you see the heart starting to tense and get defensive, you just stop.

What exactly does it mean “to stop”?  It’s something you do inside.  It’s called letting go…Consciousness has the tendency to focus on disturbance, and disturbed energies inside are no exception.  These disturbed energies will draw your consciousness to them.  But you do not have to let this happen.  You really do have the ability to disengage and fall back behind them.  

If you aren’t centered, your consciousness is just following whatever catches its attention.

You have the ability to not go with any of these thoughts…A thought or emotion emerges, you notice it, and it passes by because you allow it to…When you see your heart start getting anxious, you are obviously aware of this experience.  But who is aware?  It is the consciousness, the indwelling being, the Soul, the Self.  It is the seer, the one who sees…If you want to be free, then every time you feel any change in the energy flow, relax behind it.  Don’t fight with it, don’t try to change it, and don’t judge it…You have to let them all go.

But it’s not just about letting go of thoughts and emotions.  It’s actually about letting go of the pull that the energy itself has on your consciousness.  The disturbed energy is trying to draw your attention into it.  If you use your inner willpower to not go with it, and just remain seated within, you will notice that the distinction between the consciousness and the object of consciousness is like night and day.

Let’s take a slow-motion look at what happens if you go with these energies.  First, you start to have a thought or feeling…..If these energies capture your consciousness and all the power of awareness gets focused on them, this power actually feeds them…When you concentrate on these thoughts and emotions, they become charged with energy and power.  This is why thoughts and emotions get stronger the more attention you give them.  Let’s say you feel a little jealousy or a little fear.  If you focus on it, it grows in importance and demands more of your attention….Eventually, what started as a passing thought or emotion can become the center of your entire life.  If you don’t let go, it can get completely out of control.

Letting go means falling behind the energy instead of going into it.

You become willing to pay any price for the freedom of your soul.  You will realize that the only price you have to pay is letting go of yourself. Only you can take inner freedom away from yourself, or give it to yourself.  Nobody else can.  It doesn’t matter what others do, unless you decide that it matters to you.  Begin with small things.  We tend to let ourselves get bothered by the little, meaningless things that happen every day.  For example, somebody beeps at you at the stoplight….Play with letting go and falling behind this sense of being bothered….This is how you make freedom a game.  Instead of getting into being bothered, you get into being free….Just decide that no matter what the mind says, you aren’t getting involved.  You don’t fight the mind.  In fact, you don’t even try to change it.  You just make a game out of relaxing in the face of its melodrama.  

You will see that the energy does have the power to draw you in.  Even once you decide you’re not going to let this happen, it still has a tremendous power over you….It happens with everything and everybody all the time.  Your opportunities to grow are endless…..You simply relax and release.  And no matter how many times you’re pulled, that’s how many times you relax and release.  Because the tendency to get drawn in is constant, the willingness to let go and fall behind has to be constant.

You just have to be willing to exercise your will.  But it’s not a fight or a struggle.  It’s not that you are trying to stop the energies from coming up inside.  There is nothing wrong with feeling the energies of fear, jealousy, or attraction.  It’s not your fault that such energies exist.  All the attractions, repulsions, thoughts, and feelings don’t make any difference. They don’t make you pure or impure.  That are not you.  You are the one who’s watching, and that one is pure consciousness.  Don’t think you’re free if you just didn’t have these kinds of feelings.  It’s not true.  If you can be free even though you’re having these kinds of feelings, then you’re really free—because there will always be something.

If you can learn to remain centered with the smaller things, you will see that you can also remain centered with bigger things…The types of events that would have destroyed you in the past can come and go, leaving you perfectly centered and peaceful.

There is a place deep inside of you where the consciousness touches the energy, and the energy touches the consciousness.  That is where your work is.  From that place, you let go.  Once you’ve let go, every minute of every day, year after year, then that’s where you’ll live…You will then be free to explore the nature and source of your true being—-Pure Consciousness.

Chapter 8 - Let go now or fall

The natural ups and downs of life can either generate personal growth or create personal fears.  Which of these dominates is completely dependent upon how we view change…If you have a lot of fear, you won’t like change.  You’ll try to create a world around you that is predictable, controllable, and definable.  You’ll try to create a world that doesn’t stimulate your fears.  Fear doesn’t want to feel itself; it’s actually afraid of itself.  So you utilize the mind in an attempt to manipulate life for the purpose of not feeling fear.

Fear is a thing.  It’s just another object in the universe that you are capable of experiencing.  You can do one of two things with fear:  you can recognize that you have it and work to release it, or you can keep it and try to hide from it.  Because people don’t deal with fear objectively….they go through life attempting to create safety and control by defining how they need life to be in order to be okay.

This may not sound frightening; it may sound safe.  But it’s not.  If you do this, the world truly becomes threatening….When you have fear, insecurity, or weakness inside of you, and you attempt to keep it from being stimulated, there will inevitably be events and changes in life that challenge your efforts.  Because you resist these changes, you feel that you are struggling with life….Your definition of desirable and undesirable, as well as good and bad, all come about because you have defined how things need to be in order for you to be okay.

Who said that the way life naturally unfolds is not all right?

The answer is, fear says so.  The part of you inside that’s not okay with itself can’t face the natural unfolding of life because it’s not under your control…We define the entire scope of our outer experience based upon our inner problems.  If you want to grow spiritually, you have to change that.

As you grow spiritually, you will realize that your attempts to protect yourself from your problems actually create more problems.  If you attempt to arrange people, places, and things so they don’t disturb you, it will begin to feel like life is against you…That’s why you have all these dialogues going on inside your mind.  You’re either trying to figure out what to do because they did happen. 

Life is continuously changing, and if you’re trying to control it, you’ll never be able to fully live it…There is such a thing as a life without fear.

Life creates situations that push you to your edges, all with the effect of removing what is blocked inside of you.  That which is blocked and buried within you forms the root of fear.  Fear is caused by blockages in the flow of your energy.  When your energy is blocked it can’t come up and feed your heart.  Therefore, you heart becomes weak.  When your heart is weak it becomes susceptible to lower vibrations, and one of the lowest of all vibrations is fear.  Fear is the cause of every problem.* It’s the root of all prejudices and the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, and possessiveness.  If you had no fear, you could be perfectly happy living in this world.  Nothing would bother you.

[*Perfect love casts out all fear]

The purpose of spiritual evolution is to remove the blockages that cause your fear.  The alternative is to protect your blockages so that you don’t have to feel fear.  To do this, however, you will have to try to control everything in order to avoid your inner issues……if somebody does something that stimulates fear, you think they did something wrong.  You then do everything you can to make sure they never do it again.  First you defend yourself, and then you protect yourself.  You do whatever you can to keep from feeling disturbance.

This is the beginning and end of the entire path—you surrender yourself to the process of emptying yourself.

First, you must be aware that there is something within you that needs to be released.  You must then be aware that you, the one who notices the stuff coming up, are distinct from what you’re experiencing…If you let go and stay in the seat of awareness, what you are noticing will pass.  If you don’t let go, and instead get lost in the disturbed feelings and thoughts that arise, you’ll see a sequence of events unfold so quickly you won’t know what hit you.

If you don’t let go, you’ll notice that the energy that got stimulated in your heart works like a magnet.  It’s a phenomenally attractive force that will pull your consciousness into it.  The next thing you know, you won’t be there.  You won’t maintain the same perspective of awareness that you had when you first noticed the disturbance.  You will leave the seat of objective awareness from which you saw your heart begin to react, and you will get involved in the shifting energies coming from your heart.  Some time later you’ll come back and realize you weren’t there.  You’ll come back and realize that you were totally lost in your stuff.  Then you will hope that you didn’t say or do anything you’ll regret.

Where did you go?  How did you come back?  We will address these questions shortly, but what really matters is that when you’re seeing clearly, you’re not going anywhere.  You’re simply sitting in the seat of centered awareness watching your stuff get hit.  As long as you’re watching, you’re not getting lost in it.

The key is to understand that if you don’t let go immediately, the disturbing force of the activated energy draws the focus of your consciousness.  As your consciousness gets immersed in the disturbance, you lose your clear seat of Self.  It happens instantaneously.

This leaving the seat of Self is not generally a willful act.  The laws of attraction will cause it to happen.  Consciousness is always drawn to the most distracting object:  the bumped toe, the loud noise, or the hurting heart…That place then becomes your seat of consciousness…the whole world looks different.

Now, as you look out though your disturbed energy, everything is distorted by the haze of your disturbance…But nothing has really changed.  It’s just the you’re looking at life from the seat of disturbance.

Each of these shifts in your perception should remind you to let go.  The moment you start seeing that you don’t like the people you used to like, the moment you start seeing that your life looks really different, the moment it all starts getting negative—let go.  

If you actually tell someone how you feel about them from this state of non-clarity, you have involved that person’s heart and mind in your stuff.  Now both of your egos are involved.  Once you externalize these energies, you will want to defend your actions and make them look appropriate.  But the other person will never think they were appropriate.

First you fall into the darkness, and then you manifest that darkness.  When you do this, you are literally taking the energy of the blockage and passing it on.  When you dump your stuff into this world, it’s like painting the world with your stuff.  You put more of that kind of energy into your environment and it comes back to you.  You are now surrounded by people who will interact with you accordingly.

That is how negative cycles happen.

How far down can you go?  Once you’re weakened, another blockage could get hit, and yet another.  You can fall all the way down until your life is an absolute mess.

What if all you had to do to avoid all of this was to let go in the beginning?  If you had, you would have gone up instead of down.  that’s how it works.  When a blockage gets hit, it’s a good thing.  It’s time to open up internally and release the blocked energy.  If you let go, and permit the purification process to take place inside, that blocked energy will be released.  When it’s released and allowed to flow up, it becomes purified and merges back into your enter of consciousness…..You begin to go up and up, higher and higher, and you learn the secret of the ascent.  The secret of the ascent is to never look down—always look up.

No matter what happens below you, just turn your eyes upward and relax your heart….Getting involved in the darkness does not dispel darkness; it feeds it….No matter what goes on below you, open your heart and let it go.  Your heart will become purified, and you will never know another fall.

If you fall along the way, just get up and forget it…Do not rationalize, blame or try to figure it out…If you feel shame, let it go.  If you feel fear, let it go.

So don’t fall.  Let go…..It’s pretty black-and-white.  You either let go or you don’t…So let all of your blockages and disturbances become the fuel for the journey.

Chapter 9 - Removing your inner thorn

“In order to grow, you must give up the struggle to remain the same, and learn to embrace change at all times…We normally attempt to solve our inner disturbances by protecting ourselves.  Real transformation begins when you embrace your problems as agents for growth.

Imagine that you have a thorn in your arm that directly touches a nerve.  When the thorn is touched, it’s very painful.  Because it hurts so much, the thorn is a serious problem.  It’s difficult to sleep because you roll over on it.  It’s hard to get close to people because they might touch it.  It makes your daily life very difficult.  You can’t even go for a walk in the woods because you might brush the thorn against the branches.  This thorn is a constant source of disturbance, and to solve the problem you only have two choices.

 Let’s begin with the first choice and explore how it will affect your life.  If you decide you have to keep things from touching the thorn, then that comes the work of a lifetime….

It turns out that the life of protecting yourself from your problem becomes a perfect reflection of the problem itself….If you don’t solve the root cause of the problem, but instead, attempt to protect yourself from the problem, it ends up running your life…You actually feel that because you’ve minimized the pain of the problem you’ve solved the problem.  But it is not solved.

In order to apply the analogy of the thorn to your whole life, we will use loneliness as an example.  Let’s say you have a very deep sense of inner loneliness…You’re susceptible to feeling sharp pangs in in your heart that cause quite a disturbance…What’s more, when you’re very lonely it’s often painfully difficult to get close to people.  You see, loneliness is just like the thorn…But in the case of the human heart, we have more than one thorn.  We have sensitivities about loneliness, about rejection, about our physical appearance, and about our mental prowess.  We are walking around with lots of thorns touching right against the most sensitive part of our hearts.  At any moment something can touch them and cause pain inside.

You have the same two choices with these inner thorns as you did with the thorn in our arm.  Surely it was obvious that you would  have been much better taking out that thorn…The same is true with your inner thorns; they can be removed.  But if you choose to keep them without being disturbed by them, you must modify your life to avoid the situations that would store them up.

When you’re lonely, you find yourself pondering what to do about your loneliness.  What is it that you can say or do in order to not feel so lonely?  Notice that you aren’t asking how to get rid of the problem; you’re asking how to protect yourself from feeling it.  You do this either by avoiding situations or by using people, places, and things as protective shields.

Should you be fortunate enough to find someone who manages to diminish the feeling of loneliness, you will then begin worrying about keeping your relationship with they person.  You’ve managed to compound the issue by avoiding the problem.

You now have this burden of worrying about the relationship.  It creates an experience of underlying tension and discomfort.

Do not doubt your ability to remove the root cause of the disturbance inside of you.  It really can go away.

How do you free yourself?  In the deepest sense, you free yourself by finding yourself…To free yourself of your inner thorns, you simply stop playing with them.  The more you touch them, the more you irritate them.  Because you’re always doing something to avoid feeling them, they are not given the chance to naturally work themselves out.  If you want, you can simply permit the disturbances to come up, and you can let them go.  Since your inner thorns are simply blocked energies from the past, they can be released.  The problem is, you either completely avoid situations that would cause them to release, or you push them back down in the name of protecting yourself.  

Suppose you’re sitting at home watching TV.  You’re enjoying the program until the two main characters fall in love.  Suddenly you feel loneliness, but there’s no one around to give you attention.  Interestingly, you were fine just a few minutes ago.  This example shows that the thorn is always in your heart; it’s just not activated until something touches it.  You feel the reaction as a hollowness of a dropping sensation in your heart.  It feels very uncomfortable.  A sense of weakness comes over you, and you begin thinking about other times when you were left alone and of people who have hurt you.  Stored energy from the past releases from the heart and generates thoughts.  Now, instead of enjoying TV, you’re sitting alone caught in a wave of thoughts and emotions.

What can you do to solve this besides eating something, calling somebody, or doing something else that might quiet it down?…All you have to do is notice who it is that feels the loneliness.  The one who notices is already free.

Wake up and realize that you are in there, and you have a sensitive person in there with you.  Simply watch that sensitive part of you feel disturbance….These feelings are just part of the nature of a human being.  If you pay attention, you will see the they are not you; they are just something you’re feeling and experiencing.  You are the indwelling being that is aware of all of this.  If you maintain your center, you can learn to appreciate and respect even the difficult experiences.

For example, some of the most beautiful poetry and music have come from people who were in turmoil.  Great art comes from the depth of one’s being.  You can experience these very human states without getting lost in them or resisting them.  You can notice that you notice and just watch how experiencing loneliness affects you.  Does your posture change? Do you breathe slower or faster.  What goes on when loneliness is given the space it needs to pass through you.  Be an explorer.  Witness it, and then it will go.  If you don’t get absorbed in it, the experience will soon pass and something else will come  up.  Just enjoy all of it.  If you can do this, you will be free, and a world of pure energy will open up within you.

It comes up from behind, rather than in front where you experience your mind and emotions…You don’t have to get rid of loneliness; you just cease to be involved with it….It’s none of your business. Just let things go.

If you sit within the Self, you will experience the strength of your inner being even when your heart feels weak.  This is the essence of the path..Once you learn that it’s okay to feel inner disturbances, and that they can no longer disturb your seat of consciousness, you will be free.  You will begin to be sustained by the inner energy flow that goes from behind you.  When you have tasted the ecstasy of the inner flow, you can walk in this world and the world will never touch you.  

Chapter 10 - Stealing freedom for your soul

The prerequisite to true freedom is to decide that you do not want to suffer anymore…We fear that we are not good enough or that we will fail…We fear that people will turn on us, take advantage of us, or stop loving us…As we try to have open and loving relationships, and as we try to succeed and express ourselves, there is an inner weight that we carry.  This weight is the fear of experiencing pain, anguish, or sorrow.  Every day we are either feeling it, or we are protecting ourselves from feeing it.  

Why do we have to think about ourselves all the time?…Look how often you think about how you’re doing, whether you like things or not, and how to rearrange the world to please yourself.  You think like this because you’re not okay inside, and you’re constantly trying to make yourself feel better.

Inner sensitivity is a symptom of non-well-being.  It’s the same as when the body sends pain or displays other symptoms when it's not well.  Pain is not bad; it’s how the body talks to you….Your psyche is communicating through its universal language:  fear.  Self-consciousness, jealousy, insecurity, anxiety—-they are all fear.

If you mistreat an animal it becomes afraid.  This is what has happened to your psyche.  You have mistreated it by giving it a responsibility that is incomprehensible…You said to your mind, “I want everyone to like me.  I don’t want anyone to speak badly of me.  I want everything I say and do to be acceptable and pleasing to everyone.  I don’t want anyone to hurt me.  I don’t want anything to happen that I don’t like.  And I want everything to happen that I do like.”  Then you said, “Now, mind, figure out how to make every one of these things a reality, even if you have to think about it day and night.”  And of course your mind said, “I’m on the job.  I will work on it constantly.”

The mind has to try to make it so that everything you say is said the right way, taken the right way, and has the right effect on everybody.  It has to make sure that everything you do is interpreted and seen the right way, and that nobody does anything that hurts you….The mind is constantly try to give you advice and how to make it all okay.  That is why the mind is so active; you gave it an impossible task to do.

This act of constantly worrying about yourself is a form of suffering.  But how do you fix this?  How do you get it to stop?

Your thoughts tend to focus on what is bothering you today.

What you’ll see is that your mind is always telling you that you have to change something outside in order to solve your inner problems.  But if you are wise, you won’t play this game….Your mind’s thoughts are disturbed by its fears.  Of all the advice in the world that you do not want to listen to, it is the advice of a disturbed mind.

The fact is, however, external changes are not going to change your problem because they don’t address the root of your problem.  The root problem is that you don’t feel whole and complete within yourself.  If you will try to find the perfect person to love and adore you, and you manage to succeed, then you have actually failed.  You did not solve your problem.  All you did was involve that person in your problem.  That is why people have so much trouble with relationships.   You began with a problem inside yourself, and you tried to solve it by getting involved with somebody else.  That relationship will have problems because your problems are what caused the relationship.  It is all so easy to see once you step back and dare to look at it honestly.

Now that we’ve seen what failure looks like, let’s define success…. Success means you never have to think about your psyche again….you should never have to figure out how to be okay, or how not to be scared, or how to feel loved. 

Imagine what fun life would be if you didn’t have those neurotic, personal thought going on within you.  You could enjoy things, and you could actually get to know people instead of needing them.

Your current relationship with your psyche is like an addition….If you want to be free, you have to learn to treat it like any other addiction…..Look forward to the day, and not worry about that will happen.  Your daily life can be like a vacation.

You can live a life completely free from the fears of the psyche…Let’s take smoking as an example.  It is not hard to understand how to stop smoking.  The key word is “stop”…..The way you stop smoking is to stop putting cigarettes in your mouth.

You just stop telling  your mind that its job is to fix your personal problems….you have given your mind an impossible task by asking it to manipulate the world in order to fix your personal inner problems….Your mind is not qualified for that job.  Fire it, and let go of your inner problems instead.

Whenever it starts up telling you what you should or shouldn’t do in order to get the world to match your preconceived concepts, don’t listen….The truth is, everything will be okay as soon as you are okay with everything.

All you have to do is stop expecting the mind to fix what’s wrong inside of you.  That is the core, the root of it all…The mind is simply a computer, a tool.  It can be used to ponder great thoughts, solve scientific problems, and serve humanity.  But you, in your lost state, told it to spend its time conjuring up outer solutions for your very personal inner problems.  You are the one who is trying to use the analytical mind to protect yourself from the natural unfolding of life.

By watching your mind, you will notice that it is engaged in the process of trying to make everything okay.  Consciously remember that this is not what you want to do, and then gently disengage.

The key is to be quiet.  It’s not that your mind has to be quiet.  You be quiet.  You, the one inside watching the neurotic mind, just relax….You are not the thinking mind; you are aware of the thinking mind.  You are the consciousness that is behind the mind and is aware of the thoughts.  The minute you stop putting your whole heart and soul into the mind as if it were your savior and protector, you will find yourself behind the mind watching it.

You can watch the mind being neurotic and not get involved.  That is all you have to do to unplug the disturbed mind.  The mind runs because you are giving it the power of your attention.  Withdraw your attention, and the thinking mind falls away.

Begin with the little things.

You simply choose not to get involved in the psyche.  Does that mean that you stop your mind from going around in circles trying to figure out what’s going on?  No.  It simply means that you are ready, willing, and able to watch your mind create its little melodrama….Just watch the mind talk, and keep relaxing and releasing.  Fall behind the noise.

If you follow this path, the only action you ever take is to relax and release….Simply be aware that you are seeing it.  That’s how you get out.  You just let it go.

There are some very simple awareness practices that only take a second to do, yet will help you stay centered behind the mind…Just check out what’s going on—-heart, mind, shoulders, etc.  Set up trigger points in everyday life that help you remember who you are and what’s going on inside.

Ultimately, every change in your energy flow, whether it’s agitation of the mind or shifts in the heart, will be what reminds you that you are back there noticing…But first you have to get quiet enough so that it’s not so reactive in there.  These trigger points will help remind you to remain centered.  Eventually it will become quiet enough so that you can simply watch the heart begin to react, and let go before the mind starts.  At some point in the journey it all becomes heart, not mind.  You will see that the mind follows the heart.

The path of letting go allows you to free your energies so that you can free yourself.

Chapter 11- Pain, the price of freedom

One of the essential requirements for true  spiritual growth and deep personal transformation is coming to peace with pain.  No expansion or evolution can take place without change, and periods of change are not always comfortable.  Change involves challenging what is familiar to us and daring to question our traditional needs for safety, comfort, and control.  This is often perceived as a painful experience.

Since avoiding the pain prohibits you from exploring the part of your being that is beyond that layer, real growth takes place when you finally decide to deal with the pain.  Because the pain is at the core of the heart, it radiates out and affects everything you do…..Inner pain is always there, underneath, hidden by the layers of our thoughts and emotions.  We feel it most when our hearts go into turmoil, like when the world does not meet our expectations.

The psyche is built upon avoiding this pain, and as a result, it has fear of pain as its foundation.  That is what caused the psyche to be….If you are doing something to avoid pain, then pain is running your life.

You will come to see that any behavior pattern based upon the avoidance of pain becomes a doorway to the pain itself…One way or another, the feelings you experience will work their way back to the motive behind your actions.

The heart is where pain comes from…Your personality traits and behavior patterns are all about avoiding this pain…Every time you do something in the name of avoiding pain, that something becomes a link that holds the potential for the pain you’re avoiding.

Let’s say you call a friend to go see a movie, and they say they’re busy.  Some people feel hurt by that.  You will feel pain if the reason you called them was the avoidance of pain…Your attempt to avoid this pain has created layer upon layer of sensitivities that are all linked to the hidden pain.

Let’s take a moment to see how these layers build up.  In order to avoid the pain of rejection, you work hard to maintain friendships.  Since you’ve seen that it is possible to get rejected, even by friends, you are going to work harder and harder to avoid it.  To succeed, you have to be sure everything you do is acceptable to others.  This determines how you dress and how you act.  Notice, you’re no longer focused directly on rejection.  Now it’s about your clothes, how you walk, or what you drive.  You’ve gone another layer further away from the core pain.

At the core there is the pain.  Then, in order to avoid the pain, you try to stay busy with friends and hide in their acceptance.  That is the first layer out.  Then, in order to assure your acceptance, you try to present yourself a certain way so that you can win friends and influence people.  That is another layer out.  Each layer is attached to the original pain.  This is why simple, everyday interactions can affect you so much.

What would your life be like if it wasn’t run by that pain?  You would be free.  You could walk around this world completely free, just having fun, just being comfortable with whatever happens.

To live at this level of freedom, you must learn not to be afraid of inner pain and disturbance…If you want to be free, simply view inner pain as a temporary shift in your energy flow.  There is no reason to fear this experience.  You must not be afraid of rejection, or of how you would feel if you got sick, or if someone died, or if something else went wrong.  You cannot spend your life avoiding things that are not actually happening, or everything will become negative.

You must look inside yourself and determine that from now on pain is not a problem.  It is just a thing in the universe.  Somebody can say something to you that can cause your heart to react and catch fire, but then it passes.  It’s a temporary experience….If you feel insecurity, it’s just a feeling.  You can handle a feeling.  If you feel embarrassed, it’s just a feeling.   It’s just a part of creation.  If you feel jealousy and your heart burns, just look at it objectively, like you would a mild bruise.  It’s a thing in the universe that is passing through your system.  Laugh at it, have fun with it, but don’t be afraid of it.  It cannot touch you unless you touch it.

If something disturbing touches your psyche, its tendency is to withdraw, to pull back, and to protect itself….In essence, you “close,” which is simply an attempt to put a shield around your inner energy…You do this because you can’t handle the pain you’re feeling…Once you close, your mind will build an entire psychological structure around your closed energy.  Your thoughts will try to rationalize why you’re right, why the other person’s wrong, and what you should do about it.

If you buy into this, it will become a part of you…When you deal with a situation by resisting the pain it causes, you will have to adjust your behavior and thought in order to protect yourself.  You will have to do this so that nothing aggravates what you have her inside about the incident.

If life does something that causes a disturbance inside of you, instead of pulling away, let it pass through you like the wind.

When you feel pain, simply view it as energy…Then relax.  Do the opposite of contracting and closing.  Relax and release…As you relax and feel the resistance, the heart will want to pull away, to close, to protect, and to defend itself.  Keep relaxing.  Relax your shoulders and relax your heart.  Let go and give room for the pain to pass through you.  It’s just energy.  Just see it as energy and let it go.

Yet every time you resist and close, you are building up the pain inside….You are then forced to use the psyche to create a layer of distance between you who experiences the pain and the pain itself.  That is what all the noise is inside your mind:  an attempt to avoid the stored pain.

Your true greatness hides on the other side of that layer of pain.  You must be willing to accept pain in order to pass through to the other side….it will have its moment before your awareness and then it will pass.

Pain is the price of freedom.  And the moment you are willing to pay that price, you will no longer be afraid.  The moment you are not afraid of the pain, you’ll be able to face all of life’s situations without fear.

To feel great love and freedom, to find the presence of God within you, all of this stored pain must go.

If you are no longer afraid of yourself, you are free.  You will then be able to walk through this world more vibrant and alive than ever before…You will begin to have truly beautiful experiences rise up within you.  Eventually you will understand that there is an ocean of love behind all of this fear and pain.  That force will sustain you by feeding your heart from deep within.  Over time, you will form an intensely personal relationship with this beautiful inner force.

Part IV:  Going Beyond

Chapter 12 - Taking down the walls

At some point in your growth, it starts to become quieter inside…You then come to realize that though you have always  been in there, you have been completely overwhelmed by the constant barrage of thoughts, emotions, and sensory inputs that draw on your consciousness.

You are inside a house, totally sealed off from natural light, and the house is sitting in the middle of an open field full of brilliant light….Your house is made of your thoughts and emotions.  The walls are made of your psyche.  That’s what that house is.  It is all your past experiences, all your thoughts and emotions; all the concepts, views, opinions, beliefs. hopes, and dreams that you have collected around yourself…This mental structure completely  blocks you from whatever natural light is on the outside of its walls….You are so entranced into paying attention to your thoughts and emotions that you never go beyond the borders they create.

They become your prison because they are the boundaries of your awareness.   Because you are not willing to approach them, you cannot see what is beyond them.

When you approach the barrier areas of your thoughts and emotions, it feels like going into an abyss…Eventually you will realize that darkness is not what’s really there.  What is really there are the walls that are blocking the infinite light..It is often said that you must go through the darkest night in order to get to the infinite light.  This is because what we call darkness is really the blockage of light.  You must go past these walls.

Time and again, every day, the natural flow of life collides with our walls and tries to tear them down.  But time and again, we defend them.  You must realize that when you defend yourself, you are really defending your walls…You have built a self-concept, moved inside, and now you defend that home with all you have.  But what creates that inner home, other than the walls of your thoughts?

We work hard to build a world within the confines of our inner walls that is better than the inner darkness.  We decorate our walls with the memories of our past experiences and with our dreams of the future.  In other words, we decorate them with thoughts…You can step outside your house of thoughts into the unlimited.  Your awareness can expand to encompass vast space instead of the limited space in which you dwell.  Then, when you look back at that little house you built, you will wonder why you were ever in there.

True freedom is very close; it’s just on the other side of your walls…Focus on the walls of your own making that are blocking the light…You can get out simply by letting everyday life take down the walls you hold around yourself.  You simply don’t participate in supporting maintaining, and defining your fortress.

Now imagine the walls crumbling down, and the effortless release of consciousness expanding into the brilliance of what is and always was.

Chapter 13 - Far, far beyond

Ultimately, the word “beyond” captures the true meaning of spirituality.  In its most basic sense, going beyond means going past where you are….When you constantly go beyond yourself, there are no more limitations.  There are no more boundaries.

Things seem finite because your perception hits mental boundaries.  In truth, everything is infinite.

To go beyond, you must keep going past the limits that you put on things.  This requires changes at the core of your being.  Right now you are using your analytical mind to break the world up into individual thought objects.  You are then using the same mind to put these discrete thoughts together in a defined relationship to each other.  You do this in an attempt to feel a semblance of control….Your views, your opinions, your preferences, your concepts, your goals, and your beliefs are all ways of bringing the infinite universe down to the finite where you can feel a sense of control…You must now struggle day and night to make the world fit your model, and you label everything that doesn’t fit as wrong, bad, or unfair.

If anything happens that challenges how you view things, you fight….This is the result of being unable to fit what’s actually happening into your model of reality.  If you want to go beyond your model, you have to take the risk of not believing in it.  If your mental model is bothering you, it’s because it doesn’t incorporate reality.  Your choice is to either resist reality or go beyond the limits of your model.

In order to truly go beyond your model, you must first understand why you built it.  The easiest way to understand this is to study what happens when the model doesn’t work.  Have you ever built your whole world on a model of life predicated upon another person’s behavior or the permanence of a relationship?  If so, have you ever had that foundation pulled out from under you?  Somebody leaves you.  Somebody dies.  Something goes wrong.  Something shakes your model to the core.  When this happens, your entire view of who you believe you are, including your relationship to everyone and everything around you, begins to fall apart.  You panic and do everything you can to hold it together.  You beg, fight, and struggle to try to keep your world from collapsing.

But our whole world doesn’t have to fall apart in order for us to see what we’re doing in there…If you really want to see why you do things, then don’t do them and see what happens…There’s a reason for everything you do.  If you want to see why you care so much about what you wear and what your hair is like, then just don’t do it one day…..See what happens to you when you don’t do the things that make you comfortable.  What you’ll see is why you’re doing them.

You are constantly trying to stay within your comfort zone…If things start to go any other way, you get uncomfortable.  Your mind then becomes active telling you how to get things back the way you need them to be…Your mind is telling you to fix it.  And it doesn’t really matter what you end up doing; it’s all about getting back within your comfort zone…Going beyond always means letting go of the effort to see things within your defined limits.

So there are two ways you can live:  you can devote your life to staying in your comfort zone, or you can work on your freedom.  

To understand this better, let’s take a trip to the zoo.  Imagine that you’re having a great time until you see a tiger inside a small cage…The confines of your comfort zone create just such a cage.  This inner cage doesn’t limit your body; it limits the expanse of your consciousness.  Because you are unable to go outside your comfort zone, you are, in essence, locked in confinement.

If you examine this, you will see that you’re willing to stay in this cage because you’re afraid…Would you panic and want to get out, or would you thank them for helping you feel safe?

Most people have the second reaction when it comes to the limitations of their psyche.  They want to stay in there and feel safe.

When you truly awake spiritually, you realize you are caged.  You wake up and realize that you can hardly move in there.  You’re constantly hitting the limits of your comfort zone.  You see that you’re afraid to tell people what you really think.  You see that you’re too self-conscious to freely express yourself.  You see that you have to stay on top of everything in order to be okay.

Why?  There’s really no reason.  You have set these limits on yourself.

Going beyond means going beyond the borders of the cage.  There should be no cage.  The soul is infinite.  It is free to expand everywhere.  It is free to experience all of life.  This can only happen when you are wiling to face reality without mental boundaries…..Remember, decorating your cage with beautiful experiences, fond memories and great dreams is not the same as going beyond.

Throughout each day, you frequently hit the edges of your cage….You actually use the brilliance of your mind to stay inside your cage.

Eventually you will realize that it cannot actually hurt you to go  beyond your psychological limits.  If you are willing to just stand at the edge and keep walking, you will go beyond.  You used to pull back when it got uncomfortable.  Now you relax and go past that point.  That is all it takes to go beyond.  Go beyond where you were a minutes ago by handing what’s happening now.

You simply interact with the day with a peaceful, fully inspired heart.  If your edges happen to get hit, the mind does complain.  It all just passes through.   Nothing  can ever bother you except your edges, and now you know what to do with them…All you have to do is constantly relax and lean into them.  Then one day…..you fall through into the infinite.  

Chapter 14 - Letting go of false solidity

The inside of one’s psyche is ….full of conflicting forces that are constantly changing due to both internal and external stimuli…As a result, we find ourselves struggling just to hold it all together.  But everything keeps on changing—-moods, desires, likes, dislikes, enthusiasm, lethargy.  It’s a full-time task just to maintain the discipline necessary to create even the semblance of control and order in there.

While it may not seem to you that you’re suffering, compared to what it can be, you are suffering.  In truth, the very responsibility of having to hold it all together is itself a form of suffering.  You notice this most when things start to fall apart outside.  Your psyche goes into turmoil, and you have to struggle to hold your inner world together.  But what exactly are you trying to hold onto?  The only things in there are your thoughts, emotions, and movements of energy, none of which are solid.  They are like clouds, simply coming and going through vast inner space, but you keep holding onto them, as though consistency can substitute for stability.  The Buddhists have a term for this:  “clinging.”  

In order to understanding clinging, we must first understand who clings.  As you go deeper into yourself, you will naturally come to realize that there is an aspect of your being that is always there and never changes.  This is your sense of awareness, your consciousness.  It is this awareness that is aware of your thoughts, experiences the ebb and flow of your emotions, and receives your physical senses.  This is the root of Self.  You are not your thoughts; you are aware of your thoughts.  You are not your emotions; you feel your emotions.  You are not your body; you look at it in the mirror and experience this world through its eyes and ears.  You are the conscious being who is aware that you are aware of all these inner and outer things.

Consciousness is a dynamic field of awareness that has the a ability to either narrowly focus or broadly expand…..Your sense of self is determined by where you are focusing your consciousness.  

But what determines where you focus your consciousness?  At the most basic level, it is simply determined by anything that catches your awareness because it stands out from the rest…..Mental and emotional energy patterns become fixed when they encounter concentrated consciousness… The result of clinging is that selective thoughts and emotions stay in one place long enough to become the building blocks of the psyche.

Because some objects remain in the consciousness while others pass through, your sense of awareness relates more to them…Although you are clinging to inner objects, you use them to orient and relate yourself to the multitude of physical objects that come in through your senses….You actually end up relating so strongly to this inner structure that you build your entire sense of self around it.  Because you cling to it, it stays fixed.  And because it stays fixed, you relate to it above all else.  This is the birth of the psyche.  

You will never find yourself in what you have built to define yourself….Awareness rested itself on the objects it was aware of and called it home.  Because you have this model of who you are, it is easier to know how to act, how to make decisions, an how to relate to the outside world…You will see that you live your entire life based on the model you built around yourself.

Let’s get more specific.  You try to hold a consistent set of thoughts and concepts in your mind, such as “I am a woman.”….You, who are holding onto to that, are neither male nor female.  You are the awareness who hears the thought and see a woman’s body in the mirror.  But you cling tightly to these concepts….But it is not who you are.  It is just the thoughts you have pulled around yourself in an attempt to define yourself.  You do this because you are lost inside.

Basically, you attempt to create a sense of stability and steadiness inside.  This generates a false, but welcomed, sense of security.  You also want the people around you to have done the same thing.  You want people to be steady enough so that you can predict their behavior.  If they aren’t, it disturbs you…This protective shield of beliefs and concepts regarding the outside world acts as insulation between you and the people you interact with.  By having preconceived notions about other people’s behavior, you feel safer and more in control.

So we are all clinging and then building…..In most societies you are well rewarded for how good you are at clinging and building.  If you get that model down absolutely right, and behave consistently every time, you have actually “created” someone.  And if the someone you create is what others want and need, you can be very popular and successful…It’s not that there is anything wrong with this.  Obviously, everybody does it.  But who are you that’s doing this, and why are you doing it?

It’s important to realize that it’s not just up to you what thoughts you cling to and what person you create.  Society has a lot to say about this.  There are acceptable and unacceptable social behaviors for almost everything….How does our society engrain these mental and emotional structures within us?  When you do it well, you are rewarded with hugs and showered with positive accolades.  When you don’t do it well, you are punished, either physically, mentally, or emotionally.

Just think about how nice you are to people when they behave in accordance with your expectation.  Now think about how you close up and pull back from them when they don’t.  This is not to mention getting angry or even violent toward them.  What are you doing?  You are trying to change someone’s behavior by leaving impressions on their mind.  You are attempting to alter their collection of beliefs, thoughts, and emotions so that the next time they act it is in the manner you expect.  In truth we are all doing this to each other every day.

Why do we care so much whether other people accept the facade we put out there?…If you let go of your facade, and don’t try to trade it in for a new one, your thoughts and emotions will become unanchored and begin passing through you.  It will be a very scary experience….This is what people feel when something very important outside does not fit their inner model…If you’re willing to face that sense of panic, there is a way to go past it.  You can go further back into the consciousness that is experiencing it, and the panic will stop.  Then there will be a great peace, like nothing you’ve ever felt.

You thought you had to protect yourself, so you grabbed onto the things that were coming at you and used them to hide….But you can let go of what you’re clinging to and not play this game.  You just have to take the risk of letting it all go and daring to face the fear that was driving you.

This journey is one of passing through exactly where you have been struggling not to go….You will be aware that each moment of each day is unfolding and you neither have control, nor crave it.  You have no concepts, no hopes, no dreams, no beliefs, and no security.   You are no longer building mental models of what’s going on, but life is going on anyway.  You are perfectly comfortable just being aware of it.  Here comes this moment, then the next moment, and then the next.

From this place of clarity, you will be able to experience the powerful tendency to protect yourself.  This tendency exist because you truly have no control, and that is not comfortable to you…You must be willing to see that this need to protect yourself is where the entire personality comes from.  It was created by building a mental and emotional structure to get away from that sense of fear.  You are now standing face-to-face with the root of the psyche.

If you go deep enough, you can watch the psyche being built…You will see that you’re literally taking all your memories, pulling them together in an orderly fashion, and saying that’s who you are.  But you are not the events; you’re the one who experienced the events…You do not have to cling to your experiences in the name of building yourself.  This is a false self you are building inside.  It is just a concept of yourself that you hide behind.

How long have you been hiding in there struggling to keep it all together?  Any time anything goes wrong in the protective model you built about yourself, you defend and rationalize in order to get it back together.  Your mind does not stop struggling until you’ve processed the event or somehow made it go away.  People feel their very existence is at stake, and they will fight and argue until they get control back….You were told not to build your house upon sand.  Well, this is the ultimate sand….If you continue to cling to what you built….You will have to keep everybody and everything straight in order to reconcile your conceptual model with reality.  It’s a constant struggle to keep in together.

What it means to live spiritually is to not participate in this struggle.  It means that the events that happen in the moment belong to the moment.  They don’t belong to you…You must stop defining yourself in relationship to them, and just let them come and go.  Don’t allow events to leave impressions inside of you…If an event happens that doesn’t fit your conceptual model, and you see yourself struggling and rationalizing to make it fit, just notice what you’re doing.  An event in the universe didn’t match your model and it’s causing disturbance inside of you.  If you will simply notice this, you will find that it is actually breaking up your model.  You’ll get to the point where you like this because you don’t want to keep your model.  You’ll define this as good because you are no longer willing to put any energy into building and solidifying your facade.  Instead, you will actually permit the things that disturb your model to act as the dynamite to break it up and free you.  This is what it means to live spiritually.

When you become truly spiritual, you are totally different from everybody else.  That which everybody else wants, you don’t want.  That which everybody else resists, you totally accept…Why should anything that anyone says or does cause you to get disturbed?  You’re just on a planet spinning around the middle of absolutely nowhere.  You came here to visit for a handful of years and then you’re going to leave.  How can you live all stressed-out over everything?  Don’t do it.  If anything can cause disturbance inside of you it means it hit your model.  It means it hit the false part of you that you built in order to control your own definition of reality…There’s nothing you can make up inside your mind that can ever be considered reality.

You must learn to be comfortable with psychological disturbance.

The reason you built the whole mental structure was to avoid pain.  If you let it fall apart, you’re going to feel the pain that you were avoiding when you built it…..If you were to lock yourself in a fortress because you were afraid to come out….That fortress would not be protecting you; it would be imprisoning you…You have to let go and pass through the cleansing process that frees you from your psyche.  You do this by simply watching the psyche be the psyche.  The way out is through awareness.  Stop defining the disturbed mind as a negative experience.

In time, you will come to realize that the center from which you watch disturbance cannot get disturbed….Awareness transcends what it is aware of.  It is as separates light is from what it shines upon.

If you want permanent peace, permanent joy, and permanent happiness, you have to get through to the other side of the inner turmoil.  You can experience a life in which waves of love can rush up inside of you any time you want.  It is the nature of your being.  You simply have to go to the other side of the psyche.  You do that by letting go of the tendency to cling.  You do it by not using your mind to build false solidity.  You just decide, once and for all, to take the journey by constantly letting go.

At this point, the journey becomes very quick  You will go through the part of you that has always been scared to death, and you’ll see how that part has always struggled to hold it all together.  If you don’t feed that part, if you just keep letting go and don’t let it cling, eventually you will fall behind the false solidity.  This is not something you do; it is something that happens to you.

If you pass through a period of darkness or depression, just ask, “Who is aware of the darkness?  That’s how you pass through the different stages your inner growth.

You will become filled with a light that has no darkness, with a peace that passeth all understanding.  You will then walk through every moment of your daily life with the flow of this inner force sustaining you, feeding you, and guiding you from deep within.  You will still have thoughts, emotions, and a self-concept floating around inner space, but they will be just one small part of what you experience.  You will not identify with things outside the sense of Self.

There is no need for false solidity when you are at peace with the universal expanse of your true Being.

PART V - Living Life

Chapter 15 - The path of unconditional happiness

To begin with, you have to realize that you really only have one choice in this life….Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy?

If you keep it that simple, you will see that it really is under your control.  It’s just that you have a deep-seated set of preferences that gets in the way.  “Do you want to be happy?”  If the answer is really yes, then say it without qualifying it.  After all, what the question really means is “Do you want to be happy from this point forward for the rest of your life, regardless of what happens?”

There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.  It’s not a question of whether your happiness is under your control…It’s just that you don’t really mean it when you say you’re willing to stay happy.  You want to qualify it.  You want to say that as long as this doesn’t happen, or as long as that does happen, then you’re willing to be happy.  That’s why it seems like it is out of your control.

You have to give an unconditional answer…This is truly a spiritual path, and it is as direct and sure a path to Awakening as could possibly exist.  

Once you decide you want to be unconditionally happy, something inevitably will happen that challenges you.  This test of your commitment is exactly what stimulates spiritual growth.

Billions of things could happen that you haven’t even thought of yet.  The question is not whether they will happen.  Things are going to happen.  The real question is whether you want to be happy regardless of what happens.  The purpose of your life is to enjoy and learn from your experiences.  You were not put on Earth to suffer.  You’re not helping anybody by being miserable.  Regardless of your philosophical beliefs, the fact remains that you were born and you are going to die.  During the time in between, you get to choose whether or not you want to enjoy the experience…If you can live this way, your heart will  be so open and your Spirit will be so free, that you soar up to the heavens.

If you want to be happy, you have to let go of the part of you that wants to create melodrama.  This is the part that thinks there’s a reason not to be happy.

Committing yourself to unconditional happiness will teach you every single thing there is to learn about yourself, about others, and about the nature of life….Every time a part of you begins to get unhappy, let it go.  Work with it.  Use affirmations, or do whatever you need to do to stay open….If they starve you and put you in solitary confinement, just have fun being like Gandhi.  No matter what happens, just enjoy the life that comes to you.

As difficult as that sounds, what’s the benefit of not doing it?  If you’re totally innocent and they lock you up, you might as well have fun.  What good does it do to not have fun?  It doesn’t change anything.  In the end, if you stay happy, you win.  Make that your game, and just stay happy no matter what.

So to stay happy, just don’t close your heart.

When you start to close, just question if you’re really willing to give up your happiness.  You should examine what it is inside of you that believes there’s some benefit to closing.  

The key is to learn to keep your mind disciplined enough so that it doesn’t trick you into thinking that this time it’s worth closing…Just pick yourself up and affirm inwardly that you don’t want to close, no matter what happens.  

But you have limited time left in your life, and what’s really not reasonable is to not enjoy life.

If you have trouble remembering that, then meditate.  Meditation strengthens your center of consciousness so that you’re always aware enough to not allow your heart to close.

Unconditional happiness is very a high path and a very high technique because it solves everything…The technique of unconditional happiness is ideal because what you’re doing with the rest of your life is already defined—you’re letting go of yourself so that you can remain happy…A person who actually does this every moment of every day is going to notice the cleansing of their heart…..They will come to know a happiness that is beyond human understanding.  This path solves daily life and it solves spiritual life.  The greatest gift one can give to God is to be pleased with His creation.  

If you want to be close to God, learn to be joyful.

Once you have passed through trial by fire, and you are thoroughly convinced that you will let go no matter what, then the veils of the human mind and heart will fall away….When you are done playing with the temporal and finite, you will open to the eternal and infinite.

Chapter 16 - The spiritual path of nonresistance

One should view their spiritual work as learning to live life without stress, problems, fear, or melodrama…Stress only happens when you resist life’s events.  If you’re neither pushing life away, nor pulling it toward you, then you are not creating any resistance.

If you resist this amazing force of life, tension builds within you and gets into your body, mind and spiritual heart.

If we want to understand this tendency, we must first examine why we are so resistant to just letting life be life….If you look carefully inside yourself, you will see that it’s you, the Self, the indwelling being, that has this power.  It is called willpower.

Will is a real force that emanates from your being…You use the same will to hold onto thoughts when you want to concentrate on them.  The power of Self, when it is concentrated and directed into the physical, mental, or emotional realms, creates a force, and we call that force “will.”  That’s what you use when you try to make things happen or not happen.  You are not helpless in there; you have the power to affect things.

We actually assert our will in opposition to the flow of life.  If something happens that we don’t like, we resist it.  But since what we’re resisting has already taken place, what good is it to resist?

The fact is, it cannot even be argued that we’re resisting the actual situation…What we’re really resisting is the experience of the event passing through us…The experience of an event does not stop with our sensory observation of it.  The event also has to pass through the psyche at an energetic level….Amazingly, you actually have the ability to resist these movements of energy.  The assertion of willpower can stop the energy transfer, and that’s what creates tension.

Eventually you’ll see that this resistance is a tremendous waste of energy.  The fact is, you’re generally using your will to resist one of two things:  that which has already happened or that which hasn’t happened yet…Since the event has already passed, you are actually struggling with yourself, not with the event.  In addition, contemplate how much energy is wasted resisting what might happen.  Since most of the things you think might happen never do, you are just throwing your energy away.  

If you assert your will against the energy of an event that has already happened, it is like trying to stop the ripples caused by a leaf dropped into a still lake.  Anything you do causes more disturbance, not less.  When you resist, the energy has no place to go.  It gets stuck in your psyche and seriously affects you.  It blocks your heart’s energy flow and causes you to feel closed and less vibrant.  This is literally what is happening when something is weighing on your mind or when things just get too heavy for you.

Now when we face today’s events, we are neither prepared to receive them nor capable of digesting them.  This is because we’re still struggling with past energies.  Over time, the energies can build up to the point that a person becomes so blocked that they either blow up or shut down completely.  This is what it means to get stressed-out or even totally burned-out.

It is not life’s events that are causing problems or stress.  It is your resistance to life’s events that is causing this experience.  Since the problem is caused by using your will to resist the reality of life passing through you, the solution is quite obvious—stop resisting.  If you are going to resist something, at least have some rational basis for resisting.

In order to resist you first must decide that something is not the way you like it….Why did you decide to resist this one?…..This is because we don’t all have the same preconceived notions of how things should or how much they should matter to us.

If you want to understand stress, begin by realizing that you carry around with you your own set of preconceived notions of how things should be.

These personal events that take place in our lives leave impressions on our minds and hearts…It’s no deeper than that.  The events may have happened in your childhood or at various points throughout your life…Now, based on these past impressions, you are resisting the current events that are taking place….Believing they have real meaning, you put all your heart and soul into either resting or clinging.  

The alternative is to use life to let go of these impressions and the stress they create.  In order to do this you have to become very conscious.  You have to carefully watch the mental voice that tells you to resist something….Let your spiritual path become the willingness to let whatever happens make it through you, rather than carrying it into the next moment.  That doesn’t mean you don’t deal with what happens.  You’re welcome to deal with it, but first let the energy make it through you.  If you don’t you will not actually be dealing with the current event, you will be dealing with your own blocked energies from the past.  You will not be coming from a place of clarity, but from a place of inner resistance and tension.

To avoid this, begin dealing with each situation with acceptance.  Acceptance means that events can make it through you without resistance.  If an event takes place and is able to make it through your psyche, you will be left face-to-face with the actual situation as it truly exists.  Since you are dealing with the actual event, rather than stored energies stimulated by the event, you won’t assert reactive energy from your past.  You will find that you are able to deal with daily situations much better.  It is actually possible to never have another problem for the rest of your life.  This is because events are not problems; they’re just events.  Your resistance to them is what causes the problem.  But, again don’t think that because you accept reality it means you don’t deal with things….You just deal with them as events that are taking place on the planet Earth, and not as personal problems.

You will be surprised to find that in most situations there’s nothing to deal with except for your own fears and desires.  Fear and desire make everything seem so complicated.  If you don’t have fear or desire about an event, there’s really nothing to deal with.  You simply allow life to unfold and interact with it in a natural and rational manner…..When you attain that state, everything becomes clear.  In contrast, everybody else is attempting to deal with the world around them while struggling with their own reactions and personal preferences.  When a person is dealing with their own fears, anxieties, and desires, how much energy is left for dealing with what’s actually happening?  

Up to now, your capacities have been constrained by constant inner struggles…Your capabilities would be exponential compared to what you’ve ever experienced.

So, as your path, you take on the work of using life to let go of your resistance….Imagine if you used relationships to get to know other people, rather than to satisfy what is blocked inside of you.  If you’re not trying to make people fit into your preconceived notions of what you like and dislike, you will find that relationships are not really that difficult.  If you’re not so busy judging and resisting people based upon what is blocked inside of you, you will find that they are such easier to get along with—and so are you.  Letting go of yourself is the simplest way to get closer to others.

You will realize that you have talents and abilities you never saw before.  Your whole view of life will change.  Every single thing in this world will look like it’s been transformed….The way to work with resistance is by relaxing.  That act of relaxing through your personal resistance….changes your relationship with everything.  Your soul has now learned how to let disturbing energies pass through.

Deep inner release is a spiritual path in and of itself.  It is the path of nonresistance, the path of acceptance, the path of surrender.

The key is to just relax and release, and deal only with what’s left in front of you…You will feel much more love than you’ve ever felt before.  You will feel more peace and contentment, and eventually nothing will ever disturb you again.

Learn to stop resisting reality, and what used to look like stressful problems will begin to look like the stepping-stones of your spiritual journey.

Chapter 17 - Contemplating death

It is truly a great cosmic paradox that one of the best teachers in all of life turns out to be death…While someone could tell you that you are not your body, death shows you.  While someone could remind you of the insignificance of the things that you cling to, death takes them all away in a second.

The question is, are you going to wait until that last moment to let death be your teacher?  The mere possibility of death has the power to teach us at any moment.

Any time you’re having trouble with something, think of death. 

Why wait until everything is taken from you before you learn to dig down deep inside yourself to reach your highest potential.  A wise person affirms, “If with one breath all of this can change, then I want to live at the highest level while I’m alive.  I’m going to stop bothering the people I love.  I’m going to live life from the deepest part of my being.”

Imagine that an angel comes down and tells you, “Straighten up your affairs.  You will not awake from your sleep tonight.  You’re coming to me.”…How much love could you give the ones you love, knowing it would be the last time you’d get to be with them?  Think about what it would be like if you lived like that every moment with everyone.

Take a moment to look at the thing you think you need.  Look at how much time and energy you put into various activities.  Imagine if you knew you were going to die within a week or a month.  How would that change things?  How would your priorities change?  How would your thoughts change?  Think honestly about what you would do with your last week.  What a wonderful thought to contemplate.  Then ponder this question:  If that’s really what you would do with your last week, what are you doing with the rest of your time?  Wasting it?  Throwing it away?  Treating it like it’s not something precious?  What are you doing with life?  That is what death asks you.

Let’s say you’re living life without the thought of death, and the Angel of death comes to you and says, “Come, it’s time to go.”  You say, “But no.  You’re supposed to give me a warning so I can decide what I want to do with my last week.  Im supposed to get one more week.”  Do you know what Death will say to you?  He’ll say, “I gave you fifty-two weeks this past year alone.  And look at all the other weeks I’ve given you. Why would you need more time?  What did you do with those?  If asked that, what are you going to say?…..”I wasn’t paying attention… I didn’t think it mattered.”  That’s a pretty amazing thing to say about your life.

So why not be bold enough to regularly reflect on how you would live that last week?  If you were to ask this question of people who are truly awakened, they wouldn’t have any problem answering you.  Not a thing would change inside of them…..They would live exactly the same way as they’re living now…In other words, they are living their lives fully and are not making compromises or playing games with themselves.  

The beauty of embracing deep truths is that you don’t have to change your life; you just change how you live your life.  It’s not what you’re doing; it’s how much of you is doing it.

What is it that won’t let us live our lives?…This part of us is so busy trying to make sure the next thing goes right that we can’t just be here now and live life….You’re probably not going to get a warning.  Very few people are told when they’re going to die.  Almost everybody just takes a breath and doesn’t know they didn’t take another.

The fear will fade once you understand that the only thing there is to get from life is the growth that comes from experiencing it.  Life itself is your career, and your interaction with life is your most meaningful relationship…. Everything else you’re doing is just focusing on a tiny subset of life in the attempt to give life some meaning.  What actually gives life meaning is the willingness to live it.

If you challenge yourself to live as though it were your last week, your mind may come up with all kinds of suppressed desires.  It may start talking about all the things that you’ve always wanted to do, and you may think you had better go do them.  You will soon see that’s not the answer…Life is not something you get; it’s something you experience…If you’re busy trying to get something, you will miss the slice you’re actually experiencing….It is death that makes life precious….How precious would life be if there was no such thing as death?  You’d waste every second of it because you’d figure you’d always have it.

So death actually gives meaning to life…do not be afraid of death.  Try to learn what it’s saying to you.

You fear death because you crave life.  You fear death because you think there’s something to get that you haven’t experienced yet…You’re busy thinking about what you’re going to do next…You’re not living life; you’re living mind.

If you are living every experience fully, then death doesn’t take anything from you….That’s why the wise being is always ready to die.  It doesn’t make any difference when death comes because their experience is already whole and complete….You really don’t need more time before death; what you need is more depth of experience during the time you’re given.

That’s the way to live each moment of your life.  You let it fill you completely.  You let it touch you to the depths of your being…Death has made you a great promise in which you can find deep peace.  The promise is that all things are temporary; they are all just passing through time and space.

Death is the landlord and you’re just the tenant…Death is the one who comes to claim his property because it has always belonged to him…Feel grateful to death for giving you another day, another experience, and for creating the scarcity that makes life so precious.  If you do this, your life will no longer be yours to waste; it will be yours to appreciate.

You should be experiencing the life that’s happening to you, not the one you wish was happening.

Chapter 18 - The secret of the middle way

Everything has two extremes….If you go to the extremes, you cannot survive.

When you stop swinging between the opposites [like a pendulum] you’ll find that you have far more energy than you ever imagined.

If you are in balance, you eat when it is time to eat, in a way that maintains the health of your body…It is much more efficient to deal with the body in a balanced manner than to be burdened with the effects of the extremes.

Basically, you waste tremendous energy at the extremes…The inefficiency of your actions is determined by how many degrees off-center you are.  You will be that much less able to use your energy for living life because you are using it to adjust for the pendulum swings.

When you spend your energy trying to main the  extremes, nothing goes forward.  You get stuck in a rut.  The more extreme you are, the less forward movement there is.  You carve a groove and you get stuck in it.

But how do you stop the pendulum from swinging to the outer edges?  Amazingly enough, you do this by leaving it alone.  It won’t keep swinging to the extremes unless you feed the extremes with energy.  Just let the extremes go.  Don’t participate in them, and the pendulum will naturally come toward the center.

It finds its own way to the center of each event that takes place in life and remains quietly in the middle….The swirl of life draws its energy from the center and the center draws its energy from the swirl of life.  All these laws are the same—in weather, in nature, and in every aspect of your life.

As you center by not participating in the swings, the energies will naturally find their balance.  You will become much clearer because so much energy is flowing up in you.  The experience of being present in each moment will become your natural state.  You won’t be fixated on certain things or caught up in thoughts about the opposites.

When the next event happens, you’re there.  You’re always there, and that makes you much more capable than the person who is reacting to past imbalances.  Almost everyone has a point at which they get out of balance.  Once gone, who’s minding the store?  Who takes care of the energies that unfold while you’re not there?

If you have no preference, if the only thing you want is to remain centered, then life unfolds while you simply feel for the center.  There is an invisible thread that passes through everything.  All things move quietly through that center balance.

You can’t have any concepts or preferences; you have to let the forces move you…You are merely an instrument in the hands of the forces, participating in the harmony of balance.  You must reach the point where your whole interest lies in the balance and not in any personal preference for how things should be…..Life happens, you’re there, but you don’t make it happen.  There is no burden; there is no stress.  The forces take care of themselves as you sit in the center….You can’t touch it, but you can be at one with it.

[Blind] people who walk with the use of that cane often tap from side to side.  They’re not trying to find where they should walk they’re trying to find where they shouldn’t walk.  They’re finding the extremes.  If you cannot see your way, all you can do is feel for the edges.  But if you feel the edges, and don’t go there, you will stay…..in the center, the way of balance.  Constantly look to see if that’s where you are living or if you are lost in the extremes.  The extremes create their opposites; the wise avoid them.  Find the balance in the center and you will live in harmony.

Chapter 19 - The loving eyes of God

There is a part of our being that is beyond the personal self.  You can consciously choose to identify with that part, rather than with the psyche or the body.  When you do this, a natural transformation begins to take place within you…Just as rain makes you wet and fire makes you warm, so you can know the nature of God by looking into the mirror of your transformed self.  This is not a philosophy; it is a direct experience.

What does it mean to drift upward?  It’s an experience of being drawn further back inside yourself.  You’re no longer held down to your earthly self, so you begin to feel more spaciousness inside.  You feel that there’s more of a distance between you and the thoughts and emotions inside of you.  You drift back, and then in and up.  

How does it feel when you drift up?  You don’t feel as much anger, fear, or self-consciousness.  You don’t feel resentment toward people.  You don’t close or get tight as often.  Things still happen that you don’t want to happen, but they don’t seem to touch you as much.  They can’t reach back to where you are because you’ve drifted behind the part of you that reacts to things.

As you associate less with the physical and psychological parts of your being, you begin to identify more with the flow of pure energy.

What does it feel like to identify more with Spirit than with form?  You used to walk around feeling anxiety and tension; now you walk around feeling love.  You just feel love for no reason.  Your backdrop is love.  Your backdrop is openness, beauty, and appreciation.  You don’t have to make yourself feel that way; that is how Spirit feels.  If you were asked how the body normally feels, you might say that it’s generally uncomfortable about one thing or another.  How about the psyche?  If you were being totally honest, you’d probably say that it’s generally full of complaints and fears.  Well, how does Spirit normally feel?  The truth is, it always feels good.  It always feels high.  It always feels open and light.

You naturally begin to center more and more on the spiritual part of your being.  You do this not by reaching for Spirit, but by letting go of the rest….The personal self cannot touch Spirit; you must release the personal self.

As you let go and willingly release the physical, emotional, and mental aspects of your being, spirit becomes your state.

There [is] no sense of “I” anymore.

When that happens, people say interesting things like, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30) and “…the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself; but the Father that dwellest in me, he doest the works” (Jon 14:10).

This is how you know something about God.  You become one with Him.  Ultimately, the only way to know about God is by letting your being merge into The Being, and then seeing what happens to you.

Imagine what would happen if you started feeling tremendous love for all creatures, for every plant, for every animal, and for all the beauties of nature.  Imagine if every child seemed like your own, and every person you saw looked like a beautiful flower, with its own color, its own expression, shape, and sounds.  As you went deeper and deeper, you would start noticing a phenomenal thing—you are no longer judging….There is just appreciating and honoring….there is now respecting, loving, and cherishing.  To differentiate is to judge.  To see, to experience, and to honor is to participate in life instead of standing back and judging it.  

Watch what happens to you as you get closer to Him.  It’s really the only way you can know anything about God.  If you try to read about God in a book, you’ll find five other books the say the opposite.

You can’t know God that way.  It must come from actual experience.  That’s what happens to you when you meditate.  That’s what happens when you let go of your lower self….these transformations are places within you.

What does creation look like from that Divine State?… “Now I can feel more love, more compassion, more actions of my creation.”  That is what it looks like to a saint.  And a true saint dwells with God.

If you truly love someone, your love sees past their humanness.  It embraces their whole being, including past wrongs and current shortcomings.  It is like the unconditional love of a mother.  A mother devotes every moment of her life to a child who is physically or mentally challenged.  She thinks the child is beautiful.  She doesn’t focus on the shortcomings; in fact, she doesn’t even see them as shortcomings.

If, for even one moment, you can look at someone with the eye of true love, you’ll know those eyes are not yours.  Your eyes could never look with that amount of love.  Your eyes could never be that unconditional….Those are the eyes of God looking down through you.

When the hand of God reaches out to give through you, there’s nothing you wouldn’t give.  You would give your last breath and never even think about it…When you feel this deeply, you feel that it is coming from something greater than you…It is divine, unconditional, selfless love.

Does anything in God’s creation, other than the human mind, actually pass judgment?  Nature just gives and gives to whoever will receive.  Should you choose not to receive, it doesn’t punish you.  You punish yourself because you choose not to receive.

Your relationship with God is the same as your relationship with the sun.  If you hid from the sun for years and then chose to come out of your darkness, the sun would still be shining as if you had never left…It’s the same way when you decide to turn toward God—you just do it.  If, instead, you allow guilt and shame to interfere, that’s just your ego.

Through Spirit’s eyes, the most wretched of creation looks beautiful….God’s nature is external conscious bliss.

The beauty is that you can experience this ecstasy.  And when you begin to feel this joy, that’s when you’ll know God’s nature.