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A new era in man’s understanding of God is emerging

• Like springtime, the promise of a new era in man’s understanding of God is emerging. Now the level of consciousness of mankind is high enough to be able to recognize the truth of a God of Love instead of worshiping the god of guilt and hate.

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The spiritual quest is a path …

• Spiritual learning does not occur in a linear progression like logic. It is more that familiarity with spiritual principles and disciplines opens awareness and self-realization. Nothing “new” is learned; instead, what already exists presents itself as completely obvious.
• Spiritual development is not an accomplishment but a way of life. It is an orientation that brings its own rewards, and what is important is the direction of one’s motives.
• At some point, the illusion breaks down and the opening for the start of the spiritual quest commences. The quest turns from without to within and the search for answers begins.
• At first, spiritual purification seems difficult, but eventually, it becomes natural. To consistently choose love, peace, or forgiveness leads one out of the house of mirrors. The joy of God is so exquisite that any sacrifice is worth the effort and seeming pain.
• The spiritual quest is classically likened to a pathway, a journey, or a venture. Unfortunately, the naive seeker often goes unprepared on a difficult journey without the necessary tools. In the ordinary world, we depend on many safety measures… Thus, caution comes from wisdom, not from fear. Prudence requires awareness of the pitfalls to be avoided.

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… a path you have to be ready for …

• The readiness to initiate the journey cannot be forced nor can people be faulted if it has not occurred in them as yet. The level of consciousness has to have advanced to the stage where such an intention would be meaningful and attractive.

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… a path that is challenging …

• The seeking of Enlightenment is a very major commitment, and is, in fact, the most difficult of human pursuits. It can be alternately arduous or exhilarating, exciting or tedious, demanding or inspiring. There are great breakthroughs as well as exasperating, seemingly impossible obstacles. It is to be expected that this pattern is par for the course.
• Commitment to the highest spiritual goals tends to bring up the ego’s defects, which is to be expected.
• All of us must cross the line between ignorance and insight many times before we truly understand.

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… but one that brings priceless rewards …

• Much relief is experienced when we realize that by adopting a spiritual life, righteous condemnation and the hate that ensures from it can be left to others. This pursuit of the spiritual ‘good’ benefits all mankind, and it could therefore be said to be the most praiseworthy vocation of all.

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… for nothing compares with the presence of God

• There is absolutely nothing in ordinary human experience to compare with the joy of the presence of the Love of God. No sacrifice is too great nor effort too much in order to realize that Presence.

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Our true spiritual purpose is to realise God within …

• The true destiny of man is to realize the truth of the divinity of one’s source and creator which is ever present within that which has been created and is the creator—the Self.
• The radiance of God is the light of awareness that reveals the divinity of all that exists. In the stillness of the Infinite Presence, the mind is silent as there is nothing that can be said; all speaks of itself with completeness and exactitude. With this realization one transcends the final duality of existence versus nonexistence because only existence is possible. The opposite of Truth does not exist because Reality excludes non-reality. In this realization resides the peace of God.

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… to recognise who we really are …

• What the people in the world actually want is the recognition of who they really are on the highest level, to see that the same Self radiates forth within everyone, heals their feeling of separation, and brings about a feeling of peace. To bring peace and joy to others is the gift of the benevolence of the Presence.
• Exploration is innate to mankind, and its highest levels lead to spiritual inquiry. This brings up the questions of who am I, what am I, where did I come from, what is the origin and destiny of the self, and who and where is God.

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… to transcend worldly concerns

• The goal of society in general is to succeed in the world, whereas the goal of enlightenment is to transcend beyond it.

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The inspiration to evolve spiritually is a manifestation of the presence of God within

• The inspiration to evolve spiritually is already a manifestation of the presence of God within, and it’s certainly indicative of good karma. Just to want to know truth, to evolve, to improve oneself, to become a better person, to fulfill one’s potential – those are all inspirations. And the person doesn’t make them up; they just come to them. It’s like an innate desire to fulfill your potential. That potential as one evolves becomes more and more identified in spirituality – the capacity to love, to forgive, to appreciate, to see the beauty in all that exists, to live in peace and harmony instead of discord and strife. The only requirement is to do whatever you do to the best of your capacity and leave the rest up to God.

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The world we live in is ideal for the evolution of consciousness

• The level of consciousness is determined by the choices made by the spiritual will and therefore is the consequence as well as the determinant of karma. Freedom to evolve requires a world which affords the greatest opportunity to ascend or descend the spiritual ladder. Viewed from that perspective, this is an ideal world and its society is constituted by a wide range of experiential options.

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Spiritual work is primarily a letting go of illusion

• Spiritual evolution occurs as the result of removing obstacles and not actually acquiring anything new. Devotion enables surrender of the mind’s vanities and cherished illusions so that it progressively becomes more free and more open to the light of Truth.
• It is helpful to remember that neither Truth nor Enlightenment is something to be found, sought, acquired, gained, or possessed. That which is the Infinite Presence is always present and its realization occurs of itself when the obstacles to that realization are removed. It is therefore not necessary to study the truth but only to let go of that which is fallacious. Moving away the clouds does not cause the sun to shine but merely reveals that which was hidden all along. Spiritual work, therefore, is primarily a letting go of the presumably known for the unknown, with the promise of others who have done it that the effort is more than well rewarded at the end.

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Commit fully to your spiritual path and don’t let fear stop you

• There is one basic saying in zen that one can rely on completely: Walk through all fear no matter what, committed to spiritual truth, no matter what.
• In the process of examining our everyday lives, we can find that all our fears have been based on falsehood. The displacement of the false by the true is the essence of the healing of all things visible and invisible.

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There are 10,000 ways to God, yet they can all be reduced to certain critical elements

• Comprehension at great depths unravels the essential truth of seeming complexity. It is said that there are 10,000 ways to God, yet they can all be reduced to certain critical elements common to all successful pathways.

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To become more conscious is the greatest gift anyone can give

• To become more conscious is the greatest gift anyone can give to the world; moreover, in a ripple effect, the gift comes back to its source.
• Q: What can we actually do to be helpful to the world? A: Make a gift of your life and lift all mankind by being kind, considerate, forgiving, and compassionate at all times, in all places, and under all conditions, with everyone as well as yourself. That is the greatest gift anyone can give.
• We change the world not by what we say or do but as a consequence of what we have become. Thus, every spiritual aspirant serves the world.
• In turn, every advance that we make in our awareness benefits unseen multitudes and strengthens the next step for others to follow. Every act of kindness is noticed by the universe and is preserved forever.

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Find truth within, using verified teachings as a guide

• Where does one begin the search for spiritual truth and self-realization called enlightenment? A: It is simple. Begin with who and what you are. All truth is found within. Use verified teachings as a guide.

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Instead of seeking and grasping for enlightenment, simply surrender your will to God

• Any self-designation or description is illusory. Even the statement “to be enlightened” is misleading and not a reality. The state is beyond ‘ being’ anything and there is no one to ‘be’ that condition.
• It’s willful to even insist that you’re going to be enlightened. Who wants to be enlightened? The ego… So surrender your personal will to God and pray, “I align myself with thee, O Lord, that I may be Thy servant, that I may fulfill my infinite potential to Thy glory.”
• A useful approach is to let the love for God replace the willfulness that is driving the seeking. One can release all desire to seek and realize that the thought that there is anything else but God is a baseless vanity… Out of an unrestricted love for God arises the willingness to surrender all motives except to serve God completely. To be the servant of God becomes one’s goal rather than enlightenment. To be a perfect channel for God’s love is to surrender completely and to eliminate the goal seeking of spiritual ego. Joy itself becomes the initiator of further spiritual work.

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Let go of attachment

• Non-attachment is not the same as indifference, withdrawal or detachment…. In contrast, non-  attachment allows full participation in life without trying to control outcomes.
• The spiritual aspirant, therefore, is wise to detach from all positionalities and opinions and be willing to surrender the ego’s temporary satisfactions for a higher goal.
• It is rewarding to give up the attachment to the glamour of ‘being spiritual’, ‘holy’, or ‘special’. Truth has no trappings.

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Let go of your attachment to the known

• To let go of the known for the unknown requires great commitment, willingness, and devotion to surrendering one’s faith to God.

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Let go of your attachment to your thoughts

• The sequential thinkingness in endless babble of nonsense that has to do with nothing other than perception and not with essence is totally worthless. All your thoughts, including the most treasured and wonderful thoughts surrounded with silver and gold are worth nothing. So you stare with humility that all thoughts – all thoughts are worth nothing at all. They are amusement.

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Let go of your attachment to be right

• Man is addicted to the payoffs of being right, blaming others, twisting the knife. Most would rather enjoy hating someone than to give it all up.
• With humility comes the willingness to stop trying to control or change other people or life situations or events ostensibly ‘for their own good’. To be a committed spiritual seeker, it is necessary to relinquish the desire to be ‘right’ or of imaginary value to society. In fact, nobody’s ego or belief systems are of any value to society at all. The world is neither good nor bad nor defective, nor is it in need of help or modification because its appearance is only a projection of one’s own mind. No such world exists.
• I just realized that I don’t have to have an opinion about everything–what a relief!

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Let go of the attachment to emotional love

• The next core problem is the difficulty of letting go of emotional love – not because of the love itself but because of the attachment to that which is loved. We think that the loss of a love object brings grief, but actually, the grief is about the loss of the attachment itself, which is due to viewing the object of love as the source of happiness.
• The attachment to love is really the trap (not love itself) and the barrier to enlightenment. In Reality, love is freedom, but attachment to love is a limitation.

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Let go of your attachment to judging

• All judgment reveals itself to be self-judgment in the end, and when this is understood a larger comprehension of the nature of life takes its place.

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Let go your attachment to money, success and sex

• You need to be right, you need to make money, you need to be successful – it’s the neediness that’s the problem. Instead, become that which attracts those things.
• It is not sex and money that are problems but the attachments to them. In the nonattached state, there is neither attraction nor aversion.  At beginning levels of spiritual training, avoidance may well be the best course because desires are so strong.  The mere willingness to sacrifice sensual pleasure or worldly gain is already of value in learning how to transcend attractions and instinctual drives, and the intensity of spiritual commitment is enhanced.

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All this can be achieved by letting go of your attachment to ego…

• Ego is the persistence of animal instinct from an earlier part of the brain. The frontal cortex emerged later and allows thinking. However, the thinking is then used for animal goals […] We now have rivalry and the quest for domination via the intellect, rather than teeth, claws, etc.
• Never underestimate the ego’s wily strategies. The more realistic position is to respect its capacities and compassionately heal it. Once the ego is docile it is much more amenable to evaporating into the sunshine.
• The ego has to be first accepted as though it is a reality in order to be dealt with before it can be transcended. At the higher levels, the ego is seen to be an illusion, without any innate reality. […] A naive student might hear, for example, that the ego is an illusion and then presume that ‘I don’t believe in the ego. It’s just an illusion.’ At this point, it is actually the student’s ego that is making such a statement.
• The world of the ego is like a house of mirrors through which the ego wanders, lost and confused, as it chases the images in one mirror after another. Human life is characterized by endless trials and errors to escape the maze. At times, for many people (and possibly for most), the world of mirrors becomes a house of horrors that gets worse and worse. The only way out of the circuitous wanderings is through the pursuit of spiritual truth.
• By inner humility plus wisdom, the seeker of truth takes serious note of the inherent limitations of the human psyche itself and no longer relies on the impressionable personal ego as its sole arbiter of truth.
• Why give the ego more power by resisting and opposing it?
• The ego became dominant as the result of its ancient atavistic origin as being essential to primitive survival. To the ego, a want is interpreted as a ‘need’ and a ‘have to have’. Thus, its seeking can become frantic, and all caution can be thrown to the winds.

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Suffering is the impact of the ego, not brought by God …

• A common spiritual error is made by holding God as the author of human suffering, which is actually the collective negative impact of the ego itself. This understandable error often results in atheism which refuses to believe in a God who is the source of evil. It is a mistake that is easily transcended by simply seeing that suffering is the consequence of the ego’s ignorance (falsehood) and misunderstanding of the true nature of Divinity. In other terminology, suffering is the consequence of linearity. Divinity is nonlinear and detectible as Universal Energy, the subjective essence of consciousness itself, and the primordial Source of existence.

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… for it is the illusion of individuality that leads to suffering

• The ego, or more accurately, the belief that one is the ego, obscures the Realization of the Reality of the Self as the Oneness of All That is. The dissolution of the ego results in liberation from the bondage of the illusions that create suffering.
• When one realizes that one is the universe, complete and at one with All That Is, forever without end, no further suffering is possible.
• For it’s only the illusion of individuality that is the origin of all suffering—when one realizes that one is the universe, complete and at one with all that is, forever without end, then no further suffering is possible.

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Suffering has a payoff for the ego

• The ego gets a grim pleasure and satisfaction from suffering and all the non-integrous levels of pride, anger, desire, guilt, shame, and grief. The secret pleasure of suffering is addictive… To stop the mechanism, the pleasure of the payoff has to be identified and willingly surrendered to God. Out of shame, the ego blocks out conscious awareness of its machinations, especially the secretiveness of the game ‘victim’.
• Everyone gets a secret pleasure from resentments, from being the martyr or the victim, and from feeling misunderstood, unappreciated, etc… To undo the ego, one must be willing to abandon this payoff game, with its grandstanding of emotions and repetitive rehashing of data and stories to justify its positions…  When the ‘inner juice’ is abandoned, it is replaced by inner peace.
• One can fall into the temptation of feeling sorry for oneself, or angry, or worried. The secret attraction of all these options is that they offer an inner payoff or a secret satisfaction, which is the source of the attraction of the mind’s thoughts. If these payoffs are refused, it will be discovered that, at all times, behind the thought screen, there is a silent, invisible, thought- free space of joy.

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Stillness is the doorway to divinity

• When the mind grows silent, the thought I am also disappears, and Pure Awareness shines forth to illuminate what one is, was, and always will be, beyond all worlds and all universes—infinite and beyond time.
• The doorway to Divinity is located and available as a direct experience in the exact split second of ‘now’ which is discernable between two thoughts.

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Carry your meditation into life

• The task of constant and unrelenting fixity of focus—allowing not even a moment of distraction from meditation—continued while doing ordinary activities. At first, this seemed very difficult, but as time went on, it became habitual, automatic, and effortless. The process is like a rocket leaving Earth: At first, it requires enormous power, then less and less as it leaves the earth’s gravitational field; and finally, it moves through space under its own momentum.

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Realise happiness is within, not to be found without

• It is helpful to understand that if one is not happy with present circumstances, the chances are that happiness will still be elusive when conditions change to meet one’s current desire. That is, if happiness is elusive now, it will continue to be so in the future because the ability to locate the source of happiness has not yet been found.
• There is a great joy in the realization that one does not actually need anything at all to be happy […] at an advanced level the awareness of existence itself is sufficient.

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The joy of the sense of Self is blocked by desire

• Desire is fueled by the illusion of lack and that the source of happiness is outside oneself and therefore has to be pursued or acquired. The importance of the object of desire is thereby inflated and overvalued by its symbolism and mystique. The pleasure of the sense of Self is blocked by desire. When that desire is fulfilled, the ego ascribes the resultant sense of joy to the acquisition of an external. However, this is a clever illusion because the actual source of the pleasure is that the block to experiencing the joy of the Self has been temporarily removed. The source of the experienced happiness is the radiance of the Self that shines forth when it is not shut off by an ego distress.

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Love is a state of awareness, not an emotion

• Love is misunderstood to be an emotion; actually, it is a state of awareness, a way of being in the world, a way of seeing oneself and others.

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To know the nature of love is to understand God

• To understand the nature of God, it is necessary only to know the nature of love itself. To truly know love is to know and understand God; and to know God is to understand love.
• In reality, the love of God, like the sun, shines equally on all.
• Love is not a quality of ‘God’- it is God’s very Essence. It is the ALL-encompassing Reality of the Never-Ending Present.  It is the Core of Your Existence.

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Be love

• The more we give love, the greater our capacity to do so.
• By being loving toward others, we discover we are surrounded by love and lovingness.
• It was apparent that all of mankind is actually motivated by inner love, but has simply become unaware; most people live their lives as though they’re sleepers unawakened to the perception of who they really are.

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Be kind to yourself and others

• Simple kindness to one’s self and all that lives is the most powerful transformational force of all.
• The key to Joy is unconditional kindness to all life, including one’s own, which we refer to as compassion.

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Harness the power of acceptance …

• Full acceptance does not mean becoming an apologist for grossly negative, destructive behavior. A bull may misperceive a bystander as a potential enemy, but that does not mean that one thereby allows oneself to be needlessly gored.
• Acceptance is the great healer of strife, conflict, and upset. It also corrects major imbalances of perception and precludes the dominance of negative feelings. Everything serves a purpose.
• Acceptance is not to be confused with passivity, which is a symptom of apathy.

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… by letting go of all resistance …

• Don’t call it anything, don’t label it anything. Keep your mind silent. You stay in touch with whatever you are experiencing, and you let go of resisting it. You are going to experience it, you are going to decompress it. You can do that with pain and any kind of suffering. The suffering is due to the resistance. If you keep surrendering to it you will undo it.
• That which you resist stays.

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… including resisting depression

• You let go of resisting the depression. You’ve got to sit down and go through it. You’re holding a baggage of it. The way to let go of a thing is to sit down and completely surrender to the energy of it. Don’t label it depression. You don’t have depression. Don’t label it lower feelings or any euphemism. Go into the phenomena itself. Don’t resist the phenomena, because there is only so much of it. Its like a compressed energy thing. And as you stay in touch with it and experience it out, it will come to an end. Because it is not unlimited.

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Harness the power of devotion

• The most powerful tool that is in the province of the will is devotion. Thus, it is not just spiritual truth but the degree of one’s devotion to it that empowers it to become transformative.

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Harness the power of forgiveness

• The willingness to forgive others is reflected in our own capacity for self-forgiveness and acceptance.
• Compassion and forgiveness do not mean approval.

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Harness the power of humility

• With humility comes the willingness to stop trying to control or change other people or life situations or events ostensibly ‘for their own good’. To be a committed spiritual seeker, it is necessary to relinquish the desire to be ‘right’ or of imaginary value to society. In fact, nobody’s ego or belief systems are of any value to society at all. The world is neither good nor bad nor defective, nor is it in need of help or modification because its appearance is only a projection of one’s own mind. No such world exists.
• Those in whom we recognize genius commonly disclaim it. A universal characteristic of genius is humility. The genius has always attributed his insights to some higher influence.

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Harness the power of choice

• Spiritual progress is based on acceptance as a matter of free will and choice and thus everyone experiences only the world of their own choosing. The universe is totally free of victims and all eventualities are the unfolding of inner choice and decision.
• The experience of the presence of God is available and within at all times, but awaits choice. That choice is made only by surrendering everything other than peace and love to God. In return, the divinity of the Self reveals Itself as ever present but not experienced because it has been ignored or forgotten, or one has chosen otherwise.
• Peace is literally a choice and a decision, although not a popular one in our society despite all the rhetoric about the term. The decision to overlook the seeming inequities of life instead of reacting to them is a choice.
• The soul is the author of its own fate by the exercise of its own choice and selection.
• The destiny of the spirit will be for better or worse, depending on the choices and decisions one makes.

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Spiritual truth is universal and always brings peace, harmony, accord, love, compassion, and mercy

• The road to enlightenment is not for bleating sheep. To be offended signifies that one is defended, which, in itself, signifies the clinging to untruth. Truth needs no defense and therefore is not defensive; truth has nothing to prove.
• The advance of truth doesn’t necessarily bring tranquil waters. In fact, it can disturb things for a while. You now have a new paradigm, and inherent in it is the downfall of the old.
• All spiritual truth is contained in every spiritual concept. It is only necessary to completely and totally understand one single concept to understand all of them in order to arrive at the realization of the Real.
• Facts are accumulated by effort, but truth reveals itself effortlessly.
• The human mind is incapable of discerning truth from falsehood.
• Truth is verifiable only by identity with it and not by knowing about it.
• Truth is radical subjectivity. With the collapse of the illusions of duality, including the supposed ‘reality’ of a separate ‘self’, there remains only the state of the Infinite ‘I’, which is the manifestation of the Unmanifest as the Self.  There is neither subject nor object.  Like infinite space, there is no distance, time, duration, or locality.  All prevails simultaneously.  All is self- evident, self-aware, self-revealing, and total.
• Spiritual truth, then, is universally true and without variation through time or place. It always brings peace, harmony, accord, love, compassion, and mercy. Truth can be identified by these qualities. All else is the invention of the ego.
• Truth has no opposites, such as falsity or ‘off-ness.’ Nothing is hidden from the field of consciousness.

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Perception is a mask that hinders truth

• With spiritual work, the terms ‘is’ or ‘are’ become progressively replaced by the term ‘seems to’, which is due to the increasing realization of the degree to which perception is the mask that hinders truth.
• When perception ceases, the world of wonder reveals itself. Consciousness is in all that exists. It recognizes itself manifesting as the Allness of Creation.

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Owning your faults gives you power over them

• So we admit our faults, and we stop labeling them faults. We have to get over narcissistic sensitivity. All negative reactions are not caused from outside; it’s how we choose. The way to become bulletproof is to own anything that seems a fault. The way to overcome the ego’s reaction to that is to say, “I’m stupid and ugly. It doesn’t matter; God loves me.

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Be passionate for God, not for belief systems

• Be passionate for God, not for belief systems. That is the only real decision that has to be made and can be applied to any and all situations. The question is always whether to be at the effect of the world or aligned with the Truth of God instead. The search for enlightenment is different from that of seeking worldly success.

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Life is how you perceive it …

• Life is how you perceive it. The meaning of it is what you project out there. In and of itself, it doesn’t mean anything.

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… and all reactions to life are subjective

• All reactions to life are subjective. There is nothing happening that is awful, exciting, sad, good, or bad. It is pointless to hold a position that catastrophes shouldn’t ‘happen’ or that the innocent ‘didn’t deserve it’, or ‘isn’t it awful’, or ‘it must be somebody’s fault’. With a broad view, one can remain unperturbed by either the content or the context of life. That requires giving up judgments, expectations, or ‘sensitivities’

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Beliefs determine what you experience

• Beliefs are determinant of what one experiences. There are no external ’causes”. One discovers the secret payoffs that are obtained from unconscious secret projections. One’s underlying programs can be discovered by simply writing down ones litany of grievances and woes and then merely turning them around into their opposites. “People hate me” stems from one’s own inner hatreds. “People are jealous of me” stems from inner jealousy of others. Thus if we take responsibility for being the author of our world, we come close to its source where we can correct it. By being loving toward others, we discover we are surrounded by love and lovingness.

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We interpret the world according to our level of consciousness

• Each person’s ego can be calibrated as to its level of consciousness. Each level represents a strata or level analogous to the light spectrum. To people in the yellow range, everything looks yellow; in the blue range, everything seems blue. The human mind tends to dissociate from levels that are too unlike its own. this tends to fragment society into classes. Each class has its characteristic language, style, vernacular, customs, occupational standards, acceptable behaviors, and norms. there is a tendency to disparage the other classes or their styles or modes of behavior. There is also denial of the reality of other ways of thinking or proceeding.
• The lower energy fields are like clouds covering the sun. As we remove the clouds, we experience the sun, which is always shining.
• Energy fields are so powerful that they dominate our perception. They are really portals out of which we see the world.  We often hear that this is really just a world of mirrors, and that all we experience is our own energy field reflected back upon us as perception and experiencing.

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Make your prayer one of supplication, not request

• Supplication is an act of humility. To lower levels of consciousness, prayer is an attempt to get something for self or others, such as a new car, a job, recovery from an illness, or special favors. With progress, this intention to control God is given up and the act of supplication becomes a dedication instead of a request. In war, both sides pray to win. With progression of consciousness from selfishness to selflessness, the quality of prayer shifts to the willingness to be a servant of the Lord and a channel of His Will without trying to specify the what or the how it is to be done.

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A prayer to use

• Q: What prayers are useful? A: Ask to be the servant of the Lord, a vehicle of divine love, a channel of God’s will. Ask for direction and divine assistance and surrender all personal will through devotion. Dedicate one’s life to the service of God. Choose love and peace above all other options. Commit to the goal of unconditional love and compassion for all life in all its expression and surrender all judgment to God.

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Renounce falsity and devote yourself to that which radiates love, peace, compassion, forgiveness and charity

• In its broadest and most basic sense, renunciation means the discarding of illusion and the obstruction to the realization of truth and the Reality of God. Thus, all pathways to God renounce falsity and are devoted to that which radiates love, peace, holiness, compassion, forgiveness, mercy and charity. It also means the choice of renouncing ignorance for Truth, darkness for Light, and the temptations of the ego, such as hatred, anger, pride, malice, greed and selfishness. Renunciation also means freedom from the dualistic trap of denunciation.

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Beware the downside of spiritual education

• The downside of spiritual education is the buildup of the vanity of ‘I know’ and the devaluation of people who are ‘not spiritual’. Therefore it is important as a foundation to spiritual training and education to learn how consciousness manifests as the ego and its mechanisms.

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Realise pain and suffering are not the same thing

• The first thing to eliminate is the belief system that pain equals suffering because that sets up a whole series of programs that need to be undone. Pain is one thing, and it is quite possible to be with pain to exist in the body and yet have relatively little or no experience of the pain or suffering with it at all because of an analgesic or altered (e.g., hypnotic) state of mind.  It is as though the pain is still present, but one is not connected with the pain.  The pain exists on its own but without the person being at the effect of it.  In other words, it is not necessary to be the victim of the pain.  One can be with the pain in such a way that does not involve suffering or any kind of agony.  To realize that this is possible is the first step that leads one out of it.  It is the letting go of the belief that pain and suffering are the same thing.

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Treat yourself with compassion without making yourself right or wrong

• The way to heal the small self is to reject taking a polarized, right/wrong position, which makes it our enemy, and instead view life with loving compassion and see the intrinsic innocence of the child. We first see the innocence of the child’s consciousness and then the programming that is superimposed. It is because of the child’s lovingness and trustingness that is so programmable, and we begin to see the innocence even within those who seem most hateful.  Out of compassion to see into the hearts of things, one finds the intrinsic innocence within the ego that then gets healed through that compassion and love.  We can love our humanness and that of others, and instead of condemning it, we now say, ” I see the seeming validity of that at the time.”  For example, instead of being ashamed of anger and hatred, we say to ourselves, “Well, being angry was inevitable at that time,” because a person who has never hated will not move up to Love since they have never cared that much about life.  If one does not care enough about life to have gotten angry and actually hatred, then they would be down at the level of Apathy.

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Appreciate the divine order of things

• In reality, everything occurs of its own, with no exterior cause. Every thing and every event is a manifestation of the totality of All That Is, just as it is at any given moment. Once seen in its totality, everything is perfect at all times and nothing needs an external cause to change it in any way. From the viewpoint of the ego’s positionality and limited scope, the world seems to need endless fixing and correction. This illusion collapses as a vanity.
• In Reality, everything is automatically manifesting the inherent destiny of its essence; it doesn’t need any external help to do this. With humility, one can relinquish the ego’s self- appointed role as savior of the world and surrender it straight to God. The world that the ego pictures is a projection of its own illusions and arbitrary positionalities. No such world exists.
• Nothing in the universe happens by chance or accident. The universe is a coherent concurrence and interaction of innumerable conditions attendant on the infinite number of energy patterns. In the state of Awareness, all this is obvious and can be clearly seen and known. Outside that level of awareness, it could be likened to innumerable, invisible magnetic fields which automatically coalesce or repel one’s position and which interact according to the positions and relative strengths and polarities. Everything influences everything else and is in perfect balance.

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Everything you see happening is the consequence of that which you are

• Everybody is like a magnet. You attract to yourself reflections of that which you are. If you’re friendly then everybody else seems to be friendly too.
• Everything you see happening is the consequence of that which you are.

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You are not your body

• The body is like a companion, a friendly pet that follows one around…One can continue to own the body and be responsible for it without identifying with it as one’s identity.

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All the great spiritual teachings and teachers have the same core

• The core of all the great spiritual teachings and teachers can be surmised in a few simple paragraphs. Choose to be easygoing, benign, forgiving, compassionate, and unconditionally loving towards all life in all its expressions. Avoid negativity and the desire for worldliness and its greed for pleasure and possessions.   Seek to understand rather than to condemn. Venerate the teachers of these basic principles and ignore all others. Apply these principles to one’s view of oneself as well as of others.

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Success is the consequence of integrity

• Success isn’t something you have to get, its just the automatic consequence of integrity. If you’re the best carpenter around, you don’t have to advertise.

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More thoughts

• To surrender what one thinks they are to God does not leave one as ‘nothing’, but quite the contrary… Every identification is a limitation.
• Pleasure is always derived from something outside you, whereas joy arises from within.
• Every thought, action, decision or feeling creates an eddy in the interlocking, interbalancing, ever- moving energy fields of life, leaving a permanent record for all of time. This realization can be intimidating when it first dawns on us, but it becomes a springboard for rapid evolution.
• God is both manifest as the Totality and Allness of Creation and simultaneously unmanifest as the Godhead, the Infinite Potentiality and source or ‘void-ness’ prior to form.
• ..just being ordinary in and of itself is an expression of divinity; the truth of one’s real self can be discovered through the pathway of everyday life.
• All things radiate forth an intense aliveness.