This course simplifies a major key to self discovery and personal actualization. It is very detailed consisting of 4 sections with each section having several subsections. Trust me it's worth the read. Please Enjoy!
SECTION ONE: WAKING UP
WAKING UP
In your sleeping dreams, your mind has full control over the experience. Here, in this mysterious inner realm, there is no time, there are no unchangeable laws of nature, and no one else has any power to influence what happens.
When you awaken from a dream, you realize that it was all just a dream—that it wasn’t real. You become aware of you, the dreamer, as the being experiencing the dream. This waking to remember your identity is a switch that instantly establishes the unreality of the dream.
The waking dream of life on this planet is a different dream. This complex and sophisticated dream takes place in a realm where many minds connect. Bodies can clash with other bodies and, here, physical matter is subject to the unchangeable laws of nature.
There is an immutable design to this dream of life, and we are all bound to it. There is a truth about how all the pieces work together and, therefore, there is also a correct and optimal way to experience life. The way has been forgotten, but you will remember.
Humans are sick from trying to live the waking dream as though it is a sleeping dream. You may seek peace in isolation from other minds because, just as in sleep, you want full control of the dream.
Dishonesty and avoidance of truth are strategies used to construct a dream of life according to your wishes. But strategies of dishonesty—and other forms of withdrawal and separation—never quite work because no real or lasting peace is found in isolation. In your drive toward personal control through isolation, you feel lonely and cut-off. Lacking energy and inspiration, you ultimately become stressed, fearful, and depressed.
The switch is what happens when you become comfortable looking at truth and accepting honesty everywhere in your life without any fear and without any negative emotional reactions. This requires an awakening.
No matter how carefully planned are your attempts to build impenetrable walls to protect your feelings and keep you safe, events continue to occur which oppose your wishes.
When dishonesty and withdrawal fail, and other minds do penetrate the illusion of the dream you have constructed for yourself, you become disturbed and may even respond with attack. You attack to take control over the situation, but it doesn’t quite work. Attack, even in mild forms such as reward and punishment, teaches nothing real—only that violence is legitimate, and only that you would attack.
People are sick because the world teaches a sick thought system. You may have forgotten yourself, your real identity, not as a body and mind but as the force of life, itself. You may have ignored the laws of nature and thought it possible to control reality. In a constant struggle to make real what is not real, and true what is not true, you find only suffering.
Only by looking at the truth and telling the truth, the damage is reversed and the suffering ends.
While you have believed in a logical thought system that the mind is in control and thoughts are what is real, the result has always been various levels of error and confusion. The unobserved mind isn’t as rational as you may believe. It makes panicked decisions all the time to avoid negative emotions.
Perhaps you would prefer to avoid starting difficult conversations. You may delay looking directly at problems at work or in your finances. You would rather not admit difficult truths in many areas of life. But avoidance only leads to low-level suffering and a constant need for escape. Worse yet, the truth always remains true and eventually emerges. When it does, you ultimately end up with a crisis.
There is a better way—a way to look at all truth and embrace all honesty while remaining calm and in perfect peace. The switch allows you to enjoy the process of rooting out problems. When all your challenges have been addressed, you can fully enjoy the result: a happy life of freedom that rests upon a foundation of truth.
There is a wholly different thought system by which you will experience the optimal way to live this dream of life. If you merely decide for it, then the world’s normal dream of fear, sacrifice and suffering is instantly replaced by a total embrace of truth.
Are you willing to suspend disbelief for a little while? Are you interested in trading everything you do not want for everything you do? If you are skeptical and do not want to change anything about your life, then do not waste your effort here. You can refund this course because our purpose of is not aligned.
To awaken is not to become a little more peaceful, a bit more loving, slightly less violent, a little less fearful, or to have more faith. A switch can only be either on or off. You are either awake or you continue dreaming. Nothing short of complete honesty and total acceptance will turn the switch. Anything short of this and darkness remains.
You can’t be half-pregnant, you can’t serve two masters, and you certainly cannot apply two opposing thought systems to your life. You must switch from one thought system to the other or you will remain lost in confusion—which always brings tension and fear. This book reveals the thought system of truth. Through your ongoing practice of embracing reality and always telling the truth, you can shine a light that changes lives and ends all your problems.
You have probably accepted the idea of sacrifice when, by definition, to sacrifice is to give up what you do want for what you do not. Do you still believe that sacrifice is the path toward what you want when, by definition, it is the opposite?
You have probably been obsessed about love; yet have practiced love as a jealous clinging to one person at the exclusion of all others. You have been taught that love is something you can get—if you find that one right person, use all the right tactics, and if you both just follow the normal rules.
This approach to love always fails for one of two reasons: 1) one of you end up miserable enough to break the rules, or 2) you follow the rules instead and grow old together in resentment. Would you rather remember what love really is and how to experience it always, as your eternal state of being?
You have probably been fearful at times. This is normal. However, because you think there is anything real to fear, you are not free. Fear can only exist before the switch—while you still believe the dream of life is something that is happening entirely to you.
You may be unaware that you are a dreamer in this dream. Unaware that you are very much responsible for making everything happen that does happen.
Everything happening to you which you do not want is caused by the error of dishonesty. Everything that you do want is caused by telling the truth. Forget this, and ongoing challenges will seem to continue to happen to you only so that you remember.
What happens when you awaken from a terrible nightmare? Your pulse is racing, and you are filled with fear. As you switch from sleeping to waking, you realize that it was all just a dream. You take a deep breath. Now you find that you are filled with peace and can calmly go back to sleep to find a good dream.
To awaken from the world’s dream of life is like waking from a nightmare. You remember the truth of who you are, you end the fear, and now you can relax because life becomes a happy dream.
There are many portals through which you can switch to the awakened state of consciousness, but there is one foundation upon which all others depend: honesty. The first step toward, and the foundation of your awakening is something you already understand completely: the decision to always welcome the truth and to tell the truth.
Withhold honesty anywhere and the switch cannot occur. Without perfect honesty, awakening is impossible. Without awakening, lasting happiness is impossible.
DEFINING TRUTH
Everything that has caused suffering has been constructed with lies. This is not yet believed, which is why you have not been entirely freed of your problems.
You live in a web of lies. First, there are the lies others tell you. The world is filled with people who believe dishonesty works. Parents withhold the truth from their children. Schools mislead us about how life is. Companies twist the truth in advertisements to sell more products. Politicians say whatever it takes to gain access to power. Romantic partners often lie to your face only so that you like them more.
These days, everyone lies all the time. Sometimes they know they are lying, other times they believe the lies. But each time you believe their lies, you are creating confusion for yourself by sacrificing the truth for an illusion.
Building a life upon a foundation of illusion ultimately leads to suffering and crisis. This always requires dishonesty, which is always an error. Error always requires correction. If it didn’t require correction, it wouldn’t be an error. Cling to any error, and the natural process of correction is experienced as suffering. If ongoing suffering doesn’t inspire you to correct course, crisis ultimately will.
There is nothing you can do to make illusion real. Reality cannot be different from how it is. The struggle to make illusion real only brings you endless sacrifice, great effort, ongoing challenges, a lot of frustration and misery—and it will never succeed. Dishonesty and avoidance of truth is not the path toward happiness.
Your need to believe the lies told to you by others causes you to tell lies to yourself.
You want to be normal, to fit in. You want to believe authority and to trust the people who you love. So, you’ve learned to convince yourself that, if you respect them and follow their lessons, then their picture of life will become real and the rewards they promise will materialize.
Everyone in this world believes in things that no one has proven to be true. But, because everyone seems to believe it, you believe it and you make choices in life accordingly.
The moment you believe someone else’s dishonesty and attempt to make it real in your life, you have become indoctrinated and controlled by them. You are no longer free and no longer see reality as it is.
You think everything will be fine because you are just doing what is normal. However, the deeper you get and the further you go down this path of error, the larger and more painful your crisis will be in the end. Once again, nothing you can do will ever make illusion real, and nothing unreal can ever bring lasting peace or happiness.
There are also the lies you knowingly tell others, which seem to offer a solution to a problem or a way to get what you want without hurting their feelings with too much honesty. The problem is that you almost never say exactly what you mean. You so rarely confess how you really feel. You are almost never open about what really excites you, what really bores you, and what you really want or would do if you were totally free. Now consider the fact that nobody is telling you what they mean either. This has caused a detachment from reality.
You think that, by filtering what you do and say so that it is socially acceptable, you are gaining relationships and your life is going more smoothly. But by limiting your telling of the truth, you are limiting the life you were meant to live and teaching dishonesty to all.
You are hired for a job to play a fake role and to tell the company’s lies. Then, you may come home to a relationship or family situation where telling the truth is not entirely tolerated either. If that isn’t bad enough, friends lie to you all the time about their own lives on social media or in person. During an average day, exactly when and where do you feel free to tell your unfiltered truths?
Because of all the dishonesty, you are suffering. You are sacrificing everything you want. You feel empty inside, you feel cut off and isolated, depressed at times, and for what? What is all this sacrifice of truth for? To teach everyone an untrue version of reality? To teach them the path of misery and crisis? Is this helpful, in any way, to anyone?
Each time you withhold perfect honesty from yourself and others, you are making a tragic error. All lies end either in apology or crisis because all errors will be corrected. Would you not trade the little bit of discomfort in telling an uncomfortable truth now for the crisis that will eventually result from withholding it?
You think it would be impossible to be perfectly honest all the time. Honesty is entirely possible and there is no easier or better way to live. The way isn’t very hard, but it is very different.
You have been taught that you need to withhold honesty to get love. When you were a small child, you often hid the truth from your parents because you feared their punishments and because you wanted their love. In school, you played a dishonest role imposed upon you by authority because you wanted to be accepted and approved of by your parents and teachers.
All the rules, the usual threats and routine attacks—the punishments and rewards that you have endured through your youth—have taught you the lesson that you
need to withhold honesty from a romantic partner to get his or her love. This is a serious error that is likely making the true experience of perfect love impossible for you.
Love is impossible without perfect honesty. Anything against perfect honesty is against love. Think of a time when you fell madly in love with someone. Now try to remember the circumstances of that moment or situation. Were you not both entirely free together? Were you not completely open about who you really are and how you really felt? To simply do this with someone who you are attracted to is the experience of love you are craving.
When you are in love, your energy level goes through the roof. You don’t need to eat or sleep, you can live only from that amazing feeling of love. What most people don’t know is that the feeling of love is what happens whenever you are open. Open your mind and heart completely to experience the natural energy—the force of life—that comes from within.
The wonderful feeling of love—the ultimate experience of being alive—wasn’t something given to you by the person you were in love with; rather, it was a feeling that happened inside you because you were wide open to another being. You were perfectly honest, open, and accepting of yourself and the other. You felt how someone really gets you. You felt understood. Well, yes, you were understood because you were honest and open. And it was bliss.
Then what did you two do next? You may have wanted to hold-on to that amazing feeling. You wanted it to last forever. Because you thought that the amazing feeling was something you got from him or her, you tried to make sure that no other person would come along and interfere with it.
So, you started to make promises, you developed a set of expectations, and eventually you made rules for each other. At first, this felt good because you believed that you were creating the conditions required for your perfect love to last. You wanted to prevent anything or anyone from threatening your love.
What you did not know is that this is closing; which is how you ruin the experience of love. Along with the promises, the expectations, and the rules eventually came the decision to lie about something. By putting a limit on what truth is acceptable or not, you made it impossible for each other to remain perfectly open.
Whenever you are not perfectly open and honest, that amazing feeling of love starts to fade. You probably never thought to blame the promises and rules for this; no, you probably blamed the other just as he or she blamed you. Maybe you convinced yourself that love always fades in time, that it is impossible to live in that state of perfect bliss so easily experienced at the beginning of a relationship. This isn’t true. Relationships without rules are filled with a bliss that can continue if the perfect honestly continues.
If you want perfect honesty, you will need to learn unconditional acceptance. If you place any limits on truth, you will not have it. Of course, no matter which path you choose (rules or acceptance), the truth will remain true regardless. Seen in this light, the choice for acceptance is quite clear.
Truth cannot be changed by your attempts to deny it or desire to change it. If there are rules or taboos—and particularly if there are threats of punishment along with it—truth has been forced into hiding and dishonesty is likely to emerge in any relationship.
Agreeing to any rule is, in effect, agreeing that you might eventually have to lie. Setting a rule or making anything taboo is asking the other person to lie. Do you value knowing or not knowing? If you value knowing, then don’t make knowing impossible by setting limits on truth.
In all areas of life, it is the lack of both honesty and unconditional acceptance that causes suffering. You cannot claim to value truth and not choose unconditional acceptance—which is simply a decision for truth everywhere.
Lies will suffocate any relationship; causing mistrust, resentment, distance and loneliness. Being limited by someone else’s demands—because you are afraid of what might happen, or because you want to protect someone else’s feelings—also feels lousy and is completely unnecessary. There’s nothing wrong with you and, therefore, there is nothing wrong with telling your truth and living it.
Everything you have done in your life was probably done because you ultimately wanted to feel good. You have missed this mark at times because you have made just one error: you have believed that there is some value in dishonesty.
What is enjoyable about love other than sharing perfect truth together? What is peace but the experience of resting in honesty? What is bliss but doing what you want to openly? What is safety and security but a life that cannot be destroyed by any revelation of truth? What is abundance but the ability to express everything, to share everything, to do everything and have everything freely and openly?
You can feel good all the time and you can have it all, but only after a total commitment to perfect honesty all the time. To the degree you allow dishonesty in your life, you allow unnecessary challenges and suffering in your life. The suffering is at first immediate in that mild sinking feeling, the lower energy that invariably follows any withdrawal from life.
Whenever you are less than free, the low energy remains even as there are occasional good times—times when the complex web of lies seem forgotten and you can enjoy yourself. But dishonesty takes constant effort to be maintained, so you are always being put back to work maintaining the web of illusions you have created.
The decision for dishonesty once often becomes a decision for dishonesty always. You can never stop working to make it convincing or there will come an immediate crisis.
Eventually, the truth always emerges; and you find yourself in a crisis that you have created. Your decision for dishonesty was well-intentioned, but the result is always failure. Error can only lead to failure, or it wouldn’t be error.
In failure, those brief moments enjoyed with the person hardly matter. What once seemed so real, what you worked to hold onto, is gone forever. It is as though none of it was ever real at all.
It is true that it never was real. It was built and maintained with illusion.
In the world today, nobody really believes in the power of honesty. A lot of people talk about it though. Many threats and rules are created by the people in your life who force you to tell the truth. They demand honesty. They require it. But what would they do if you gave them what they demanded?
The person demanding honesty from you doesn’t want your honesty; he or she wants to control you. The demand for honesty is always based around an assumed right answer. The demand for honesty is, therefore, a demand for you to tell the truth in such a way that your answer is the right answer.
Of course, the demander of honesty hopes that your answer is true; but will never know because of the way the request for honesty was framed. You are made to feel as though you had no choice but to provide the correct answer rather than the truthful answer, and so you withheld perfect honesty.
Sometimes there may appear to be very good reasons why you want to hold onto a person you love or situation you enjoy. Attempt to hold on by withholding honesty and forfeit your freedom. Now you are no longer entirely free to live your truth. Now there is a crack in the relationship, and it becomes a cause of suffering on some level.
Sooner or later, this kind of relationship becomes a chore. Because you have chosen dishonesty, the laws of nature always ensure that the outcome of dishonesty is certain: ongoing suffering that ultimately ends in crisis.
If you want happiness rather than suffering and crisis, the only way to respond to a person who is demanding honesty is to give it. Offer total, deep honesty in a way
that is loving and sensitive. Now accept the outcome; whatever it may be. Do not retreat from honesty, but by this is meant loving honesty. Honesty can only be loving because only love is true.
When you first begin to surrender your life to honesty, however, you will probably need to start by confessing truths which are not loving. This is what is meant by apology or confession: sharing a truth that is not loving. If your truths were loving, there would be nothing to apologize for or to confess; only to joyfully share. But, as of now, not all your truths are joyful because not all your deeds have been loving. You have probably made many errors—all stemming from your belief that there was some value or power in dishonesty.
Now your reality is this: there is no way toward purification, toward peace, toward joy, toward happiness, toward awakening, toward everything you want if you are not willing to flip the switch by revealing the significant truths you have kept hidden.
The world is sick from the darkness of dishonesty. The only cure for dishonesty is the revealing of truth. To apologize is to substitute the truth for the lies. Never apologize for the way you make someone feel—only apologize for your dishonesty and do so by telling the truth.
Before you can apologize, you must first give up control over the outcome. If you are still trying to shape or control the outcome, then you still believe in dishonesty. Your apology—your revealing of truth—may not be forgiven.
To accept an apology and to forgive is to accept the correction of error in another. In most cases, your errors will not be forgiven because most of the people you are apologizing to are not healed. They don’t want to heal, and they certainly don’t want you to heal; they want you to remain in suffering with them.
Unfortunately, because they still believe in dishonesty and you know truth, there is a good chance that your revelation of truth can break a relationship or change a situation. A person who has built a life around sacrifice, dishonesty, and total commitment to making illusion real will feel threatened by a person who commits to truth.
Your simple apology—the obvious and right decision to say what is true and to correct the error of dishonesty—will lead to chaos and destruction for one simple reason: you are destroying something. You are destroying the error of illusion—the foundation upon which this entire world of suffering was built. To speak your honest words is a very powerful and dramatic act.
You cannot control the process or outcome; but learning to enjoy the wild ride toward truth is a necessary step in your awakening. This is a relatively short step that every awakened person must go through. There is no path to heaven unless you are willing to take this ride; and it is a ride you cannot design or control. But you are safe. When the wild ride comes to an end, the outcome of truth can only be heaven.
The person or situation that once demanded your honesty, ironically, really demands that you continue to believe that there is some value in withholding it. However, because you know how reality works, your only hope of salvaging the relationship or situation is to bring the other along with you in truth.
If he or she loves you, if you are valued as you wish to be, then this will be effortless. But if there is no love, if you are being exploited or deceived on some level, then the situation will deteriorate. What is real about the situation or relationship will be revealed, and this is the time for your practice of acceptance.
You don’t know what telling the truth will do to your life situation; but you can be certain that the outcome is what you do want because it is the only outcome that is real.
The thought system of perfect honesty offers complete knowledge because it is the mandatory step that begins to reveal the whole truth about life. By choosing perfect honesty, you are also called upon to choose unconditional acceptance so that others in your life are free to practice their perfect honesty as well. You want truth not just for yourself, but everywhere in your life and from everyone. Judgment keeps you weak, while acceptance channels the power of truth.
Because information and situations will be revealed to you that are not easy to deal with, through honesty you will become stronger and better at letting go of judgment. This happens as you begin to see that there is no good news or bad news, only truth or lies. The thought system of error and confusion would have you judge between good and bad; while the thought system of truth would have you distinguish only between that which is true and false.
There are times, however, when brutal honesty causes unnecessary conflict. The level of crisis can be minimized when, along with the thought system of perfect honesty, you also come to know the thought system of perfect love.
In perfect love, you will learn that to give is to receive. You will come to fully understand that past and future is an illusion. You will come to know what some have called God but is, in truth, beyond words and in a dimension beyond perception. You will no longer attack. You will no longer need to defend yourself against attack because you are already safe. You will let go of all fear. You will come to know this all when you are perfectly honest and; therefore, purified and ready for the truth.
Throughout the centuries, the great prophets and sages have told us about these same spiritual truths using so many different stories, concepts and languages. Most of them have perhaps missed the simple lesson: that total surrender to honesty is the only step required for total salvation. Is this a difficult lesson? The world would have you believe that it is.
You have learned the false lesson that there is no truth, only shades of gray. You may think there are different kinds of truth—that there is universal truth, plain truth, and perhaps ugly truth. Some truths are considered good, appropriate, or acceptable; while others are meant to be hidden in shame. You may believe that you have your truths and I have mine; or that you would have to convince everyone of your truth for it to be considered true at all. So you remain stuck in the mental game of argument and debate.
Truth can only be honesty. There are no orders of reality to honesty. There are no levels or different types. The truth about an error is no less truthful than the truth of love. Therefore, there is no need to judge or sort out the significance or importance of various truths. The truth about your life, your feelings, your desires, your needs, your experiences, or your fantasies are no less important than the truths spoken by the Buddha, Lao Tzu or Jesus Christ.
All honesty is truth and can be honored equally. The philosophy of truth is simple: if you are telling the truth and you want only truth, then you are on the right path. You are allowing reality to reveal itself to you as it is.
Nobody can judge your path. There is nothing to argue or debate. There is no superior form of honesty; only honesty or dishonesty. You don’t need to discover the ultimate secrets of the universe right now, though you probably will. For now, you only need to be honest. So how do you choose honesty? By being honest always.
If you are choosing honesty and want the truth with conviction, that means you want only honesty in your life. You instantly recognize all lies as unreal and ignore them. You don’t fight against dishonesty or corruption, you don’t attempt to correct people by attacking or shaming them, and you certainly don’t demand honesty from anyone.
The choice for honesty is entirely a personal one. It isn’t right to demand from someone what is a personal choice. If you can’t demand it or require it, how do you get others to be honest with you? By offering unconditional acceptance.
ACCEPTING THE TRUTH
You create space for honesty by telling people that you welcome the truth, that you will do your best to handle it, and that your intention is to create no unnecessary drama in response. This doesn’t mean that certain revelations may not be difficult and may not change something.
Often, situations and relationships do change with honesty. But whatever does happen in honesty, it will be the truth of the situation. Because it is truth, it must be accepted and valued as such. There is nothing real that can be gained through dishonesty; for the price is always too high.
If you want the liberation of being able to speak and live your truth, then it is right and necessary to offer others the same. It is far better to do this at the start of a relationship or immediately upon entering a new life situation. If you establish the dynamic of total honesty and unconditional acceptance from the very start, there will be nothing very difficult for you to deal with or process later. There will be no crisis to sort through because no crisis can exist if perfect honesty is the dynamic from the start. This is a fundamental concept: only dishonesty creates space for crisis and collapse.
Your path is more difficult if you currently find yourself in a situation where you have lacked faith in truth and, therefore, have failed to offer total honesty and unconditional acceptance to someone. This is a situation that must be fixed sooner, rather than later. If you go more deeply into the lies, the impending crisis will be more severe, and the relationship will become even more difficult to salvage. If something is broken now, it must be fixed now, or it will worsen. But to fix something properly, you need to take the right approach.
Ease into honesty by offering to do the most difficult part: allow the other person to go first in honesty. You can only do this by offering the other person unconditional acceptance and forgiveness.
By creating space for truth, you set an example of what you would like in return. If you are not ready and cannot handle perfect honesty that goes both ways, then you are not ready to turn the switch and to awaken. You can allow a bit more suffering in your life, or perhaps wait until everything inevitably does fall apart until you do the right thing.
You may be afraid to offer unconditional acceptance because you are afraid of the hurt you may have to endure. You aren’t sure whether you can forgive everything. But we’ve already defined forgiveness as acceptance of the truth as a replacement for lies. Would you cling to the false certainty of a life built on lies, or do you want the unending bliss, joy and peace of a life rooted in truth?
When you create the space for another person to be honest and to live freely, then some of what they reveal may be difficult to deal with. At the same time, remember that this person is also being honest about all the things that make you feel good. By creating space for honesty, you are creating an opportunity for all kinds of honesty to flourish. You can fully enjoy the fact that everything about the relationship is real.
Honesty isn’t only about the difficult stuff. A refreshing purity enters the honest relationship, and you know that nothing done or said is ever coerced or untrue. Everything is done and said and experienced for the right reasons: because it is all true.
Asking for total honesty by offering unconditional acceptance will make it so that you will be offered the same in return. Even if you are not offered the same, you will have to take it and be honest anyway. Relationships cannot be one-sided. Honesty and unconditional acceptance, even if it is at first offered by only one party, will expose the truth of your relationship—not only the truth about who did what, but also about how the relationship works and what it is.
Is your relationship really based on love? If so, what does it mean to love someone other than offering unconditional acceptance? Love is perfect, and perfect love is unconditional.
Anything less than unconditional love is not love at all; rather, an arrangement where you use each other for some purpose. But is there really a need to deceive each other at all? If there is a practical fit, would you not choose to remain together in truth just as you have been together in dishonest union? Honesty cannot threaten anything that is real—and even your practical reasons for being together with someone may be very real.
To live in honesty not only concerns what you do in your intimate, romantic relationships. However, starting here is necessary for most people because this is where the most urgent need for honesty is. This is also, by far, the most challenging area to be honest.
By turning on the switch here and overcoming dishonesty in your romantic partnerships or marriage relationship, you will make it possible to fully awaken and to live in truth throughout every area of your life.
Most of the prophets, sages, religions and spiritual leaders that have existed in this world have missed this simplest message of all—that honesty is salvation. Perhaps they did not see the truth about honesty because they were afraid of total honesty.
Even many of those who have preached about honesty, truth and forgiveness have attempted to draw lines in the sand about what kind of honesty is acceptable and what kind is sinful. They are like the jealous spouse who demands your honesty and then tells you that what you said is not okay.
Religion has become largely irrelevant for most people these days, but the problem is that everybody is still doing the work of the priests—enforcing taboos, judging, and trying to make you believe you are an irredeemable sinner.
There is no path toward spiritual awakening that does not involve a total commitment to honesty. What is always required is a total conviction, a decision to be honest at any cost.
Total honesty is a true expression of a faith that supersedes any religious doctrine, tradition, or ritual. Continue to make some truth off limits, maintain some taboos, and you continue to create space for lies. No philosophy or thought system that leaves any room for lies can be superior to honesty.
Of course, there is one topic that is always off limits and never considered appropriate by the world. It is sex. The reason you may not have yet awakened is that you are not entirely honest about sex. The whole world is against sex and you have been forced to lie about sex all the time.
The world is against sex because almost everyone is sexually jealous. Perfect honesty is impossible in your life unless you are willing to work through your sexual jealousy. The main reason you do not offer your romantic partner unconditional acceptance of whatever they do or say is that you are afraid he or she will have sex, or already has had sex, with someone else.
Sexual bliss is fleeting and clearly not the path to salvation, but the world’s attitude about sex blocks your awakening by making sexual jealousy real and, therefore, honesty about it impossible. Making anything taboo—especially such a fundamental and important topic as sex—causes a lot of people to lie a lot, which always causes suffering and ultimately crisis.
This is never said, but the root of all dysfunction in most relationships and families is sexual jealousy. It is probably controlling and limiting not just your life, but it is the cause of suffering in the lives of your children, your family, and everyone around you. Sex isn’t the problem. Sex is the most natural expression of life doing what it does: enjoying aliveness and creating more life. The problem isn’t sex, it is sexual jealousy.
It is mainly because of sexual jealousy that you set rules and expectations intended to control and limit the person you love. In so doing, you are instantly preventing the possibility of honesty in your relationship. You are attempting to control a most fundamental human drive in another person. Sex is the most basic source of bliss and excitement available to us, the very impulse that originally brought you into this world, and a force that brings anyone together into a romantic relationship.
By failing to accept your partner’s sexuality unconditionally, you are failing to honor the core of his or her being and the foundation upon which your relationship is built. In so doing, you are tragically and severely hurting not just your partner, but yourself and everyone around you.
You have a right to your sexuality—whatever that may be—and everyone else has that same right; including the person who you love. Your partner may never need anyone else. Most people who are loved unconditionally are not inspired to form multiple romantic relationships. People tend to do this when they are not loved unconditionally. The lesson here is clear: life gives you what you resist, in order to teach you not to resist. Drop the resistance and end the problem.
Because of sexual jealousy, the default relationship style is monogamy. Monogamy is cruel not just because it limits love and defines it through rules. It is cruel because of the way people are forced to treat one another.
Monogamy makes sexual jealousy very real, indeed, because you establish a set of rules whereby your partner must leave you if they feel sexually or emotionally attracted to someone else. A monogamous relationship is, therefore, the most brittle and unstable of all.
Founded upon a rule that cannot be adhered to because it is against nature, the relationship instantly falls apart even in a meaningless act of surrender. What’s more, by making certain kinds of sex taboo, you make it seem even more desirable and even more thrilling. Everyone is doing it all wrong, which is why everybody is cheating and why most marriages fall apart.
If your relationship were, instead, based on perfect honesty, openness and unconditional acceptance rather than monogamy; then no sexual act could threaten it. There would be love for each other and respect. Neither of you would throw away what you have—a love that is real, joyful, blissful, freeing—because of an act of passion.
Furthermore, it is unlikely that either of you would have much of an appetite for doing something that would cause great pain and suffering for the other. You would, instead, find a way to meet your needs while remaining honest and sensitive.
This honesty and sensitivity would bring you closer together than you could possibly be with a new person, so you wouldn’t abandon each other. This ever-so-common need to run away and start over with someone else would be so rare in a world in which people were being honest about sex.
Sexual jealousy can be dealt with and overcome. Millions of people have done it. Honesty, openness and acceptance is powerful enough to overcome any negative emotion. But you would never know this if you have never tried—if, like most people, you have allowed your life to be controlled by sexual jealousy.
Would you rather have sexually jealousy or unconditional love? You can only choose one.
Authority does not want you to awaken because, when you are awake, you are free. You are then beyond their control. Awake, you will no longer be exploited for their gain. You will not be dependent upon them because you will already be healed.
The religions of this world, throughout the centuries, are clearly a form of centralized authority designed to exploit you. Like the therapists who want to keep the patients coming back, the church does not want you to awaken because, if you do, you will not need them.
To ensure their continued relevance, they make it impossible for you to heal by making it impossible for you to be honest. Rather than accepting you, they would
rather call you a sinner when you fail to make real their illusions about human nature.
Speaking an unpopular truth in church is almost unthinkable. If you were to go to church and tell your truth openly, you may find that you are judged quite harshly and not welcome there. Religion is against honesty and so it is a very real part of the problem.
Most people these days pay little attention to religion, yet you are still indoctrinated against sex through movies, teachers, parents, and basically everyone you meet. Everyone wants you to lie about something because everyone wants to control you.
By making you ashamed of your enjoyment of sex and your need for it, they quickly and easily take away your power by forcing you to compromise on perfect honesty right from the start. If you compromise honesty just a little in any area of life, you’ll quite easily compromise more, then a bit more, until eventually there is no room for truth and honesty anywhere in your life. The need to force you into dishonesty is the reason why the world is against sex, and a core reason why most people continue to suffer in dishonesty. Turning the switch requires that you are also honest about sex.
You withheld truth from your parents for their approval. You pretended to go along with absolute nonsense at school for approval. You faked being cool and lied about your deepest feelings to please friends. You told your lovers what they wanted to hear so that would they like you. You did whatever your bosses required because you feared the loss of your job. You’ve raised your kids in ways that are considered appropriate, even while your kids have no idea about the person you really are.
At each step and in every area of your life, you meant well but you are erasing yourself by hiding your truths. You’re a good person—of course you are. But your best intentions have failed because you are probably suffering from low energy and fear, and you are made to believe you don’t matter in this world. The life force within you has been cut off by your choice for dishonesty. Honesty will heal you and you will become the force you were meant to be.
Do you want people to love you? Offer them unconditional acceptance. Make it okay for everyone in your life to tell you anything and everything. There is nothing for you to judge because anything they say or do isn’t about you. It is about them growing and being honest.
In the gift of unconditional acceptance, you offer the people you love the chance to reach their fullest potential in life. You teach that it is possible to be honest, and by doing so you make it possible for everyone in your life to be very happy. Do you think they are not going to love you like crazy if you are allowing them to be happy? Do you really think you will lose them? Try it and find out for yourself.
Or would you rather continue to carry this impossible burden of trying to control everyone—judging everything and manipulating everything according to what you think is okay and not okay when, deep down, you know that you’re missing the very same mark you set for others.
The only mark worth hitting is the standard of perfect honesty. When you teach the people around you to hit that mark, you offer them the greatest gift and the most important lesson in life. But you will never create space for perfect honesty if you think it is ever okay to judge.
You cannot expect any honesty if you are not teaching it. If you continue to attack, if you ever resort to shaming or blaming, if you feel the need to sort out who’s right and wrong, and if you continue to use punishment and reward as a tool to control behavior then you are teaching dishonesty.
These behaviors demonstrate no faith in truth and place all faith in illusion. This can only lead you to suffer now and face crisis later.
You don’t need to control anything. Furthermore, you can’t control anything even if you wanted to. Reality is too complex.
You don’t know what’s good or bad. Maybe your child doesn’t want to attend college and you believe it is bad. What if college isn’t the path toward his or her calling or life purpose? What if, by forcing your child to attend college, you are only setting the person you love most on a course of dishonesty and misery?
You may think it is bad that your wife or husband has a huge sex drive that sometimes extends beyond your relationship? Have you not enjoyed his or her passion? What if you were able to accept it and embrace it more than anyone else could?
Or you may think that the worst thing in the world would be for your marriage to end? What if the end of your marriage ends up being part of the switch that ends your suffering and begins your awakening? You might ultimately find yourself in perfect bliss with your ideal partner and, since you will live in truth, all your family and even your ex will love and respect you anyway.
You cannot and do not know what is good or bad. Because you are learning to value truth above all else, you are learning to accept that there is never a need to judge anything. It is as it is. This is acceptance.
Acceptance is total, unconditional, and beyond judgement or control. What is just is. What is unreal will always dissolve, while what is real will remain. In this law of nature, there is nothing for you to control.
You need only sort out what is honest and dishonest. Then you can relax.
BREAKING TRADITION
Honesty begins by looking within. You may still be afraid to look deeply within yourself in perfect honesty because your mind is not yet freed from a thought system that tells you guilt is real.
You may still believe there are lines that should not be crossed, rules and traditions that should be honored, thoughts that should not be spoken, or experiences that should not be explored. You may believe there is a correct path toward happiness and fulfillment in life, and that the world has pretty much figured this out.
If all this is so, why have you felt such a deep need to cross so many of those lines? Why is it that, when you try your hardest to fit in and be normal, it never quite works out and you feel rather stifled and miserable?
All your life, you have been made to believe that something is basically wrong with you—that what you feel, you should not feel; that what you did, you should not have done; that you’re going about things the wrong way; that you’re a sinner; that you’re wrong, and that you’re not quite good enough. Is this so?
Is anyone living in the way the world has taught you to live? If they are, do they seem to become genuinely happier as they get older?
It’s easy when you are young. You still haven’t felt the wear and tear of this grueling game yet. You still believe that there is a destination for you that will make the whole thing worthwhile. But, as you get older, your eyes begin to open. So much is wrong with the way people live that it becomes impossible to ignore. It becomes clear that nothing in life is as you were promised it would be.
When this conclusion is reached, as it eventually is at some point in everyone’s life, you may fall into despair. You may partially blame a corrupt system, and you may also blame yourself for not playing the game of life well enough. If only you had known the right people, had been a little tougher, had sacrificed a bit more, and had been braver. If only you had not messed-up your life, you could have had it all and you could have been happy.
But you may think that there’s still a chance. You might decide to work harder, to sacrifice more, to exercise and diet, to become a more loyal spouse or partner, to be a better parent, to focus on more ambitious goals. Why are you doing it all? To eventually be happy at some point in the future, right? But now, you’re not enjoying much of anything.
There is a fundamental problem with this approach to life, and it is this: you are living for the future while the future is only a concept. If there is to be a better future for you, it will be experienced as a better now.
Will you ever know how to be happy in the present moment when, all your life, you have been sacrificing happiness in the present moment because of your belief in future happiness? If this is to change, and you are to actually become happy, it will change only when you realize that happiness can only be in the present—when you let go of the concept of future altogether and begin to live in the now.
It is a very strange game you have been convinced to play and the fundamental error is that you have agreed to a game that can only end in crisis and misery.
The world’s game of life is a game where you strive to achieve happiness by being better than others. Being better supposedly means you have more approval. It means being right about things more often. It means winning more arguments and battles. It means looking better, earning more money, living in the better neighborhood or city, moving in the right circles and achieving a higher status in life than others.
In spiritual terms, this is known as seeking happiness in external form—in the material realm. This is a materialist thought system whereby your supposed happiness depends entirely upon what you have, accomplish, or appear to be externally.
In this game, your inner dimension is considered inconsequential. This is odd, because to win at this game is supposed to bring happiness; which is, of course, experienced within. Wouldn’t it make more sense to skip the game and go within to be happy now?
Sometimes the game of being better appears to work. For a time, being better convinces you that you are happy. A very attractive young man or woman may enjoy the boost of self-confidence found in being physically superior to others or being desired by many. A rich person may enjoy the experiences and all the wonderful things that money can buy. Being famous or popular can be quite a thrill for a time. Being more educated, well-spoken, well-travelled, talented or experienced in a certain area can also boost your self-esteem—which is an enjoyable feeling that does, temporarily, relieve you of suffering. Marriage is an alter to this value system— a stage upon which you can project your success and superiority, and an opportunity to appear perfectly complete according to the world’s game of life. But what happens when any of these external realities are taken away, as everything in the material realm eventually will be?
Will it not be a crisis for the beautiful woman to lose her looks in old age? Does becoming rich not require great effort and sacrifice all the while, and will wealth mean so much if you are diagnosed with cancer? Can fame last long? If it does, might it not require a desperate clinging, dishonesty, and constant sacrifice to make it so? Will someone not come along who is more talented, more accomplished, more experienced, or more successful? What if your marriage ends and everything you built together and put on display is now publicly declared a total failure?
When even one of these events happen, which it absolutely will sooner or later even for the most fortunate—and your coveted position and status in life begins to slip— will you not experience a crisis? Is it even possible that this game will not end in suffering? Don’t you think this matters a great deal? More importantly, is suffering on some level not present all the while as you strive toward and cling to the external?
In this never-ending quest to be better and more, you have learned to hate so much about yourself just as you force yourself to pretend that everything is absolutely wonderful.
You may think the problem is that you’re not the best, you aren’t attractive enough, you aren’t rich enough, you aren’t famous, you aren’t admired for your talents and abilities, and you don’t have the perfect spouse or children. For this, you declare yourself guilty and hate yourself so much.
Nobody is harder on you in this life than you are. You have suffered so much, even as you have accomplished so much. You are suffering only because you are chasing the goal of happiness with the wrong thought system.
You are not guilty, and you have nothing to be ashamed of. You have merely made a mistake, and mistakes can be corrected. All you did wrong is that you’ve learned the ways of the world. Like everyone, you were forced to. The question is, how long do you plan to continue in error before making the one and only correction that brings everything you do want?
Let yourself off the hook. There’s nothing wrong with you. You are no different from anyone else. Everyone is going through the same thing. Nobody is happy for long because almost everyone is very confused. The world may have convinced you that you’re the outsider, that you’re the failure, that so many of them are better, but none of it is true. Remember, the world’s faith is in dishonesty. Everyone is only projecting that which isn’t necessarily true.
Almost everyone is playing the same game that you’ve been playing: the game that requires dishonesty to prove yourself better so that you can be happy even though you never really are. It is a silly, insane game that you can stop believing in and stop playing.
SECTION TWO: IDENTIFYING EGO
IDENTIFYING EGO
This game of the world was created by the ego. An ego is a mind that has chosen illusion. It is a mind that believes it is separate from other people and somehow even separate from the entire universe.
This belief creates a great deal of fear. A person with an active ego is driven mad by fear. Everything that is feared is made very real, and the desire to avoid fear is used to justify anything and everything. What scares the ego more than anything is reality, itself. So, it forces you to hide from reality.
A person with an active ego is focused on getting and taking and, for this reason, often attempts to control or manipulate any situation at any cost.
A person with an active ego is not well, and is often physically ill, for the simple reason that the ego demands so much energy and creates so much stress.
A person with an active ego often wakes up in the middle of the night and, because you follow a fearful train of thought, you find yourself in the grip of a panic attack. Your heart begins to race, your body clenches up, there is so much stress caused by overblown fears—sometimes about just the most basic and ridiculous things—and you can’t go back to sleep.
In this state, great strain is put on your body. Your mind is driven mad and you are filled with negative emotions such as anger, jealousy, resentment, the need for revenge. You are overtaken by an attitude of overall pettiness and smallness. But the ego would convince you that it is big, that it is you, that you are it, and that by feeding it and following it you will one day be great. Nothing is further from the truth.
In your closest relationships, the ego’s madness is frequently revealed. How? You literally get mad at people. You lose control, you attack, you yell or even worse. You feel something quickly come over your body and you are completely taken over. You begin to shake. You can’t breathe. Your eyes appear frightening. Your voice is raised to a level that would scare anyone.
Every person with an active ego, from time to time, needs to go mad and act out in this way. In some people, this happens every few days.
When the episode of madness is over, they say “I’m sorry. I was just upset and didn’t mean it. I don’t know what came over me.”
Ego came over them, and it isn’t okay. If this happens to you, you are not well. If this happens to anyone you know or love, they are not well and need healing.
Even when the madness temporarily subsides, a mind where ego is present remains unwell and plays an insane game. The game of ego is a very unfriendly game of communication played by almost everyone in this unhealed world. It is also played by organizations and institutions.
The behavior of an ego is utterly predictable and can easily be understood. Every ego is the same and plays the same game. It is a game where, despite presenting an illusion of reality, nothing real is ever accomplished and everybody ultimately loses.
The objective of this game is to be right and better in some way than the other player. In this game, dishonesty is allowed and even encouraged.
Your aim is not to find solutions to problems or to make anyone happy. The object of this game is, rather, to prove that you are right and that others are wrong.
It is a game of conflict that is played between two, but there are six different roles or positions you both can play: Judge, Defender, Jailer, Prosecutor, Offender, and Victim. Let’s look at each of these roles to understand the game.
HOLDING COURT To start the ego game, one player assumes the role of Prosecutor and tries to draw the other player in by launching an accusation. The purpose of the accusation is to cause a negative emotional reaction in the other player. For the move to be successful, the other player must fail to remain calm and, instead, must choose to make a make a move in response.
In a court of law, think of how an attorney tries to establish who the Offender is by proving who the Victim is. This is the Prosecutor, who uses language like, “how dare you...” or “do you think it is acceptable behavior to...” or “you always lie to me, drink too much, flirt with people, etc.”.
is true; it is intended to cause a strong emotional reaction so that the other player is pulled into the game and into the ego’s grip.
When a couple argues, it is typically an argument between the Prosecutor and the Defender who are frequently switching roles without ever agreeing on the Judge’s verdict.
All forms of argument and debate is meant to appeal to the Judge, who decides the winners and losers. But the Judge only has authority if both parties are willing to agree who the Judge is. If they do not agree on the verdict, then the argument continues and can go on indefinitely.
As mentioned, the roles can be easily switched. The accused may either choose to play the role of Defender or he may, instead, choose to respond by trying to assume the role of the Prosecutor. Here is an example of a switch in roles:
Woman says: “How dare you get drunk again.” Man responds: “I only drink because you are constantly yelling at me and shaming
me.”
In this way, the man’s move in the game is to try to assume the role of Victim and Prosecutor rather than that of Defender (which is where the woman wanted to put him). If the woman falls for this move by defending herself as someone who doesn’t yell or shame, then she has assumed the role of Defender and the man’s move has been successful. Now they can argue about that.
If she, instead, simply ignores the accusation of “yelling at and shaming” him, then she maintains her role prosecuting the crime she cares about and can carry-on trying to be right.
A successful Prosecutor does such a good job making you feel guilty that you willingly move to the Offender position and agree that the other player can assume the role of Judge, Jailer, and Victim.
To avoid admitting guilt and moving to the Offender position, the most common response to a Prosecutor is to be become a Defender. If you are attacked by a Prosecutor and begin to play the Defender, then you are attempting to refuse or deny the legitimacy of the Prosecutor’s position.
As a Defender, you attempt to establish that the accusation isn’t true. However, as you attempt to defend yourself against one set of charges, a determined and skilled Prosecutor can be very clever and will surely find a different set of charges that you are guilty of.
While the role of Defender seems to be a strong and reasonable position, the problem is that it legitimizes the other player’s role as Prosecutor. It also legitimizes the role of Judge.
By assuming any role at all in the game, you make this entire game of right and wrong seem real. You agree that it is okay to judge, okay to argue about who is right, okay to make guilty and to punish, and okay to control other people through arguments and manipulation.
In truth, the role of Defender is not a strong position and often requires you to lie. Let’s face it, you did do some of the things you are being accused of—but that doesn’t make you guilty.
Remember, this is not an honest game. It is a game about establishing guilt, but you cannot be and never were guilty.
Like in a court of law, the Judge establishes guilt. The Judge decides who is in the Offender position and who belongs in the Victim position by deciding whether to agree with the Defender’s case or the Prosecutor’s case. If the Judge identifies a Victim, then he may turn the Offender over to the Jailer for punishment.
Interestingly, the role of Judge must always be agreed-upon by both players. If the two players do not agree on the legitimacy of the Judge or the judgment, there can be no resolution and the prosecution and defense can carry-on indefinitely. This is how most marriages work.
In many cases, however, the person being prosecuted eventually tires of the game and tries to end it by surrendering to the Judge. This is how one person controls another. Unfortunately, acceptance of any verdict does not end the game.
In admitting guilt and agreeing on a verdict, you allow the other player to move to the role of Jailer and Victim. Allowing your opponent to assume the role of Victim is not a good idea. Your opponent now feels justified in administering any punishment. You now must assume the role of Oppressor, and this carries with it a lot of shame and punishment that may never end.
Also remember that, just because one ego game seems to have come to an end, there is no limit to the number of ego games you can play at the same time. Just as you are being punished for one crime, you can be accused of another, and the whole game can start again.
The Jailer position in the ego game enforces the consequences or punishments. The Jailer is given permission to jail the Offender whenever all parties agree with the Judge’s verdict. The Jailer takes over when a parent punishes a child for bad behavior or when a spouse takes away certain privileges after an offense.
The Jailer’s role is to keep the Offender away from temptation, out of contact with Victims, and ideally to provide a path to recovery. Most Jailers, unfortunately, can be overly cruel. They often even believe that abuse is justified.
The Offender is the mean, guilty person who has hurt some poor, helpless victim. Sometimes, however, a person may assume the role of Offender by choice and feel justified in doing so.
You may become so tired of being accused of things, so worn down by the game, that you may start to enjoy acting out as an Offender. You may feel entirely justified in doing whatever you want to do and believe you are relieved from all moral judgment.
Offensive behavior such as alcoholism, drug abuse, physical abuse, or cheating on a spouse is always the result of assuming the Offender role. You do it because you believe that the offensive behavior is your path toward freedom.
While you may achieve a certain degree of freedom and it may be a lot of fun to act out as an Offender, your reckless behavior and web of lies will also cause a great deal of destruction and suffering for you and others.
As an Offender, you feel justified by the unfairness of your situation. The pleasure you get as an Offender is an intense form of ego-gratification—physical pleasure combined with the belief that your recklessness is justified and that you are right.
Perhaps it is because the Offender role cannot be removed from the game that the truth always surfaces in any situation where there is an attempt for one person to control another. But, in the ego game, none of the roles can be removed. This is how the ego works and it can be no other way.
The Victim is also a person who uses a wrong as an excuse. The Victim plays the role by acting helpless, weak and hurt.
A person stuck in the Victim ego role often chooses this identity for life. While a strong person may choose to let go of the Victim role, a lazier or weaker person seeks pleasure by attempting to get sympathy from friends and family and to generally be let off the hook.
Playing the role of victim is a way to disengage from life while still being better at something—you are a better and bigger victim.
The ego game is presented as a win-lose proposition. The winning positions are the Judge, Jailer and Prosecutor because they can assume “rightness”. The losing positions are Defender, Offender, and Victim because they are assumed to be either guilty or abused.
In truth, the game does not produce a winner or loser because, for most people, the game never concludes. It just draws you in further and makes you more and more crazy.
The ego game takes place between you and other people or organizations, but it is also played as that voice inside your head. You have become so used to playing this game that you have become an expert at turning this game against yourself even when you don’t have anyone else to play with.
This inner ego game is even more destructive than the ego games you play with others. The inner game is on-going, exhausting, and depressing. You prosecute yourself for failures, you try to defend yourself, you judge yourself, you punish yourself, you play victim to yourself.
If you believe the game of being better than others is the path toward happiness, then this is the game you are almost always playing. It is an insane game and the outcome can only be confusion. How can you know who you are when you are shifting between six different roles?
There can be no true happiness or fulfillment within the game because there is no acceptance. Without acceptance, there is very little room for honesty. Without honesty, there is no reflection of truth. Anything untrue can only be a game.
The way to stop playing this game is to forgive. The game ends when you offer unconditional acceptance to yourself and others.
Each time you are drawn-in to an ego game, you can refuse to play. It is difficult at first, but you do this by breaking the habit of defending yourself. If someone is prosecuting you, you can simply respond as follows: “Is that so?”
Rather than defending yourself, which would be the normal reaction, you can just disengage with a response like “I see” or “it could be”. If you are pushed further, simply state that you’re not interested in arguing or that you don’t debate. Simply refuse to play.
Others try to make the game real by wanting you to legitimatize their assumed role. They will tell you about what a big Victim they are, how terrible their Oppressor is, what they are going to do about it as Jailer, and on and on. No response is needed in any case because nothing about the game is real in the light of truth. All truth is found in honesty and acceptance.
The ego game is often mistakenly referred to as “the real world” by miserable people. In truth, it is a game. There is nothing real about it.
For thousands of years, humans have been exploited and controlled by this game. From the youngest age, you were conditioned to the ways of the ego by schools, then in workplaces, also through the legal system, in church, in normal social interactions, and throughout every other part of society. The ego game is so pervasive that it seems real.
The game of establishing guilt seems legitimate. But life is not a game about who’s right and who’s wrong. This is only a silly distraction.
You are here to be kind and to love others. You were born to experience the fullness of life and, in doing so, to grow. To be fully alive is to go through life with an open mind and heart. Whatever you or anyone says, thinks, or does, it is all part of the experience and it all has a purpose.
There is error and then there is correction, but the error is always found in dishonesty and the correction is always found in honesty. Making guilty is not helpful or effective because it doesn’t teach truth in a way that feels good; and so nothing is learned.
The game of ego doesn’t solve anything and doesn’t lead to happiness or anything that you most deeply want. You need not wear yourself out with it. You need not fear. You need not stress. There is no need to be better than or righter than. Nobody is guilty. You don’t know what is good or bad and, even if you did, you don’t have any control over any outcome.
Just be honest and let life guide the way. You can rest in honesty.
SECTION THREE: AUTHENTICITY
AUTHENTICITY
So, you want to practice perfect honesty? Merely saying what you think in every situation, while it is a great start, isn’t quite the same thing as taking the power of honesty to its full potential. You can begin your journey toward honesty by simply saying what’s on your mind; but be prepared to make some errors and to be corrected.
The ego likes a certain kind of honesty: negative honesty. A negative truth is always about what you do not want.
The ego’s purpose is the opposite of openness because it believes your path to happiness and safety is in separation. When your ego tells the truth, it is mostly about putting walls up, defining boundaries, and telling others what you don’t like and won’t tolerate.
This has the effect of pushing people away, which is exactly what the ego demands of you so that it can maintain control over your life. In the joy of perfect union with another person, the ego becomes unnecessary and unwanted. Obsolescence is what the ego fears most; so it demands your loyalty and will use very clever tricks to convince you that you still want what it offers. But what does the ego offer other than suffering?
Here, no further attempt will be made to distinguish orders to honesty or to define good honesty vs. bad honesty. That would be a judgment and would not provide the necessary space of acceptance where you can be free to tell the truth. However, clearly positive honesty carries with it much more power than negative.
Make your honesty mostly about what you do want. Then, remain open to others so that they may collude with you to make your happy dreams a reality. In contrast, honesty about what you don’t want prevents two minds from connecting and blocks the flow of life.
Correction by others is part of the process of growth. Being honest and open allows this natural process of correction to transform your life. As of now, your knowledge of this thought system of truth isn’t complete. But, if you start where you are and don’t look back, you will ultimately reach the destination of perfect knowing, uninterrupted peace, bliss—in other words, you will awaken. It is a process.
The first few steps along the path are sometimes rocky, but there is nothing to be afraid of because you are safe in truth. Just start telling the truth and allow the process of personal growth and correction to unfold.
Remember, turning the switch causes a light to shine that exposes all the illusions that were previously concealed in darkness. These include your illusions and those of others. The more illusions you have destroyed, the calmer the waters. But first there are a lot of waves. You can understand why it requires patience to allow waves to settle.
You are beginning a journey toward truth that will take you in a very different direction from what you might anticipate. Being honest changes you fundamentally—as fundamentally as the difference between waking and sleeping.
You may have gotten the wrong idea that to apply honesty in your life means that you will not be able to properly play the game of life or to engage as effectively in the world. You may think that you will become an outsider, and that you may have to sacrifice material success and status. Nothing is further from the truth.
To be honest is to engage with the world. Remember, those who are dishonest are confusing sleeping dreams with the waking dream of life. But you, by remaining open and honest, are fully engaging with other minds and, therefore, you are taking part in this life exactly as you were meant to. Honesty optimizes the way you live and removes the bad habits and false perceptions which have been holding you back.
The most wonderful and important thing about openness and honesty is that it allows your mind to connect harmoniously with other minds. Dishonesty is clinging to isolation; and nothing in this world can be accomplished in isolation. When you are open, honest, and accepting, then you create perfect union with others who share the same purpose. This union is the source of abundance and external success.
Union with others brings the opportunity to create value for them and with them. How can you bring your talents, skills and value to anyone if there is not a mutual understanding and connection? Furthermore, you’ll expand your abilities by harmoniously joining with people whose strengths make up for your weaknesses. Joined with others, the sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
Do you think it is more effective to compete with people and prove that you, as an individual, are more right and better? Or do you think you might be able to benefit on a much larger scale through harmonious collaboration and cooperation?
Competition leaves you weak and no greater than your own abilities. Leaders, on the other hand, know how to work with others to achieve something far superior. Leaders know how to eliminate resistance to success.
While the ego’s drive is toward external success, it’s behaviors and habits often prevent it. If you can cultivate more productive, harmonious, win-win relationships with more people from beyond the ego; you will obviously be more successful in this life.
Greater worldly success comes after you awaken—and it comes more easily. But remember, you aren’t striving toward worldly success to become happy. It’s the other way around. You first become happy and feel good by awakening, then success flows from that.
More accurately stated: the total success of awakening and feeling good is your starting point. This is the starting point that others will never reach as an ending point through the methods and means they have been taught to use.
From this perfect starting point, life continuously gets better because you are also able to enjoy whatever level of success you want to achieve. You enjoy everything from this place of being happy and feeling good all the time.
So how do you get to this starting point? How do you become happy by awakening? On the most basic level, you need only tell the truth and seek only the truth. Take this leap of faith and, by design, the flow of life will take you the rest of the way. Perhaps you aren’t quite ready because your faith in honesty is not complete.
You may fear that, if you begin to tell the whole truth, you will end up alone in this world. Maybe you don’t know anyone who would accept all your truths. Yet, on another level, you know that if you met that person who embodies all these principles of perfect honesty and unconditional acceptance, you would want that person in your life. So be that person. Other people very much want you as that person, and you will not be alone.
If you go all the way into truth, you will not be alone. But withhold your truth anywhere, doubt the lesson that honesty is truth, question whether truth is heaven, and you will be lost. Remember, you cannot serve two masters and there are no gray areas between truth and lies. You must go all the way or don’t go at all.
If you think you will hold onto someone by withholding honesty, you already do not have that person. You are clinging to an illusion and it is only a matter of time until the relationship changes entirely.
You cannot know, ahead of time, exactly what the steps are and what you might experience along the way. This is your personal journey. But you can know that, if something is happening in your life—and you are always being honest as it does happen—then it is supposed to be happening and life is guiding you in the right direction.
The right direction is always truth, and the wrong direction is always dishonesty. Seeking truth doesn’t depend upon learning something; rather, it is a process of unlearning untruth. It is a letting go of illusion and seeing through lies.
You don’t need to know everything about everything. You can’t know everything anyway. But you can know everything you need to know about your present moment. In any given moment, everything you need to know and understand is right there for you.
To awaken is to have removed all the clutter from your mind so that you can easily know what is really there; in any moment, whatever may or may not be happening. Fully awake and living in truth, the correct response to any situation you encounter will always emerge.
To access this power of perfect knowing, you need only set the intention of perfect honesty and do so with 100% conviction and faith. If there is a prayer, it is a very simple prayer that you be always aligned with honesty and truth. That’s it.
Decide again, each day, that you do not want illusion and do not want lies anywhere in your life. This sounds easy, but to succeed you will have to undo the world’s conditioning. A daily practice is required. Simply reading this book and then setting it aside will not be enough because you will go off-course. If telling the truth doesn’t work, the only reason can be that you aren’t doing it. If you ever fall short of the truth, then you must correct this immediately through apology.
You’ve spent most of your life, until now, learning the false lessons of the world. This is helpful because you now understand how normal people think. You know the dysfunction, you know the expectations, the habits, the frustrations and the whole range of what almost everyone is going through.
You’ve been there, and you will never forget any of it even after you awaken. Don’t worry about forgetting or losing anything. You will not be diminished in any way. You are only letting go of illusions; which are only weaknesses and completely unreal constructs.
Awake, you will be far more effective because you will remain calm. You can get a lot more done in a state of calm than you can in a state of stress and panic. Awake, you will move through your day with intention. Your mind will become clear and unclouded by fear. Solutions to problems will come easily. There will be far fewer mistakes to redo. This means less work and more time to enjoy yourself. Even as you are working, you will enjoy yourself.
Do you know your highest purpose in life? Your reason for being? Your calling? If so, this process of undoing error and illusion will allow you to fulfill it. If not, this practice of telling the truth will reveal it. To be honest is to awaken fully. You can’t know what it means to awaken until you are awake.
INTERNAL AWARENESS
Are you ready to turn the switch? If so, you are about to experience the most important moment and the ultimate success in life. Do you want it? If you aren’t sure, please stop reading and return to this book when you are ready. If you are ready, then take a moment to congratulate yourself.
Do not expect anything supernatural to happen. There will probably be no crescendo and nothing dramatic; just a sense of perfect peace. If you do not think you care about perfect peace, it is only because you haven’t experienced it. Now that you are about to experience it, you will find out that peace is what you want.
Before you any go further, ask yourself, do you feel pretty good right now? Are you tired? If so, first take a nap. Are you are stressed? If so, first do something you enjoy that will put you in a better state.
If you are going through any sort of crisis, then the idea of awakening may seem to be more difficult. However, crisis is the ideal time to make a drastic change. Regardless of your state, you can always find a quiet place, perhaps lay on your back in bed all alone, and surrender completely to whatever it is you do feel.
If your state seems beyond repair, then surrender to it completely. Just let the suffering be. Keep going into it until it feels a bit better; until it feels manageable.
Now, when you are sure that you are ready to continue and you are completely open to this enjoyable teaching, you can start by remembering that you are not guilty.
SELF LOVE
If you have made any errors, they will now easily be corrected. You no longer need to live with the burden of all that garbage. You will correct any past errors. For now, just set aside any situation that is bothering you and let it be. The correction of error will happen naturally after you awaken.
Now go within. Feel your inner dimension, notice your chest.
Can you find a place inside of you where you know that nothing is wrong with you? Can you feel it, even vaguely? Can you remember and know that nothing is wrong with you? If so, you are starting to love yourself.
All the love that you desire comes from within you. The source of love arises from that place inside where you feel that nothing is wrong with you. Use that place to let love arise from within and fill you. Feel yourself loving yourself.
At first, this may feel a bit strange. All this time, you’ve depended upon a man or woman to give you this feeling of love. Maybe you thought that learning to love yourself was a cliché, and never took the idea very seriously.
That love you want to give to a romantic partner, or to your children—can you try to give that love to yourself? If you are starting to feel it, then remember this wonderful moment. If not, set this book aside for as long as it takes until you feel some love for yourself arising from within you.
You can either close your eyes or keep them open; but just be still and don’t move anything. Relax your body. Give it some time. Allow yourself to start feeling good.
Think about the love within. Feel the range of emotions.
Think about what you mean by love, how it feels for you, and try turning that feeling of love toward yourself. Another person is not required for you to experience love. You can do it alone.
Now that you have begun to learn how to love yourself, you are freeing yourself from the need to worry about getting love from someone else. This makes you feel a lot more comfortable telling the truth and accepting all of life unconditionally. You no longer need to experience the absence of love in your life.
You may still be deeply concerned about losing a relationship; but now you know that, even if your relationship fails, you will always have the love you need and that it comes from within.
Now, maybe for the first time in your life, you are ready to properly love another person. Love isn’t something you get, and it is certainly not something that can be negotiated through a set of rules or behaviors. Love flows from within you. It seems to originate in your heart, and it flows outward from there. It wants to flow through you—extending as far and wide as possible.
In this practice of self-love, you will begin to feel so much love flowing from you that you may not want to limit it to just one person. Just see where love takes you and feel that freedom.
You may want to become free to love anyone and everyone, and to allow that love to take so many different forms. In love, you can allow yourself to do and to experience whatever inspires you. Love sets you free.
There are times when you drive yourself crazy, right? Read that sentence again and ask yourself: who is the “you” and who is the “yourself”? Are there two of you? If so, which one is real?
To even have this thought means that there is a self who does or does not like what the other self is doing.
The thing about this dream of life is that you were born with a mind that never stops thinking. There is a voice in your head that sounds like your actual voice. It easily convinces you that it is you. For this reason, you begin to believe that every thought you have is to be taken seriously—that your thoughts are you. This isn’t true.
Spiritual gurus talk about stopping thought, but this is very difficult for most people. Either way, it doesn’t matter all that much and your awakening does not depend upon your ability to not think.
Instead, you can realize that the voice in your head—your constantly active mind—is just that: your mind. Like the body, the mind is just a tool that you have learned to use to help you navigate this life on Earth. It is a wonderful, perfect tool, but only once you know that it isn’t your identity. To know your identity is to escape from ego. So, then what is your identity?
You are the observer of your mind. You are the dreamer of the dream. You are beyond your thoughts and words. You are watching your thoughts, watching the world around you, observing it all and just taking it in.
As you contemplate this, perhaps there was short moment of no thought? During that moment, could you feel that you were still present? You did not disappear because you had no thoughts for a moment. Of course not, you would have been even more present without your mind getting in the way.
If you did not experience a moment of no thought, here’s another approach. Watch your mind and wait for your next thought to appear.
It probably took a moment before your next thought arose. During that moment, you were conscious, but there was no actual thought about anything.
This exercise is only important so that you learn to observe your thoughts—to watch them. You can learn to always watch your thoughts and not take them so seriously.
INDIVIDUAL OR COLLECTIVE
What is the force called “life” that fills your body? Think of how it is the same life that fills every living thing in this world.
When a living creature dies, the mass of its body stays the same. The life has left, but the part that left isn’t measurable and weighs nothing. That’s because life is not material. It is invisible, non-matter, not a thing.
Your physical form arose from nothing and will return to nothing. You probably don’t pay much attention to nothing. You may not think about empty space or silence. The mind is preoccupied with only that which can be observed. That’s what the mind is for. It is the bridge between your essence and your experience of life on Earth.
The vast majority of the universe is empty space. It is nothing. What most people don’t know is that the empty space within you is proportionate to the empty space to matter ratio throughout the entire universe. There is an inner universe within you— on a tiny, molecular level—that scales just as small as the outer universe scales big. This is beyond the natural perception of your senses; but has been observed with the help of science.
You are almost entirely empty space, and this is the same realm from which you came and to which you will return. With all that empty space within, you never left the expansive dimension of nothing—even as you are here in this body and in this physical dimension.
Pay attention to empty space. Herein lies all truth. The matter in the universe (the stuff) is constantly changing. That’s one of the laws of nature: matter moves and changes. All things in the universe are unstable. That which changes cannot be truth because truth cannot change. Only nothingness remains the same. It cannot be threatened or changed. It is beyond all that; and as such it is eternal.
Your real identity, as truth, is found in the perfect oneness of nothingness. The truth about you is the same as the truth about the universe. You are part of the universe and, in this universe, only the emptiness is unchanging. Nothingness is the realm from where you came, the realm that continues to exist within you and all around, and the realm to where you will return. Your identity is rooted in the nothingness—in the unchanging truth.
Of course, for practical purposes, now you are also physical form. You are a human being. The human part is your form, the being is your identity. Nobody can identify or point to exactly where you are as the dreamer, the observer of the mind, the being. That’s because being is in the nothingness, of the nothingness, and connected seamlessly and eternally with all the nothingness in the entire universe.
Knowing this, you no longer need to take every thought very seriously. The mind is only a thing producing thought-forms. You can also stop taking the details of your life as seriously. Your mind will continue doing what the mind does and things will be as they are, but now you can sort of just observe it all and smile at it. You no longer need to fear anything because you, the being, are beyond threat. You are eternal. You are safe. Take a deep breath.
This realization can be expressed as “I am”. You can rest in the truth that you are.
If you can conceptualize how your being is rooted in the empty space, then contemplate for a moment how all the empty space within the universe and even within you is all connected as one.
The nothingness that surrounds and pervades all things is connected. Things move through it, but do not break it or change it. There is no gap between it. The eternal blackness is one thing; except it isn’t a thing. No thing can be one because it has parts. Only empty space can be one.
As an individual human—physical form—you are clearly separate from others and different in many ways. But matter doesn’t really matter because it changes, breaks down, and dies. But as a being, you are eternal and are the same as others. Your real identity is in this oneness.
Why is it that every person craves love? Why does everyone want to feel safe, to feel understood, to feel good, to feel joy, bliss, and to enjoy life? This is what everyone values and wants most—far beyond possessions, status or things. The only reason anyone chases possessions and status is for this deeper fulfillment and satisfaction.
Everything you most deeply want and desire is immaterial and imperceptible. Love, happiness, feeling good, excitement, inspiration—it all exists in the invisible realm and cannot be observed or measured. Of course, your body reveals clues about your internal state of being—but your state of being is in the inner, deeper self that is beyond physical form.
As self-love flows from within you, it changes you on a physical level. When the needs of being are met, you become youthful, radiant, and healthy. A person who has awakened looks good even into old age, while a person still in the grip of ego looks older, ill, and worn down. Of course, the reason for this is that fear causes stress—which derails the normal functioning of the body and causes all sorts of illness and sickness.
To feel safe in telling the truth, it is important to understand that every human is also a being—and on the level of being, everyone is the same. By recognizing this, you can remind yourself to see past the differences between people on the material, physical level. You can know, without any doubt, that on the level of being everyone is exactly like you. Everyone has the same core needs—though most people use dishonesty to hide this.
To be honest is to express those needs, those desires, those feelings that you know every person has. Of course, there are also many desires every human has on the level of form: the need to eat, to be comfortable, to sleep, to have sex, to laugh and so many others. Not only in being, but even on the level of physical form, everyone is alike in far more ways than anyone is different.
Minds contain different content because everyone has a different experience of life. Bodies are different, languages, ages, and so on. The ego is mainly concerned with those differences—always seeking to become better than others or proving superiority through those differences.
To the unexamined mind that has been conditioned by the world, these insignificant differences seem to be all that matters. But, when you think about what really matters (love, feeling good, being understood, etc.), everyone has the same needs and here there are no differences.
Your ego cannot survive if you admit that you are one with all your brothers and sisters. After your ego dies, which it does the moment you understand anything presented in this book, your mind will still be used as a practical tool to perceive differences and to help you function in this world. But now, you will begin to look more deeply and see beyond the obvious. You will be able to see past differences. You will recognize the oneness that exists both within and even beyond material observation.
To be honest, open, and to unconditionally accept others is to back away from judgement and to allow a comfortable space where oneness can be expressed and shared. This is perfect forgiveness.
TRUTH ABOUT TIME
Now let us look at the concept of time from a different perspective.
On the most basic level, time is only the movement of matter. The planet rotates once, that’s a day. It moves around the sun once, that’s a year. All matter is moving, and this is all that time really measures. If nothing moved, there would be no time. Time, as they say, would stand still.
You were there, now you are here. Next, you will go somewhere else. Just like you, all physical matter in the universe is moving. When the mind observes this, it is called time. But all this movement is always taking place in the present moment.
There was never a moment of existence that was not now. Everything that ever happened or ever will happen—it all happened in the present moment. The planet is moving, but it is always moving in the present moment. Nothing comes from the past and moves to the future. It is always here, just moving and changing.
The mind perceives time as past, present and future. But in in truth, the past is held by the mind as a memory and the future is what you imagine will happen. Neither are exactly real.
The past is real only to the extent that it is a memory you have now. Perhaps you are looking at an old photograph. The photograph is only real in the sense that you are seeing reflections of light now. The light, the dark, and the colors symbolize how things looked when everything was in a different position.
The mind is an extraordinary tool that can fairly accurately recall how things were when things were in a different position—and not every life form has this ability—but the problem with taking the concept of past too seriously is that, oftentimes, your stories and experiences become your identity. You may become unable to experience the present moment fully because your mind limits you with stories, images, and lessons of the past. The concept of the past can work against you.
The unobserved mind is usually wrong about things. It doesn’t know what’s good or bad because reality is too complex. That said, do you think your memory is all that reliable? Memories always involve interpretation. Oftentimes, memories are just vague images combined with stories you tell yourself about yourself, about other people, and about the nature of circumstances and situations you went through.
You can learn from the past, but it shouldn’t be taken so seriously.
Now contemplate the future. The mind’s idea of time is that it defines the future largely according to the past. If there is something in the past that you judge as good, then you probably want more of it in the future. If you want something from the past to change, then you probably expect it to change in the future.
The fundamental problem is that the future doesn’t exist. It is a mere concept. So, if you are waiting for change in the future, change will never come.
What you perceive as a better future, if it is to be so at all, will occur as something that must happen in the present moment. So, rather than waiting for the future, the way to change your life situation is to do so now.
Of course, doing something often takes many steps. You first do this, then that, then travel there, then talk with someone, then do some work on your own. This all feels like a long time, and in a practical sense of course this is true, but all the while it is always the present moment.
When you perceive your body aging, or sense that time is running out, it is because your body is slowly growing old in the present moment. All physical form changes. You will only last on this Earth for so many rotations around the sun. That’s a law of nature and it’s how you are meant to experience this dimension. But you are eternal. Time is never running out. It is always now.
If you are letting the past define who you are, it is an illusion—an untruth. You are as you are in this moment—totally independent from your past failures, experiences, and stories. In this way, you are entirely free from your life situation. Almost no life situation can restrict your freedom to do, make, say, think or feel in the now. Your freedom comes only from within and depends upon nothing external.
Of course, if you are in prison or homeless, then your life situation is probably causing significant challenges and limiting you in very real ways. But, even in such a worst-case scenario life situation, you can awaken to the present moment. You can still go within to heal and even begin to transform your very difficult situation into something else.
The concept of the present moment is not referring to, for example, the balance in your bank account, the mess in your living room, whether your car needs repair or whether you are in a relationship. This is only your life situation.
The present moment only includes what you are actually doing now—exactly what you are experiencing. In this instant is eternity. It is all there is. No matter the life situation, always pay attention to this instant. This is where everything exists, everything happens, and where everything is possible.
To let go of the past and to realize the future isn’t real is to direct all your attention to the field where all life is and always has been; this moment. What, in this instant, is impossible for you to live with? What is here right now (or in any other moment) that you can’t handle if your attention is fully here?
All chance of failure comes either from guilt and regret you are carrying from the past or fears you have about the future. The mind has been crippling you and blinding you to what is here in this instant. This is a tragic condition, considering that the present moment is all there ever was and ever will be.
The ego cannot survive in the present moment, just as it cannot survive when you learn to love yourself, or when you know your true identity, or when you understand the one emptiness that connects everything. To awaken is to expand your understanding of truth beyond the relative smallness and pettiness of what the mind cares about.
None of the ideas presented in this section are original. They have been taught in different ways over many centuries. But if you understand the truths presented in this section, you may become aware of a different, deeper kind of understanding. It is a knowing that cannot be grasped in the same way as other knowledge. Just when you know it fully, it eludes you a bit.
Spiritual truths must, therefore, be remembered each day. This is a different kind of learning and a different kind of remembering.
To awaken is to remember that truth is in the unchanging empty space, and that all the stuff of this life is surrounded by it and contained within it. You are observing it all, through a mind and body, but what you observe is only part of what is real. In a relative sense, what you observe isn’t real at all because it is material, and therefore always unstable and changing.
Now you can observe all that you perceive, and learn to enjoy it, from this deeper perspective of knowing that also encompasses the truth about what you cannot see.
POSITION OF POWER
Perhaps you have not yet believed in your perfect authority because you have not yet trusted yourself. Flailing about in a world that seems meaningless and dangerous, where everything appears to be arbitrarily happening to you, you have been afraid and confused.
The ego is always certain of everything, until the very next moment when it becomes entirely certain of something else. With its six different and conflicting roles and a thought system that creates only chaos and drama, the ego is confusion.
There can be no authority in confusion, and the ego ought not have any authority. Because of the ego’s confusion, you have rightly doubted yourself but have wrongly given authority to those who would claim it over you.
The problem is that those who have claimed authority over your life also have no legitimate claim on it. They too are very confused. The state of this world is dishonesty; a confusion about reality that leads only to drama, chaos, suffering and even war.
While you have been honest enough with yourself that you have denied the legitimacy of your own authority, those who have claimed it instead of you are egos who are very unwell. Because you have given legitimacy to their authority over you, they have made the error of believing in their own legitimacy. Your compliance has gone to their heads and must be withdrawn for healing to occur.
By entrusting them as your authority, you have made them very wealthy and have created the illusion that they are powerful. They have tricked you by creating fantastic illusions: systems that seem bigger and more real than you. All the systems of the world—the governments, the schools, the religions, the corporations, and other institutions—they were created and are maintained, in sacrifice, by humans no less confused than you who have been simply doing as instructed by those who you have given authority.
When you have clearly seen the problem of false authority—and perhaps, at times, you may have even resisted and fought back in some form—you have perceived some threat of punishment. Precisely because their authority is not legitimate, they must always eventually resort to punishment to force your compliance.
Punishments have seemed very real, and so you have learned to comply. It is in this compliance that you have been forced to learn the thought system of dishonesty.
You are disturbed by the cognitive dissonance resulting from your compliance with what you do not agree with. Your mind, therefore, tries very hard to agree with what you are told must be agreed to. This always fails because your being knows otherwise and your body always responds accordingly.
This is the cause of your fear, your depression, your frustration, your anger and all other negative emotions that are blocking you. The mind may argue that it is being honest, even that there is nothing you have ever done that is dishonest, but your being has been telling you otherwise and your body tends to agree.
By deciding that confusion has no authority, you now effortlessly allow all false authority to fall away from your thought system. You now see that authority does not belong outside you. This isn’t a battle of any kind, just a decision that you are now free to easily make as part of your inner awakening.
Even as false, egoic authority has threatened you with reward and punishment, nobody has successfully taken away your power to think in truth and to tell the truth. In this simple realization, you claim all authority back, to where it belongs, in your awakened inner dimension.
You will still deal with the corrupt, confused systems of false authority in this world. On some level, you are forced to comply with their rules to avoid any further escalation of violence they would impose upon you. But, particularly in their confused violence, it is quite clear that their claim of authority over you is false.
By the time you finish this book, you will no longer fear external, false authority in the same way. You will no longer blame anyone for your lack of freedom, and you will no longer feel any need to fight back. To fight back against that which is false is to make it seem real—as though a lie must be disproven at all, and that truth needs any defense.
Truth needs no defense. That which is false is self-evident when the truth is remembered. You need only state the truth that you are your authority and false authority loses its power over you. That which is unreal is revealed as unreal with a simple decision for what is real.
There is always a path toward truth, and by claiming your authority over you, you have that path. The egoic systems and power-hungry, out-of-control egos will never establish dominion over your inner dimension. While they have tried for thousands of years, it will never succeed. Here, you are always free if you choose it.
From this place of truth and freedom, you can easily connect harmoniously with other human beings who share your purpose of freedom. Nobody has taken away your total freedom to feel, know, think, and communicate. What more freedom did you want than this, and what have you been waiting for? Permission? You now have your own permission for freedom, and it is delivered to you in your willingness to simply be honest about your own authority.
To fight back against authority, or to argue against it, is to play an ego game that appears to make the illusion very real. Fighting what you do not want focuses your attention on the negative. From this perspective, the negative takes over your life and the entire illusion of false authority maintains its grip.
You can, instead, focus your conscious attention on where you are free and always will be free. There is no freedom beyond the freedoms you already have: the freedom to feel, to think, to make your own choices in life, and to communicate perfectly with other people. All power is here, and if it has been lacking it is because you have negotiated it away, conceded it to false authority, for the illusion of happiness and safety that they have promised you but have not delivered.
The last section of this book, entitled “Application”, proves that you already have perfect freedom and total authority. Furthermore, you will have the chance to begin living your authority as your truth.
Now, you will begin to move from your inner awakening to your new outer journey.
THE GREAT WORK
You know that you are ready to begin telling your truth when you begin doing it. Telling the truth about everything is the switch. Until the switch, these are nothing more than ideas in your mind.
Your awakening is the start of a movement toward inner truth, but your outer journey makes it real.
The new reality begins the moment you remove dishonesty as an option in your life.
Here there can be very little confusion; there is either the light of honesty or the darkness of untruth.
…Simple Yet Everchanging
The end of all confusion is the end of illusion. Illusions are always constructed with lies and always destroyed with truth. Partial truth solves some of the problem and makes things a bit better, but unless honesty is total and complete, you remain on the path toward crisis.
Illusion is always the belief in that which is untrue and, therefore, constantly changing and unstable. All that is built upon what is unstable ends in collapse; and in this collapse lies all failure and suffering.
There are no illusions that need be kept real. If something is an illusion, it is unreal and can be let go of. That which is unreal can easily be acknowledged as such and the result will always be truth and, therefore, peace.
Attempt to keep some dishonesty for yourself and you will find yourself in the impossible service of two masters. Here is found only confusion. Here you sacrifice feeling good, you sacrifice your authority over yourself, you sacrifice freedom, perfect love, perfect peace, perfect health—everything you do want. What would you sacrifice any of this for? And why?
To tell the truth is to ignore the ego’s confused demands by always choosing togetherness rather than separation. It is to focus attention on the present moment rather than the past and future. This is to decide for healing and against illness, for freedom and against bondage, for the truth of experience rather than the illusion of continued fantasy.
When you are honest with yourself and with others, the force of life shows you the way—and the way is always good. Truth is the good with no opposite. Now, what was once fantasy becomes reality.
Reality always feels a bit different than you expected. Each time you find out what is real about something, you learn. Growth then becomes your inevitable state—and growth can come only through doing. Doing is knowing, and nothing involves more honesty than doing.
To tell the truth is one thing, to live it is something else entirely. When you tell the truth, you open the pathway to doing. Too often, you have avoided doing by avoiding difficult conversations and; therefore, pushing things out to the future. But the future is an illusion.
To do in the future is to not do. To wait for someday is to wait forever. If now is all there is, all doing can only be done now. Don’t worry, you cannot miss your opportunity; for it is always now.
Turn on the switch. Tell your truth and live it so that your life becomes rooted in truth. A life rooted in truth no longer contains the ups and downs; for all opposites to truth have already been recognized as unreal. Can that which is unreal affect you in a real way?
Your responsibilities in life never require that you honor the unreal. While others may judge you as insensitive to their pain, your effect on them will ultimately be that of healing. Because they fear, they may prefer to delay crisis through the continued maintenance of illusion. You will not help with this illusion because your knowing is in truth.
When others are suffering, your truths may seem insensitive. But it would be dishonest to make their suffering real because it need not be, and is not, real.
Now you will ease suffering through forgiveness. Rather than delaying the recognition of truth wherever it may be, you will bring it to the light, teach correction, and you will instantly forgive error even before anyone has asked for your forgiveness.
You are not guilty, nor is anyone else. But in this world—where the truth is not taught and must instead be remembered—error is a necessary and unavoidable part of the curriculum. How wonderful it is to intimately know all the effects of error from having lived it. Even your errors have become part of your truth because now you understand the effects.
Many will doubt this message for the simple reason that the error of dishonesty has not yet led to crisis in their lives. Yet still, on some level, suffering is always present. There are the constant ups-and-downs. There is the confusion and fear. But all this seems normal and, for that reason, somehow acceptable.
For all those who continue to doubt the power of perfect honesty, the crisis will come. The illusions will be exposed. When this happens, the truth will be remembered—and for the simple reason that here it has already been revealed.
Truth, once revealed, cannot be forgotten. While you may choose to use time to delay living it, the instant of total awakening—the perfect alignment of your inner and outer world—awaits you and is inevitable. When this happens, you will experience heaven in this life and in eternity.
Eventually, enough of us will choose to awaken now—not in the future—and a massive remembering of truth will overcome the world.
Perfect honesty is the only real revolution. Any other so-called revolution changes nothing and only constructs a new illusion in a different form. Let dishonesty only be forgotten and the world changes in an instant.
If there is even one fully-awakened person who always speaks and lives the truth—it will be enough to heal all the world. This person will show the way to so many others, and those others will show the way to still others in turn, that a total healing of the world is inevitable.
The world will awaken from this bad dream, this dishonesty, this scary and confused dream of ego. The world will enjoy the fearless dream of truth and beauty. You are already perfectly free, and therefore nothing will stand in your way. It is already so.
The good dream of life is a dream where all honesty is welcomed. If there is something you feel inspired to share, you have authority to share it. If you feel excited about doing something, you have the authority to do it. Any doubts or taboos have now been lifted, upon your own authority—which has been the only real authority all along.
Now boundaries and taboos have been replaced with unconditional acceptance. Attack has been replaced with the loving correction of error. Now there is a gentleness to life that extends forever through this dimension and beyond into the eternal. Heaven is now, and upon your authority over yourself, you are free to choose it now (if you want it).
All you need to do is to tell the truth about everything. Always tell the truth and the outcome is certain.
ENDLESS PATIENCE
The shift from dishonesty to honesty is a process of change. You are changing the way you think, the way you see the world, what you do, who you give your attention to, and the way you respond to everything in life.
Beyond these personal changes, also remember that there is a process of change that you can expect everyone in your life to also be going through. Because you’re changing so drastically, they will need time to adjust.
Be not just patient with the process and with everyone involved—be endlessly patient. In fact, there is no end to this process nor a point where things return to the old normal. This is a new way of experiencing life.
You’re an intelligent, reasonable person. You probably aren’t going to announce all your previously hidden truths right away. In many cases, you still need to understand what your truths are and what you even want to say. So, it is enough to set an intention that, moving forward, you will decide for truth whenever possible. You will begin to be honest with yourself about when you are being even slightly dishonest, and you will begin to correct it.
In cases where total honesty doesn’t seem feasible—perhaps a job you know you would lose the moment you said what’s on your mind—you may simply recognize the inner truth of the situation and then choose to begin moving in the direction of finding another way to earn a living.
In other words, if you feel trapped in a dishonest situation and there is no space for truth there, the path of honesty may require that you leave the situation. This can be delayed for a short time, but ultimately the dishonesty must end for you to be happy.
The easiest way to change a situation is always to tell the truth and see what happens. You tell your truth and let others deal with you. Don’t make any assumptions about how anyone will react to anything. This is being open. Just let them know, then let them decide what to do with you.
You can be practical on some level, but make no mistake; as long as you continue to put up with a situation anywhere in your life in which you must continue to be dishonest, you will continue suffering now and the situation will build-up to a crisis. To avoid this, at some point truth and honesty is required.
SELF TALK
The most important of all your truths are the ones about what you do want. Rather than telling others what not to do, why not tell them how much you enjoy it when they do something you appreciate. Rather than expressing what you do not want, why not express your positive visions and truths?
Positive truths open doors, while negative truths close them. Closed doors mean broken communication between you and other people. The changes you want cannot happen for you while communication is broken.
Everything you want, on some level, requires collaboration and connection with other people. Nothing done, created, or experienced in isolation is ultimately very real because it is not shared.
Lay out your wildest fantasies, your seemingly impossible visions of happiness and joy, discuss your revelations and breakthroughs—now you are leading others toward the destination of happiness that is yours. You are laying aside your dream of fear and inviting them to conspire with you in your mischief of happiness.
Honor your FeelingsThere are many theories about self-improvement and many paths to enlightenment. While other strategies and options can also be effective, telling the truth is the clearest, easiest and most certain path toward happiness for a few reasons.
Firstly, putting honesty into practice feels good. The moment you express your truth or confess what you are correcting, you naturally feel the weight lift from your shoulders. You can breathe again. You can rest. Then, in almost no time at all, you feel positive energy, excitement and inspiration starting to flow back into your life.
Not only does the path of truth make you feel good, your body effortlessly tells you whether you’re on the right track. If you feel anything negative—such as fear, stress, anxiety, anger or frustration—you can know without a doubt that you are on the path leading to suffering and crisis. To find the right path, simply recognize your feelings. Then allow your mind time to catch-up—time to understand what went wrong and all the reasons why.
Most people live cut-off from feelings, with total faith in a confused mind. An awakened person knows that thoughts create emotions. Fear-based, panicked thoughts have an instant effect on the body. Your heart rate accelerates, your breathing is tense, you clench-up, you feel stressed out and lousy.
This creates a negative feedback loop between the mind and body. When your body is stressed, your thoughts get even more confused, stressing the body even further. This is the cause of illness and insanity.
People pretend to be cut-off from feelings so that the logical, rational mind is in control. This is denial and illusion, however, because it is impossible not to feel what is going on within your body. That’s what your body does; it always feels. That’s also what your mind does, it always produces thoughts. But thoughts mislead you; while feelings are always real. Smile at thoughts, listen to the body.
The mind pretends to ignore what you feel, yet all its decisions and reactions flow from it. If you feel tired, your mind often assumes a grumpy attitude. If you feel overly stressed, your mind is likely to choose the reaction of anger. When the body is feeling lousy, the mind usually reacts in a way that generates more problems, more stress, and more fear.
Now there is a negative feedback loop not just between the mind and body, but also between what appears to be happening to you in the external world. You are then in a state of chaos and spiraling toward crisis.
The mind cannot be the ultimate, unchecked authority because the mind cannot feel. It only thinks. The mind may tell you that doing this or that will lead to happiness, but the mind is not an expert on happiness. Happiness is beyond the mind because it is not experienced there.
Let the heart, your inner dimension, your body tell you when you are feeling good and when you are feeling lousy. Feelings must be your guide, not ideas. Good ideas always flow from good feelings.
When all your doing is rooted in a positive state of being, you can’t fail. If you are tired or grumpy, then rest. If you are frustrated, then do something else. If you are fearful or panicked, then take a step back and remember.
The only way to break the negative spiral is to stop sacrificing and learn not to follow every train of thought. Meditation teaches you to let thoughts go, to not let one crazy thought lead to another. Thought isn’t nearly as important as your mind has led you to believe.
Whatever you are feeling at any moment, be honest with yourself and others about it. By telling the truth, life conspires to fix how you feel. If you decide to delay telling the truth and pretend that everything is alright when it isn’t, you are delaying feeling good. Not only this, you are generating more problems in your life by acting from a position of confusion and powerlessness.
Doing your best means doing when you feel your best. No doing that comes from a negative state can lead to a positive result. What you create is always a reflection of how you feel. Feelings are always leading the way.
Relax. Much less doing is now required of you. Now you have learned to cut out all that which isn’t leading to the results you want. Furthermore, you are starting from the result you want: the state of feeling good. Because you are already there, no doing is required at all.
Build a life of Integrity When you have turned the switch, truth and honesty become the status quo in all areas of your life. Not just in your relationship but also with all members of your family. Not just with friends but also with colleagues, your customers, relatives, neighbors, and everyone else.
Even the entertainment you consume should be more honest to reinforce your new reality. At a minimum, you’ll probably want to avoid advertising. Even movies and music can reinforce the confused thought system of the world.
Don’t try to force yourself to stop enjoying the entertainment that you do enjoy; but stay aware of how it affects the way you think and feel. Be sure you do enjoy the content you are consuming. You may find yourself becoming bored with all the cliché and simply choosing to do something else with your time.
Today’s entertainment is mostly about drama, and drama can only flow from the error you are undoing here: dishonesty and illusion. Most popular entertainment models and reinforces the supposed realness of confusion, dishonesty, drama, chaos and crisis. Some of it does so with humor, showing the ridiculousness of it all, and this can be enjoyable and helpful. Other types of entertainment take ego seriously and, when you see this, you will ultimately become very bored with it.
Entertainment may not matter much to you now, because everything you need to fulfill you and entertain you will come from your real life. That need to escape into entertainment to forget your problems—the need to escape from your own life—will be significantly diminished when you have awakened.
Everything you have been attempting to escape from are only fearful illusions caused by dishonesty. Your escape from illusion is not found in more illusion; rather, only in truth. When you tell the truth, no escape is ever necessary, and your life becomes more enjoyable than the best movie.
NEVER SACRIFICE
The problems of this world were created by people willing to sacrifice. This idea probably goes so much against your way of thinking that you find it opposite of everything you once held to be true. But what is sacrifice? Sacrifice is the setting aside or doing away with what you do want in exchange for what you do not.
There are endless reasons for sacrifice, and none are valid or true. Your body’s response to sacrifice is always the same; you feel lousy. Deep down, to the core of your stomach, you feel a little bit sick when you enter a state of sacrifice.
Your attitude becomes negative, you complain, you become skeptical and sarcastic. Do you expect anything done in this state to lead to anything good? The only positive ending to sacrifice is the ending of it. End sacrifice sooner, rather than later.
Those who are successful in sacrifice do earn a sort of reward, but it is no reward that you want. Success in sacrifice always earns you the opportunity for more sacrifice. Become good at a small job you do not like, and you will be promoted to a big job you dislike even more. Feign enthusiasm in a relationship that fails to fulfill your needs, and you earn the prize of spending even more time together with that person.
The beginning of honesty spells the end of sacrifice. If you find yourself sacrificing, first understand why. The reason is always that, somewhere along the line, you were dishonest about something. But let’s be sure about what is and is not sacrifice. Work, for example, is necessary to some extent and ought not be called sacrifice at all. If you know why you are doing what you’re doing, and exactly what the result is as something you do want, then work is no sacrifice.
Honest work that leads to fair pay is not sacrifice. The work that goes into the creation of something you feel passionate about is not sacrifice. Doing something that somebody else wants to do because you love them or enjoy their company is also not sacrifice. Complying with the law or playing by the rules is also sometimes practical or necessary; and need not be considered sacrifice.
Just be honest with yourself about what you are doing, why you’re doing it, and how it feels. Is the good you want worth what you’re putting into it? If not, then don’t do it. Does doing it allow you to continue feeling good? If not, stop doing it.
You don’t ever need to sacrifice, but sometimes you do need to do what needs to be done for the right reasons. Be honest with yourself and others to abolish the error of sacrifice. Find a way to fulfill all your needs without ever having to sacrifice. This is considered finding your true path.
IDENTIFYING FEAR
Whenever you feel any fear, it is because you have surely gone off course. If you have awakened, you will not feel any real sense of fear.
If fear is still present in your doing, then this is a clear indication that you need to set yourself free in your inner world. Any recognition of fear is a signal to go more deeply into meditation and into your daily practice.
If you fear, your love for yourself isn’t strong enough. You have forgotten your identity. You still believe that you are separate from the universe and vulnerable. You are not living in the present moment.
If you were in the now, you would see there is nothing you cannot respond to or handle. You may have believed, for a moment, that time is real, that things are happening to you which are beyond your control, and that you are somehow vulnerable. If you have feared, you must have believed some sort of illusion. Any illusion, upon a simple recognition, can easily be dispelled. This is how you let fear go.
Presence of fear is lack of faith in truth and honesty. You can be practical and responsible—you can use the present moment to confront a challenge or to make plans—but even in a present moment that is not entirely enjoyable, there is still nothing to be fearful about. What is the worst that can happen? No matter what it is, can you not respond from a position of honesty using all your skills, experiences and personal assets?
Do you feel as though your life being threatened? Seen from the perspective your eternal identity in the realm of nothingness, even this most extreme case isn’t anything to be fearful of. In this bold recognition, are you not released from all fear? This is the lesson that Jesus taught on the cross. But your life isn’t being threatened, so now what do you have to fear?
Whatever happens in life is to be accepted. That is the constant, the only starting point in dealing with anything. If you are afraid of something or find it difficult to deal with, then focus your attention inward on how you feel about it.
Go directly into the problem. Find out the full truth about it by doing more research or through true communication. If you can look at anything honestly and without fear, you can find a way to either accept the situation, find out it isn’t as challenging as you thought, or you can easily change it. In any case, you will always find out that there is nothing to fear.
Nothing can be solved from a state of fear. All challenges can be overcome. If you panic, if you don’t think straight, if you have no control over what you do or say— then your fear leads to total failure. You can become powerful and effective by rooting out all fear and by responding to reality as it is.
Ending fear is a process and success here isn’t always immediate. You are unlearning years of conditioning. But, if fear remains real, then your journey toward perfect honesty and truth is still incomplete.
Just try to be honest. If you can do this, life will show you that there is nothing to fear.
CURRENCY AND VALUE
To give is to receive. Give what you can—the most value you feel inspired to give—and the value flowing back to you will be equal yet more valuable to you than what you have given.
Giving will balance your life. You offer your abundance where you have a surplus. Abundance flows back to you where there was lack.
You have unique strengths. Those areas where you are blessed with abundance are the areas where you can be most generous and most helpful to others. Your gift of generosity will naturally and effortlessly lead to a gift of abundance received in areas where you were lacking.
True abundance means having enough in every area of life. If you lack money, offer the abundance of your skills and service. If you are wealthy but don’t have much spare time, pay others who do have spare time to focus on those areas you have neglected. If you enjoy parenting or taking care of stuff around the house, offer this to a life partner who appreciates this and who brings different strengths and benefits to the relationship.
You have so much to give, and much of it is unique. There’s no reason you can’t offer your expertise. You have acquired so much through years of hard work and service. You are creative, honest, loyal, and skilled. The value you offer is your source of abundance because others want and need what you bring to the table. Deliver your value completely and others will reward you in the way you need to be rewarded.
Being open and honest is a requirement for collaboration. Even if you are the expert, don’t try to do things all by yourself. You may not be the best in the world at anything, but you’re better than 99% of people in at least one area. How can you turn that into a business?
What jobs have you held and what unique skills or insights have you gained from you work and other experiences? How might you do things better than your employer did? How might you offer the role you once provided as a valuable service to other companies?
Design your product or service, get a business license, open a bank account, be prepared to pay your taxes, now get to work selling and delivering.
Whatever business model you come up with, do only the parts that you do best—the parts that nobody else can do. Hire people for all the other parts.
Far too often, what holds small businesses back is that the owner tries to do everything. If you have an idea how to create value, the next step is to create a process that generates profit, operates smoothly, and allows you to step back from the business so you aren’t sacrificing all your precious time and energy. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Processes that generate value and profit are what businesses are all about.
When you do hire people, let them work rather independently. You can do this by defining the role and your expectations precisely. How exactly is the role performed, how many times per day or week, and what result needs to happen?
Understand, inside and out, what you are asking someone to do by first doing it yourself. Then, patiently train the person. Finally, let go a bit. Give the person space to do things in their own way and on their own schedule.
Forget about the obsolete notion of how many hours someone works per day. Think, instead, about what you will invest financially to get what outcome. Consider what is reasonable to expect a person to do, what is the going rate for that work, and what financial result you expect from your investment.
Hire contractors who perceive a personal benefit from the work you are offering and who find the role a better option for them than what other companies are offering. They will stay loyal and will help you to succeed.
This is your idea, your process, your company, so you’re the salesperson. While other people can support you in the process, the customer relationships are yours. This is about you serving and creating value for other people or businesses. The money you bring in is always just an outcome of that.
Create maximum value honestly and set a reasonable price. In so doing, you will get paid what you need. In your honesty, you become the kind of leader who others will honor, follow and can trust. As a result, you will always get paid and will always be treated fairly by everyone you work with. You are safe, your life is abundant.
If you aren’t there yet, get started in the present moment and have patience. This doesn’t have to happen according to any set timeline, but you can start somewhere and take each next step whenever you feel inspired to do so.
You probably didn’t expect that a discussion about giving would be about starting a company to deliver a product or service. This is because the world has gotten giving all wrong, and you still retain fragments of the flawed thought system of the world.
Giving does not mean that you do something without generating any value flowing back to you. If you are offering value, you should receive it. To give is to receive.
Give what you have to offer and allow others to return to you the value they can offer. Together, you will create the most harmonious relationships where everyone is generating abundance and creating joy in their lives by harmoniously working together.
The values of the ego—which are suspicion at best and attack at worst—will cut off abundance from your life. The ego would have you think that you’re being prudent, but to follow your ego is to drive people away.
If you aren’t being honest, open and accepting, your relationships will surely be dysfunctional. Dysfunctional relationships fail at creating anything of value, they fail to establish the trust required to take leaps of faith together, and they lead you toward a miserable life of over-working yourself only to fall short of your potential.
Money is not the source of value. It is only a storage container of value. Money flows to wherever value is being created.
The giver of money naturally expects something in return. The creator of value expects to be paid the right price.
Ask this question frequently and you will never be lacking in financial abundance: what can I do or create that is most valuable to the most people?
You don’t need to get rich or to raise capital before you can do what you were meant to do. It’s the other way around: first, you follow your inspiration and create value for others, then the money flows to you. You are the source of value. Value is creation and service to others.
Do everything you can to offer real value to others. If you can serve someone or create something that others see as valuable, then equal value will inevitably flow back to you in the form of money, fulfilling relationships, favors, new opportunities, recognition and admiration.
You must go first. Limitation is an illusion seen by those who refuse to go first. Sometimes it is enough just to explain what you are going to do. Any support or funding you need may come up-front.
Others may error, they may even rob and steal, but nobody gets away with anything. To acquire wealth through deceit or abuse of power is to attack. To attack is to create your own hell on earth.
You who serve and create are the truly rich. The wealth you enjoy is a beautiful reflection of the love you give.
IN SUMMARY
There is no real line between your inner experience and outer. Each experience in life always involves the inner and the outer. There can, therefore, be no real distinction between your inner state of being and your outer journey. It is always now, and everything you are experiencing in the present moment involves what is both inside and around you.
Most people live in a state of being here but wanting to be there. The unhealed mind is fixated on the idea that the present moment, just as it is, is never quite enough.
The mind tells you that everything should be different. You should be somewhere else. It was better before or will be better in the future. Try to go back or just wait. You just need to find a way to get there.
The only way to get there is to take the direct path, which is only available to you now. Fortunately, this is an opportunity you cannot miss because it is always now.
Where can you get to other than here, in the present moment? Wherever you are going, you are already there. It is dishonest to see yourself as wealthier, more successful, or famous in the future and then to form an identity around this.
It is also dishonest to maintain an identity from something you accomplished in the past, or from an experience you may have had that others haven’t. But this is what so many people do—they act as though they are above it all, above the reality in which they find themselves, because of some thought form. As a result, they are not enjoying the experience of what honestly is.
When you become present, almost everything about what is real in this moment becomes enjoyable. You let go of those stories of being better or worse, right or wrong, guilty or not guilty.
Now, when you are simply walking to the kitchen, you notice how each step feels. Now, when you are cooking, doing dishes, brushing your teeth or going to the grocery store, you no longer feel that sense of rushing to get to the imagined destination.
Most people live with this underlying thought that the present moment is only a necessary step required to get to the future—and that, in the future, they can finally begin to enjoy themselves. But, whenever the future moment comes, it is still always perceived as just another step and the future feeling of enjoyment is always pushed out a bit further. This is not a happy way to go through life.
Enjoyment can only be experienced now. Enjoyment comes through acceptance of how you feel, what you hear, what you see and what you are doing. If it isn’t possible to enjoy this moment, then either make some adjustments so that you do enjoy it or go do something else that you enjoy.
Telling the truth also involves telling the truth to yourself. If you have been going through life as a sort of means to get to a better future, now is the time to be honest with yourself about this error. There are always things to do which are not exactly a vacation. Even so, if your mind’s attention is on the present moment, you will perceive pleasure and beauty no matter what you are doing.
Imagine you are driving somewhere. If you keep thinking about how much longer it will take until you get there, you won’t enjoy the trip very much. It will seem to take much longer and, even when you do arrive, you will have become so used to thinking about future enjoyment that you have a difficult time shifting your enjoyment to the present moment.
You will find reasons to be disappointed even though you are at the destination you’ve been waiting for. Maybe your hotel room isn’t good enough, or you are hungry, or someone shouldn’t have said something to ruin your mood. Only you have the power to ruin your mood—and it happens whenever you give your mind total control over your mood.
Now imagine instead, that on this long road trip, you focus all attention on the trees speeding by you in the corner of your eyes. You feel such realness and vibrancy in the simplicity of a bird flying across the sky in front of you. You feel the smoothness or bumpiness of the road without any judgment. You enjoy the music, the conversation with a companion, or an audiobook. You feel your hands on the wheel.
There need be no thought about getting there because you know that, even when you arrive, it will still be the same present moment. You are already there, even as you are traveling at such a speed. How beautiful is this moment now?
As the cars pass you going in the other direction, you notice them and then easily let the thoughts of them go. Your mind always stays focused only on what’s happening. The colors surrounding you are so beautiful. Perhaps the rain on the windshield becomes somehow vibrant. Everything seems to come alive and there is a new sense of ease within.
This is a much better way to take a road trip. It is also a far superior way to go through life. All of life can become this experience of enjoyment, but it is only possible if it is what you want it and if you are willing to train your mind to focus attention on the present moment.
Telling the truth is much easier when you learn to live in the present moment, though this isn’t a requirement. It’s just more fun this way and your truths will be much more pleasant.
As you get better at focusing your attention on the present moment, you will remain in peace even as you are talking with people—even when confronting a challenge. No more negative emotion, no more ups and downs, no fear and no reason to ever be dishonest.
Whatever your experiences may be, without judgments and without allowing the mind to pull you into the past or future, every experience can be fully enjoyed—but only if you are being honest. If your mind is busy maintaining a web of illusion, it will not be focused on the now.
From acceptance of truth, you can remain present even when someone is trying to pull you into a silly and emotional argument. You can maintain your inner peace, calmly say something or not, and effortlessly allow reality to adjust accordingly.
It won’t matter much what happens anymore, because you will enjoy the process all the while.
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