Finding Gold

So many of us are sincere in our desire for spiritual development. But our faith is not whole. There’s this little smidge of doubt that says: “Is this really true? Am I not just making all this up?” What do we do with this?

Job one is never going to be: push that aside. Such avoidance is done with the very best of intentions. We just don’t want to have these doubts. We hope that if we ignore them, they will ...

Under the weight of our emotional baggage, many of us are carrying around opinions that aren’t actually ours. For sure, these might be valid opinions, but if they aren’t our own, arrived at through our own mature thought processes, it is more harmful than holding a wrong opinion that we came to in an honest way. Surprising, huh?

Sure enough, it turns out that an honest mistake trumps an opinion arrived at th...

Any truth can be distorted into an untruth. This is, hands down, one of the most powerful weapons of evil. Complete untruth is not the problem. But take something true in one setting and apply it over there, where it doesn’t belong—especially when it’s set up as a rigid rule—and we’re in dangerous territory. In this way, any truth can be bent into a distorted extreme that makes the truth null and void. And so i...

This state of self-alienation we are in—where we are truly not our real selves—is so pervasive, we don’t see the symptoms of it. We think we’re just being “normal.” Well, it may be normal but it’s certainly not natural to find ourselves feeling trapped in situations that are outside our control. This state of helplessness is a red flag that there’s an underground conflict—a problem in our soul.

Naturally, yo...

We think that being lazy is a garden-variety fault. But we need to look deeper. It’s not something we can command away with our sheer will. But it can be tackled by taking on self-alienation. Because when we’re anchored in the center of our being, we will not be lazy. We will not feel apathetic. We won’t want to remain idle. We’ll savor our rest and relaxation, but that’s not the same as being lazy. We’ll have ...

If we grow up and don’t develop identification with the self, we will create substitutes for the parents we originally identified with. Often we will find, not an individual, but a national, religious or political group. It’s possible we will find a minority group to identify with so we can rebel against the majority.

Conformity results from this need to identify with someone who is more powerful. This can a...

Living in this land of duality, we are continually harboring arbitrary either/or concepts. Some of these, we may not even be aware of. One of the most common ones, which causes one of our greatest limitations, is an attitude we hold about being a winner vs loser.

In this way of looking at things, being a winner means being ruthless. We must be selfish, trampling and triumphing over others and belittling them...

Our ability to land in bliss is directly related to our self-esteem—our ability to like ourselves. This equation must always come out even in the end. To the exact degree self-liking exists, happiness exists. Pencils down.

But if self-liking is missing, the psyche can’t experience its natural state. When this happens, we are alienated from universal forces, and that sets up a barrier that prevents us from jo...

So let’s dive into yet another way we unwittingly block ourselves from making use of universal power. It’s more like a soul climate we’re speaking of here. If we want to be compatible with this power, we have to have a state of mind that is totally chill—inner and outer relaxation.

We’re not talking about being immobilized or lacking in energy. This isn’t the kind of relaxation that’s not breathing and respo...

When we’re in a bad space with rock-bottom self-esteem, we tend to compound the error of feeling unacceptable, destructive or negative with thinking things are fixed—and this is the way it’s always going to be. But in reality, life is fluid. We’re alive, ergo, we’re fluid. But through our ignorance of this truth, we enclose ourselves in rigid enclosures, trapped in a box where we think we must stay forever. And...

So you may be wondering: what on earth does self-forgiveness have to do with self-confrontation? Great question. There is a deep but extremely relevant connection between self-hate, fear of punishment, fear of death and the disintegration of the cell structure that falls into a channel and then is attracted into a new form.

It’s like this. Our thoughts are creations that have their own cell structure and the...

There are essentially two value systems governing all of us. Being values is one of them, and appearance values is the other. Let’s look at the ramifications of each.

Most of us are operating on the level of appearance value most of the time. It takes some serious investment in personal work before we start functioning for the sake of what is, and not for the sake of what it looks like in the eyes of others.

Our self-imposed blindness removes us so far from awareness of self-creation that we really do become removed from what we create. Then our creations don’t seem to even be connected to our actions—the things we can control. This is painful. We feel we don’t deserve what’s happening and life is a frightening unpredictable place. We truly seem to be a victim of circumstance.

This is the great human hoax: that ...