Every day we are attacked by a multitude of pains, so frequent and so familiar we don't even question them. In fact, we accept them as friends, as something to occupy us. These pains can range from petty irritations to the anxiety we feel every time we write a check and see our bank balance decrease, to concerns about our health. One of the major sources of pain involves other people and our relationships with them. 

Have you ever noticed that you get rid of one person in your life, and you get somebody just like it?  Amazing!  But you didn’t get somebody just like it. You got you again! That’s the lesson, isn’t it? We should be so tired of pointing our fingers at other people. 

So, then what happens? Here I am, fighting with my past, revisiting and revisiting how I was abused, or how somebody broke my heart – trying to get over what happened. And I fight, and I fight to get the condition to go right until at some point, I realize I’m fighting with the wrong thing. I’m trying to make, in my own heart and mind, a reconciliation from a set of conditions that I believed I was apart from. 

Ask yourself: how many times have I won the object of my desire, only to find out that it wasn’t enough? How familiar do the following statements seem to you?      
  

“This is the greatest thing that’s ever happened … but what if …”

         “I love you … but …”

         “This moment is almost perfect … all it needs is …”

The only thing that really troubles us is that our attention doesn't belong to us. Presently, something calls for us and claims our attention. Every errant thought and feeling that passes through our psychic system commands that we attend to what it tells us to.  We are made captive to whatever our negative attention has clung to.

Our work, in terms of reclaiming our right to be in relationship with what we choose, begins with being able to see that we suffer because choices are made for us by this unconscious thought nature.  This is unnecessary suffering. The mind has produced commentary on the moment, and then has an automated response to the messaging that makes us miserable.

Long before it’s possible for us to be spiritually reborn, we must first awaken to ourselves.

Awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn’t the only world..

But in a true awakening, I recognize that there’s a world beneath me. And the way I know there’s a world beneath me is that I can feel something pulling on me. Something wants to drag me down into depression. Something wants to pull me into anger. Something wants to move me into a state of myself where I can justify my agitation. Then, as I start to get irritated, angry, impatient, something else says, “Uh-uh. And it isn’t some moral platitude that’s been pressed into my brain. It’s an actual understanding that, “This hurts and I don’t want to act from it!”

Before we can experience the truth of a higher state of consciousness, before we can stand on the ground of ourselves that is the secret stuff of Reality, we are asked to quietly be who and what we are in the Now.  

To do this we must learn to let go of those parts of our present nature that are never quite pleased with what is. After all, doesn’t it seem that we are always in some sort of a struggle to change whatever or whoever it may be before us that misses the mark?

If I were to leave a single message to the world, it would be quite simple: Your life, with all its unique experiences on this earth, is part of a much greater story. Yes, we can create, manifest pretty much what we will, but we are first and foremost creations ourselves, a vital convergence of celestial and earthly forces that are ceaselessly being expressed in what I call the “Presence moment.”

Have you ever been in the midst of that very personal sense of peace called, "sitting in front of the TV with a nice pizza"? Then the phone rings, or a neighbor drops by, and . . . boom! Your slice of heaven is replaced with simmering resentment toward the person or event seen as disturbing it. 

Our relationships with one another are often a source of distress. In general, the principal form of conflict we experience with others has to do with some form of consideration that we feel they are not giving to us. We often suffer from thoughts like these: “She is not being respectful enough.” “He is not as kind as I want him to be.” “They just don’t care as deeply as I do.”

Each spring great forces are released to work upon and within us. During this time of the year the possibility of making a brand new beginning in life is never greater. Why is this true? Because spring also “dawns” within us, and if we will align ourselves with the power of its presence, then working for us is the unstoppable principle of rebirth itself. But, if we would receive this new life, with all its promise, then we must be willing to sacrifice within us whatever stands in its way…

When you look at a flower in springtime, standing there with its beautiful petals and leaves, can you understand that flower is not the life alone that you see coming out of the ground? That flower belongs to a much greater life than the individual expression that you behold and say, “Isn’t that beautiful?” You could never experience the radiance of the flower or utter those words if it were not for the fact that the life of that creation itself belongs to a body, a universe of life from out of which that one flower comes. 

But we don't see the bigger life behind the little one. We only see the little life… which incidentally is why people fear death, because they only see the little life. They know nothing of the bigger life from out of which the little life has come.

Knowledge, regardless of its sophisticated nature, is a tool. It arises from and belongs to what has passed. As such it embodies, defines, and relates us to life through what we already know about the world around us. By definition, this kind of understanding is limited.

However, no system of thought can stand up to the ever-shifting changes of real life, let alone meet those same changes fearlessly. Regardless how sophisticated its knowledge, the Self that knows itself only through its own conditioned thinking can never develop beyond the content of itself, any more than a math equation can suddenly outgrow the line of symbols responsible for its form.

How many of you know that, on any given day, you will be standing before a wall? Every single day, to one degree or another, a person runs into something like this: “God, I don’t want that,” “I wish I wasn’t feeling this way,” “Why are they doing those things?” “Oh my God, I’ve put on 5 pounds,” “Oh no, look at the economy”… any one of a thousand different ways in which, in any given moment, there you are blindly walking through life, and suddenly you’re standing before a wall. And what is the actual wall you’re in front of? The wall is always one thing: “What I don’t want.” This means that the walls we continue to run into are a creation of our own resistance to what life brings.

There is something in this consciousness that goes before you, not to make the crooked places straight, but to build walls. And the reason it builds walls isn’t for you. It builds walls so that you can stand in front of them, and by hating the wall, strengthen the unconscious nature that’s producing it so that your energy doesn’t ascend; it descends. Your energy isn’t released; it’s put into bondage.

We value negative states because of the strong sense of self we get from them. This may be very difficult for us to see, but a strong light will show us the freeing facts. No one wants to believe that he or she values things like self-pity, anger, and depression. We would insist we don't, and as evidence we point to the fact that we fight against them, but the struggle gives us a false sense of life and importance. It focuses attention on us and makes us feel like the center of a great deal of activity.

Regardless of the assertion of any fearful state that seeks to convince you otherwise, apply this one great truth:

That fear must break down if it doesn’t succeed in breaking down your willingness to test its reality. How do you conduct such a test? You learn to look at its presence within you with the quiet understanding that, in reality, nothing in life is fixed. All things change. Everything passes. This is truth. Knowing this to be true is power over fearful states that hold us captive.

Have you noticed yet that wherever you go, the thing that you don’t want the most seems to know where you are? Seriously. It doesn’t just know where you are. The Divine has created the conditions under which a reaction will be stirred and brought into your consciousness so that you can finally realize that running from it doesn’t change the reality of it. Only bringing it into the light of a new order of awareness can bring into its presence the fulfillment of itself. Why? Because you start to understand the reaction is just what you don’t know about yourself yet.

Has there ever been a time in your life -- a period of real self-enriching growth -- that wasn't connected to a risk you either willingly undertook or -- to a time of inner trial where there was no other choice for you but to take a risk? Of course, there's only one answer to this question, and it's one recognized as being true wherever you may ask it in the world: The prize of greater wisdom and inner strength always goes to those who take, in one way or another, the risk.

Taking conscious risks can be such a powerful catalyst for inner change. A conscious risk involves making a choice to do what’s true, in spite of what that choice may cost you. On the other side of any conscious risk is the realization that who you really are has nothing to fear. But, in order to make this self-liberating discovery, you must willingly face those fears, whatever they may be. 

Whenever we put ourselves on the side of what we know is true, then the truth takes our side, lending us what is noble, needful, and divine. Truth sees to it that we are strengthened by wisdom, sheltered by light, and that our hearts know the peace of having fulfilled her plan. And the more we choose in favor of being awake to our own True Self, the sooner we will come to realize the timeless happiness that already awaits anyone who will seek it first.

The deepest parts of you know that if freedom from fear was as easy as "creating a new reality" for yourself, then you would already be the fearless person you know in your heart that you're meant to be. It's just not that easy...which brings us to a great liberating truth, an insight you must prove to yourself before you can know its power to dismantle any fear. When it comes to the fearless life, the Divine gives nothing freely . . . save to those who freely give themselves to discovering the truth about their own fearless Self. The good news is that this supreme confidence and calm already lives within you, needing only your realization of its unshakable presence to empower you with the fearlessness you seek.

The following seven laws are like a golden invitation to your own coronation. To "open" each one, and receive its royal instruction about how to live free of fear, you need do only one thing: ask sincerely that you might understand its secret message and then, when the answer comes, welcome those insights as long lost Friends...for that is exactly what they are. They will do the rest for you.

In a thousand different ways, we are meant every day to begin to realize that it’s so easy to just run on automatic. Everything just goes on, doesn’t it? It just goes on. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s bad. But it just goes on. We are meant to understand that as long as we live from a life that just goes on, no difference is taking place in our life or in the world we’re in. We’re just part of a great machine, churning itself over and over again. Repetition, reincarnation, recurrence is all that’s happening.

It’s the clarity of this understanding that produces the need and the willingness an individual must have to make a difference. And it can be in the smallest way – as when you’re polite to somebody at the cost of yourself, meaning that you catch the impolite person in yourself and don’t give it a voice. To make a difference means that you are being different in the moment so that nobody knows what you’re doing, what you had to give up. That’s the beauty of it. Those you have interacted with won’t even know anything happened. They won’t know that you suffered yourself and allowed something new to happen.