According to the book “Games Ego Plays” by Kevin Fitzmaurice, the ego is like a never-ending board game. This is a role-playing game to determine who’s right. The voice in your head is you and your opponents are everyone else. Your attitude toward your opponent is either suspicious (at best) or vicious (at worst).

To play the game, you shift between six possible positions: victim, defender, jailer, judge, offender, prosecutor. To begin the game, one player must attack and the other must respond defensively. For example, a wife may prosecute a husband by making the accusation “You never play with the children.” At first the husband attempts to defend himself, but she isn’t convinced. Eventually, he may try to take the role of prosecutor and respond, “You won’t let me, you always control everything!” Nice move. Now, if she defends herself, her position collapses until she makes another move. These types of ego games often last a lifetime.

If you can get another player to agree about who the judge is, you may be able to agree on guilt. You might convince the other player to let you play jailor and deal out the punishment. If you do not agree on who the judge is, there are ways to justify your behavior. You might assume the role of offender and feel justified in getting away with something. Or perhaps your best move is to take the role of victim, which justifies all sorts of insanity.

This game sounds like fun, but the problem is that the players don’t know it’s a game. Since they can’t imagine a reality beyond the game, they don’t know how to stop. But there is a way to stop playing.

Love is the anti-ego. In love, you end the game when you stop defending yourself. When attacked, you might calmly respond “is that so?” Refuse to assume any of the six positions. Be humble. Trust people. Be accepting and forgiving. Make yourself vulnerable.

Nobody has ever won anything real by playing the ego board game. It is only a game. Real life is what happens when you stop playing and realize you already had everything before you started playing. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.  

It may seem trivial to look at life from a more philosophical perspective. But without clarity and understanding, life is impossible.

You are awakening, which is the most beautiful thing that can happen to any of us. It is the ultimate purpose of our time here on earth in this physical form. You are seeing that it is all really just a dream.

The difference between waking dream and sleeping dreams is that, in sleep, your mind controls everything. Awake, life is a dream that is shared between many minds.

Life is a temporary dream. We escape the waking dream each night when we sleep. We end the dream when we die.

The way we perceive with these senses is unreal in an ultimate sense. It is relative. Only humans experience this particular dream. Other life forms experience the dream of life based upon how their senses work.

Ultimately, you are not the dream. You are the observer of the dream. Consciousness. Which is the same thing as God. Which is what you are. A mind in service of truth, consciousness, is free and perfect. A mind that does not yet know this is lost, suffering terribly.

If you don’t know or agree yet, you will. Faith is allowing yourself to get there. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Ambition is the desperate longing for a result. A willingness to sacrifice the present moment for a future goal. 

Ambition justifies the sacrifice of everything and everyone. This is ego in its full grandiosity. Shouting for attention, needing to be better than others, seeking salvation in specialness and exclusion.

The world sometimes rewards ambition, but even then the ego is never satisfied. Success leads only to ugly pride and arrogance, followed by desperate clinging and fear of loss.

Ambitious, we become hollow, boring, unoriginal, and nothing we say or do means anything to anyone. Ambitious miscreations often result in human suffering and destruction. This is the path to inner failure even when there is an appearance of outer success.

True success is humble service to others. Success is bringing people together and making them feel better. 

Thus, there is only one true ambition: the ambition to love everyone and everything. 

Love is the goal and it can be achieved now. Love instantly brings the inner success of joy and bliss, followed by an outer success that endures. 

Love is our true aspiration. Reach for a humility so pure that is absent of ego. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Nothing can be learned or created in a state of panic. Fear is the opposite of life: paralysis and death.

Life flows. Life grows. Life creates. The energy of life is love, which is the opposite of fear. A mind cannot be aligned with both love and fear. One must be made real the other unreal.

To fear is to perceive with ego. To choose ego is to suffer. The insanity, violence, and suffering of this world is all the miscreation of ego.

With full allegiance to love, we function just as we were created to function. Move beyond fear, beyond illness, beyond struggle by simply choosing to fall in love with everything. End all resistance to love and let go of all that is unreal.

We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

If you want to know the truth about something, know that it is always the opposite of what so-called authority tells us it is.

Success is not the result of a good education.

Reducing fat and calorie intake will not lead to weight loss.
The health care system will not heal you and will only make you ill.

The news media presents the opposite of what’s really going on and it’s irrelevant to your life anyway.

Love is the opposite of what we are shown in the movies.

God is the opposite of what we are told about in Church.

Sex is the opposite of what it looks like in porn.

Music is the opposite of what we hear on the radio.

Beauty is the opposite of what we are shown in the beauty magazines.

History is the opposite of the version we are taught in school.

Wealth is the opposite of the advice given to us by the banks.

Science is the opposite of truth.

The truth is within you. Find it, trust it, and share it. This is the shift to decentralization. This consciousness revolution is about people claiming truth, coming alive, connecting together, and living in honesty and acceptance. You are allowed to ignore the self-serving, manipulative and lying voices of authority. You can live in loving truth without fear — but only after escaping the ego.

We continue toward freedom tomorrow and each day after that.

“To perceive errors in anyone, and to react as if they are real, is to make them real to you.” — A Course in Miracles 

Spirit and ego are two opposing thought systems. They have nothing in common, cannot see each other, and cannot communicate. If you see errors in anyone, then it is because you are perceiving ego with ego.

Know that everything the ego does is meaningless and insane. There is no need to react, or attempt to correct, on the level of insanity. If the ego cannot correct itself in you, do you think you can correct it in another? Insanity cannot undo insanity. It does not work.

By reacting to insanity in any form, you are activating your ego and attempting to make insanity real. This is belief in illusion, which can only result in error and suffering — which can only be undone when you remember again who you are.

See the truth in yourself and everyone — the pure consciousness, not the ego. Observe consciousness with consciousness. Here there can be no form of communication that is not joyous and peaceful, no feeling other than love.

We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Yesterday we discussed how loss can only be the loss of illusion. Truth is always beyond physical form. It cannot exist in the material realm because all matter is unstable.

The truth of your relationship with a loved one is this: what is real between you will never be lost. You may separate or divorce a spouse—yet your love for each other remains. Despite the mind’s failed attempts to “move on”, you remain connected in that love always. The mind has no power over love.

If you are afraid to express that love, perhaps because you are with jealous new partners, then that is an error that will cause you suffering. Better to lovingly express yourself fully about who and how you love. This teaches acceptance and creates the most beautiful relationships.

Maybe you lost your home due to financial struggles. While you may no longer hold to the key to that structure, the positive feelings you created while living in that place remain. You can carry those feelings to the next place, even if it may be smaller. You can celebrate the way you live, the way you do things, noticing beauty even in simplicity.

Even if old age, physical decay or a disability limits the kinds of experiences you once enjoyed, you might experience that same sense of excitement in new interests such as writing, creating, reading, or otherwise exploring something new.  

Everything that matters is beyond the five senses: love, feelings, inspiration, excitement, human connection, fun. This is the realm of spirit. Align with spirit and live at the center of the wheel—where there is no real loss and you cannot be threatened. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Yesterday we said that true intelligence is beyond the mind. Because you did not always know this, your mind has been in control. This has created illusions which ultimately will be undone.

The so-called “normal” life is purely mind-dominated. Any mind that is not in balance with spirit is merely an ego—lost, confused, yet believing in its own ways despite all evidence to the contrary.

The ego seeks wealth, status and fame—all of which bring momentary highs followed by suffering because of greater complexity, conflict, and potential for loss. We seek permanence and safety in a marriage, in a beautiful home, in in the role of parent—even as nothing in the world of form can possibly be eternal and unchanging.

Even when you reach your goals, there is no lasting happiness. The ego needs drama and change. So even from within the illusion of a perfect life, we fall to substance abuse, cheating, and other destructive behaviors.

The normal way of life is catastrophic. Sure, we all project happiness, but in hiding we suffer greatly. The happy pics were taken during those few moments when we are up—but then come the long stretches in hiding when we are very much down. Nobody, no matter how beautiful, rich or famous, has experienced a mind-dominated life any differently. This is how it is.

Furthermore, when the hand of true intelligence invariably enters the picture, we experienced the severe agony of perceived loss. Just as the mind has built perfect castles in the sand, universal intelligence comes to wash them away.

At some point, we all lose the beauty, the relationship, the dream home, and the status. Loss destroys the mind’s hope for the happiness it had always believed was just around the corner.

In truth, loss is just the undoing of mind illusions. After illusion is undone, truth remains.

Unwanted change brings the opportunity to shift away from the egoic mind and into true intelligence or knowing. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

True intelligence cannot originate from the mind. It also cannot be grasped or held by the mind.

The best our minds can do is to let go. We can surrender, accept that we cannot control reality. Concede that there is a level of complexity to reality that is infinitely beyond the limitations of our perception.

Now we stop judging situations as good or bad. We stop trying to manipulate people to make us happy. We let go of our strategies for happiness. We accept the past and no longer seek salvation in the future.

Now we use the mind for only what it was designed to do well. We let true intelligence, which is within us and all around us, be the guiding force—which it was all along despite our impotent resistance. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

You are at your best when doing one thing at a time with all your attention. This isn’t possible unless you have trained your mind, through meditation and a spiritual practice, to let go of thoughts.

Don’t do anything unless you are first present. Notice your surroundings, the details, the colors, the textures. Pay attention to the sounds. Accept everything that is. Resist nothing. Notice the energy within the inner-body. The stillness and silence.

Now calmly go about whatever it is you are doing: your work, parenting, making dinner, driving your car, reading a book, talking with your spouse. Approach it calmly from this place of stillness or “no thought”. Now any thought that you do generate will be about what you are actually doing.

Move through your day like this—with frequent breaks and 1-3 meditations. Try this for a few weeks and notice that there is no stress. You are no longer afraid to check your email or answer your phone. You resist nothing. Nothing that happens on the level of forms matters in an absolute sense. You have wisdom and knowing. You are able to calmly respond to whatever happens. Life gets easy because you have mastered it. This is the only way to master life.

Through awareness of being, your quality of doing is maximized. The value you provide everyone improves. People enjoy your presence and involvement. Abundance begins to flow into your life. You are trusted and respected—not because you demanded it, but because you deserve it simply by being exactly what you are. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.