People lie all the time – mostly to the people who they claim to love the most. We lie to get our way, to maintain stability, or simply to avoid hurting someone’s feelings. But to lie is to cover up the truth in favor of illusion. Yet, no matter how hard we try, illusion can never be made real.

Building a life based upon deception is like building a house upon a foundation of shifting sand. You work so hard to please those who do not fundamentally accept you for who you are. You think that, by protecting them from the truth, you are being considerate of their feelings. In truth, you are only attempting to hold onto what is not yours.

What is yours must be yours in truth. Tell the truth and then accept any and every outcome as perfectly natural. This will open your heart and mind so that your natural energy source is unblocked. As for the question of who to spend your time with? Be with the person who would stay by your side even after they know the truth.

We continue tomorrow and each day after that.    

There exists an enormous source of energy within you. Where does it come from?

When you are in love, excited about something, or truly inspired, the energy level within shoots through the roof. You can’t sit still! You pace around the room feeling fully-alive.

Other times you feel completely lethargic, depressed or uninspired. What causes these shifts? Do we get this energy from food or rest? No. Sometimes, when we are excited, we barely eat. When we are depressed, we eat or sleep too much. What exactly is controlling the energy frequencies?

You want to get inspired and stay there? Here’s the secret: just open your heart and mind. Accept new possibilities into your work life, your social circle, and your love life. Accept what people have to say with an open mind. Try something before rejecting it. Say “yes” to life and never close your heart or mind to anything or anyone.

You’ll also need to express yourself fully. Share your truths openly and without fear. Be real and let whatever happens happen.

Ever notice how, when you have a few drinks with a close friend, you start to open up? What happens next? Your energy increases and you talk and laugh for hours. This energy doesn’t come from the alcohol (to the contrary, alcohol is a depressant). But alcohol also has another effect: it makes you more open.

You may also notice that, when you have a few drinks with a depressed, judgmental or closed person, you want to go to sleep. Drink a few more and still nothing works.

You want to feel good, and the only way to feel good is to open your heart and mind. This is a big breakthrough for me. Stop rejecting or resisting people, opportunities, or something new. Stay alive and stay young by remaining open. We continue, fully alive, tomorrow and each day after that.

Consciousness is another word for attention. During the normal course of life, our attention gets focused on thoughts, emotions, or objects.

A person who is spiritually awakened is able to focus attention without losing awareness that her identity is this consciousness (attention). However, a person who is spiritually unconscious tends to lose herself in the object, the circumstance, the thought, or the emotion.

Freedom is the separation between you and the external. Health is maintained here because your bodily functions are not adversely affected by each thought, each stimuli, each life event. Your relationships are stable, peaceful. You solve problems without unnecessary emotion and life is so much better.

Simply knowing that you are the subject (consciousness) and not the object of your attention (the thought, circumstance, etc.) allows you to remain in a state of steady calm, joy, peace.

That’s the core of spiritually. This is so simple that even a child can understand. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

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Abscondo Podcast 54

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Each moment, you have the power to offer either heaven or hell.

Give total control to thought and teach attack and judgment through violent words and gestures, rewards and punishments, and through aggressive debates and insults. The ego has its own thought system of insanity, which produces the fearful emotions of hell. This is the life of misery and suffering, which is considered normal in an insane world.

Then there is another thought system beyond the mind. It is called love. A mind and body aligned with perfect love teaches and creates only heaven. Here you have total power to offer the eternal joy of union — which rests upon unconditional acceptance and total honesty. Here you unleash perfect peace, total freedom, perfect health and abundance.

While the ego demands total sacrifice, love releases you. Hold heaven safe in your love. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Spiritual awakening does not require an epiphany or a mountain-top high. You don’t need to complete a 2-day fast or a 2-hour meditation to rise above ego. The so-called “toxic people” don’t need to be removed from your life before you can begin. You also don’t have to “manifest anything” to prove anything to anyone. This is all external and, therefore, meaningless.

True and lasting salvation is a state of being that persists even as you are just taking care of the kids, even as you are dealing with the challenge of visiting your parents or in-laws for a week, even as you may occasionally eat too much or drink too much, even as you spend hours troubleshooting new gadgets, and even as you may choose to watch football.

It isn’t so much about what you do; rather, your state of being while you do it. If you are conscious in meditation, you will eventually learn to also remain conscious at work, conscious playing video games with your children, and conscious while cooking or cleaning the kitchen.

A spiritually awakened person does need to have some sort of spiritual practice each day, but this is no sacrifice at all. It is pure enjoyment. Beyond that, you should be able to engage in life in just the same way as anyone does. What changes is your state of being, your attitude, your thoughts, your behaviors.

Now you accept what is happening rather than resist. Now you stop labeling everything as good or bad. Now you let go of the past and don’t think so much about the future. Now you are present, calm, and loving to everyone. Now you are healthy and almost never ill. Now your stress levels are way down, even as you troubleshoot the computer. Now you go through your days and nights without fear. Now you stop worrying about everyone’s opinions and you can be yourself. Now your relationships are happy and blissful. Now your life is filled with love and success.

For a true spiritual awakening, no sacrifice is required. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Some examples, as quoted from A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle:

“What the ego calls love is possessiveness and addictive clinging that can turn into hate in a second.”

“Anticipation about an upcoming event, which is the ego’s over-valuation of future, easily turns into its opposite – let down or disappointment – when the event is over or doesn’t fulfill the ego’s expectations.”

If, during the holidays or anytime at all, you experienced a love relationship that devolves into an ugly argument or feelings of resentment…or if you at any point feel let down as an anticipated event winds down…then you can be sure that you are in the grip of ego.

For every peak, the ego has a deeper valley. This roller-coaster ride is what most people consider normal. There is the thrill of the good times, followed by the hangover.

Look to the external for happiness rather than looking inward and you will always be let down. No lasting, true happiness can be found in anything external to you. To repeat yesterday’s lesson: “Inward is sanity. Insanity is outside you.” -A Course in Miracles

Do you know what it means to go within, to the source of love, freedom, and abundance? Do you know fully that you are already perfect and divine – that there is nothing in the external world of form that is needed to complete you? We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

No matter the unease, the noise, the chatter, the gossip, the fearful stories being shouted around you, inside your true self it is always perfectly sane, quiet and safe.

We are taught by the world that it is the other way around — that we are wrong, that we don’t fit, that we aren’t like everyone else. We are taught to doubt our feelings, our truths, our selves. Yet there can be no higher faith than faith in our divine selves.

This Christmas, we celebrate the divinity of Christ while connecting with the Christ-like divinity within each of us. We are one soul, governed by the unchangeable energy of perfect love. Today, we see not ego and connect only on the level of our shared divinity. Here lies all power, all truth, all joy, all peace. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

We are all obsessed with sex – especially those who claim to be against it. Why?

Sex is a blissful escape from ego that delivers us to a euphoric state where there is no “I”, no judgment or guilt, no “my problems” or “my life situation”.

Sex is timelessness. In sex, there is no awareness of time. We become fully present, with no past and no future.

Sex is perfect union. The removal of all boundaries, all separateness. Sex is two becoming one.

Sex is creation. It is the energy from which we were all conceived. The moment of fertilization instantly unleashes 70, 80, 90 years of creativity. It is sex that has created the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Gandhi, Eckhart Tolle.

Sex is divine. Everything humans have created is first born of sex. Sexual desire is the energy of new life and love is the energy that sustains that life.

Through sex, men and women are able to transcend ego, to rise above the challenges of life on earth, to touch the divine. But not quite, because it is a state that only lasts for a few moments. Sex provides us with only a glimpse, a temporary portal to heaven.

Make friends with sex. Nothing is more natural, so enjoy it fully – but then learn to transcend the impermanence of sexual bliss or it will become an addiction. Move toward a more permanent, divine state beyond sex. Spiritual awakening is learning to exist permanently in this state of no ego, no time, union and creativity. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.

Reality is not necessarily what we see because so much of what our senses perceive are the makings of the human mind. While we may call this “reality”, the truth is that what is man-made is the stuff of dreams and illusions.

First there is the man-made material realm, which we have filled with products, machines, buildings, décor, devices, things – all manifestations of the human mind. Our creative minds take the stuff of nature and transform it into the stuff of society. While everything in this man-made realm may be real in the sense that you can see it, touch it, taste it, and use it, it is also true that everything man-made was dreamed into existence. These are only ideas brought to the realm of form – illusions.

Then there are the immaterial makings of man: money, rules, laws, customs, standards of behavior. We have been conditioned to believe that this is reality, yet again these are only ideas – words written in a book and violently enforced. Here there is no reality or truth.

Then there is this other category of reality that we acknowledge only occasionally: nature. Next time you find yourself worried about money, about something you shouldn’t have done, about something in the future that may or may not happen – if you start to believe that any of this is real, just contemplate a blade of grass. Do our worries matter to a blade of grass?

So what is the real world? The illusions we have created? Nature? What is truth? The ideas forced upon us by authority and thoughtlessly accepted by most people? Or is truth to be found somewhere else? Perhaps in the energy of love? Or in the pure consciousness of a baby?

Truth is that which is unchanging. Nothing that takes physical form is truth because it is unstable and changing. Truth, on the other hand, is that which cannot be threatened, is beyond time, and does not change. Truth is in the realm of the unmanifested, the nothingness, the realm of consciousness, spirit, love, God. We continue tomorrow and each day after that.