People use the word “I” referring to a particular body and mind with a particular life story and situation associated with it. “I” or “my” is concerned only with the dimension of stuff / material / matter—the shifting forms of the material realm.

While I recognize that there is a particular body, mind, life story, and situation associated with this temporary physical form, it is not who I am. “I am” refers to consciousness / life / spirit—which is not in the observable, material realm; rather, is of what the mind dismisses as “nothing”.

The paradoxical truth is that something is actually nothing, while nothing is really everything.

We are talking about identity, and there is a fundamental need for a permanent identity. The problem is that we attempt to build one up through everything we are doing in the physical dimension / external world. Here everything is always changing, and all life forms grow old and die.

For to be meaningful, it must be permanent. That which is not permanent / eternal is only a meaningless situation.

A person driven by ego does not fundamentally understand this. Until we escape from the ego trap, we exhaust ourselves in a vain attempt to build up an identity that is recognizable in the external world. We attempt to derive lasting happiness through particular life situations or outcomes, but reality is such that it does not obey our mind’s desires. Anyway, the mind cannot know anything about what you really need until it knows who “you” are.

To spiritually awaken is to humble oneself to the point of saying “I am nothing”, or “I am” without adding anything to it. This is the recognition of identity / truth / reality—which is unchangeable, or it wouldn’t be truth and reality.

Now you can observe the external world and take part in it—but in a way that you no longer want or need anything from it. You are free. You can express and handle truth. Only loving thoughts and expressions are real, and everything else is forgiven.

Ironically, you don’t earn the respect or approval of others by pretending to be the person you imagine others want you to be. How could they respect someone who demonstrates so little confidence and self-worth?

When you encounter someone, don’t you want to know the real person? Wouldn’t you rather interact in truth? Wouldn’t role-playing insult both you and the actor by attempting to put you both into a box?

Be yourself. Don’t compare don’t compete. Not only will you effortlessly earn respect, you will give others permission to do the same. You will also form the most solid, deepest relationships.

What’s great about you is not how well you fit in; rather, how you don’t.

Search for freedom externally and find only closed doors. It is true that there are endless obstacles to freedom in this world, and that's exactly the point. The doorway to freedom cannot be found externally because it is within.

What is freedom but the right to openly and honestly be yourself, to express yourself, to live your dreams and fantasies? Your soul wants to be set free. You want to feel unrestricted, unblocked, unshackled. Why? Because you want to be happy, to have fun, to love and be loved, to learn and to grow and to play. 

The door to all of this is only found within. To open it, open your mind and your heart to perfect love. To the mind, unconditional love is a thought system. To the heart, it is an energy and a state of being that is felt.  You do want freedom, but real and lasting freedom is only accessible when all your faith is in love. All that is not love can be let go of.

This is the only door to freedom: learn what perfect love is, learn to love yourself fully, then extend it freely and align your thoughts with only loving thoughts. Without first doing this, there is no person, situation, or circumstance in the world that could possibly offer you any sort of real or lasting freedom. You may have already been offered freedom, but failed to experience it because you haven't walked through the door within.

Only if aligned with love are you free. You are free to tell the truth, free to connect with other free people in love, free to explore, and if you embody only love you will render ineffective all the world's attempts to restrict your freedom. You are consciousness, which is another word for perfect love. You are eternal. You are beautiful. You are the light. You are free.

As A Course in Miracles explains, “You believe it is possible to be host to ego or hostage to God.” Indeed, religion has falsely taught us that salvation requires tremendous sacrifices that would rob us of fun and richness of experience in life. While religiosity can make life dull, spiritual awakening brings aliveness.

The story of Christ dying on the cross is not a story of sacrifice; rather, a story about fearlessly overcoming death as spirit-identity. No sacrifice is required to align with God because God is the force of life, itself. It is what we are, beyond the flesh. When you recognize your divine identity, you choose to let the false ego identity go because you simply recognize it as the source of problems. Is ending your problems in this life and beyond a sacrifice?

People misunderstand God as something external, far away, a sort of man in the sky whom we are supposed to fear. This idea of God is so ridiculous that most people, choosing to become agnostic or atheist, assume the world’s false identity of ego instead. The tragic error of ego is undone when we recognize God as the energy and force of life, itself, experienced by humans internally as the energy, feeling, and thought system of Love.

Of course, Love (capitalized because it is divine) is another badly misunderstood concept, for the simple reason that we are taught that it, too, requires sacrifice.   

“Sacrifice is so essential to your thought system that salvation apart from sacrifice means nothing to you. Your confusion of sacrifice and love is so profound that you cannot conceive of love without sacrifice. And it is this you must look upon; sacrifice is attack, not love.”
-A Course in Miracles

To Love fully, to spiritually awaken and to align with the divine thought system of Love, requires no sacrifice at all. Those who would make you sacrifice for love or for salvation are manipulating and exploiting you for very selfish reasons. To embrace this message is to free yourself, to end your suffering, to awaken to truth, reality, and joy. No sacrifice. No fear. Just love.

Nothing good comes from doing something when you don’t feel good. You may feel the need to get something done, but what is the quality of your doing?

If you are rushed, everything you do will be sloppy. If you are stressed, you will only generate more stress for yourself and others. If you are depressed, nothing you do will inspire anyone. There is no point to working on anything while in a negative state. You will create problems rather than solving them.

If you feel lousy, you must have gone off course. Step back. Take a nap. Do a meditation. Do nothing at all. Go for a walk. Do something that makes you feel good. When you feel good again, when you feel inspired, then calmly place your attention on whatever you feel inspired to do.

When a person who feels good does something, it generates more enjoyment. Conversations are uplifting, creative projects are beautiful, ventures are successful.

When people are grumpy, it is because they are tired, hungry or stressed. We all get down from time to time. When you do, don’t try to solve anything. Don’t try to figure anything out. Try not to think about anything serious and just rest. You’ll be back to your best self in no time.

Complete identification with the mind (the belief that I am my thoughts) is the cause of failure, suffering and insanity.

Still today, most people make exhaustive efforts to blame other people and situations as the cause of suffering. The thinking goes, "If only this person would change, or if only I could find a way to accomplish this, then I could finally be happy.” This story appears to make sense when we are young, but as we pass through life something changes.

As we mature, we look back upon all the things that were supposed to make us happy. Much of what we wanted in our youth was eventually experienced or accomplished. But just as soon as we get what we want, we find the next problem. When we eventually recognize this pattern, most people surrender to despair and grumpiness. The other alternative is to find out how to simply observe thoughts, not take them too seriously, and mostly ignore the stories of the mind.

Through daily meditation and a spiritual practice, you can awaken to the fact that the voice in the head isn’t really you; rather, the conditioning of the world. This is the recognition of reality an the undoing of ego.

All that which is real is beyond the mind and can be best described as unconditional love. When we align with unconditional love, the mind functions optimally and the suffering ends. Awakened, you live in alignment with reality rather than in a state of resisting it. The scattered thoughts no longer cause emotional reactions. Now the sane, creative, productive mind has humbled itself to the vast realm of consciousness.

Doesn’t everyone want to be free of pain? If so, why do we make choices that hurt us? We avoid being close to others. We make ourselves sick through poor diet and other bad habits. We beat up on ourselves and others. Why?

This is not a rhetorical question. There is a clear answer: guilt. We suffer when we believe we are guilty and have not learned to exchange guilt for innocence.

When people believe in their own guilt, you can see it in their eyes. They feel unworthy of love, freedom, health, and abundance. Believing that they have nothing good to offer, they withdraw and attack others to break relationships and create more separation.

Those who believe they are guilty also behave in ways that cause themselves to be attacked. Most people believe that attack can teach a lesson and can correct behavior. Imagine how misguided it is to attack the guilty, when teaching the exchange of guilt for innocence is what heals.

I know that every brother and sister is inherently good. Our love, our goodness, our light is the only thing real about any of us. As the force of life, itself, we are not only equal we are one. It is only our belief in guilt that drives all the thoughts, perceptions, and behaviors that ultimately cause pain and cloud our goodness.

The truth about you, about everyone, is the truth of perfect innocence. Forgive all guilt by simply recognizing it is as unreal. It is not what we are and nothing we need to carry. Whatever errors have been made, we can effortlessly correct them in the embrace of our innocent, good selves. Whatever we’ve done, whatever we want, whatever we need, we can correct it and obtain it by applying the thought system of unconditional love, total honesty, and freedom. This is the exchange of guilt for innocence, the end of pain, the beginning of ongoing joy.  

To hide anything—however seemingly small or inconsequential it may seem—is to lay one more brick upon that castle in the sand. One lie demands others, and those others still, until we are trapped in a web of confusion with no way out other than crisis. The only way to avoid this sad reality is to always be honest.

The choice for perfect honesty starts by being honest with yourself. What do you really need? What excites you and inspires you? Who are you and what do you want to become? What do you want to experience? If you can be honest with yourself about everything, without consideration of what others may think, then you have awakened within to honesty. Most people never get this far.

Even being honest with yourself is not enough. If you repress or hide your honesty, you suffer from low energy and depression. Under the constant labor to create the image of a life that isn’t true, life becomes a job. Furthermore, to the extent that you withhold honesty, you are limited by others, controlled, repressed, and unfree.

It is very normal in this world to avoid all that is true and real because of fear. In a world of lies, the honest person feels like a total misfit. To fit in, we create a pretend version of reality while hiding what is real about ourselves. How many of us are there hiding, believing we are misfits? Probably the majority.

If we could learn to accept the truth about ourselves and one another, and if we could see that the judgments of others mean nothing, we could break the barriers of fear. We would step our from our isolation, come together, and live blissfully.

“The present is before time was, and will be when time is no more.
In it are all things that are eternal, and they are one.”
-A Course in Miracles

The normal state of existence in this world is to overlook all that is eternal and here right now to focus on either the past (which is gone) or the future (which is unpredictable, temporary, and fleeting at best). This helps explains the world’s uninterrupted state of confusion.

Only that which is in the present is real. The past and future are not here and, therefore, do not literally exist. Time can seem real only when we bring memories, hopes, and fears to the present. This is the unobserved mind’s unfortunate habit of problem-making.

None of the stuff of this world—the external threats, attacks, manufactured fears, lies, promises, rewards, punishments—none of it is actually here in your present moment unless you choose to bring it into the present moment; thus giving it power, making it seem real, and choosing to live out of accord with the eternal reality.

The stuff of the mind can be interesting, but pay attention to your emotions, thought patterns, and decisions. If you are negatively influenced by the stuff of the mind, you are losing presence and attempting to replace reality with illusion.  

We are at our best when we are present; focusing all our attention on what is here, what is real, what is eternal. By letting thoughts of past and future drift away, we can fully love, create value and beauty, and we can relax and enjoy ourselves in safety and freedom. The mind still has thoughts, but those thoughts no longer control your emotions or behavior. You are able to distinguish present-moment reality from time-based fiction.

The world teaches us that guilt is real and that we are all guilty. Yes, in the past, we all have made mistakes. But is the past here right now? Here, right now, in this moment, are we not perfectly innocent?

To believe that guilt is real, one would have to believe that each moment of your life you are supposed to carry the full burden of your past. You are meant to do the hard work of constantly being ashamed of yourself for what is not here. Ignoring present reality, you are meant to pay a price for memories. For this, you punish yourself and allow yourself to be punished. In truth, your guilt is only a story—a collection of thoughts, no longer true right now, that you choose to make real.

But if you can be still. If for one instant, you can let go of the past. If you look around you, noticing the colors, the textures, the sounds, the silence, and stillness behind it all. Can you clearly recognize that you are not guilty in this moment? That you are perfectly lovable? Right now, you are perfectly innocent and perfectly lovable. This is forgiveness. This is also reality.

In an instant you can heal from guilt. Then, you can love yourself. You can even extend that love at every opportunity. You can allow yourself to feel good. You can smile. You can let that burden of your past drift away. You can fix anything in your situation that needs fixing—not from a position of guilt and shame; rather, from the certainty of your perfect innocence.

If there is ever any insane behavior in the present moment, you can correct it. But to hold guilt over yourself or anyone is to condemn to death by creating an insanity in the mind that overshadows the beauty and perfection of the present moment. You cannot awaken, you cannot heal, you cannot love if you decide that guilt is real. I assure you it is not. You are perfectly innocent.