You will learn faster and have more fun (suffer less), to the extent that you identify with Source, to the extent that you know who you are and operate from that knowingness. A life without suffering is a life lived in grace. This is your natural expression as the Son of God in a human body. This is the manifestation of “Heaven on Earth”.

You are not really the body, so identifying with the body is false. This creates a false self, which we call the ego. The ego is the concept of you, not you as you are. The false self only survives by the habit of you mistaking the concept of yourself for your true self. When you are making this mistake, you are said to be asleep, or in a dream.

The body’s situation is precarious. It has a temporary existence. It is frail and weak, and its existence can cease at any moment. To identify with the body is to open the door to fear. The root fear is the fear of not surviving. The false self mirrors this fear, and strives to survive at any cost.

For example, you have a certain kind of experience. It can be experienced as either positive or negative. Because you are identifying with the body, you take this experience personally. You take it to mean that you are a certain kind of person, and that you have a certain kind of value to other people.

In a normal development, you will create thousands of beliefs about yourself through charged experiences. Some of these beliefs will reinforce previously held beliefs. New beliefs that conflict with old beliefs will split off and form separate identities. You will end up being a different person in different circumstances, and acting differently toward some people than you do toward others.

At some point, you may notice that your beliefs about yourself don’t really have your best interests at heart. You may then enroll yourself in some kind of therapy, trying to figure out why your life isn’t working. The weeds of the false self have grown and grown and become untenable. Who you really are has been almost squeezed out of existence. Life has become a dry husk, and you have gotten more and more stuck. You have gathered dust from the road.

The truth is, you came into this life with issues. You have carried forward your false beliefs, your karma, from your previous “incarnations”. But, as a child, you were closer to God, having recently come from the infinite spring. You naturally put first things first, i.e., life before the ego. You hadn’t developed a current ego yet. You hadn’t yet been fully inculcated into a society of egos, a society where almost everyone operates as a concept of him or herself.

Being without the rules of the ego, at first, you were able to fully express yourself, and so could release energy as you required. Gradually, you would learn to subjugate your will, your emotions, your desires, your self-expression, to the rules of a society of false selves. And if you wanted to fit in, and be accepted, you would develop a false self of your own.

Let’s face it, children are great at pushing buttons. Unfortunately, most adults have a low emotional IQ. We identify with our buttons. We don’t know our buttons from us. When someone pushes one of our buttons, we often defend it with our lives. It’s a shame, because having one of your buttons pushed is a great opportunity to discover where you’re not free. We don’t see it as an opportunity for two reasons: we don’t know who we are, and we don’t know how to release.

If you remembered who you really were, would you be snapping at someone because they put your toothbrush in the wrong place? “You know I always put my toothbrush on the right side!” And for this little thing we feel like they don’t respect us anymore. Perhaps they are as bored as you are with the comfortable status quo, and are not-so-consciously trying to return some aliveness to your relationship.

If you remembered who you really were, you would know that you can’t be disrespected. This is a great piece of wisdom from “A Course in Miracles”. “The Son of God can’t suffer.” Who you are is the Son of God. Since you are suffering, you must have made a mistake. You must have created a misperception, and then placed yourself at the effect of that misperception. This is your choice. There is no question that you feel like a victim to the situation. But, there is a difference between a feeling and the truth.

The truth is that which never changes. Who you are is like the sky. Everything that happens to you is like the weather. Weather, like emotions, or life situations, comes and goes, can be mild or severe, and can be beautiful or dreary. Who you really are never changes. As soon as you identify with any weather, you suffer. When you remember who you really are, you see the beauty of the weather for what it is.

Wayne’s teaching that the best you can do is to emulate Source is perfectly married with this notion. If who you are is Source, then what are you doing pretending that you don’t have something, that you are somehow deficient in who you are? When you affirm something in a tone of supplication or incompleteness, your actions speak louder than words. What you are actually affirming is that you are needy and incomplete. And then we wonder why we keep getting more of the same.

Wayne delivers us to a true affirmation which is, simply, a statement of the truth. With these affirmations, you acknowledge your relationship with Source, and are thus actually affirming something that you truly want, and that the universe would have for you as well.

A feeling of wanting or needing money is one that many people can identify with. A low-level affirmation would go something like, “I want to be wealthy.” What you are actually affirming here is that you are deficient in wealth and that wanting is very important to you. Since you are deficient now, you are setting up an unreachable goal, asking for something in the future. Since you can only have in the present, you will go on wanting indefinitely, and your wanting will intensify.

A higher-level affirmation would go something like, “I have great wealth now.” Notice how this affirmation is immediately more powerful because it puts you in the moment, where all power is. It also makes use of another one of Wayne’s teachings, that you must keep the end in mind, that you must operate as if you have the result now.

But this last affirmation can still be practiced quite selfishly, placing the emphasis on “I”. More powerful affirmations would move closer toward the truth. An affirmation inspired by Hale Dwoskin’s, “The Sedona Method”, might go something like, “I allow myself to have great wealth now.” The amazing thing about “The Sedona Method” is that the simple techniques operate from an assumption of who you really are. The real you is actually impartial. It understands that wealth and poverty are interchangeable. With this affirmation, you are free to be wealthy, but by no means do you have to be wealthy. This helps alleviate any unconscious impulse you may have to create wealth in compensation for some kind of felt deficiency. What’s most important is who you are, not what your manifestation is.

The affirmation from “Excuses Be Gone” is, “I am connected to an unlimited source of abundance.” As with the previous affirmation, this lets go of having to control the outcome. It is a statement of pure fact, from the point of view of Source. It opens the door for complete trust. Who you are is abundance. Do you really need to control exactly what the manifestation of abundance looks like in your life? Can you really even know what it’s supposed to look like? Perhaps the force that powers every molecule in the universe knows a little more about it than you. When you give up control, you are freed to be yourself.

In this story, the young monk is stuck on a rule: “Never touch a woman.” You can see the pitfalls of religion in this, the cost of taking a spiritual guideline literally. It causes you to not see the forest for the trees, takes you out of the moment, leaving you wrestling with a concept, as if the invented concept was somehow more important than life itself.

I am often amused at people using the terms religion and spirituality interchangeably. Religion is obviously a control structure, where inspiration is turned upside down and the rules are placed on top. This is evident in the beliefs being concretized in the early Christian epistles and reaches a pinnacle in things like the Catholic elite holding conferences to definitively decide, and then proclaim, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin (1000, by the way).

How many people have been helped by knowing the quantity and position of dancing angels? I would venture to say none. Undoubtedly, though, more than a few egos have gotten off on this piece of “knowledge”, and the idea that the holding of it provides some kind of authority advantage.

In apostle Paul’s epistles, he refers to Jesus of Nazareth as “lord”. In 1 Corinthians, he condemns an immoral member “to Satan for the destruction of his flesh”. It’s scary that you could be an apostle to someone like Jesus and still miss some main points. But this is the fine line in the world of the ego.

The ego is the concept of yourself that comes about by you identifying with something that you are not. Most of us don’t know the difference between who we really are and the concept of who we are. This is where the fine line comes in. If you hear a piece of information through a concept of yourself, you will mis-hear the information. You will miss the point.

The ego is only an idea, and lives only in a world of ideas. It only survives by getting you to consistently enforce or reinforce old ideas, or to generate compatible new ideas. These ideas are constructed around core ideas like superior and inferior, worthy and unworthy, good and bad, and right and wrong.

The young monk in the story is not able to access the truth because he is stuck on an idea of right and wrong. More specifically, he thinks that the actions of the body are more important than those of the heart. In other words, he is stuck on form and is missing the content.

This is the nature of identification. As soon as you identify with the body, you are in a losing game, and have given birth to the ego. The ego can now use all the frailties and imperfections of the body against you, and you will shudder and cower at its judgments. And, the more you identify with these judgments, the more you become entrenched in the game of judgment, the game of the ego.

Rules become workable when you recognize them for what they are. I had a good friend who used to say that “everyone’s instincts are right.” It’s just the implementation that suffers. So, can you see why and how the rule was created? Can you recognize it for its true intent?

Perhaps we do this in an effort to reduce the mental and emotional pain that almost every life entails. As the mind is a great master in the art of delayed gratification, it has the ability to spread out pain into the past and into the future. This relieves us of the burden of having to experience our pain all at once.

Of course, what seem like the past and the future to the mind are just ideas. One of the things the mind really does to mitigate pain is to use ideas as distractions away from other ideas. Notice that distracting yourself with a new idea does not solve the problem. It is a level of avoidance. Your consciousness will be lowered depending on how much energy you use to shield yourself from the process.

The other way the mind mitigates pain is by using a new idea as leverage against another idea. If my first interpretation of an experience is one of discomfort, then I can use another idea to justify tolerating the first idea. This justification will be effective to the extent that the rest of the mind’s logic is in agreement.

So, this sounds pretty useful, to be able to reduce my stress with ideas. But, it’s interesting to note that the original pain was just a perception. It in itself was just an idea. So, the mind uses ideas as buffers to protect itself against its own interpretations.

Note that this is a great way to ensure the persistence of both the perception of pain and the need for its alleviation, as one feeds the other.

Having a direct experience of your pain bypasses this dysfunctional duality. In the mind’s logic, experiencing uncomfortable sensations directly can only be uncomfortable. In truth, nothing mitigates pain like direct experience. It can cause pain to disappear, and can even be euphoric. Using your energy to attend to the truth in the moment, it seems, grants access to your latent powers.

“Surely, this next book will contain the answer I’m looking for, even though I’ve already read dozens of other self-help books. I just need one more meditation tape. Maybe this incense will do it, or this bell. This bell has such a magical sound, and it is different than all others I’ve tried.”

This thinking that we need only to “add the missing element” hints at a superstitious past and also betrays a presupposition that the nature of things is somehow defective or incomplete. Partly out of fear and partly in an attempt to “fix” things, we take matters into our own hands. Taking matters into our own hands leads to imbalances of its own. It has led, for example, to an excessive emphasis in the creation and belief of the need for drugs.

Even though most drugs don’t work, and their side-effects are often as damaging as the diseases they claim to solve or mitigate, we continue to hope for that miracle cure. We really haven’t changed any since the days of the alchemists. We’re still looking for the fountain of youth. We’re still looking for that magic elixir, hidden somewhere in the world, that will solve all of our ills.

The thinking that we can find a “miracle cure” reinforces our deep-seated quick-fix mentality, our hope in a never-ending womb-like comfort (along with the ego’s self-gratification in its own cleverness). What we’re really hoping for is that we won’t have to change ourselves, that we won’t have to do the real work. The truth is that you don’t have to change yourself and you have to do the real work.

Of course, it’s your true self that you don’t have to change. The false self, the ego, the personality, will have to undergo many changes. All that’s needed, however, is for you to focus on your true self, and to allow any falseness to fall away in its own time and of its own accord. This is a very natural cleansing process.

That the “real work” entails suffering is a matter of perspective. The falseness is just dirt on the gemstone. There was never anything wrong with the gem, it was just covered with grime from the road of your travels. The more you are identified with the “dirt”, the more releasing the “dirt” will seem like work. All struggle will originate with the lack of clarity that you have between your true self, that which you have always been, and your false self, the ideas of yourself that you have fallen for along your way.

So, you can trust the nature of things completely. The universe is almost infinitely smarter than your ego. As Jesus implied, you have to give up who you think you are to become who you really are. The ego is who you think you are, the concept of yourself. You are just yourself. Do you want to be yourself, or do you want to live one step removed, through an idea?

When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
Anything your heart desires
Will come to you

At some deep inner place, I think we all feel like we deserve everything, that we are the center of the universe (in its most holistic sense), that we are the forgotten princess or prince in an estranged land, that we have been given the keys to a great kingdom, but we have forgotten where we left them.

To escape sentimentality and emotionalism (while trying not to run away from them), we can follow a reasoning akin to Ockham’s Razor, that the simplest thing must be true. What if, simply, you are the star?

This you would be your true self. Your true self is simply you in your true nature. It is everything you need. It is whole. It is complete. It is fulfilled. It is perfect, not as a static object of perfectionism, but as an emanation or beingness complete in its own nature.

You are an emanation of Source. Would Source create you, or create space for your beingness, and then leave you stranded in a dark alley of the universe without giving you the tools you need for your journey? This would presume that you had somehow been separated from life. This would seem to require some effort on the part of Source itself. A simpler answer would be that you are always within the field of life. So, what, then, creates the experience of separation, of needing to struggle for your existence, or to fight for what is yours?

Source, in its infinite expression, gives you the freedom to choose your own identity. You can maintain your identification with Source (stay in the Garden of Eden), or you can choose anything else to identify with, like your body or your mind, and you can even choose to deny your existence as an emanation of Source, or even to deny the existence of Source itself.

So, you are free to journey without Source, to see what you can accomplish, or create, on your own. You are free to delve into selfishness. To the extent that you disidentify with, or separate from, Source, is the extent to which you become your false self. Being a separate self provides for some gratifications and pleasures in selfishness. You get to think you did it all on your own. It can also be very lonely. Inevitably, you discover that the best moments of your existence were the ones in which you forgot about yourself, that is, forgot about your false self, and operated, consciously or unconsciously, in the backdrop of Source.

If you are the star, then you serve as your own compass. You need only follow yourself to your destination, to your “fate”, to your destiny. Certainly, this is too simple, too easy. Don’t I need to discover something, uncover something, find something lost, find some buried treasure, search some deserted ruins, use an ancient incantation employed with the right tone to find myself or my answer?

Go ahead. But what if what’s simple is true? What if following your true self as your own North star is challenging enough, is fulfilling enough? Do you really need to add drama on top of it?

By the way, a journey into selfishness is a journey into drama. False journeys cannot add to your true self, to your “treasures in heaven”. False journeys can only add to the stories that surround your false self. Your true journey may well appear boring from the outside, and it won’t be satisfying to your false self, but it will fill your true self completely.

When I can stay myself around my family, I am able to enjoy them. I experience love for them. I can see the positive aspects of them. If I don’t stand up for what I want now, or fall into an old family role, my enjoyment vanishes. I become resentful. I begin to see mostly the negative aspects of my family members. I have lost my separation.

When those in intimate relationships lose their separation, the spark goes away. Like spark plugs in a car, if there’s no gap, the engine doesn’t fire. It requires separation for the spark to fire and the vapors to ignite. As soon as I become you, or you become me, the battery goes dead. The polarity goes away. The potential is gone. I stop being able to see you. I begin to see you through a concept. I begin to act out a predetermined role. Expectation fills in where surprise used to be. You may say that it’s normal to fall out of love at some point. Maybe, though, our desires for stability and control put out the flames of love.

Spiritual people know that not giving in to your worldly pleasures opens you up to experience true pleasures, treasures greater than you’ve ever imagined. This is true because you begin to put your energy, your faith, in the right place. When the pleasures of the world become too great, when all that glitters becomes gold, you put outer things before inner things. You put temporary things before eternal things. Your relationship with the temporal becomes stronger than your relationship with your Source. The farther a seeker moves into the outer world, the farther away the flame in their heart appears to be. The less fulfilled the seeker feels on the inside, the more they grasp for the outside. Outer pleasures become a vicious cycle. Indeed, you can’t ever be satisfied by things that aren’t truly satisfying.

When you know that there is nothing greater than your Source, when you know that your Source is everything that you’ll ever need, you become completely full and filled. Everything, and everyone, in the world then becomes beautiful. You don’t need anything, or anyone, in the world to determine your state of being, so you become free to be able to enjoy anything, or anyone, in the world. Your separation gives you an appreciation and a gratitude for everything that exists. Certain Buddhist monks practice predominantly the art of seeing beauty in everything. When you put your Source first, this is a natural outcome.

I’m still blown away by the miraculousness of this. Why isn’t somebody skywriting this in the sky every day over our cities and towns? You gain everything simply by putting first things first. I knew but I didn’t know.

Like most things in the realm of powerful truth, it’s a slippery paradox. “Subtle is the Lord”, said Einstein. God doesn’t sell God. It’s a shame, for those of us not always sure what to do with our attention, or those of us who haven’t yet committed fully to relinquishing control of our lives to a greater power, the only power that really matters, our true self, the Source of life.

Every day or so, Bill would call me and check on my progress. I was enjoying having something to do each morning for someone else. There is nothing like using healing abilities to try to be of service. Bill would tell me about the Moroccan sorcerers and about his wife’s family and about their experiences with the embassy. With each new bit of information, I would delve deeper into the world of his wife’s day-to-day life.

It was all going great until his wife had a breakdown episode. She was very sensitive to energy, and the healings were affecting her directly, and immediately. Bill let me know and urged me to change my healing techniques. Though it wasn’t my typical style, I took it on as a challenge. I would try to direct my healing efforts in such a way as to affect Bill’s wife in the least manner possible.

Now, this wasn’t the easiest thing to do, as it isn’t usually possible to tell what the effects of any given healing will be. By its nature, the pathway of energy is like the path of a lightning strike. You can know basically how lightning appears and moves, but you can’t predict where its going to strike exactly. So, some healing efforts would work, and others would trigger an unexpected reaction in Bill’s wife. I adjusted my technique as best I could. It was turning out to be an impossible task.

Eventually, Bill got angry with me. He said, “I want you to get my wife home without her having to go through anything.” Bill finally made clear what I had sensed all along. I was failing in his eyes because I couldn’t deliver on the typical Western expectations of “control your reality”, “make it happen” and “I shouldn’t have to change to get what I want”. Bill would ultimately ask me to stop healing altogether.

If I’d told another healer about Bill’s attitude, we would have had a good laugh over it. It’s ludicrous to think that you can go on any worthwhile journey without being altered by it in some way. And why would you want to do otherwise? From a spiritual perspective, what’s truly important is the soul that you’re creating through your life experiences and your responses to those experiences. Do you really want an empty gift, one that you haven’t earned?

It’s a shame that Bill and his wife and I couldn’t have on a physical level what I had experienced with them on a spiritual level. I grew and changed with Bill’s wife as I worked with her and performed healings on those around her. I knew that the real reason Bill called me was to get spiritual communication and validation for himself, and I did my best to provide this for him. I will never be the same from the experience. That’s the amazing that about spiritual growth. It’s growth that you never give back. It can never be taken away from you.

You are the true gift. The greatest gift that you can ever give anyone, including yourself, is the gift of your true self. When you get an opportunity to polish the diamond that you are, take it as the gift that it is.

The focus of existence in this reality is our physical body. Our bodies are conduits of life. The more cluttered they are with obstructions, the less they can pass the vital life force energy. True freedom can be found in two forms related to this. You can transcend the physical body, achieving a consciousness whereby the physical body has relatively little importance in relation to your true self and your true life. This is the ultimate path of enlightenment as, in the end, the physical body cannot be counted on. It is always temporary. It’s something that we have to come to terms with.

The full expression of a human being would include the health and vibrancy of the physical body as well as that of the true self. In fact, having a healthy spirit, and an unhealthy body, is somewhat of a lie. Can you really have one without the other?

The second level of true freedom can be found in the body. You can relieve the sources of obstructions to its vital life force energy.

Most of us engage in bypasses to true freedom. We think we can outwit our destiny, and thus we seek shortcuts to bliss. We settle for false bliss in pleasure-seeking. Inherently, there is nothing wrong with pleasure. Pleasure and pain are enforcers of truth. The body, however, can be trained to experience true pleasure. It’s opposite, and typical manifestation, is addictive pleasure, those pleasures which we aren’t in control of. Of course, the mind will pretend that it is in control, and this obscures the addiction.

Denying the body is a form of trying to transcend the physical structure before you are ready. You are done with pleasure when you are done. Can you admit to yourself that you are a pleasure-seeker and that this is where you are right now?

Obsessively engaging in trying to remove obstacles to health in your personal sphere is also an avoidance technique. Health is important. It affects everything that you do. But, if your life becomes about removing obstacles, haven’t you lost a real life?

Most “problems” disappear when we get out of their way. In the West, where the mind is king, how do you accept the idea that, most of the time, all you really have to do is observe the situation? Your attention is ultimately all-powerful. It is the great solvent of your reality, a stream of life that flows down, in its own time, and cleanses all things.

Being present solves most issues. That’s because you are part of life. Life always works out. You can separate yourself from life to the extent that you engage in the identification with mental abstractions. Ultimately, though, life will fold you back in, and won’t take any consideration of your comfort.

Being present means facing our own foolishness, our own baggage. We’ve all done things that we aren’t proud of, and even that we can’t forgive ourselves for. But, facing these things is only a problem if we have accepted the notions of others into our personal sphere. The ideas and thoughts of other people become judgments in our own consciousness. Only your own ideas truly work for us.

At some point, we have to either kick out all of the notions of others from ourselves, or we have to transform them into our own ideas through full acknowledgment. In the latter, the foreign substance gets expelled anyway, as its nugget is freed in the fire of your awareness.

That judgment doesn’t work is a frightening concept for the Western mind. Conventional wisdom would say that without judgment, we would be surrounded by chaos and anarchy. That’s because the mind takes everything to be equal to everything else. Though the physical world and spiritual world mirror each other, they are not identical. You could restrain a violent person, because that is what works on a physical level, without being in judgment of that person. The physical action doesn’t change. The reason for the restraint does. This completely alters the quality of the encounter.

Judgment is pernicious. All the concepts that we have accepted from others, we unconsciously turn onto ourselves, and worse, onto those around us. We force others to live by the same set of rules that we feel forced to live by. “Everyone has to follow the rules.” “Everyone has to be treated the same.” Again, the mind takes a spiritual truth to be a global truth. You could certainly, for example, treat everyone as an emanation of the divine, without forcing them all to have a Spam sandwich for lunch.

Non-judgment is the great dissolver of ills. Your true awareness doesn’t contain any judgment. Judgment limits your awareness by denying you access to that which is interpreted as unacceptable. You become obligated to blind yourself to the full spectrum of life within you and around you.

Under the microscope of judgment, all of your personal history takes on a charge. This makes it difficult to allow things to be as they are. The things in your past deemed negative can loom large, hanging over you like a dark cloud. With just a moment of silence, you can hear the skeletons rattling in your closet. This is all thanks to judgment. Take away the judgment, and you have a patchwork quilt, a mandala, of almost infinite breadth, of indescribable depth and beauty. Behold the splendor of your true self.