A Philosophy to Live By

The following philosophical notes are meant to supplement the twenty-one modules of course notes that make up A Course in Happiness.

It is hoped that the selected entries provide useful insights for any person seriously seeking self-advancement through higher awareness.

The notes have been categorized under a variety of sub-headings ranging from
Acceptance to Understanding.
By clicking on the heading of your choice, you will be taken directly to that section without the need to scroll down the page.

ACCEPTANCE

Self acceptance.
It’s more important to be the right person rather than to find the right person. You are perfectly okay just the way you are. The world has a place for you and that perfect place is exactly where you are right now. You are the equal of everyone and everyone is the equal of you.

Inner peace.
We can never really be at peace until we learn to enjoy our own company. After all, we are the person to whom we are the closest. We are with ourselves every second of every minute. If we can’t enjoy, value and accept that person, how can we possibly experience inner peace?

Compassionate acceptance of others.
As we grow beyond the demands of our own ego self, we learn to emotionally accept people exactly as they are, complete with foibles and perceived shortcomings.

I’m OK, they’re OK.
As we come to appreciate ourselves more, and thereby become more loving and tolerant, we will also develop a deeper appreciation of other people and a greater tolerance and acceptance of them.

Non interference.
There are few actions that bring greater joy and happiness to other people than to honor and respect them by leaving them alone and let them be whatever they wish to be.

Live and learn.
You always have a choice. You can accept events which have happened as simply over and worth learning from, or you can let your ego-self become upset about them. Remember, the world itself doesn’t assess and evaluate events, it simply has them.

How great is your acceptance?
Can you love and accept others even knowing their non-acceptance of you? Can you love them regardless of how they feel about you? It is a measure of our growth if we love for the sake of loving, whether that love is returned or not.

Most problems are in the mind, not out in the world.
If you think you have a problem, accept that your belief systems (thoughts) are giving you trouble, not the world. For example, if you’re unemployed and believe immigration contributes to unemployment, the problem is in your attitudes, not the immigration policy.

Embracing the extended Self.
You cannot accept and embrace something and expect it to instantly go away. It doesn’t work that way. Whatever you have created as a problem outside of yourself becomes part of you by extension. By accepting and embracing the situation, you’re accepting and embracing yourself.
This way you’re not striving for external changes “out there,” but change through acceptance and acknowledgment inside.

Zen acceptance.
“If you understand, things are just as they are.
  If you do not understand, things are just as they are.”
This is the essence of acceptance and the way of arriving rather than striving.

Letting things just BE.
People are the way they are, and your need to dominate or change them in any way is a demand of the lower mind — the ego-mind.

Tolerance.
One of the first steps along your path to higher understanding is learning tolerance—tolerance in allowing things to just be. This means seeing and accepting the world as it is, rather than how you demand it to be.
Your ego will argue that tolerance must mean permitting criminal behavior and social problems, but a higher awareness knows that letting go of intolerance does not imply an endorsement of evil. The “evils” that exist in the world are independent of your opinions about them.

Honoring others.
Each person is at a different stage of development, but no single person is of greater value than another. The ego may wish to judge, but it’s wise to allow and honor others their place in the evolving drama simply by letting them be.

Preferences.
In the world of truth and true perception, there are no winners, no losers, only participants in life acting out their chosen role on the world stage.
A silver coin has two sides — opposites. The two sides are essential parts of the whole. I might prefer the coin displayed two heads, but my judgement-free preference and choice does not affect the monetary value of the coin in any way. To prefer one situation in life over another is an acceptable choice as long as I don’t allow the ego to judge and devalue the less preferred choice.

Using your willpower.
You tap into your own willpower when you can observe yourself getting angry or frustrated — and with a knowing smile, you’re able to let go of the emotion, because you see the futility in owning it.

Addictive Demands

Tunnel vision.
Addictive demands are the debilitating tools of the ego mind. They’re the potholes in the road to happiness. They act as blinkers to true perception and restrict us to a tunnel vision view of life and the world around us. Addictive demands keep us from accepting ourselves and others. They make us emotionally and intellectually reject others and ourselves.

The “musts” and “shoulds” of addictive demands.
An addiction is an emotionally created demand or expectation of how we or others should or must not be. An addictive demand connects us to something we feel we must have in order to be happy.

Emotional smoke-signals.
You recognize addictive demands by becoming aware of your emotions. You must develop awareness of what you are feeling, rather than what you are thinking.

Ego demands.
Your habitual mental demands actually cause you to make yourself unhappy, but the demanding ego mind creates the misleading belief that other people or events are making you unhappy. When your ego causes you to become emotionally upset, you’re caught in a demand.
Your ego will try to distract you from identifying an addictive demand when it occurs. It will assure us we don’t have an addiction whenever we demand “I am right and they are wrong.”

A cultural virus.
We have been conditioned, over many generations, to feel fearful. Our culture’s deeply imbedded demands were around long before we arrived on the scene. Addictive demands are like a negatively-charged virus passed on from one generation to another, stripping us of independent thought, and perpetuating negative thinking and behavior.

Reliving the past.
The first reaction most people have when it’s suggested they let go of  their collection of addictive emotional demands is one of apprehension. These addictive emotions played a vital part in the various survival mechanisms developed way back in their early childhood. After all, isn’t the fact that they have survived up to this present day an indication that these addictions work? Even if their life has been one of constant conflict and suffering, they will tenaciously hang on to their addictions. They will find every excuse to hang on to the past, because as difficult as it was, relived memories of the past helps the ego feel safe and secure.

What did I do?
Remember that it is other people’s expectations and addictive demands that cause their emotional displays, not the things you say or do. Don’t buy into their ego and your ego trying to put the blame onto you. They, and they alone, are responsible for their own addictions, not you!

Seek to understand their addiction.
Ask questions of your partner in order to understand their basic interests and concerns.
In other words, their ego needs. Keep verifying their beneficial positive intentions by asking them,
“If you get what you want, (need fulfillment), how will you feel?”

What will people think?
One of the surest clues you are being controlled by your addictive demands, is if you are continuously asking yourself, “What will people think?”
If you are constantly concerned about what other people might think — then your life does not belong to you — it belongs to others.

Wrong Way . . . Go Back!
Whenever we think such thoughts as, “What will people think?” — regard such thoughts as a
warning sign similar to those we see on expressway exits —“Wrong way . . . Go Back.”
We are thinking the wrong way when we place the opinions of others before our own.

Choosing the peaceful way.
The ego, through its addictive demands, can interfere with your peace by condemning you or choosing to attack someone else. It’s important not to underestimate your ego’s potential for disturbing your inner peace even when you feel your mind is focused and conflict free.

Peaceful transformations.
When we accept inner peace for ourselves, peace is received to some degree by all others we come in contact with. This is how the world could be transformed, and not by our attacking those who are themselves in favor of attack.

Breaking the habits of the ego.
Why does a person fail to break an addictive habit? Because the very self who is trying to break the habit is the same self trapped by it. A new sense of Self is required. When a man discovers this new Self, he also breaks the habit.

Objects and addictions.
If you are addicted to someone else, you are treating that person as an object.
When love is replaced by an object, the result is addiction.

Always.
A key word in recognizing addictive demands is always. As soon as your mind tells you something “always happens,” you are in the grip of an addiction. “Always” is never true; reality isn’t a vast, fixed scheme trapping you without choice. Letting go is a deeply personal choice — you are going to have to be your own teacher. During times of duress and stress, look for the pearl of wisdom within the drama. Pause and tell yourself, “There is something here for me, if I have the awareness to find it.”

Ego can delay your growth.
You can delay your conscious growth by many years if you insist in criticizing, analyzing and pointing out the emotion-backed demands of others. Your ego knows the best way to defend its own demands is to attack. It’s helpful to remember that your growth does not require you to rescue others from their addictive demands. It is not your responsibility. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of each person to rescue themselves.

Security addictions.
Ever noticed how often inner feelings of insecurity and fear are associated with the future? Some of us are always worried about what terrible event may happen next. People tend to forget that the same haunting thoughts accompanied them throughout the entire length of the past year, and yet no terrible thing ever did eventuated. Learning to live only in the now moment is the best antidote for fear and insecurity.

Sensory addictions.

Power addictions.

Success.
Quite often the more a person becomes outwardly successful, the less successful he is on the inside. Anxiety, ulcers and heart disease tend to increase in line with external symbols of “success.”

Anger

Returning anger.
We may feel relaxed after a particular explosive release of anger, but unless awareness intervenes, we still retain the addictive demands that make us vulnerable to similar situations in the future.

Anger on demand.
If you say “You made me angry,” you’re operating from a common fallacy. A more accurate statement might be, “When you do that, my ego-mind triggers my demanding programming which automatically stimulates my anger.”
Notice that when you’re caught in an illusion such as, “You make me angry,” you have put your happiness into someone else’s hands. You see yourself as their victim, and mistakenly blame them for your suffering.

Programmed mind.
Do I become angry because you criticized me? No—I get angry because my programming demands that you do not criticize me. My demand is the direct cause of my anger, while my anger is the effect of my demand.

Preferential choice.
By turning a demand into a preferential choice, the problem of emotion suppression or expression doesn’t come up. We have removed the cause (our demands), and not just dealt with the effects (our anger).

Proving a point.
Some angry people are so blinded by anger that they lose sight of any positive goal. They are often more intent on proving a point than solving a problem.

Suppression.
Sometimes we try to suppress or repress our anger only to have it emerge in another form as stress or disease.

Attachment - Detachment

Emotional bonding.
Attachment refers to an emotional bonding, say between two people, where the element of dependency is present in the relationship. The need for attachment does not necessarily abate as we mature.

A lack of self-acceptance.
A person attached to another identifies his happiness with that person, meaning he projects the cause of his happiness outside himself. This always indicates lack of self-acceptance — which is self-denial.

Separation anxiety.
Adult attachment is similar to child attachment where anxiety can result at being separated from the mother.

Attachments to beliefs.
Many people are so attached to what they already believe that they insist that everyone who disagrees with them is wrong.

Attachment to being right.
Many scientists differ in their opinions on how the universe operates, and yet the universe still operates independent of our opinions about it. Man’s theories of right or wrong do not impact on the universe. The universe simply is the way it is.

Attachment to winning.
If we play competitively and our opponent scores more points or “wins,” what have we really lost? We simply went out and played a game. Having nothing at the start of the game, we lost nothing. An attachment to wining means we are the score or the performance. Suffering results when we see ourselves as having lost something.

Attachment to money.
If you feel you must have money in order to feel happy and successful, you are attached to money.

Attachments to opinions.
We must learn how to detach ourselves from our attachments to other people’s opinions and how we are perceived by others. Many of us have grown up believing what we do really matters. Then we worry about how it will be perceived. We focus on external opinions, and consequently cannot simply be.

The middle way.
If you maintain equal detachment to both pleasantness and unpleasantness, both conditions will work themselves out, and you will have balance. A lack of extreme anguish and a lack of extreme elation. You will have equanimity. The middle way is one sure way to true happiness.

Stillness.
Stillness comes only when there is detachment from everything, whether it be confusion or peace, sadness or happiness. Detach yourself from the need to hold on to things and people. Every attachment is an impediment to living in a higher state of awareness and happiness.

Demanding conformity.
Unconditional love allows your partner the freedom to be unlike you, whereas attachment demands they conform to your needs and desires. Unconditional love imposes no demands. Attachment expresses an overriding demand— “Make me feel whole!”
Unconditional love expands beyond the limits of two people. Attachment tries to exclude everything but two people. Controlling equates to attachment. Allowing equates to non-attachment.

How can you enjoy the moment if you continually live for the future?
Some people become so attached to their demands of accumulating more wealth for their future, that they forget to live in the present.

Are you the owner or are you owned?
Most people pride the things they own, but most are in fact owned by their possessions—by their attachment to possessions. In fact, we never really “own” anything — we are more like temporary custodians.

Nothing is owned forever.
All things are in transition. All things are circulating, landing in our laps for us to enjoy momentarily and then they get back out and about, recirculating for someone else to enjoy. Everything that was “owned” by a person some years ago is now serving someone else. The land, the car, the house that was thought to be owned is now serving others.

An addiction for “more.”
If you are the sort of person who needs “more” in order to feel complete, then you will still feel incomplete even when you have acquired “more.”

Possessions as symbols.
Many people consider possessions to be extensions of themselves, symbols of their self worth. Viewed in this manner, no possession is neutral, but a symbol of its owner. So strongly has this principle been embraced, that property is often treated as being of equal value as life itself. So ingrained is this attitude in society that its become a case of — who we are is often seen as what we have!

It’s a matter of perspective.
The more riches we develop within, the less we need riches without.

A parent is a guide.
Who can step into a child’s mind? Not even a parent can. No one is allowed to trespass there, and it would be the height of arrogance for parents to think they could change their children’s thoughts and feelings. No parent has that right, because children, like adults, shape their own lives with their own free will. A parent is a guide, no more, no less. If you strongly feel responsible for everything the child experiences, you are standing in the way of his or her own personal development. Nothing encumbers a child more than parental attachment.

Seek only the truth.
Attachment comes from not knowing the truth, and attachment is the very thing that keeps us from the truth. People attach themselves to the past and the future, to material things, to social status and to authority. They attach themselves to their spouse, their children, to land, property or riches. When you have released your attachments, your mind will be free from the suffering that addictions bring.

Observe your doubt rather than own it.
Doubt is produced by the ego. Doubt is not a part of your true self. With this awareness you can choose to observe your doubt rather than own it. Use your capacity to detach yourself from doubt and watch how it enters your inner world. Then watch how doubt literally forces you to act in predetermined and limited ways. This act of detached observation will in itself cause doubt to fade away.

Become the observer.
Begin now to observe things about you and your life. Observe your behavior. Observe your driving habits. Remind yourself that there definitely is an activity called observing, and it includes the observer as well as that which is being observed. Concentrate on being the observer and getting accustomed to going to this place in your consciousness more frequently in your daily life. Observation creates an awareness of your various addictive demands. At this level of awareness you are better able to respond to situations rather than habitually react. By observing from the aspect of a silent witness you are able to passively detach yourself from the drama and its limiting emotions. From this aspect, you are not the event, you are that which is observing it.

See the event without identifying with it.
Being a detached witness does not mean being emotionless. It simply means being free of immobilizing emotions. By becoming a silent witness, you do not become passive or uncaring. You become the observer who sees what is happening for what it is. Free of the drama and its emotions, you are better able to see solutions too. Events are meaningless until the mind allocates an emotion-driven reaction to the event. Most emotions are based on a collection of habits and memories — a set of learned responses to a particular thought pattern. While the emotion-driven ego-mind will evaluate the event, the higher self allows it to unfold free of judgment.

Tools of communication.
You have a body. You own your body but you are not your body. If you make the mistake of believing you are your body, anyone can upset you by making an unflattering remark about your body. You have a mind. You own your mind, but you are not your mind any more than you are the fearful thoughts produced by your mind. Your body and mind are tools of communication through which your real self expresses itself in the physical world.

Discover the big secret.
Being the silent witness lets you in on the big secret; you are not your problems, your frustrations or even your physical experience of life. You are that which is observing it all.

Body and soul.
We are more used to thinking we are a body with a soul than we are to realizing we are a soul with a body. Many people think we are human beings learning to be spiritual. In truth we are spiritual beings learning to be human.

Attitudes

Attitudes of hopelessness.
“Yesterday was awful, today is terrible and tomorrow will be even worse.”
This is the way many fearful people look at life. Do you?

Change your mind and change your world.
The world does not have to change before we can be happy and peaceful. The only thing that has to change is our attitude.

Ego in control.
Our egos have controlled us through fear and pain for so long that we find it hard to believe things can ever be any different. This limiting attitude is exactly what our ego-mind wants us to believe.

Reactive habits.
Attitudes are reactive habits. A set of learned reactions to the trial and error experiments of life.

For us or against us?
Are the attitudes we hold conducive to our growth? Are they working for us or are they in fact working against us?

Reinforce the positive.
It’s better to reinforce a positive attitude than to attack a negative one. Eventually, the strongly reinforced positive attitude will overshadow the negative one.

Positive attitudes.
Instead of “giving up” smoking or drinking etc., “take-up” non-smoking. “Giving up” suggests negativity, while “taking up” suggests a more positive alternative attitude.

Limited by our attitudes.
We are limited by what we have learned from all our yesterdays. This limitation severely hampers our perceptive awareness whenever we try to make sense of what is happening today.

Negative traits.
If you examine any negative trait you insist is in another person, you will find that same trait hiding somewhere in yourself. The more you deny this trait, the more strongly you will have to project it. Projection always hides a feeling you don’t want to look at.

Attitudes, habits and beliefs.
Your thoughts and behaviors are habits resulting from your experiences of life. Many of your attitudes reflect the beliefs and attitudes of others — all the well-meaning people who taught you about life. Life as they interpreted it to be. Teachers, parents, uncles, aunties, siblings and peers — all are tempted to embellish their interpretation of life with personal perceptions based on events in their past.

Awareness

Opportunities for growth.
When we release the past and let go of fears of the future, we come to see that everyone is our teacher and that every circumstance is an opportunity for growth in happiness, peace and understanding.

History lesson.
My reality is more about my history than what you are saying or doing. As I observe it, your reality is more about you and your history than it is about anything I am doing or saying. When I observe an event, what meaning I give to it, what feelings I generate and what I do about it, is about me and my history.

An awareness of past programming.
As you grow in awareness, you’ll be able to watch your ego-mind trigger your own addictive programs, but you will no longer identify yourself with them. You will be able to identify them as programs that were put into your mind sometime in the past.

Insightful awareness.
With growing awareness you’ll gain insights into distinguishing between a person and their programming, disliking their behavior perhaps, but still accepting them as an evolving human being.

Letting go.
Once your analytical mind lets go of an issue, your internal wisdom has a chance to take over. Your thinking is freed and can start to evolve into higher awareness.

Change.
Awareness brings change, but the change need not be only about what you’ve learned, it can also be about what you’ve let go . . . limitation.

Harmonious future.
Living your life in growing awareness is creating a future filled with direction, intention and harmony.

Awareness of the lesson.
The moment the true cause of any imbalance or problem is recognized and faced, the symptom has served its function and ceases to be.

Crisis awareness.
Awareness first enters into an unaware personality through the experience of a crisis. The awakening of the personality to the potential of the higher self sometimes requires the loss of a mate, the death of a child or the collapse of a business, or any other situation that renders the individual powerless.

Be aware of the difference.
Be aware that love is of the soul, fear is of the ego-personality.

Doorways to awareness.
The pains you suffer, the loneliness you may encounter, the experiences that are disappointing or distressing, the addictions and perceived pitfalls in your life are each doorways to awareness.
Within each experience of pain or negativity is the opportunity to challenge the perception that lies behind it, the fear that lies behind it, and to choose to learn with wisdom. When fear ceases to scare you it cannot stay. When you choose to learn through wisdom, to evolve consciously, your fears surface one at a time in order for you to exorcise them with greater awareness. That’s how it happens. You exorcise your fears — your own “inner demons.”

A matter of choice.
A reaction is automatic. It draws upon fixed beliefs and expectations, images of past pain and pleasure residing in memory, waiting to guide you in future situations. If you were bitten by a big dog as a child, seeing a big dog today will make you draw away. Memory has reminded you, in a fraction of a second, that your reaction to big dogs should be fear. Overcoming this or any reaction requires an act of awareness. Awareness doesn’t resist the imprint of memory — it goes into it and questions whether you need it now. When faced by the big dog, awareness tells you that you are not a small child any longer, and that not all big dogs bite. Being aware of this, you can ask if you need to hold on to fear. Whether you wind up patting the dog, ignoring it or withdrawing is now a matter of preferential choice.
Reactions result in a closed set of options; awareness results in an open set of options.

Turn around . . . look at you.
Others are others and you are you. Focus on uplifting your own awareness of self, and yours alone. Polish your own character. Heighten your own spirit. Foster your powers of observation. Until now, you have been focusing your thoughts, energy and sensitivity on other people’s unsatisfactory traits. Turn your focus around 180 degrees and observe yourself. You need not concern yourself with the perceived rights and wrongs of other people. You must awaken to your own identity — your own truth.

Good intentions.
People easily see their own good intentions, but have difficulty seeing the good intentions of others. You achieve trust, by realizing that, like yourself, other people mean well.

What you are, and what you are not.
You are not your body, you possess your body. You are not your mind, you think thoughts with your mind. You are the consciousness that created the thoughts. When you become aware of that consciousness, you become aware of your true self.

Hope is wishing . . . faith is knowing.
Hope is a pessimist looking at things optimistically. Hope is a wish for something better. Those who seek to better their lives through hope seldom witness any improvements. Hope is wishing. Faith is knowing. We are sure of the physical things we see, feel, hear, smell and taste. However,  we have less faith in the reality of the power of mind and the forces of spiritual existence because they do not register within our sensory range. We hope they exist and timidly experiment with them, but because they do not fit into the same patterns of reality of the physical world, ego quickly suggests we abandon them when our first tentative attempts at understanding end in disappointment.

All is One.
One mind, one spirit, one Self pervades the universe, and its purpose is to know Itself. It is primal stuff, the first cause of all things, and is constantly engaged in a work of expanding consciousness.
Neither space nor time exist within it, for it is infinite. Nor does it adhere to any form, for it is all form. It is forever becoming things, and becomes all things; and each form it creates is an expression of its knowledge of itself. It is the eternal Now, which is all times, past, present and future.
It’s one place which is all places and anyplace.
It is invisible. It is spirit. It is intelligence. It is mind. It is love. It is All That Is — it is God.
Incarnating into form, it becomes that form. It is this in man which is immortal — not the body, not the ego, not the personality, but the Self. He who strives to attain awareness of the Self, attains to power.

Let things be.
Higher awareness sees an event as it is and lets it be.
Lower mind sees an event and colors it with the perceptions and interpretations of the ego.

Evolutionary awareness.
Each individual is at a certain evolutionary point of consciousness. Consciousness is an awareness of the truth of yourself or of life. However, because consciousness or truth cannot really vary or have degrees, it is more accurate to say each individual is at a certain evolutionary stage of being less ignorant and less unconscious.

A growing awareness.
Through a renewing of your mind and its attitudes, you will begin to understand that everything that happens to you, no matter how horrendous it seems to you at the time, can be turned into a positive learning experience.

Behavior

Poor programming.
People are not their behavior. Let’s use an analogy to illustrate.
Suppose I have a tape player and I play a tape recording, the sound quality of which I consider to be very poor. Even though I dislike the recording, this does not cause me to dislike the tape player. My tape player simply played the recording. I can dislike the recording being played, and still like the tape player. It’s unwise to judge people by their behavior just as it’s unwise to judge the quality of a tape player by the quality of the recording being played.

Identify the cause.
In trying to understand your own behavior and that of other people, it’s helpful to look for the immediate, practical cause of all emotional reactions. By being able to identify the cause, in which most cases will be an addictive demand, it becomes easier to modify the effects.

Competitive behavior.
Competition is a behavior. A behavior that builds on the personality need of the individual to be faster, cleverer, or richer than the next bloke. Competition is a wasteful process, for every winner comes at the expense of a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand people labeled as losers.

Thought precedes behavior.
All of our behavior results from the thoughts that precede it. Change our thoughts and we change our behavior.

Beliefs

8.h) What is a fact?
Facts are the props in life’s drama, and they change as the actors do, for they emerge to begin with from the actor’s minds and conceptions. Sometimes these facts change dramatically; sometimes they serve for generations, but the actors are alive and real, while the facts are simply the exterior set, secondary, shifting, to be used and discarded as they serve their purpose. Man is not subordinate to the facts . . . he makes them!

A change in beliefs.
When more accurate methods to determine the shape of the planet were discovered, showing it to be spherical instead of flat, many people continued to cling to the old belief despite the new evidence to the contrary. They even persecuted those who had presented the new ideas. Do you fear new ideas? Do you feel threatened when someone questions your belief system? In the past believers who felt threatened resorted to burning books—or the “heretics” who wrote them. Through ignorance, fear, or both, they felt they had to, at all costs, repress that threat to their belief.

Limiting beliefs.
We need to ask ourselves, “Do I really believe this and is it applicable NOW? Does it hamper my progress or free me for growth?” If a particular belief is no longer valid it may be time to discard it.

Belief systems.
Belief systems are made up of our own thoughts and the thoughts of others, congealed layer upon layer around a seed of truth — or a seed of fear.

Scripted beliefs.
Our own personal belief system writes the scripts that we innocently act out. But you must be willing to accept that all beliefs you hold dear are interpretations of what reality is. Your beliefs are your assumptions of how things are. Your ego will have you hanging on to beliefs that are usually based on distorted and negative emotions. It’s a wise practice to test your beliefs by applying rational, logical thinking. Do your belief structures hold up against the clear light of reasoning? Is your view of life one of struggle, turmoil, dissatisfaction and despair? Then chances are your view of reality is being distorted as it filters through an ineffectual belief system. To change your perceptions of life you’ll need to make changes to your attitudes and beliefs.

Reluctance to change beliefs.
We will attempt to maintain our original attitudes for as long as we possibly can, because to test the validity of our beliefs is to challenge and diminish the value of our ego-self, and to challenge and diminish the value of our ego-self is to accept a lessening of “self-worth.”

Reinforcement through repetition.
As you become more and more familiar with an idea through repetitive use, it becomes part of your belief system. Positive or negative, the subconscious cares not.

Opportunity for growth.
When challenged by the beliefs and actions of another, your emotions will remain stable if you are able to simply honor the challenge as an opportunity for inner growth and awareness.

Identity crisis.
Many of us hold on to our beliefs to help give us an identity. It is mainly those beliefs that are keeping us from our greater happiness.

Knowingness.
Peace is found not in beliefs, not in faith, but in knowingness. More than a belief, knowingness is a heartfelt feeling of fullness and completeness.

Eastern and western beliefs.
The Eastern view is that one takes responsibility for one’s life and the possibilities for modifying that life through transcendence and growth. In the West the belief is that God is responsible, which relieves us of the necessity to consider our actions and absolves the individual of the ultimate responsibility.

Traditional beliefs.
An attachment to a tradition often involves creating barriers between people, and shutting out those who are not a part of the tradition.

Body and soul.
By accepting you are a soul with a body rather than a body with a soul you will create for yourself a life that is literally without limitations.

Albert Ellis and his Rational Emotive Theory.
“People and things do not upset us, rather we upset ourselves by believing that they
  can upset us.”

You see what you believe.
If you are blaming and full of condemnation, that is what you believe, and of course, that is what you see as well.

Who says so?
Rather than blindly accept the cultural belief systems of those around us, ask yourself firstly,
“Who says so? . . . where is it written?”  And even if it is written down, does that automatically make it the truth?

Stillness.
From the cradle you have been taught not to be still. People keep you from being still, and you keep them from being still.

Effort is the problem, not the answer.
Just like the person struggling to remember a name but getting nowhere, people thrash wildly to fulfill their desires, never realizing that effort is the problem — not the solution.
Allow yourself to stop believing that struggle is the answer.

Projected beliefs.
Projection distorts our perception; it attaches our beliefs onto other people. A man who believes no one will ever love him, is projecting his own lack of self-acceptance onto others. The internal belief, “I’m not lovable,” is so painful that it cannot be faced, and one way to lessen the pain is to stop claiming it as his own. Instead he decides other people are at fault. They have let him down — they don’t think he’s good enough — they have no wish to love him. In reality, there is no “they”— only projection.

We were taught to know no better!
For ages past, human beings have been taught and guided to focus on their own disharmony, their own imperfection, their own vice. Since they were born, they have lived with the feeling that their imperfect, ailing and “sinful” selves are their true, original selves. They have seen no alternative but to recognize those negative qualities and believe in them. It is a natural law that people’s lives unfold according to their thoughts and beliefs. This is why unhappy things — ugly, inharmonious and imperfect things — keep happening one after another. Set your mind right, and you set your life right.

We believe others know better than us.
As a society, we’ve always listened to the learned, to those who are called leaders, experts or knowledgeable people. In the majority of cases, we’ve accepted their words as being unquestionably true. These are words and ideas that exist on a plane with similar ideas, generated by people who compete with each other for dominance and authority. And still the illusion continues! People still look outside of themselves for the fulfillment of their desires, seeking solutions from those whom they regard as superior to themselves. Isn’t it time for a change in the way we see ourselves and others?

Letting go.
Let go of the belief that more is better. Replace it with the knowledge that peace is better.

Do you believe, or do you know?
A belief is handed to you. A knowing come from within. When you believe in something without knowing it, there is doubt attached to the belief. Beliefs restrict you. A knowing empowers you. Beliefs are transitory and open to change. Knowings are fixed in the eternal. The sun will rise tomorrow morning in the East. We don’t just believe it, we know it and have faith in it.

Eating disorders start in the mind.
Most eating disorders are, initially, efforts to meet a standard of appearance that someone believes will bring happiness. Ego has convinced people with eating disorders that their true essence is located in the value of their appearance to others. They ultimately destroy their bodies trying to make them perfect in the eyes of another. They live their life in servitude to a belief — that “thin” is in — and “fat” is out.

Do you believe in labels?
A résumé is just a box of labels. Try to describe yourself without using any labels. Write a few paragraphs without mentioning age, sex, position, title, accomplishments, accreditations, experiences, heritage or geographical data. Independent of all such labels — who are you really?

Have you found such a person?
Find a man who hates and you will have a man who believes he is hated. Find a man who resents and you’ll discover a man who believes he is resented. Find someone who is bitter and you’ll have someone who believes life is treating him bitterly. Find someone who is without hope and you’ll find someone who really believes no one cares for him. The common belief of all who lack an understanding of love is their conviction that life does not love them.

Blame Game

10.g) Blaming through our addictions.
We usually look at what we don’t have and ignore the “enoughness” of what we do have.
We often blame someone other than ourselves, and this always means we are running one of our addictive programs.

Taking responsibility.
As you begin to grow in awareness you increasingly take responsibility for creating your moment to moment experience of life. You stop accusing other people of “doing it to you”. You see outside events for what they are — learning opportunities. Instead of blaming others with accusing statements like “You make me feel . . . ,” take responsibility for your feelings by starting out with, “I feel  . . .”

Illusionary happiness.
Blaming other people for your internal emotional experience creates the illusion that your happiness is dependent on the thoughts, feelings and actions of other people.

Guilt and blame.
Guilt is a lesson not learned. Blame is a lesson not learned about responsibility. You have created difficulties in your life simply to find the jewel within. You are only here for the experiences to be learned.

The blaming ego.
One of the biggest obstacles you will find on your path to personal growth is when your ego-mind keeps blaming others for your fear, frustration, anger and unhappiness.

Judgment.
Blame is not taking responsibility. Blame is judgmental, and when you are blaming yourself,
you are in judgment of yourself.

Be new and true to yourself.
Don’t blame, don’t complain, don’t accuse, and don't tell your sad story. Be new through a renewal of your mind. Pause . . . hold your newness. The world will always try to drag you backwards, and its most powerful weapon is the past. Don’t look back. Be still. Hold true.

Who is right and who is wrong?
Our ego always wants to see its way clear before it acts. It prefers mental conflict to simple action. It would rather have us bog down and stagnate than see us move forward, and so it uses it’s favorite delaying tactic — the question of who is right and who is wrong.

Body

Who is animating your body?
Your body is not you. If it were, and your leg were amputated, part of your consciousness would be lost with your leg. Neither are you simply brain. If you were only brain, then the rest of the physical body could be stripped away, and the brain would continue to function. The brain itself does not think. Some invisible thinker merely uses the brain as a central receiving station for sensory perception. Someone or something is animating your body, peering through the windows of your eyes, listening at the portals of your ears, using your brain to receive impressions. Invisibly dressed with your physical form, it uses your body as a learning device and a means of communion with physical reality. This something, this thinker, this observer, is the higher Self.

We are not our bodies.
Ignorance begins with the notion, “I am the body.” Test for yourself. What is your biggest problem, your deepest worry? Chances are it derives from your identification with the body, the altar of your ego-personality. Hence the personality, because it has no awareness of its true self or presence, which is beyond problems and death, is ignorance personified. The personality is the cause of all suffering.

Body and choice.
Our body is a teaching machine. It will reflect on its screen the feelings and thoughts we program into it. The entry point for all programs is the mind, and what we see reflected in the body is what we put into our mind. Our body will exhibit thoughts that are conflicted and anxious or ones that are peaceful, loving and happy. The body has no choice in this, but we do.

Outer identification.
We have become so completely identified with our outer trappings—our bodies, brains, egos, wills and personalities, that we have come to believe they are our real selves. So we cater to them and try to keep them happy and satisfied, which is a never-ending task and doomed to failure.

Brain

11.f) The thalamus.
Just below the brain’s cerebellum is an egg-sized bunch of nerves called the thalamus. Think of the thalamus as a switching station for most of our incoming feelings. Its job is to relay those feelings to the frontal lobe of the brain for a response. In effect the thalamus is the seat of our emotions and the cerebellum the seat of our reasoning. Sometimes we react instinctively through the thalamus, instead of allowing time for emotional thoughts to be relayed to the cerebellum whose powers of reason can mediate and determine our response. We therefore have a choice to react emotionally and habitually (addictive programming), or respond rationally via a mediating response through the cerebellum (preferential programming).

A central processing unit.
The brain is a receiver of thought. It cannot, of itself, create thought. The brain is a processing unit, receiving thought images from both the ego-mind and higher consciousness. The brain is simply part of our body. We are not our body.

Brain and mind are not the same.
Many people think of the brain as the mind. Not so. The brain is physical matter and the mind is pure thought energy. The brain is the central processing unit which handles the incoming programming of the mind. We could use a television broadcast as an analogy. The television set (brain) is the receiver. The broadcast station (mind) emits television signals as invisible waves of energy. These modulated waves of energy (thoughts) traverse space and can even pass right through matter such as walls and roofs (and skulls). The television set receives these waves of energy and translates their vibrational frequencies into images and sounds (sensory perception). Miraculously the TV set appears to have a life of its own as it projects images and sounds that originated from a location far removed from your living room. However, you will notice that the TV is dependent on a source of energy in order to perform. Unplugged from its source of power it becomes an inanimate object. Still and lifeless (brain dead).

Transmitted energy.
The energy that transmits the program is the same energy required by the television receiver to convert the transmission into sounds and images. That invisible energy is electricity. Notice that the televison set is not the programming and the programming is not the television set. Both are independent of each other. The television set (the finite brain) is simply an instrument that enables the broadcasting station (the infinite mind) to express its programming (thoughts and emotions).

Universal energy.
We spoke of electricity as the driving force powering both broadcaster and the receiver. What unseen energy powers the brain and the mind? The same all-encompassing energy that powers electricity. Universal energy — the eternal, infinite and omniscient energy of All That Is.

Cause & Effect

Behaviour and response.
Seeing the conduct of those who are monopolized by their egos is not a reason for you to do the same. These people will eventually learn from their behavior. You need to consult the awareness within for your response. This is the way to tame your ego and experience the peace that comes with refusing to judge others.

Effort before results.
We will endlessly complicate our lives when our awareness is focused entirely on results (effects).
It is only the effort (cause) that we control. Simplicity lies in putting effort before results.

Addictions.
If I am addicted to having you not criticize me, and you say something critical, I automatically become angry. The addiction is the Cause of my anger. The anger is the Effect of the addiction.

The peaceful pause.
Next time conflict flares up and emotions threaten to get out of hand, adopt a peaceful pause. Develop the simple practice of pausing, and asking yourself whether your ego, which thrives on turmoil, or your real Self, which loves peace, is about to act. This peaceful pause will help you to send out a peaceful response, even in situations where you are feeling impatient or misunderstood.

The effect of peace within.
When you are dominated by your ego, you tend to dominate others. When you become peaceful within, the effect is an extension of peace toward — and within — others.

The truth is within. The facts are without.
All truth exists within the mind of man and never in the world about him. He who studies the world studies effects. He who studies his own mind studies the cause and source of things as they really are.

A patient acceptance.
Everything has its place and function, relative to one’s stage of development, growth, awareness and understanding. Everything is evolving through experience. There is a reason for everything. There is a cause and effect at work behind everything, so let us try to be patient, understanding and accepting.

Change

A change of heart.
The only way we could really change is to change the way we feel inside. Our thinking changes our outlook, and our behavior follows suit. We can change our minds. We can all change and shift from a negative, judgmental perspective to a positive outlook without any change in circumstances.
We can call this phenomenon a change of heart. A change of heart is preceded by a moment of truth. The moment of truth may be anything from a subtle, unnoticed moment of clarity, to a profound moving and insightful experience. All that is needed for a change of heart is a momentary quiet mind.

Changing others.
To help your mate change, you must totally accept him/her as they are. Otherwise they will resist your judgmental attitude. Those who accept their mate have little need to change them.

The domino effect.
Change works like a domino effect; a thought generates a feeling that in turn motivates a behavior. For example, thoughts about smoking lead to the desire to smoke, which leads to smoking.
If you want to change, trying to stop the fall of the last domino (the behavior), will not do the trick. The feeling is the domino that pressures you to behave in a certain way. Thus if you try not to smoke when you still feel like smoking, you must pit your conscious willpower against your escalating desire, a desire created by powerful programming of the subconscious.
Similarly, if you feel angry, and repress expression of that anger, it will intensify into open hostility. Clearly, the way to change behavior is to change the feeling that motivates the behavior. You do this by changing your thoughts. If, instead of thinking about the perceived satisfaction to be found in smoking, you thought about the many pleasures and personal rewards of becoming a non-smoker, you will generate positive feelings about giving up smoking. It is these feelings that will help reprogram your ego's desire to smoke.

Habits stem from insecurity.
As our attitudinal level of well-being goes up, we are increasingly insulated from the temptations of habit. Conversely, when we feel insecure, habits seems to have a strong hold on us.

Changing habits.
The best way to change a habit is to change the level of your well-being . . . become happier!
When you are happier all your habits are easier to resist. If you raise your level of inner security (your conscious awareness), the habits wont even occur to you.  It’s a mistake to struggle with your habits. You become discouraged and end up making yourself insecure. The insecurity then fuels the habits even further. The internal factors — what we think and how we feel, are forces behind real change. If you try to change at the level of behavior, you are trying to make the tail wag the dog.

Entering the pattern of change.
When you occasionally find yourself falling into an habitual pattern of old attitudes and behaviors, and you do not judge yourself, you’ve started a new pattern of change.

Reluctance to change.
Remember, for a turtle to make any sort of forward progress, he has to stick his neck out.

From personal to global change.
Change at the global level must first begin at the personal level. Change must begin on an inner level before it can manifest in external structures of society and lead to a physically healthier world.
We are assimilating change and evolving as a species at a speed commensurate with the level of
our change in consciousness.

Desire.
To produce real, productive change, there must first be the desire, and the willingness to act upon it.

Remove the blinkers.
We must adjust our current perception about ourselves, about others, and about life, to be able to see clearly what is really going on.

Stress brought on by change.
Usually we mentally accept the concept of change long before we come to terms with it emotionally. Accepting change on the emotional level takes place gradually over a period of time.
Logically we may see the advantages of the particular change and so be mentally willing to accept it. Emotionally it may be a different matter altogether. Mood swings and anxiety could be an initial effects of change. But remember, although we may associate risks with change, in the final wash-up, risks are nothing more than thoughts.

Free the serfs!
We do not have to be shackled to negative emotions. By inviting change into our lives, we can become free human beings exercising our own free wills, instead of emotional serfs, chained to society’s addictive demands.

The future remains unwritten.
What happens to us today need not be a confirmation of what always was and always will be. Today is but one page in the book of our lives, and the future pages still remain to be written.
We can all learn to change. Our behavior is not locked in as a fixed, inflexible part of our character. We have merely responded so consistently and predictably that our reinforced behavior has hardened like a callus into a habit that only seems like part of our natural makeup.

Safer to reject.
Many people reject new ideas for the safety of those to which they have become so comfortably accustomed.

What are you for?
If you are against terrorism and war, you become part of the problem. You are one more soldier fighting for what you believe in. Instead of being against terrorism and war, try being for peace. Everything that you are against, works against you. When you are able to state what you are for, you are focusing on the potential for positive change.

The old way didn’t work anyway.
The ability to change is quite easy if we remind ourselves that the old direction did not exactly deliver us to the realms of peace in the first place.

Peer pressure.
In your quest for higher levels of conscious awareness, you will encounter people applying covert pressure upon you to give it up, merely because it doesn’t fit in with their image of you. Your personality characteristics have become part of the group dynamic they’re comfortable with, and any change in you implies the danger of change for them also.

Change what can be changed, accept that which can’t be changed.
There are some things you simply cannot change, but you can acquire the skills for coping with what you can’t change. It is said inherited personality traits can’t be changed, but there is no doubt learned attitudes can be changed!

Surrender.
The more you stay with what you are accustomed to, the more you will hang on to the worries and stresses that are of the external, physical world.

Changing the world.
Ego wants you to believe that you must be upset and anguished to prove you are a worthy person who cares about world problems. This ego-agitated approach to problems prevents you from ever becoming part of the solution for things that can be changed. You can’t change the world, but by changing the way you think, you can change the way you see the world.

Change as the catalyst.
Change is the catalyst for inner growth. As understanding grows, it allows one to embrace change without fear. Progress is more quickly achieved by learning to adapt to change and rid the mind of old habits which serve only to impede one’s development.

Change need not be a struggle.
The caterpillar, a seemingly insignificant creature by the egotistical standards of man, is a miracle worker. It has the amazing ability to transform itself from one type of living being into another.
When viewed through time lapse photography this miraculous change is effortless and struggle-free.
If a lower species such as a caterpillar has the ability to make such monumental changes within itself, how much greater is our potential for change? Especially when you consider we have the gift of a free will and free mind at our disposal. The caterpillar didn’t achieve change through struggle.
It simply became still. Be still. Allow the metamorphosis to begin within you, and like the butterfly, you will eventually awaken to discover a whole new world opening up for you.

Confusion within the illusion.
One could fill a whole book on how doubt inhibits man’s progress, but suffice to say, doubt is one of the big guns the ego uses to help create confusion within the illusion.

Stagnate or grow.
Change is the only constant in life. Everything is undergoing some change of some sort. Nothing remains the same — even you. You can accept change and grow, or you can struggle through life hanging on to all your old attitudes and beliefs, stagnating in the process. You can accept change and grow, or refuse change and stagnate. The choice, as always, is entirely up to you.

Change at the physical level.
When you make the choice for change you make it from a mental level. However, as the mental choice for change manifests itself into more positive attitudes to life, you can expect to feel and experience some change on the physical level. By releasing negative beliefs from your system you are removing blockages in your emotional and physical bodies. This comes about because the body and its energy system are totally integrated with the mind.

Awakening pains.
For the individual starting to wake up and become more conscious, old habitual emotions start reasserting themselves, causing bouts of resentment, anger and sullen resistance to the workings of Universal Law.

Choice

Free will, free mind.
We are free to choose the thoughts we put into our mind and simply by changing these thoughts we are able to change our experience.

To change your world, change your mind.
In order to perceive the world differently, it is imperative we learn to retrain our minds and realize we can regain control over our thoughts  . . . we can choose the thoughts we want to have in our minds.

Freedom via the power of choice.
I claim my freedom by exercising the power of choice to see people and events with acceptance instead of fear. Fear or acceptance — it’s up to us to choose which voice we want to hear.

It’s our decision.
Peace or conflict is always our choice. We are truly responsible for what we experience.
Peace doesn’t come to us by chance or good luck. Peace or conflict always comes from a decision we have made ourselves. If you prefer peace, choose to make a conscious decision for peace.
If you seek conflict, simply hold on to habitual thoughts that are hostile and judgmental.

A new way of playing the game.
With the freedom of choice which preferential programming provides for us, we can say, “Let’s see what the game of life feels like if we play it this way instead of the habitual way we’ve always played it in the past.”

Do you want to be happy or would you rather be right?
Frequently remind yourself that your habitual and addictive demands are of your creation, and so you can decide to release them yourself. This requires no real struggle, only the recognition that we would rather be happy than right.

Change.
If things are not working for you then a choice for change is required.
Change is the only certainty in life.

Compassion or resentment.
The choice is yours. Being “wronged” by another need not cause resentment. If you choose to try and understand the “wrong doer,” you will feel compassion rather than resentment.

Pause and choose.
Whenever you find your ego wanting to react defensively, catch yourself just as you are about to speak, and ask yourself if you want to be guided by your false ego-self or your real Self.
By consciously making an attempt to curb the need to be right, you will move another step forward in your quest to make redundant, the addictive demands of the ego.

Emotional choices.
Your emotions are physiological reactions to your thoughts. These reactions show up as feelings in your body and they flow directly from the ways you choose to use your mind. Your emotions do not just happen to you — they are choices that you make.
Remember — emotions always follow thought. How you feel inside — be it sad, scared, happy or angry, is a direct reflection of what you think.

Stinkin’ thinkin’.
Chronic, long-term stinkin’ thinkin’ plays a major hand in the development of addictive behavior. Regardless of how many books you read or workshops you attend, if you are going to rid yourself of addictive behavior, you will have to do it on your own. No one else can do your thinking for you, although you may have let your ego do most of it up until now.
You must choose — the noisy, insecure chatter of your lower self, the ego — or the still, quiet voice of higher awareness, your true Self.

Preferential choice.
When you say you do not like the color of a friend’s car, what you mean is that you wouldn’t choose it for yourself, you would prefer another color. To say you dislike the choice of someone else is to judge someone else’s preference, and by doing so you divide yourself from them — and division is disharmony.

Responsible to your self.
The truth is you are totally responsible for what you think. Start seeing your thoughts as choices.
The world around you does not rule your mind, nor does your body rule your thoughts.

There must be another way!
Most of us keep telling ourselves there must be another way of experiencing life. Choosing to raise your level of awareness is one sure way of experiencing life as it was meant to be. Balance and harmony enters your life once the choice is made to give up your ego’s addictive thinking patterns.

Two choices.
The commonly shared belief system of the planet is the collective belief system of the ego.
It is based on perceiving a world of separation, guilt, fear and limitation.
It is, therefore, a world of  misperception. The opposite is a thought system of acceptance, based on perceiving a world of unity, peace and happiness. A world in which false perception has been corrected through insightful acceptance.

Our beliefs filter our perceptions.
We must remind ourselves over and over again that it is our belief systems that are responsible for what we see — not external situations.

Two persuasions.
We always have choice — whether we want to hear and respond to our inner self, our true reality, or continue to be restricted by the limitations of our ego-mind. We constantly need to be reminded of this.

Discernment and choice.
Only rarely will our egos allow us to hold two contrary opinions and beliefs in our minds at the one time, yet this is exactly what is required in order for you to awaken to higher levels of consciousness. As you learn to raise your level of awareness and discern the differences between the addictive demands of lower  consciousness and the intuitive directives of the higher self, you place yourself in a position of power. No longer do you give your power over to the habitual reactions of the ego.
You become aware of the freedom of choice which the state of higher awareness provides.
You become aware that an opposite point of view can be held simultaneously with your own.
This self-empowerment allows you to rationally choose the thoughts and attitudes that engender peace of mind rather than the chaotic irrational thoughts of an addictive ego mind. Choose loving acceptance or choose fearful rejection. It’s a daily choice, and the choice we make determines the kind of day we will have and our day by day perception of the world.

Communication

A meeting of minds.
Effective communication aims at a meetings of the minds, rather than looking for weaknesses in what is being said.

Seek the truth.
You have to learn to look at the truth in what is being said rather than what you disagree with.

Overcoming ego.
When we overcome our hesitancy and learn to express our thoughts and feelings, we break through the ego’s game. This gives our minds a chance to quit triggering separating feelings. You will no longer let your ego get away with saying, “These are my private feelings.”

Avoid expressing dissatisfaction.
People assume that expressing dissatisfaction is the first step towards satisfaction. But experience has shown that it is more often the first step toward creating hard feelings. People tend to be sensitive about their so-called frailties. This sensitivity grows when somebody, operating from lower awareness, addictively points them out.

Tell me more.
Instead of attacking when you find yourself in disagreement, detach yourself from your need to be right by saying something like, “Tell me more. That’s a point of view I’ve never considered before.”

Don’t tune out.
We often interrupt people before they have finished speaking. In fact, we frequently tune them out long before we interrupt, because we are busy preparing our response. What we have to say becomes more important than what the other person is trying to tell us.

Our greatest gift.
Listening to another with our undivided attention and unconditional acceptance is perhaps the greatest gift we can extend to others.

Practice active listening.
When in conversation with another, lay aside your addiction to defensiveness or the need to fix and explain. Just listen with your heart and hear what the other person is feeling and respond to that feeling.

Compassion

Personal perspective.
Whenever people exhibit counter-productive behavior, you can be sure they’re in an insecure state of mind. If they were feeling more secure, they would have the wisdom to avoid those behaviors. When we perceive counterproductive behaviors in others, our response is either resentment or compassion. We feel resentment if we focus on the behavior and how it affects us. We are compassionate if we look beyond the behavior to the troubled state of mind that motivated it.

Self-judgment.
Compassion also protects us against our own harsh self-judgement. We gain tolerance of our own imperfection. When we feel compassion we can identify with the humanness of life’s predicaments. We are reminded of how we all occasionally get lost in our thoughts and lose our perspective.

Inner calmness.
Compassion calms us down and makes us feel more secure.

Sympathy.
Compassion is not sympathy. Sympathy requires you to recall painful feelings from a similar event from your past. By sympathizing, you and your companion are both troubled. You become distant from your companion because your attention is on your memories, not on him/her.

Look beyond specifics.
To find compassion, one must look beyond specific problems to the basic human elements involved. If a person is sad because his mother has died, the listener must look beyond the death to the basic human experience of disappointment through loss.  If a person is angry, the listener must look beyond the situation to the pain we feel when we lose sight of another’s innocence. Compassion reminds us of our own humanity. We are able to see the big picture.

Look for the motivation.
To find compassion, look beyond the behavior to the troubled state of mind that motivated the behavior.

Connectedness.
Compassion for others is almost impossible if you are filled with a belief that you are separate and distinct from other human beings. Individual yes — separate — never!

Compassion eases friction.
Without compassion and understanding, interpersonal friction erodes the good feelings in a relationship. Compassion is the emotional lubricant that protects human beings from each other’s frailties. Compassion is like a blanket of understanding that protects us from the rough edges of personalities. Were we not filled with compassion, we would be intimidated by the other person’s behavior. 

Conflict

Individual perceptions.
Many of the difficulties and disagreements we have with other people are based on the highly individual nature of our perceptions.

Addicted to conflict.
If you are addicted to conflict then this will be evident by the battlefield you find yourself in.
If you prefer to choose harmony, then the pleasure will be all yours.

Self attack.
The more a person attacks, the more he needs understanding and the more you should reach out and reassure him. When somebody is attacking another, they are really attacking themselves . . . their fears, their guilt, their own perception of powerlessness.

Expressed anger.
In many cases, anger is nothing more than an attempt to make someone feel guilty.

Mind your own business.
Work only on your own growth and let your partner take responsibility for their own growth,
or lack of it.

Addictive reactions.
It is usually your partner’s addictive demands that are the immediate practical cause of their separating emotions, not the things you say or do.

Practice letting go.
Your trust in the power of unconditional love increases as you use the challenging sparks of your disagreements to practice letting go of addictive demands.

Avoid pointing out another’s addictions.
Don’t play teacher by working on your partner’s head. Avoid your ego’s tendency to tell your partner how “wrong” they are. Pinpoint specific emotions and addictions YOU are experiencing. Remember also to use “I” language, such as “I felt angry when you . . . ,” instead of “You made me angry when . . .”

Meeting of minds.
Disagreeing is a way of thinking. The opposite of disagreeing is understanding. Disagreeing involves comparing your old thinking to what is being said. Understanding involves looking for the new in what’s being said. When you act out the thought process of disagreeing, you argue. When you act out the thought process of understanding, you become more intimate and attain a meeting of minds.

Tenacious warriors.
Divorce for a “things” orientated person becomes a battleground in which they feel the need to
prove themselves the most tenacious warrior by getting as many things as possible. Those with a dollar-orientated personality find it becoming the master of their life.

Great expectations.
Conflict originates when you expect the world to be the way you want it to be and you find yourself upset because things aren’t going the way you want them to go, or as they used to go, or even worse, how you insist they go.

What are you trying to prove?
You will eliminate conflict and confrontation as you begin to find it unnecessary to prove yourself to anyone.

Defensive reinforcement.
When people’s attitudes are attacked head-on, they are likely to defend those attitudes, and in the process, reinforce them. So clearly, it is wiser to reinforce a positive attitude rather than attack a negative one.

Simple misunderstanding.
All disagreements are results of misunderstanding someone else’s level of consciousness. This is why other people seem  “wrong” when their perspective on life doesn’t match your own. All of us are at different levels of understanding and growth. When you become aware of these differences and are able to allow and accept them, you have raised yourself to a higher level of consciousness.

Domination.
Conflict is the workplace of the ego. When you obey the ego’s need to dominate others, you are guaranteeing the emergence of conflict. The addictive demands of the ego convinces you of your need to win the conflict  in order to prove your superiority. Acting in a controlling manner may provide brief episodes of ego-gratifying experience, but these episodes cannot lead you to a more satisfying, purposeful way of life. Your relationships will always suffer and you will feel a sense of emptiness and being “off purpose” as long as you habitually react to addictive demands of the ego.

It’s not all bad news.
There are around six billion people on this planet. Around three million are at war with each other. Only three million out of a population of six billion. That means there are over 5.99 billion who are not at war. That’s a hopeful statistic that our ego’s (and those of the media), do not want us to consider. The collective ego consciousness of the planet strives to keep the populace nervously on the edge with fearful reminders of how the world is out to get them.
It’s a mind-set of “Us versus Them.” This ego viewpoint not only reinforces the insane escalation of ways to kill each other, but is also responsible for most of our social problems.

Control

Lack of self-acceptance.
The need to control, or be controlled, reflects a lack of self-acceptance. The fear within a person who controls others is that if there is no one to control, then they do not feel powerful. The fear for someone who is controlled, is that without someone to control them, they feel powerless to create their own life.

Rejection.
Cutting off the love supply with rejection is the oldest control drama in the book. It is the age-old pattern of projecting our pain onto others and calling it their own.

Modifying your programming.
There is no limit to your ability to modify your own programming if you are determined to do so.
It will really happen when you want to create your own happiness more than you want to try to control everything that happens around you.

Allow time for change.
People are not set in concrete. They can change. However, the people in your life cannot change the instant you want them to. You need patience and a willingness to work with life as it is. It’s okay to try to change things, but above all, continue to use every situation for your own growth, while carefully watching for any addiction that things should change faster than they currently are.

Criticizing others.
You can delay your growth if you insist on criticizing, analyzing and pointing out the addictive demands of your partner — especially when they’re not asking you to do so.

Changing others.
Don’t go into a relationship with a secret program in your head that you are going to change the other person, so that you can live happily with him or her. It doesn’t work! If you must have someone change in order for you to be happy, you’re just setting up trouble in your life.

Diversionary tactics.
The ego may try diversionary tactics that do not require it to surrender any territory. You discover it’s easier to make a big deal out of your partner’s addictions than to work on your own.

Masks of control.
Some people who feel isolated and misunderstood, wear the mask of someone who is in control and seeks respect. People who wear masks believe what other people’s masks communicate.

The answer is always within.
When we do not feel loved or lovable, instead of looking within, we usually make the mistake of trying to gain control over the external circumstances we believe are causing our unhappiness.

The illusion of threat.
The ego needs the illusion of threat from “enemies” in order to control you. When you are controlling others, it is because you have permitted ego to control you.
Your world will make a change for the better only when you stop trying to improve conditions with intolerance and judgment. It is only when you are not controlled by ego that you can choose not to control others. What you believed was power when you dominated others, was actually the external activity of ego controlling you!

Mind as the first cause.
Growth in consciousness is simply no more than a refusal to believe that the cause of anything exists on the physical plane. Our delusional conscious mind accepts every negative circumstance of our lives and is forever assuring us that these circumstances control us instead of us controlling them. This does not mean we must deny negative circumstances. Simply choose not to accept negative circumstances as final and instead build habits of positive rather than negative thinking.

Ego

Defining the ego.
What is the ego? The ego is energy. It is none other than the accumulated energy of our own way of thinking, our own emotions, our own experiences, our own beliefs. We own all of these things, and they each in turn, own us. Each of us has created an ego, and this ego maintains and perpetuates our own way of thinking. The ego can be defined as a separated sense of individuality (our personality), which expresses itself via the medium of the physical body. The ego is a wrong-minded attempt to perceive yourself as you wish to be, rather than as you really are. It’s characterized by complexity and confusion rather than simplicity. The ego believes if you don’t fear the past and worry about the future, the world will fall apart.

Breaking down the fortress.
The ego fortress is nothing more than a self-made delusion. Having made it yourself, you are responsible for dismantling it. The bricks that make up its walls are nothing more than past memories. The fortress is a defense mechanism put in place by the ego in order for it to feel safe. Never lose sight of the fact that the ego-personality is something you have adopted, and is not something you are. In the final analysis, your visible persona is really no more than the ego pulling the strings to your collection of attitudes, reactions and beliefs.

Ego as an extension of my past.
Seen through the eyes of the ego, my identity is dependent on the opinions and judgments other people have about me, as well as the opinions and judgments I have about myself. My present identity is seen simply as an extension of my past. My ego has been with me since early childhood. It’s been nurtured by almost everyone I have ever been in contact with. Unfortunately, generations of those nurturers have also been dominated by their egos.

The mask of insecurity.
Personality is a derivative of the Latin word “persona” which was used to describe a mask sometimes used by Greek actors in times long past. It is common knowledge that the vast majority of human beings hide their true self behind a mask — the deceptive mask of the ego personality.
We strut around the world stage behind our masks, playing a role that we think others expect of us, never really daring to drop the facade and reveal the true self. Lay our real selves bare to the world? Never — that’s just too dangerous.
Sometimes during times of crisis, the mask may slip a little, and our vulnerability — our insecurities — become exposed. The ego, once exposed and threatened, will then set about building even sturdier defenses. Brick by brick, hurtful memory after hurtful memory, a fortress takes shape to defend our vulnerabilities. Inside this fortress we feel safe, yet isolated, never realizing it is this very isolation and separation than adds to our feelings of insecurity.
We become so skillful in playing out our roles that we lose sight of the fact that it is just an act.
We eventually adopt this illusionary persona we have adopted and accept it as our real self. Barricaded behind the fearful walls of its self-made fortress, the personality ego then spends the rest of its life trying to make sense of its make-believe role and the illusions of the other ego personalities sheltering within their personal fortress.

The changing truth of the ego.
Ego’s truth changes constantly because it is always relative. What is “true” is whatever the majority believe to be correct at any given time.

Ego thrives on doubt.
Our ego likes to increase our levels of doubt by raising questions such as, “Are you sure you’re not just fooling yourself?” Questions such as these enable the ego to instill a fear of change and maintain its limiting hold on our awareness.

Ego’s fear of attack.
Fear is essential for the survival of the ego, for without fear the ego would cease to exist. This fear is based on the perception of being attacked, and the ego’s advice to us when we perceive ourselves as being attacked is to be afraid and defensive — or attack our attacker.
According to our ego, fear is not a choice, but an unavoidable part of our existence.

Judgment is of the ego.
By encouraging us to become fault-finders and judgment makers, the ego blocks our awareness of the very acceptance we seek.

Ego focuses only on the external world.
Our ego tries to persuade us that if only the world and its people would act differently, or a situation would change, all our problems would disappear.

A fearful world is an illusion created by ego.
Whenever we condemn others or even ourselves, we are allowing our minds to be fed by fearful illusions created by our ego, and we become imprisoned by these distortions.

Honesty blocked by ego.
At times your ego may wish to barter with you and say, “I’ll be open and expose my feelings to my partner only when my partner is open and honest with me.”
This attitude can block honesty for an entire lifetime! Your ego is attempting to place all the responsibility upon the other person — avoiding any possibility that you might learn the freedom honesty can bring.

Ego’s likes and dislikes.
The underlying cause of most people’s unhappiness is the ego’s almost complete dependence of liking and disliking as a way of life. Their most memorable experiences and topics of conversation are usually based on what they like and dislike about people, places and things.

An anchor around our necks.
The ego mind anchors us to the body and its many needs and desires, and prevents us from taking even one step towards our true potential and true identity.

Letting go.
The expression, “Let go and let God,” suggests we actually let go of our own ego and its attachment to all it holds dear, and allow our true self to be expressed through our personality, which it will only do if we ask it to. If we would only let go of whatever false security shackles us, we could be free.

Ego is to serve us, not enslave us.
The rationale, the intellect, i.e. the ego is here to serve you. You are not the slave of your intellect unless you choose to be. You do not change the enslavement by denial, by pushing the ego away. The ego is terrified of annihilation, of no longer being needed. You can effect trauma-free change by embracing the ego with the approach, “Don’t worry. We’ll make the change together.”

Ego the defender.
The ego sees itself as your personal defender. It sets itself up as the first line of defense against the world “out there.” What was intended to be a servant has in most cases become the master. The ego operates the defense mechanism which keeps you from higher awareness. Rather than react to the ego’s defensive tactics, quietly observe and be aware that it acts as it does only because it fears it will become redundant.

Appeasing the ego’s of others.
Getting hooked into someone else’s story is of no benefit to you or anyone else. To be concerned that others will not love you if you do not appear loving and caring is to buy into their ego trip and to fall into the trap of judging yourself. If you are acting only to appease the ego of others, or you are acting from your own ego, or social conscious — you are buying in. It’s called disservice — to both yourself and to them.

The rituals of the ego.
Man’s ego has him attempting to be like the rest of the crowd, always trying to gain the approval of others, which reinforces the need for ritual conduct. He lives for the approval of others, of other’s opinions, acting out his assigned roles efficiently and properly for fear of rejection.

Recognizing the illusion.
We labor under the illusion that our present personality, the sum of which we call our ego, is our true self. This is simply not so. The ego is something our true self created. It’s like a magician’s trick. We know it’s an illusion, and we strive to learn how it’s done. Once we see it’s just an illusion, we quickly lose interest. We lose our fascination of the illusion. Our purpose in life then, is to recognize this veil of illusion, and once the impostor is revealed, truth enters our life. Happiness then becomes a way of life.

The collective world ego.
The world ego is an extension of all the individual egos of the planet in conflict with each other, fighting their battles to prove just how separate they are from each other.
The world ego is not who we are as people, but what we believe we are as a collective species.
Nationalism represents the selfishness or egoism of a nation and will prevail as long as ego is honored as the bearer of truth. As long as we have nation states and imaginary boundaries we will be dominated by the world ego. There is nothing more powerful than an idea who’s time has come. The demise of the world ego is long overdue.

Who’s the boss?
Science tells us we use only ten percent of the brain’s true potential. What prevents us from utilizing the full capabilities of this magnificent utility . . . and why? In comparison with the full potentiality that we can become, the ego represents just a tiny part of our mind. It is the part which has adopted the role of boss. In this role it attempts to protect you with the false idea that your physical being is the sum total of who you are and it must be protected and thus focused upon at all times.

The ego as our historical selves.
The ego requires a constant reliving of memories in order to sustain a continuity of its own.
It is only aware of itself as a repeatedly updated autobiography. The ego does not actually exist — it is an illusion of continuity. It is built up from an edited picture album of our past. What we have been is nicely and securely fixed in our subconscious. We become more and more identified with the past, with old knowledge and fixed belief systems which continue to bolster our historical selves — and we forget that there ever was anything else.

A fear of change.
The ego fears change and it will always try to keep the status quo, because that’s all its ever known. The ego’s creed is, “The way things have always been must be the best because it works. How do I know it works? Well, I’m still here aren’t I?”
That’s all the ego cares about — its survival. Not happiness, not satisfaction — just survival.

Recycling old knowledge.
The ego prefers to recycle old knowledge rather than risk experiencing something new. Based on what it has experienced in the past, it separates the world into what it feels is right for us and what it feels is wrong for us.

Instinctive behavior.
If a tiger growls and roars at you through the bars of its cage, would you feel offended? Of course not. The tiger was just being a tiger. Whether you like it or not, your fellow humans are in some ways just like the tiger. They are just doing what they do. When you have tamed your ego, you are no longer offended by the behavior of your fellow humans. Free of the ego’s illusions, you see your fellow humans as they are — not as you think they should be.

How awareness can control the ego.
Let’s imagine your ego as a sour-faced little entity that sits on your shoulder. It’s there for a purpose. It wants you to feel outraged when you are wronged, insulted when you are ignored, offended when you don’t get your own way, and hurt when you lose a contest or an argument. The more you become aware of its presence, the less control it has over your thoughts and behavior. Because of your growing awareness, its service are no longer required. It becomes redundant.

Ego is the cross we choose to bear.
Ego is a projection of the conscious mind. Conscious mind is the reception station at the nerve endings of the five senses. It is a classifying, calculating, analyzing machine governed solely by sensory stimuli and perceives all things as existing outside itself. It builds patterns of habits and perceives the movement of time. The ego is comprised of habits and memories, and prompts us to act fearfully in the light of past experiences. The ego’s perception of reality is what our lives become. This thing we falsely call “I”, this ego, sees its limitations and brings those limitations into our lives. It fears and hates and envies, for it seeks constantly to puff itself up, by vain posturing, by blind attitude, and it brings into our lives the physical results of these mental causes, and keeps us constantly in chains.

Ego and its self-delusion
The ego’s perception of other egos as being real is only an attempt to convince itself that it too is real.

Ego by any other name.
Self-esteem is another name for ego and any perceived threat to one’s “self-esteem” manifests as anxiety and stress.

Emotion

Emotion follows thoughts.
Emotions are borne of thought. Sadness only exists in our lives when we think sad thoughts.
When we realize emotions are just thoughts, they lose their power to distort our lives and distress us. Emotions only have the power to affect us when we are actively thinking them, such as angry thoughts, sad thoughts, jealous thoughts etc.

Emotional mirages.
Emotions are mirages of the mind. Viewed from the perspective of the ego’s lower levels of consciousness, the mirage is real. Viewed from a higher, broader perspective, the mirage is seen for what it is — an illusion. Human emotions are illusionary in the same way. Any power they appear to possess is created by the ego mind, the ultimate practitioner of illusion.

Drop the thought and you drop the illusion.
Suppose you’re having an argument and the house catches on fire. Do you forget the argument and concentrate on fighting the fire instead of each other? Of course you do! If emotions can be set aside in emergency situations, it stands to reason that they can be set aside anytime you choose.
Fires are real — emotions are illusionary.

That which is learned can be unlearned.
Most emotions are based on a collection of habits and memories, learned responses to a particular thought pattern. Negative emotional habits, like any habit, are learned reflexes. It’s a response that becomes unthinking and automatic through constant repetition. If negative thinking is a learned behavior, it can be unlearned. Think of negative emotions as weeds of the mind. If left unchecked they will grow in size and strength. Negative emotions, like weeds, can be uprooted and discarded — all it takes is a conscious decision for quality control and change.

Quality control.
Emotions are never a statement about the world around us. They are always a statement about our momentary perspective of life. Emotions are quality control devices that measure the quality of our thoughts.

Emotional stability.
Our emotional stability is reflected in the quality of our thinking.
Negative emotions tell us our mental fitness is suffering, just as physical pain signals an imbalance in our bodies. A change of perspective is required to correct our thinking — to regain feelings of inner comfort and well-being.

Events in themselves are emotion-free.
Events are meaningless until our mind allocates an emotion-driven reaction to the event.
Likewise vision is formless until the mind transforms an image into an object with form.

Empowerment

Subservient attitude.
As long as you depend upon another to supply you with love, acceptance and security, you will have missed knowing what you — and this life — is all about. You will have become only what they want you to become.

Acknowledge the power of the Self.
Worship is another name for followship. In following the greatness of another, one tends to overlook the greatness in oneself. Enlightened Masters such as the Christ Jesus would no doubt prefer we choose to revere the message rather than revere the messenger.

Focused attraction.
Whatever you focus your thoughts and emotions upon, you give power to. If you focus on ill health, hate or jealousy, so it is you give power to these things — and what we empower, we attract.

Fear

A fear of unworthiness.
The natural insecurity of the ego reinforces our unconscious fear that we are not good enough, that we are not worthy of love and loving. It’s in this judgment of ourselves that we become more and more insecure, more and more defensive.

Defensiveness.
When somebody verbally attacks you and you defend, look inside yourself and question your addictive behavior. What are you are defending and why? What are you hiding from? What is the primary feeling you are experiencing? Is it insecurity perhaps?

Lessons in fear.
Fear is a reflection of how you feel about yourself. The lower your level of self-acceptance, the greater your levels of fear. Remember, when you truly know and accept yourself unconditionally, there can be nothing left to fear. Don’t strive to overcome and defeat fear. Accept fear as nothing more than an emotional illusion, a toothless tiger created by your ego-mind in order to validate its existence.

Illogical reasoning of the fearful ego-mind.
A core issue for humanity is that we do not feel worthy of acceptance, either of ourselves or by others. This insecurity will manifest in many ways such as possessiveness, jealousy or the need to be right. If you are possessive, you fear loss. If there is a need to be right, it is because you fear to be wrong, and if you are wrong then you must be unacceptable. Behold the illogical reasoning of the ego-mind!

Embrace the fear.
Fear will never go away while it is invalidated, while you are trying to push it away, or suppress it. By placing your attention and focus upon fear, your are empowering and feeding it in a way.
So rather than reject your fear, recognize and then embrace it. Imagine the fear is really the insecure child within you. Visualize picking up the child, embracing it and telling it you understand and accept it exactly as it is. Through acceptance, the child within will be frightened no more.

Fear expressed as anger.
When there is no blame, when you take responsibility for the circumstances and the thoughts creating the anger — then the fury, the emotional anger within, may be embraced and accepted. The opportunity to expand your conscious awareness has been successfully addressed and you have taken another step forward in your journey of self-discovery.

Fear of abandonment.
Our fear of being left, abandoned and cut-off from the love and acceptance we so desperately need from others is the single most threatening fear people have to deal with. All other fears are secondary to this primary need for love and acceptance.

Fear of lack of supply.
The never ending demand for the acquisition of more and more “things” is the result of the fear of not having enough. Our hunt for supply is therefore based on fear.

Focused attention.
Deny light to a plant and it will fade and die. Deny attention to a fear and it too will fade and die. Focus light on a plant and it re-energizes and grows. Focus attention on a fear and it too energizes and grows.

Fear of loss.
You can’t lose anything because the only thing you’ve ever really had is yourself. Objects and possessions come and go. What remains is yourself. Everything in creation is made of energy.
The ego gets attached to certain forms of energy that it doesn’t want to see dissolved, be it a house, a sum of money or a relationship. The ego struggles to defend these objects from dissolution. However, you can’t fight to make a flower bloom, it just happens. You can’t struggle to make an egg-cell evolve into a baby, it just happens. The ego readily accepts these facts about flowers and babies, but not about houses, money, relationships and other things it gets attached to.
The same Universal Law governs all life.

Prisoner of the past.
Each time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past, or a pioneer of the present. The past is closed and limited — while the present moment is open and free.

Fear creates doubt.
Fear and doubt are partners of the ego. That which you doubt will cause you to feel afraid.
That which you fear creates doubts about your ability to handle it. Each emotion feeds off the other, strengthening the addictive demands of the ego.

Performance motivated by fear.
When we live in fear, the focus of our life is the seeking of approval and avoidance of rejection.
With fear, you tend to believe your value is based on your performance. According to the ego, if you perform well, you are “worthy”— if you fail to perform well, you are “worthless.”

Focus on the good in others.
We are all good, decent souls who occasionally get lost. Even those we label as criminals were not born “bad.” They were taught how to develop dysfunctional attitudes that causes “bad” behavior. When you can focus on the good in another and hold that in your mind, you are acting from a higher level of consciousness. This higher awareness helps dissipate anger and fear.

Fearful employment.
Fear is what keeps most people working in a job they hate.

Being one of the herd.
My free will and free mind gives me the empowerment to create my own path through life. Giving up my power to the will of others is allowing myself to become one of the fearful herd. With blinkers off, I’ll listen with tolerance to what others have to say, but I will not allow the fears and opinions of others to lead me from my own individual path. Not even the persistent chatter of my own ego.

Forgiveness

Forgive us our expectations.
Pain and suffering are the means to learning compassion. Compassion grows from forgiveness, and forgiveness comes from accepting that the world and its ego-controlled population is imperfect and will inevitably fail to meet our expectations.

Give us this day our daily teacher.
Everyone who has ever come into your life has been your teacher, regardless of how much you choose to judge or hate them. Everything that has ever happened to you has provided you with lessons you can be grateful for.

Who’s going to change first?
As long as we blame others for the way we feel today, we will have to wait for them to change before we can grow out of our immobilized state.

Accepting responsibility.
We really have nothing to forgive, since we create our own reality by how we choose to assess the behavior of others. If you resist the ego’s temptation to judge others, and instead accept them for being precisely where they are on their path, you have put forgiveness into practice.

Forgiveness of self.
At some point in your life, you adopted certain attitudes and beliefs and made them a lifetime code of conduct. Yet you also found it was impossible to live up to all of them all of the time. Consequently you filled yourself with guilt for not having lived up to the judgmental code that was imposed upon you. When you are no longer judgmental toward others, you will have forgiven yourself and be well along your path to enlightenment. Remember, your need to put others into categories defines you, not them. When you stop doing this, you have forgiven yourself for whatever aspect of yourself you see in them.

Guiltless innocence.
Where guilt is absent, forgiveness has no purpose. A state of being without a need for forgiveness is a state of innocence, a state of enlightenment.

Guilt

What is guilt?
Guilt is the feeling of self-condemnation that we experience after we do something our conditioned ego-mind tells us is “wrong.” Guilt demands punishment, and its request is always granted in one form or another.

Bring in a verdict of innocence.
The cycle of feeling guilty, shifting blame to others, getting angry at the guilt we now see in them, attacking them for their guilt, feeling even more guilty for our attack and punishing our bodies in payment, cannot be escaped as long as we believe in guilt as a valid emotion in our lives.
We must make a decision for innocence if we are to ever have consistent mental peace and its resulting physical peace, free of stress and anxiety. The innocence of another cannot be found in his past behavior, but it can be found in the peace that is within us. It is viewed past the personality, past behavior, and past our mental associations. To undertake the search for innocence is basically all we need to do to gradually free ourselves of pain, grief, depression, guilt and other forms of ego manipulations.

Programmed guilt.
Try to see that it is your programming that creates your guilty feelings, not what is happening. It really is possible to go through the rest of your life and be free of guilt. It’s a matter of re-programming.

Perceive only guiltlessness.
Once you perceive no one as guilty, you will affirm the guiltlessness in yourself. When you no longer see any value in guilt, you can choose to see only innocence in others as well as yourself.

Projected guilt.
Projection is the mechanism by which we deny responsibility for a thought or feeling we are experiencing, such as guilt. By projecting the guilt onto somebody else, we can hold them responsible. We believe if only they would behave differently, then we would not experience the difficulties we are having.

Guilt and punishment.
Guilt produces projection, and projection is simply a way of shifting blame rather than letting go of blame. Because projection is a form of attack, it makes us feel even more guilty and so we continue punishing ourselves in some form or another.

Projection of wants.
Sometimes your partner is a projection in your mind of what you want and don’t want in your life. The simplest way of changing your experience of your partner is to work on what you are judgmentally rejecting about yourself.

Happiness

Be happy now.
We can only be happy now and there will never be any time when it is not now!

Relationships.
It is unrealistic to expect our relationships to make us happy. No person or thing can make us happy. It’s up to us to make ourselves happy. All our relationships can do is furnish a cast of characters for our melodramas. It’s up to us whether we run a preferential comedy or an addictive tragedy.

Have and have not.
We open ourselves to happiness by not demanding or stewing over what we don’t have.
We often tend to focus on what we don’t have, and unconsciously take for granted the abundance we do have.

Yesterday’s joy.
Can the joy of yesterday ever be repeated today? The desire for repetition only arises when there is no joy today. When today is empty, we look to the past or to the future for our fulfillment

Lay some happiness on me.
It is neither your right nor responsibility to try to make someone else happy. In fact it can never be done successfully because your concept of happiness will never be the concept of another’s happiness.

Pack a big lunch—it could be a long wait.
You may find yourself waiting for a very long time for someone to come along and make you happy. Sorry, but the truth of the matter is, no one is going to make you happy. That’s one aspect of life only you can provide for yourself.

Feeling good.
You feel good not because the world is right, but your world is right because you feel good. Happiness is your choice within every now moment.

The unpredictability of life.
Life really is unpredictable, but we still try to impose some sort of restrictive order to our life.
We feel comfortable with a sense of order, we feel threatened by disorder. We try to control the uncontrollable. By letting go of addictive demands, giving up control and opening up to the potential possibilities of a spontaneous, unpredictable future, we allow peace and happiness into our life.

Will marriage bring you happiness?
If you seek happiness through marriage, do not expect your happiness to be provided by your marriage partner. Your pain and dissatisfaction will only increase in proportion to your degree of your expectations. This is because your partner has neither the duty nor the right to bring you happiness. Your partner has their own life to live. Your happiness will always be built through
your own power.

Life’s ongoing message.
We need to remind ourselves over and over again, that whenever we’re unhappy, life is giving us a message we need for further growth.

Happiness is a state of mind.
Being drunk is a state of mind. Being angry is a state of mind. So is being happy. Each state of mind has its own special thoughts and feelings. When we communicate from drunkenness, anger or happiness, what we say can only be understood within the context of that state of mind.
What you say when you are drunk is what you think when you are drunk.

Healing the Mind

What is attitudinal healing?
Attitudes are the programs of the mind, and it is how we respond to this programming that dictates our behaviour. Attitudinal healing is letting go of attitudes that engender fear and guilt and then choosing to see everyone, including ourselves, as innocent.

A matter of choice.
Attitudinal healing is not concerned with behaviour. The individual has within him the resources to modify his behaviour and to make those decisions for himself. Our task, should we choose to do so, is to help others and indeed ourselves, gently make the shift into a higher state of awareness.

Letting go of the ego’s needs.
We are cleansing and healing the mind when we choose to let go of the need to analyze, interpret and evaluate our relationships.

Pain is not contagious.
Your emotional pain is just that — your pain. You did not catch it from your partner as if it were some contagious disease. Your own personal healing comes from within you. All attitudinal healing is accomplished by actively seeking and eventually knowing ultimate truth.

A change of heart.
True attitudinal healing is not about the manipulation of external circumstances. It is a change of heart, not a change of circumstances, even though a change of circumstances may accompany it.

Focus on attitude, not behaviour.
In attitudinal healing, the changing of our attitudes may result in certain changes in the way we behave, but we usually recognize these in retrospect, and we do not make modifying our behaviour our first priority.

Judgement

Our restricting past.
Our decisions are usually made by judging situations and consulting past memories for what we are to change and how we are to change it. It always appears that the situations or the people connected with it, need correcting. If we are counseled to shift our concern from the outward picture to our own mental state, this may require a degree of trust we are not in the habit of exercising. But surely it is obvious if we continue running our lives strictly along the lines that our personal past dictates, nothing new can enter them. By declining to judge, declining to apply standards based solely on the past, we can look directly at what is happening and turn to this other reality within us, which is not attached to our old experiences, and thus receive a fresh insight.

Preconceptions based on past conditioning.
Far more often than we realize, we see only the past in the people we encounter. But it is actually our past rather than theirs that we view as part of them. Consequently, we do not respond to them, but only to our various preconceptions.

Reflected hostility.
If your separate ego-self judges and labels a person as hostile, you will treat them with hostility, and they will probably respond with antagonism. Then you’ll think your original judgement is confirmed by their hostility. What goes around, comes around.

When intimacy decreases.
When a new relationship is formed, a couple’s intimacy level is usually very high because their focus is on enjoying each other. As they start evaluating each other (is this the one?), they become distracted and their intimacy level drops. They attribute this decrease to not being “right” for each other. They don’t realize it is the evaluation process itself that dampened their intimacy.

Free of addictions.
Freedom is given to us all when we no longer feel a need to control and judge our situations and the people around us. The acquisition of that freedom is a simple matter of choice — choose to live a life of fear or choose to accept the world exactly as it is.

Valuable or useless.
If an individual has a tendency to judge the worth of anything, then that individual automatically creates two major categories — valuable and useless. Each category is entirely dependant on one’s personal perception and interpretation of the world at large. And as we know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. The entire concept of what is valuable and what is useless becomes redundant when you forego the need to judge.

“Right” and “wrong” behaviour.
Any objective person would soon see one person’s “right” behaviour is another’s “wrong” behaviour and vice versa. You must decide for yourself not whether your behaviour is right or wrong, but whether it is effective or ineffective in the pursuit of legitimate and progressive goals.

Identify the cause.
Try to be more interested in what is causing you to feel judgmental rather than what is “wrong”
with another person. Once you identify the attitudes causing you to judge, you begin to get a better understanding of how much the ego’s addictive demands are behind most of your separating emotions.

“Good” and “bad” evaluations.
Good and Bad are judgements about things in the world “out there.” These judgements are generally based on your own set of personal preferences, strengthened by your ego’s addictions on how things “should” be. Those things you like and agree upon, you label as “good,” and everything else your insecure ego labels “bad.”  Colour me good and colour them bad. Are you beginning to get the picture — how judgements are a major cause of your stress and anxieties? As you awareness grows, so too does your level of acceptance.

Your judgements mirror and define yourself.
When you judge another you are only defining yourself. Your judgements describe your likes and dislikes, they do not define the person being judged. That person is defined by his or her own thoughts and actions. Once you recognize this, you begin replacing your inclination to judge with acceptance, and this is forgiveness in action.

Failure.
You do not fail in life, you only produce results. You have the right to learn and grow from any results you produce. The word “failure” is itself a judgement, and if you label yourself a failure in any context, you are judging rather than accepting yourself.

Prejudice.
The word “prejudice” means to pre-judge. Prejudiced thinking comes from treating your mind like a rental space for the thoughts of other people. The moment you sense a prejudiced thought enter your mind, suspend it. Shift the thought. Shift it consciously — from a position of judgement — to one of quiet acceptance. Allow the thought to become a silent witness of acceptance.

Self-imprisonment.
We’ve imprisoned ourselves within a self-created fortress of insecurity, and the force holding the bars in place is judgement. Our ego-mind is judge, jury and jailer.

Look for the pearl of wisdom.
Instead of judging an uncomfortable situation as bad or worse than others, we should remember that the oyster’s irritation becomes its pearl within. Irritation is an equally valid part of our life, as it helps form within us our own personal pearls of wisdom.

Addicted to avoiding judgement.
Don’t become addicted to banishing judgement entirely from your life. It’s difficult to avoid judgement completely because every thought we have has some element of judgement connected to it. To tell yourself it’s a beautiful day is a judgement.

Striving to achieve.
What drives the high achievers? Is it a fear of having less and therefore “being less” than the other person? Is it unconscious feelings of inferiority and insecurity. Is it a driving need to be recognized and accepted as “worthy”? It could be that the high achievers, by their very actions, are constantly affirming their lack of self-acceptance, which in essence is judgement of self. Is this assumption a judgement in itself. Indeed it is! The difference here is that I have recognized the judgement and embraced it. I accept my fallible humanness and in a state of higher awareness, I am able to move on.

Is beauty in the eye, or the mind of the beholder?
Who is to judge the wild flower as being inferior to the rose? The wild flower was delighted with itself until judgement arrived. Nature knows nothing of judgement. All in nature is exactly as it should be with no single living thing considered more valuable or attractive than the next. The eye is merely a receptor of light. It is the mind that processes that light and converts it into information. The ego-mind then processes that information and makes a judgement based on preconceived beliefs of what beauty is and is not. The ego mind arrogantly believes its evaluation of beauty is an infallible process by which one living thing actually can be seen to be more valuable than the next.

Limitation

Does our past limit our future?
The ego demands us to accept as real, a world whose existence depends on a past, present and future reality. It fosters the illusion that we are limited in the present by events of the past. Events which the fearful ego tells us will likely recur in the future if we don’t watch out! It is by engendering this fear within us that the ego hopes to limit our growth and potential. By limiting our capacity for self-acceptance, the ego reinforces our need for its assistance in order to survive.

Buying in.
Many people choose to buy into their parents’ philosophy and accept the limitations of their environment.

Limited understanding.
What is it that limits your understanding of yourself, your fellow man and the world around you? Your belief system . . . your limited understanding of yourself . . . your desire to be right . . . and your fear of being wrong.  In short — your ego-mind.

The unlimited mind.
You live in a world of physical limitations. You can only run so fast, work so many hours and jump so high. But these limits apply to the physical world of form. There are absolutely no limits on your ability to think. Beyond the restrictions of a fearful ego, you can imagine yourself doing anything.
And what a man thinks, so he is!

Step out of the limited ego — Step into the true self of the “I Am”.
I am my ability to think and to feel (emotionally). I am not limited by form. I am what I think!

Society’s limitations.
Once the limitations imposed by society’s group consciousness is broken, such as physically breaking the four-minute mile, you have changed group consciousness. You have opened up a new possibility. A new paradigm . . . a new way of thinking.

Closed minds are limited minds.
Science needs to measure, weigh and dissect in order to explain the nature of things. That which science can’t measure, weigh and dissect can’t be explained, and so to the ego-driven scientific mind, if it can’t be explained, it probably doesn’t exist.

An infinite universe—an infinite you.
Pascal said, “The narrow limits of our being conceal infinity from view,” which is another way of saying that to understand how all of life lies within us, we must abandon our sense of separation and isolation from everything around us and expand our consciousness to include all things.

What if?
“What if the world were round?,” pondered Christopher Columbus, and one day he found himself sailing westward over an ocean which everybody knew was flat. “Foolish man,” they sneered,“he will sail off the very edge of the world!”
“What if man could fly?,” asked the Wright Brothers. “Stupid men,” they jeered, “if God wanted man to fly He would have given him wings.”
Only an unlimited imagination has the audacity to challenge what others will tell you is impossible. The imagination conceives the idea and the Universal Subconscious Mind delivers the goods. Are you ready for change? Can you imagine a life free of frustration, turmoil and fear? The ego-mind dares not contemplate such foolishness — the same ego-mind that told Columbus and the Wright Brothers that it can’t be done! What if it can be done? What could you achieve if you knew you could not fail?

Live in the present moment.
Resist the ego’s insistence that you are a being of limitation. Why let it preoccupy your mind with fears of past limitations projected onto the future?

Love (romantic, conditional)

The chemistry we call love.
To ensure propagation of the species, Mother Nature concocts a powerful chemistry best described as an undefinable and overpowering biological attraction. A chemical attraction which romantic novelists mistakenly call “love.” Rational reasoning and logical thinking are early casualties, swept away by an avalanche of physical and emotional attraction we incorrectly label as love. Sadly, after the initial novelty of physical gratification wears off, relationships are in jeopardy if there is insufficient awareness, understanding and acceptance to lend support.

Attraction is not love.
Romantic love is a strong addictive attraction that is based on projecting onto another person our illusions of what we want and need in the perfect partner.

Society’s illusions.
Our fairy-tale literature and our education have led us into believing that the be all and end all of love is the finding of a mate, but our divorce courts and counseling clinics are hosts to a multitude of unhappy and disillusioned people who have discovered this is not so. For no person can truly love another until they learn to love themselves and humanity first.

Secure in unconditional love.
When you say you’re “in love,” what you’re really saying is an imaginary need you carry around inside yourself has been satisfied. Lacking love for yourself, you form an image to cover the void. That is why being shunned or betrayed in love causes such pain, because the gaping wound of your own need gets exposed. Personal love that you feel for another is a concentrated form of unconditional universal love; universal love is an expanded form of personal love. Emotional love is based upon your inner image of what love is. When the one you love betrays you, your inner image feels defiled, and since it was the image you loved all along, its betrayal creates pain and anger. Emotional images, by their very nature, must be subject to change. Universal love is being able to love beyond mere form. Insecure people call it love when they feel completely attached to another person. Secure and consciously aware people call it love when they feel no attachment, no possession.

Do you give in order to get?
The word “love,” as we generally use it, means something quite different from real love. Romantic love is giving in order to get. It is a barter, a trade arrangement. This is fairly obvious in romantic relationships in which one partner is giving with the expectation that it will be returned in the specific form that is desired by the needs of the ego.

Love is not a trade-off.
When we play the game of “love,” we discover that whenever our ego expects something in return, we lose the purity of love. Love simply cannot be like a business deal based on barter or equal exchange. The magic and spontaneity does not happen when one has a bookkeeping attitude to love.

A broken heart.
Emotional love arises from liking and disliking. Emotional, romantic love cries over lost objects or persons. If your love is emotional attachment, you will find when things and people go, as all things must, you will be left with a “broken” heart.

 “Special” love.
We are in trouble when we tell ourselves that our love is “special” If we think of our loved-one as “special” then we feel the need to hang on and not let go.

The ego’s perception of lack and supply.
“Special” relationships are based on the belief that we lack something in ourselves that only other people can supply, and unless we get it from them, we will be incomplete and unhappy.

IF.
The identifying word in respect of conditional love is “IF”.

Happy or unhappy in “love.”
You will be very happy when things are fitting your addictions. You will be very unhappy when they are not! In this phase of being, love is highly conditional. For example: “I’ll love you if you meet my needs (my addictive demands), and I’ll reject you if you don’t.”

Abandonment.
A child often loves his parents only when he gets what he thinks he wants, whether this be a new possession, or approval and praise. Such love, whether in a child or an adult, is not dependable or permanent. Its temporary nature causes us to carry an underlying fear that we are about to be abandoned.

The search for romance.
If you are constantly searching for romantic love, you’ll find yourself going from partner to partner, mate to mate.

Possessive love.
Once the romance is killed off by addictive demands, what’s left is just possessive love.
My wife . . . my husband . . . mine, mine, mine!

Love does NOT hurt.
Love that knows pain is not love. The pain and heartache of “lost” love, is the dislike and disappointment of losing an object you were positively stimulated by and emotionally attached to.

Chemistry of attraction.
The word “chemistry” when applied to two people, describes an almost undefinable and overpowering biological attraction which we mistakenly call love.

The insecurity of conditional love.
The person who is loved “conditionally” never feels loved, even if they are told they are. It’s because they have to earn that love through performance and through conformity to another’s expectation of them, that they never really feel loved. Therefore it’s difficult for them to be inwardly secure.

Love (unconditional)

Total acceptance.
Unconditional love can be defined as total acceptance of ourselves or another person without qualification, reservation or limits of any kind. Unconditional love is allowing the freedom for others to simply be. There are no conditions or restrictions attached to unconditional love. Unconditional love can only be experienced when we are giving it away and feeling joined in oneness with others.

The unconditional love of a mother.
A mother loves her child unconditionally. She doesn’t judge the child because she sees the child as a part of her own being.

Give love to receive love.
When we practice unconditional love, we recognize that giving is receiving, and there is no measurement, evaluation or judgment placed upon our love.

No obligations.
The giving of unconditional love means that all of one’s love is extended with no expectations.
It means the other person is under no obligation to return our love or to change in anyway.
Total giving means unconditional love.

Giving rather than taking.
We start to become aware of real love whenever we choose to accept people without judging them and commence the gentle effort of giving without any thought of getting something in return.
Love is for giving — not for taking.

No strings attached.
Unconditional love means exactly what it says . . . “There are no conditions and no strings on my love.”

Like attracts Like.
You will greatly increase the number of people with whom you can establish a deep love relationship by more deeply accepting and loving your self.

The key.
Emotional acceptance, free of any judgement or expectation, is the key to creating the experience of real love.

Programmed attitudes.
The only way to love unconditionally is to learn how to distinguish between the person and their programming. Programming refers to the attitudes which cause the person to behave the way they do.

Understanding wants and needs.
Only the power of unconditional love enables two people to be comfortable with each other’s programming, backgrounds and their ego’s ever-changing wants and needs.

Love is . . .
Love is respect when directed towards parents, companionship when it flows toward friends, passion when felt toward your partner, affection when you are drawn toward children and reverent appreciation when directed toward the gift of life and the world we live in.

Love the Self.
If one cannot love one’s own self, how can one know how to give love to others? Attitudes of an insecure nature have made us think of ourselves as unworthy of love — unwanted for most of our life. Once you have the capacity to love the self as well as those around you, you’ll never have to ask anyone what they think of you. When in total acceptance of your self it just doesn’t matter.

Love is not a physical attraction.
Real love, unconditional love, has nothing to do with physical attraction.

Mind

Limited sight.
A mind-set is a rigid, limited way of seeing life, an automatic pre-disposition. A mind-set is like a pair of sunglasses; it colors the way life looks to you. When people have a suspicious mind-set, they look upon everyone and every situation with suspicion. Perfectionists see imperfection wherever they look. Mind sets lock you into uncomfortable but familiar feeling states. People often perceive their mind sets as realities.

Become aware of your addictive mind-sets.
We are able to make changes in our behaviour once we become aware of our mind-sets and make allowances for them. When we are unaware a particular mind-set exists, we have conflict with each other. When we are aware of mind-sets and how they affect behaviour, we can navigate individual differences gracefully. When we talk of mind sets, we are of course, talking about addictive demands of the ego.

Habitual thoughts become mind-sets.
Anything we spend a lot of time thinking about will become a mind-set. People who tend to think a lot about food for example, find thoughts of food consuming their consciousness.

Insecurity.
A mind-set is a habit we adopt out of insecurity. A critical and dissatisfied mind-set feeds on itself, determining what we think and see — and how we react.

Safeguard your mental health.
Learn how essential it is to your mental health to drop painful thoughts from your consciousness.

We are what we think.
Thinking is a function that allows every human being to create a personal reality. Each thought creates a feeling that makes the thought appear real. If we think we are old, we feel old.

Your reality is your choice.
You are constantly creating your own reality and you may do it from a foundation of love, which has little to do with your mind, or you may do it from fear, which has everything to do with your mind. How you perceive your reality is a moment to moment choice.

Emotion — the expression of thought.
A thought has no purpose for being until it is felt in pure emotion. Words were only created to express the emotion of a thought.

What you think, is what you become.
Try to see thoughts as something that exists not only within you, but outside of you as well.
Thought is something you are, as well as something you do.
What you think is what you will become. What you fill your mind with, is what will fill your life.

Liberation or bondage.
The mind is a fine instrument with which you may find liberation through higher consciousness, or bondage through the limitations and mind-sets of the ego-mind.
When you control the workings of your mind you have the capacity for greatness.
When your mind controls you, you become a slave to your ego and your senses.

Happy thoughts.
A simple rule for healthy mental conduct is to only think what ever makes you truly happy to think.

Thinking and being.
The mind can only think about love and life—it cannot be love and life.
Whenever you are unhappy about love and life, that is the ego-mind working.

Six Billion separate ego worlds.
Even if members of one family all live under the same roof, each of them lives in a separate world. Though you live in the same house, share the same space and eat the same type of food, you never live in the same world. Each of us builds our own fortress — our own individual world to live in. Each of us have our own way of thinking, different from others. Once you have settled into your world, the same world forms itself around you wherever you go. It can do nothing else, since it is your world. You can communicate your thoughts, experiences and way of living to your marriage partner or your child, but that is as far as it goes. You can never guide the other along the path of your own thinking, for your spouse and your child create their own worlds with their own thoughts. You might leave your home and run away from society, but your world will follow after you. Since no two people have exactly the same thoughts, the number of worlds on earth is exactly the same as the number of people.

Thoughts as things.
The human being thinks. What is a thought? Thought is pure energy. The atom has energy. It can’t be seen but it’s obviously there, just ask any nuclear physicist. The atom is a thing, a piece of matter. Split the atom apart and energy is released. Matter and energy are one. Thought is energy. It too can manifest as matter — it becomes a thing. We know thoughts activate action within the brain, yet no brain has ever been cut open to reveal a thought, just as no body has been opened up to reveal a soul. We acknowledge the existence of the unseen energy called thought, yet some still deny the existence of the unseen energy called soul. The energy that activates thought is the same energy that activates soul.

The fertile garden of the mind.
Place a seed of thought in the fertile mind and it will take hold and grow. Whether the thought is moral or immoral, ethical or unethical has nothing whatever to do with the process involved. The seed, having been planted, must grow, and grow it will, into physical fact, unless the seed itself is weeded out and another planted in its place.

Be careful what you plant.
Plant a seed of failure and the universe will respond. The universe doesn’t judge the value of the seed, it simply responds to your gardening. A seed (thought) of failure will develop failure, just as a seed of unhappiness must develop unhappiness for you.

Concepts into form.
Every minute of every day your conscious mind is conceiving thoughts and projecting them as images into your subconscious mind. The subconscious will respond unconditionally. Whatever you conceive will be created and returned to you. If doubt and fear predominate your thinking, those very things that you fear will be visited upon you, for they are convictions that the subconscious must create into actuality.

A disciplined mind.
A disciplined mind is a free mind. With discipline and training, the ever busy ego can be made to step aside and allow peace and tranquillity into your life. But you cannot change your mind by changing your behaviour. It works the other way around. Mind renewal effects a change in behaviour due to a change in your personal reality. Yes, the mind can be retrained. It can be taught to let go of its restrictive addictions. Within this fact lies your freedom.

Needs

Need implies lack.
When need dominates over love, the delicate thread of self-acceptance is broken. Need implies a lack in oneself, a missing piece that someone else must supply. Women are generally asked to supply the softness, nurturing, comfort, beauty and affection that men may not otherwise find inside themselves. Men are expected to supply the strength, protection, power and will that women may otherwise not find within. Both feel that the other has made them complete. The softness, tenderness and nurturing a man finds in a woman is only borrowed unless he can be taught to develop these same qualities within himself. A woman may find some benefits from the power, will and strength she finds in a man, but that is not the same as having those qualities become her own.

Be as little children.
Little unspoiled children don’t really need money or toys or anything to be happy. Just leave them alone to play and they can take joy in just being alive. What do you feel you need to make you happy? Beware of needs — they have a habit of reinventing themselves. That is, as you fill one need, another pops up to take its place.

Giving up our power.
When our needs are satisfied by another, we feel contented. If they are not satisfied, we are likely to feel anxious. The moment we want or need something from another person in order to find contentment, we give that person the power to decide whether or not we will be happy.
We give them the power to play with our emotions.

Feel good demands.
The seeking of feeling good only creates more suffering. You feel good, so you want more of this feeling good. So you try to feel good all the time and end up suffering because this condition of “feeling good” cannot be turned on whenever you want it. All addictive demands such as wanting and needing must ultimately lead to dissatisfaction.

Why don’t they listen?
Our ego's addictive attitudinal inner needs demand people listen to and absorb what we are saying to them without being distracted by their own opinions on the subject, or even by their own feelings toward us.

Competing needs.
If a man or a woman feels there is a price to pay for being loved, their whole perception of love is damaged. It has become confused with a transaction between winners and losers in a game of competing needs.

What’s in it for me?
All too often a courtship serves to lay the groundwork for mutual selfishness. A man and a woman may bypass the pain of exposing their deepest fears and insecurities to each other. Each concentrates on what the relationship will do for me.

Giving.
The process of giving involves more than the handing over of a present or two. Real giving involves being aware and accepting of the ego needs and wants of others. It is higher consciousness that encourages to give unconditionally. It is your ego that seeks a reward. It’s important to distinguish between giving and sacrificing. A sacrifice is made only to get something in return. When you are sacrificing, you are in ego mode — you are giving in order to get. Unconditional love asks for nothing and demands nothing.

The need for intimacy.
When a person you’ve had a conversation with feels accepted, listened to and understood, you
have both enjoyed real intimacy. Intimacy involving the heart, not the body.
However, if you felt a need to make them wrong to prove your point, or if you judged them in any way, you succumbed to the addictive demands of your ego.
Intimacy means showing kindness and respecting the needs and wants of the other person.
Avoiding intimacy could see a person bounce from one dominant/submissive relationship to another.

Reinforcement of needs.
In need-driven communications, we look to messages from others that reinforce our inner needs.
If you are addicted to receiving recognition and verbal approval from others you would be well advised to review your attitudes about your own self-image.

Lack of communication.
Open communication between two people is unlikely to occur when each is absorbed by the need to focus on their own concerns. If you are unable to share your concerns and inner thoughts, it means you feel you have to conceal a part of yourself from your partner.   

Openness

The real you.
It’s okay to be yourself. Don’t let your partner depend on a phoney you.
Don’t let your partner coerce you into doing, saying or promising anything you can’t live with.

Separation.
The problem with lying or hiding things is that these activities make you feel increasingly separate from other people. Your ego-mind may try to intimidate you by whispering, “It’s too embarrassing, too risky to be honest with others.” If you are seduced by this fearful ego-voice you’ll become enmeshed in a web of concealment.

Living with an act.
If you are not deeply honest and open, your family is living with an act — not you.

Fear of hurting others.
Another ploy the ego-self uses to limit your honesty is an addictive fear of hurting the other person if you are totally open. The only person who can emotionally hurt the other person is the other person!

Pride is of the ego.
When we overcome our hesitancy to share our feelings and thoughts, we begin to break through our ego’s pride and vanity programming. Our unified self begins to replace our separate self.

Suppression can cause stress.
Hiding your deepest feelings from others keeps one stuck in an illusion of separateness from other people. The feelings we hide can lead to headaches, high blood pressure and anxiety, and destroy the joy of living.

Ask for what you want.
Sometimes when you ask your partner for what you want, you may feel apprehensive or fearful if you expect it will trigger your partner’s resentment or anger. This attitude is buying in to your partner’s addictions. When you take responsibility for your partner’s reactions, you both get trapped in an enmeshed, co-dependent game.

Perception

The false perception of self.
If you were to ask the average man in the street, “Who are you?”, he would give his name and possibly his occupation as an answer. He will identify himself with the labels he himself and society have placed upon him. He will not look within for an answer, but will look around at what he has in an attempt to define who he is. And all too often that process requires him to compare himself to those around him. Enter competiveness. A condition that demands and imposes upon you the scale of values that are not yours, but those of the society around you.

Truth.
What we believe to be truth is simply our own interpretations and evaluations of what we perceive based on our past conditioning.

Projected perception.
What we experience through our bodies seem to be real because it reflects what we want to see and hear. Projection makes perception. What we view as our reality is merely a projection of our inner thoughts and desires.

Peace of mind.
Peace of mind is possible when we learn to change our perception of conditions, rather than try to change the conditions themselves.

Self-fulfilling prophesies.
Entrenched addictive demands can form gates across the mind’s incoming information paths, so we only perceive those things that are consistent with our addictive attitudes. As a result our behaviour becomes more restricted and change becomes harder to assimilate. The strength of the attitude creates a selectiveness of what we see, hear and think. This selective blindness creates the delusion that everything truly is as the selective attitudes have perceived, so even if an alternative should arise it will not be recognized or valued. The attitude becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Create and enter a new world.
If you live in a world of perceived separateness, you live in a world of imaginings. Your world becomes personal, private, unable to be shared and intimately your own. Nobody can enter it and see as you see, hear as you hear, feel your emotions and think your thoughts. In your world of perceived separateness, you are truly alone, enclosed in your ever-changing dream, which you take as life. The world of a consciously aware person is an open world, common to all, accessible to all. In this world there is unity, community, insight, allowance and unconditional acceptance. The individual is the totality. All are one, and the one is all.

Preference

Released energy.
Addictions waste our energy in bodily tensions and emotional drains. Preferences enable us to release our energy to enjoy life and to creatively change what can be changed, and accepting that which we can’t change.

Accept the here and now.
Preferences never make you upset. If life delivers what you prefer — great! If it doesn’t — that’s okay too. Through a raised level of conscious awareness, you’re able to emotionally accept the here and now of the moment. You can feel relaxed and aware because its a preference, not a demand.

Calmness of mind.
Asking for what you want with a calmness of mind, shows you are not addicted to getting it.
Ideally, when you ask for what you want, you are simply sharing a preferential choice.

Relaxed communications.
Can you explain what you want to someone without feeling upset? If so, you probably have a preference. If not, chalk up an addiction. A preference is a desire that does not make you emotionally upset if you do not get it.

Emotional acceptance.
With preferential programming you can emotionally accept what is happening in your life and still try to make changes.

Calm acceptance.
If I can explain what I want and why I want it without suppressing or getting upset inside, I’m probably expressing a preference. If I begin to puff up with indignant “shoulds” and “should nots,” I’m re-running an addictive demand.

Relationships

We are not victims of the world around us.
Many of us spend a great deal of time seeking love — believing what we want and need is something outside of ourselves. We continue to place expectations on others to meets these needs, and sooner or later, we become disappointed and frustrated because we don’t get what we think we want. Consequently, we often feel depressed, frustrated and in conflict. We also feel anger, and our minds become filled with unforgiving “attack” thoughts. When we become seekers of romantic love, the temptation to identify with our bodies becomes stronger than ever, and we act as though this distorted, limited concept of reality is a true reflection of who we are. The reason we experience these limiting, negative thoughts and feelings is because we give our power away. When we give to others the power to decide for us whether we will be peaceful or in conflict, we reinforce the belief that we are victims of the world around us.
Forgetting we alone are responsible for our own peace, we conclude that whatever happens to us is caused by someone or something outside of ourselves — something “out there.”

The ego’s scanning antennae.
When two people meet, they set their “antennae” flapping trying to sense what about the other is different from them. They make comparisons and form quick judgments about each others traits and appearance in order to decide if they are dealing with a potential friend or enemy. Usually we are only dimly aware of the activity of these antennae, and yet we make automatic responses based on their limited and habitual comparisons to the past. We ignore the fact that this interferes with us being able to see what is really happening now. One can still scan, but it is suggested one uses an entirely different kind of mind set. If you resolve beforehand to look only for positive traits — signs of love, gentleness and peace — we will see only innocence, not guilt.
We must learn to look at others with our heart, not our preconceived assumptions.

A fear of being “incomplete”.
Any relationship based on a need or a perceived lack in oneself, is actually based on fear. What we call “love” in relationships of this kind is really the ego’s illusionary version of love, which covers up the fear we feel about our own sense of incompleteness.

Soul mate.
You’ll create only frustrations and disappointment if you allow your ego-mind to convince you that inner contentment depends on finding the one perfect person who is your “soul mate”— someone “special” on whom your entire future happiness depends.
No one thing or person on this planet is “special”. All is one.

Only one true love?
Don’t fall into the trap of believing there is only one special person that you are able to love.
Instead, try to develop the expectation that the world is full of people you can love, and who can love you — romantically or otherwise.

Half a person?
If you tell yourself you must have a relationship to make you happy, you’re already in trouble.
If you create the illusion that you’re only half a person, and you need someone to somehow help you fill in the missing half, you’re setting yourself up for a dysfunctional relationship. Your partner cannot make you feel good or guarantee your self-confidence and self-acceptance. Count yourself fortunate if your partner can do this for themselves!

Living with another’s history.
When you marry, you marry your partner’s whole history. Likewise, your partner must live with your history. The success of your relationship will depend on the depth of your understanding and acceptance through unconditional love.

It’s their business — not yours.
The only thing that has anything to do with you is what’s going on in your head. What’s happening to the other person and what’s going on in their head is their business. If we can just learn to let things be, and pick up on what’s ours and leave what’s theirs to them, relationships will run a lot smoother.

Two into one does not go.
One of the great confusions of our society is the assumption that two people will always and forever be able to force their lives into one mould.

Hanging on.
If you find yourself hanging on to a difficult situation for the sake of someone else, you are deceiving yourself and achieving nothing.

Commitment.
Commitment to other people means seeing each person in the best possible light.
To do this, we must dismiss personal emotional reactions that might lessen enjoyment of others.
The ultimate interpersonal commitment is to forgive and forget any residual thoughts that interfere with affinity and respect. The benefit you get from commitment is peace of mind on both sides. Commitment prepares the mind for full involvement and guards against distraction.

Distorted focus.
Focusing on the problems and defects in a relationship makes sense for evaluating the relationship, but makes no sense for enjoying it. A focus on shortcomings and problems will sour your perspective and compromise the experience. After a while, you will have trouble seeing anything of value in the relationship. Most problems occur when each person is concentrating on what’s missing in the other person. When you focus on what you love about someone, that focus will grow in your relationship.

Look for the clues.
When our relationships are less than wonderful they hold the opportunity to know ourselves better. Every niggle and discomfort is a clue to a dysfunctional belief, or addictive demand.
It is these ego-based fears that cripple our real potential.

Lessons in harmony.
To learn to live in harmony with all your relationships is to learn to live in harmony with yourself. When we truly accept ourselves, we naturally attract loving, harmonious relationships with others.
Our most important relationship we have is with ourselves. Our combined relationship of Spirit, Mind and Body.

Understanding differences.
Different age groups, different social groups, and different people at different times in their lives all place different values on those separate elements which contribute to a relationship. It is with the understanding and acceptance of these differences that lasting relationships are built.

Marriage of convenience.
Opposites attract when one partner sees a strength in another which will compliment whatever is lacking in the other. One’s attachment to another based on one’s insecurity is almost always a recipe for conflict at some time in the future.

Validation and comfort in numbers.
Lacking 100% acceptance of our self, we sometimes seek validation of our values and are attracted to people with similar attitudes and values to our own. A dependency on others may bolster feelings of security, but what will happen if they decide to move away?

A dynamic duo!
How many couples bond together by forming a we that is just a stronger, tougher version of me? The rationale being that if survival is paramount in a dangerous world, two are better at it than one. Like an individual, a couple can pursue money and power, or at the very least, security and comfort. Love gets left behind because it wont bring material rewards, at least not as clearly as unloving tactics will. Money and power require toughness, the willingness to fight for what you want.
You are better off having a killer instinct, not a loving heart, if you pursue these things. Security and comfort also require looking out for number one. In this case, one has become two — nothing else has changed.

Levels of consciousness in a relationship.
At the ego’s lower level of consciousness, two people cannot want exactly the same thing all the time. Yet at levels of higher consciousness, they cannot help but want the same thing all the time. Your ego wants material things, predictable conclusions, continuity, security, and the prerogative to be right when others are quite obviously wrong! Each person brings into a marriage a complex bundle of ego needs; the husband may be loving and kind, but his ego demands that life turns out according to certain expectations, and the same may be true for his wife. A relationship based on need is not love.

Where did the magic go?
When relationship start to lose their sparkle, one question often asked is, “What happened to the person I thought I knew?” In most partnerships of egos, where need fulfillment is the prime objective, what you get to know is mostly personality, and personality is an act. It’s difficult to continue the act all of the time, and each partner begins to see the truth of the other when masks are being left off more and more. The masks are diligently worn with full paintwork for others to see, but there is little mystique left between the former doe-eyed lovers. The partnership becomes predictable and mechanical.

Relationships.
When you let go of the expectation that your relationship will make you happy, you can absolutely count on your relationship to give you lots of opportunities for conscious growth.

Security - Insecurity

Insecure thoughts.
If you want to understand why people behave as they do and feel the way they feel, you need only understand the role insecurity plays in our lives. Insecurity is the source of all distress and counterproductive behaviour. Thanks to the tireless efforts of our ego, thoughts of insecurity periodically pass through our minds. If we learn to dismiss these thoughts we will remain secure, our ideal selves; easygoing, joyful, compassionate and wise. If we allow the ego to dwell on thoughts of insecurity, we will end up in a state of distress.

Defensive reactions.
When a person is insecure, his thinking is defensive, his behaviour is habitual, and he will react rather than respond. He will live in a negative reality and create an inner state of distress.

Positive reality.
When a person feels secure, he moves into a positive reality. He thinks with more reflection, and rather than react defensively through fear, he responds out of wisdom and foresight.

The problem with problems.
The mere mention of the word “problem” brings on feelings of insecurity. Problems are in fact, a state of mind, which can focus on any issue the ego sees as threatening.

Emotional triggers.
Within an insecure mind, emotional thoughts around a problem will trigger emotional reactions.
If we are not careful, we will spend our time dealing with these emotional reactions (addictive demands), instead of the issue. For every problem there is a solution. These solutions are usually obvious to the dispassionate and detached observer, but we cannot see them if our minds are clouded by emotional reactions. When the emotional environment is no longer turbulent, we can calm down and access our natural wisdom. We begin to respond with heightened awareness, rather than react habitually through fear and insecurity.

Resist becoming another’s problem solver.
You can’t solve another person’s problems. He or she will disqualify any solutions you propose with the “yes, but” response. Problems lie in thought systems, not out there in the world.

Avoiding conflict.
When you are feeling insecure, you tend to take another’s comments personally. Your emotional reactions tend to obscure your ability to see what is really being said. In a secure state of mind, you see what is being said with true perception and understanding. If you find you are taking it personally, rather than listening with understanding, suspend the discussion until emotions have time to settle down.

Learning the lessons.
People have to learn to see for themselves that every misguided action is accompanied by an addictive demand brought on by an insecure state of mind.

Distractions of the ego.
Being distracted by addictive demands is just a habit. Once you realize that certain attitudes are extraneous smoke screens of the ego, your thinking will become more functional. Closeness to others will grow as you gain more control over your thinking.

Habitual, extraneous thoughts.
Thoughts that seem appropriate and natural are the main distractions. We take them for granted. That’s why they persist as addictions. When we see them as irrelevant, extraneous thoughts, they will begin to drop away from our consciousness.

Secure in the moment.
When a person feels secure, he or she finds it easy to be in the moment. When one feels unsafe or insecure, one lapses into addictive distractions.

Do you need to be the best?
If you need that sort of recognition for your own ego strength, you are being fulfilled by the plaudits of others rather than from within, and this is one of the surest signs of insecurity and low self-acceptance.

Insecurity blankets.
The first step to shedding an insecurity blanket is to recognize when we are wrapped in one. The alcoholic’s first step back to sobriety begins with the words, “I am an alcoholic.” The drug addict’s first step towards recovery is when he or she can say, “I am an addict.” The emotional addict’s first step is to say, “I am addicted to anxiety, or to depression, or to helplessness,” etc.

Are you sewn in?
Some people are not so much wrapped in their insecurity blanket as sewn into it.

High security prison.
Many of us are so focused on attaining emotional or financial security in our lives, we actually imprison ourselves, through our own fears, within a mental high security prison — a fortress of our own making.

Reliance on others.
We are all suffering from some type of insecurity, due to the fact we have been taught to rely on tangible objects and other people for security instead of our own real self.

The value of money.
Money has no value in itself. Its only value is the value we give to it and the reactions we have to it.
If we react with fear of its lack or loss, it has power over us and we lose ourselves to it. Money does not measure success, wealth, security or even self-worth. Our reaction to it is the measure of how much we are able to accept ourselves — how much trust we have in our Self.

Captives of our past.
We are all held captive by our past. Our memories create the conditioning that literally runs our life.

Stress

Expression of needs.
If our attitudes and environment are in tune with the needs of our ego personality, we experience a feeling of inner comfort. But if our attitudes or environment are inhibiting the expression of our personality needs, we experience stress with all its by-products of anger, fear, pain and sickness.
If unaddressed, stress can manifest more deeply as a loss of self-acceptance and possible depression.

Cause and effect of stress.
It’s not people or conditions in our external world that causes us to be stressed, but rather the thoughts and attitudes we have about people and conditions. It’s our habitual addictive demands that cause us to be in conflict and dis-stress.

Reflected stress.
Stress in our lives is not caused by unwanted events. Rather the unwanted events are a reflection of the internal stress caused by our inability to accept ourselves, unconditionally.

Stress may lead to illness.
Stress has been shown to inhibit the body’s ability to manufacture interferon, a natural protein that curbs viral infections. Rejection, anxiety and anger are all stressful and do indeed appear to inhibit the body’s capacity to resist or recover from illness.

A lowering of T-cells.
Deep grief and its associated stress, can cause a lowering in the activity of T-cells, one of the blood cells that attack disease.

Mental quicksand.
Some thoughts are like quicksand; the more you struggle with them the deeper you sink. Rather than struggle with thoughts, choose to be aware of them, but resist engaging in what they are telling you. As angry thoughts fade, so will the reactionary impulses of the body — relaxation occurs.

Emotional detachment.
You can learn to bypass stress by making a preferential choice; to actively participate or passively observe. Participate in the dama or emotionally detach and observe at a distance. It is wise for you to develop a conscious awareness of preferential choice. This will allow you to balance your well-being each day and live relatively free of stress.

The Now Moment

Be as little children.
The ego encourages us to project our past learning onto the future, ensuring our future will be just like our past. Thus, in satisfying our ego’s need to control and predict, we all but eliminate the possibility of experiencing love and happiness in the present moment. However, a new-born child, innocent and free of any past guilt, has no need to control the future. Free of ego control, which operates on past experiences, the child relates to life by concentrating its full attention on living completely in the present moment. In the ego-less mind of the new-born, the present moment is all there is.

Separation leads to disharmony.
When you judge someone else’s moment, you automatically separate yourself from them. Through division or separation comes conflict and disharmony.

Live in the moment — die in the moment.
When the future arrives, it will always be now — the eternal now moment. We always imagine we will die “tomorrow,” but when we die, we die “today”— in the moment.

Building defenses.
All of us have hurtful memories from our past. In order to protect ourselves from repeating these painful experiences in the future, we build up our defenses. Such defenses usually include mind-sets based on addictive demands on how the world should and should not treat us. In using our fearful past to prepare for a predicted fearful future, we are unable to live happily in the present.
The present is the only time there is, but we constantly think fearful thoughts about the future and expect it to be like the past.

Make the mental shift back to reality.
Our mental habit of rewriting the past and rehearsing what is to come does indeed generate some form of emotional pain. A mental shift back into the present helps remove the source of our misery. It’s simply a matter of choice, and the choice is entirely up to you. Think sad or think happy.

The only reality is now.
If we accept the fact that only the present moment is real, then the past cannot hurt us, and will not hurt us unless we choose to make it part of our present.

Access to inner wisdom.
You have to clear your mind of an event to have access to inner wisdom. That’s where forgiving and forgetting past actions come into the picture. It’s the first step in clearing your mind of addictive demands.

Learning.
Learning to respond to now is all there is to learn, and we are not responding to this moment if we are judging any aspect of it. The ego looks around for something to criticize. This always involves a comparison with the past. But a raised consciousness looks upon the world peacefully and accepts it as it is. The ego searches for shortcomings and weaknesses. Higher consciousness allows one to see how far one has come and not how far he has to go. How simple it is to raise awareness and how exhausting it is to always find fault, for every time we see a fault we think something needs to be done about it.

Focus on now.
If you are focused on where you are going rather than where you are, you may fall into some unseen pothole. We have become so goal orientated that we have forgotten how to enjoy the simple pleasures of the journey. There is an abundance of life, love, joy, pleasure and wholeness in every moment if you are but willing to look.

Negative thoughts.
A negative experience of the past, when recalled, is just a negative thought. It was an experience back then — it’s just a thought now. The thought would be no less troubling to you if it came from a dream.

Forgive and forget.
Forgiving and forgetting the past is a very selfish thing to do. This type of selfishness is good for you. By hanging on and not letting go, you are the one suffering from the painful thoughts.

Hanging on.
Some people have the mistaken idea that hanging on to resentments somehow protects them from making the same mistake again. This focuses your attention on the past rather than on the present. It’s difficult to move forward if you’re always looking backward.

Changing the past.
We cannot physically change the happenings of the past, but we can transmute the pain of the past. If that pain is reflected in today’s physical disease (as some suggest), then by changing the emotions connected to the past, you can possibly affect physicality.

Past is thought.
Up until this now moment, your entire past is nothing more than thought. Likewise your entire future as you attempt to perceive it, is also nothing more than thought. Only you can give those thoughts the power to hurt you. Think they can, or think they can’t, either way you’ll be right.

Abstract concepts.
Life exists only in the present. Future and past are nothing more than abstract concepts of the intellect, and yet they dominate our lives and are the root of almost every emotional disorder or discomfort ever experienced. Concerns for what is past and what is yet to happen, cause more insecurity, anxiety, fear, frustration and tension than any other condition.

Recollections and expectations.
If the past is memory recalled in the now, and the future an expectation experienced in the present now, the entire premise of there being something behind us or in front of us, completely vanishes. The present is no longer boxed in by boundaries, but expands to fill all time.

Why bring the past into the present?
If it is true that only now is real, then the past cannot hurt us, and will not, unless we make it part of our present.

Just like a dream.
The past is no more real than a dream. Once an event is over it becomes a mere memory.
The past only has as much power as you give it through your thoughts.

Truth

Opinionated truth.
An opinion is always a relative truth, not an ultimate truth. Sustained by supporting arguments, it is a subjective, intellectual viewpoint. In this way, our conditioned world is defined for us, and in this way we are defined to the world. However, when an opinion is so conditionally solidified that we are unable to see beyond it, and when this opinion becomes so embedded in our make-up that we can no longer intellectually or perceptually step outside of it, it becomes excess emotional baggage.

Allow your truth to be flexible.
Our thoughts and opinions are our own creations, borne from our own limited personal experience, background, early conditioning and current situation. As such, they’re not necessarily true or even factual. And as they merely express our personal version of truth or reality, they’re not always applicable or meaningful to other people. There are as many “truths” as there are people. Because our truth may not be everyone else’s version of the truth, it should be flexible and changeable, not static or rigid.

The whole truth.
Each of us possess our own unique portion of the truth, but our ego mind foolishly has us believing it’s the whole truth. So when our small slice of the truth appears to differ from somebody else’s slice of truth, we egotistically proclaim their version to be wrong.

Believe with conviction.
If you believe in something, but cannot achieve it, the day will surely come when you will be able to put your belief into practice. All the conditions and events that come into your life are the manifestations of what you have believed up until now — your relative version of truth. Likewise, those things that we do not believe in will not appear in front of us at all. The problem is that when people cannot believe something from their hearts and don’t try to believe it, those things will not appear in front of them at all! Thus, the true world, which is free from insecurity and unhappiness, will not reveal itself in front of them. Your convictions have shaped your experiences. Your beliefs construct your experiences. If you firmly believe that insecurity, unhappiness and trouble have no true existence, those very convictions of yours will construct your future experiences without insecurity, unhappiness or trouble. If you genuinely try to devote your attention to ultimate truth, the time will surely come when you are able to believe in that truth with your whole being.

Ultimate truth never changes.
What we believe to be true is not necessarily the truth. What is true today, can be changed by circumstance to be something entirely different tomorrow. Ultimate truth never changes. It may be true that man has arms, but that’s not ultimate truth because not all men have arms.

Ultimate truth.
Ultimate truth is what’s happening right now, before the mind has a chance to think about it.
But once the moment has past, in the world of the ego mind it becomes relative truth.
I clap my hands . . . and we have an ultimate truth. A moment later all that’s left is a memory of that event — a relative truth. Its validity as a truth then depends on who remembers it, what they remember of it, and what their conditioned attitude to it is.

Relative truth.
Relative truth is all created in the mind and includes thought, opinions, attitudes and memories.
It’s inside this world of memories, opinions and attitudes that we live. Many of us don’t have the awareness to perceive what’s happening in the present moment because we are so caught up with processing the relative truth of all that happened before the event.
Relative truth is the world of memories, thoughts and feelings.
Ultimate truth is the world of direct experience.

Understanding

Understanding others.
When the illusionary boundaries between yourself and others has been dissolved, you will see others as being at their own individual level of growth and accept them unconditionally for being precisely where they are.

Our steps forward.
Understanding can only come as each experience uncovers a new step forward.

Being the best we can with what we have .
We can only do and be the best we can with the understanding and knowledge we have at the time.

Observing with compassion.
We can observe others expressing themselves and their truth without a need to prove them wrong. We are simply at different stage in our personal growth.

Patience.
There are many things we do not understand simply because we are not yet in a position to do so. This is why patience with other people’s experiences and points of view is not only a comfort to them, but a relief to us as well. A patient acceptance of other people’s behaviour, even though we may not yet understand it, is a sure way to relief stress within ourselves.

Will empowers thought.
Understanding resides midway between thought and action. When we understand that thoughts have no power without our will, we can more easily keep them from dictating actions.

Negativity can be eliminated through understanding.
The only way we can eliminate negative emotion is through understanding. Catharsis, the release of pent-up emotion, will not permanently remove an emotion. At best, it will act as a relief valve.
The same emotion will return as soon as it’s triggered by a new event or circumstance. There’s always someone who understands and appreciates the very same people we may see in a negative light. For example, one man’s shrew of an ex-wife is another man’s dream come true. We all have the capacity to view that person as her admirers do.
Our perceptions of others will always be colored by our attitudes. If our attitudes are negative and intolerant, our perceptions of others will be negative and intolerant.

Don’t confuse giving with sacrifice.
Sometimes we make attempts to be patient and kind, and then withdraw our love when our efforts are not acknowledged to our satisfaction. True giving of self should not be regarded as a sacrifice. A sacrifice suggests some ulterior motive. Giving is simply giving with no strings attached.

Accept responsibility for creating your own world.
Your thoughts, your words and your actions shape the reality of your world around you, and it’s wise to remind yourself of this truth every minute of every day. Words and actions are physical responses to the thoughts and emotions you create in your own mind. An understanding of this fact will allow you to recognize that you, and you alone are responsible for exactly how you feel every waking minute of every day. A disagreeable person or event didn’t make you feel upset. Your thoughts and attitudes about the person or event (and your reactions to them), are what made you feel upset.