If we were to take the whole human race and try to see its nature as being one creature, what kind of animal comes to mind for you? For me, the answer is evident: humankind most resembles an ostrich. When a disturbance comes along this creature sticks its head in the sand so as not to see what's taking place. This is not unlike closing our eyes in the hope that an approaching tiger won't see us! Our rationale is the terribly mistaken idea that what we don't know -- what we don't see -- about ourselves won't hurt us.

To summarize this unhappy condition: instead of being self-discovering -- as we are created to be -- we are self-deceiving. Our present level of consciousness lives in a shaky alliance with a host of dark states that betray us by making it seem as though we can delay dealing with what we fear about ourselves. Why would any of us choose to lose in this way when we are the creation of a fearless Light, endowed with the right to command all that happens within us?

The answer is as simple as it can be hard to see: through countless generations of mounting false social, cultural, and corrupted religious traditions, we've been conditioned to believe in a lie that looks something like this: whatever character faults we fear dwell within us must not only be hidden from the world around us, but kept from ourselves as well.

This unconscious conclusion is not only a tragedy, but unchecked, is a prescription for psychic pain that will never end. Here is the real medicine:

We are created to be self-correcting beings through our awareness of whatever we see within us needful of being corrected.

This doesn't mean we judge ourselves; condemning ourselves only keeps us a captive of the false self that sits in judgment of everything. Instead, we simply agree to let the light of higher perception do its work of perfecting us in ways we can't imagine. In no time at all we realize that being enlightened is always better than living frightened!

One of the gifts born in our growing awareness of the celestial process of creation perfecting itself is greater self-command. After all, once we see that nothing can happen to us that isn't already a part of this perfection in motion -- what is there to fear?

The birth of this new strength is, in part, what it means to walk through life with "Truth by our side," for now we are starting to live from a wisdom that "passes all understanding." Our new vision shows us, even in the midst of what used to make us miserable, that everything we encounter is for the good of us. And the light of this new and higher self-understanding shines in all places, including those parts of us we would rather never run into -- hatefulness, jealousy, regret, despair, rage -- whatever that shadow may be that makes us want to look away from it.

Whenever we catch a glimpse of something dark dwelling within us, we do so by the grace of a living, timeless Light whose celestial character knows we have not been created to live as the captive of any fearful condition, let alone those we unconsciously create for ourselves. Its wish is to give us what we cannot give to ourselves: true spiritual freedom and its peaceable command over all our interior states. It offers us this greatest of gifts by inviting us to bring whatever we see about ourselves into the light of its Life. As we do this, our former dread of darkness fades away because the fear that bred it no longer holds power over us. We see -- beyond the shadow of any doubt -- that it is never negative to see the negative since it is always the perfectly positive that empowers us with this new kind of seeing.

Our hope is nothing less than to realize conscious relationship with the light Life; for then ours will be -- without stress or strain -- the effortless awareness of what is our own -- and what is not our own. As we awaken to see the truth that no fearful sense of limitation or inadequacy belongs to our True Self, we also make this most astonishing discovery: we already have everything we need to succeed.