Every time you get negative, you drain from yourself something vital to the development of your soul. But every time you catch yourself in those dark waters that carry you away, you add something to your development by working to understand them.

The source of those dark, raging waters is an illusion. It is the illusion that is part and parcel with the present activity of your mind, the way you see life. It is the illusion that there is something more for you to be and have than this present moment has given you to be and have.

There is nothing more than what this present moment holds. Anything else that we are looking for is an image produced by our conditioning, an idea structured in a society that has told us that to be a whole human being means one must achieve x, y and z and be seen in such and such a light.

This moment has everything in it, but the problem is that you believe you know what the moment is. This moment is not that thing you don't want! But your experience of it is.

In fact, this moment is not our concept of it. This moment is not what we imagine it to be. Yet we do experience in our imagination, don't we? We imagine there's something wrong with this moment. And then we suffer for it!

So, what is this moment? It's not a time or place, but a Presence. And everything that we need to be is already contained in this moment.

Our minds are not sensitive enough to see this though because something within us wards off any sensation that's not familiar to us. So if something stirs us uncomfortably, if there's something that seems unfathomable and more than we know how to handle, our present nature -- rather than allowing us to participate in that convergence of energies -- will actually take that moment and name it so the self that "knows" what it is feels protected.

But in such protection is isolation and the need to protect the image the mind came up with. So rather than being a participant in Real Life in this moment -- with its light and color and sounds and emotional qualities -- we live in a few strands of strained emotion, or we feel a few moments of jubilance that are part of the opposite party.

We actually live in an ocean of emotions that give breadth and depth to everything we see. It can't be thought about, but it can be participated in. But for us, unfortunately, every emotion that stirs and moves through us is accompanied by something telling us what the emotion is. So we participate in life through a tiny pinhole instead of recognizing that the conflict we experience -- the absence of peace, the dark raging waters -- is born of our becoming a rock in the river!

Do you know what it's like to be a rock in the river? "This is my place; this is who I am; this is what I do. And anything that challenges that, or upsets it, is my enemy." The illusion that won't let me be at peace with myself is that there's something more I can be other than everything there is. It's the idea that there's something I have to gain! I don't know why she or he did that, and I need the power to fix them. I don't understand why I turned out the way I did, so I must understand my past so I can predict and improve my future. Garbage!

Do a moment of true soul searching for you - true soul searching where you don't identify with what you see in that search. If something in you looks back through what you call your life, and you wind up crying or taking a drink because of what you've discovered, it was not you doing the searching. It was a self whose sole purpose for driving you through that was to put you in conflict and get you to feel the old things you feel. Haven't you had enough of that?

Soul searching is what we have to do. In fact, it's so beautiful. When things go bad, are you willing to examine the whole of it, not to see how to fix the problem or get away from it, but so that you can become a participant in the parts of you that actually produced it? Will you do that? That's what is necessary for your development.