There is no consumptive negative state in the consciousness without resistance being the "goo" it grows out of -- something black and dark pulling and pushing on you. And in the moment that dark state starts to swallow you, when you're starting to feel sorry for yourself, or you're trying to figure out what to do about something because you're asleep to yourself, all you know to do is to push back. Then an hour or a week later, you have no idea what's happened to you -- who you've hurt, what you've said, what you purchased. Everything is in a complete fog because you haven't learned (yet) what it means to wake up and say, "I have more important things to do than get stuck in this goo."

And the goo is sticky, isn't it? You get into a negative state, and you start to fight. Or you lay down in it, or you try to leap over it. And every one of those actions is determined by resistance to the disturbance. That self that stands up and fights, resists, wants to leap over what has disturbed it is actually confirming itself through the resistance. The thing that it hates proves that it has a right to hate. The thing that it fears proves that it needs to protect itself. What it amounts to is a psychological construct, an amalgamation of thoughts and feelings collected inside you over time (because you're asleep), and that becomes the secret conspirator in the goo-making machine.

But that resistance isn't yours. It has no power over you without you being identified with your own past in some shape or fashion. And you are not your past. You are not what mom or dad did or didn't do. You are not what anyone said is true or not true about you. You are none of the things. But buried deep inside of this psychic system are tens of thousands of strange images of yourself, all of which are collected into a self that rotates just like a kaleidoscope. And when certain events take place, it spins instantaneously, and that which is affronted by or bothered by what it says takes place -- because it's not part of what it wants -- and boom! There's resistance to it, and the split second there's resistance to it, you're in the goo.

You're in relationship with negative states all day. You're in the goo. Every time you think about you, you're in the goo. Every time you think about what somebody didn't do, you're in the goo. And the goo you get stuck in doesn't belong to you, because the resistance -- that is the fiber and substance of it -- isn't yours.

So, when you understand even a little bit of what we're talking about here and along comes a moment in which there is pain, fear, worry, the first and foremost thing for you to understand -- that takes no thought whatsoever -- is that "anything that pulls on me, anything that pushes me can't be right for me."

And when you can say, "I have more important things to do than get stuck in this goo," you enact with words what you must begin to practice in deed. And the practice is that at the moment of the disturbance, you recognize that the resistance, the negative state is forming in you. But it's alright, because now you can act in the moment towards that ache in a way you've never done before, which is to release the resistance. Why? You know it doesn't belong to you.

Whatever you're doing, be careful. Be conscious: "Oh, I can start to feel that heaviness. I can start to feel nothing is right. But wait a minute. This resistance that I have to that thought, that feeling -- it isn't mine! It belongs to a self that formally called itself me.

Now you have to decide what to do with the goo. Nobody can do that for you. And you must be ruthless with it, because if you don't give it up, the goo gets you. Give it up. Release the resistance and watch how a whole new reality is born inside of you through a relationship with the intelligence that knows clearly the difference between what compromises you and what glorifies you.