Wake Up from the Self-Centered Life

Question: Would you please explain what it means to "remember" yourself?

Answer: Working to remember yourself doesn't mean to think about or otherwise consider yourself, as that is all most of us do all the time anyway. Remembering yourself is quite the opposite of this form of self-considering. To remember yourself begins with realizing you have been asleep, taking part in a self-centered life instead of the God-centered one.

You may think of the idea of remembering yourself as simply being aware that "you" are both house and its contents, and that if this house (or awareness of yourself) doesn't know it's there, doesn't know it "stands" in and of itself while the contents rattle around and change position within it, then you are identified totally with the contents... which means you are asleep to yourself. Bad dreams are inevitable in this kind of spiritual slumber!

To awaken (at least at one important level) is to realize that a house divided cannot stand, and that only when both house and contents are present to your awareness are you truly conscious and capable of really being involved in this miracle called life.

Work to remember yourself. Asking God to help you do this will help you succeed because it is impossible to remember yourself without remembering His Life, in which your life dwells.

Question: I have realized my memory has created a made-up self, and that if I just watch my mental workings, that I don't give this made-up self any more energy to keep it alive. Am I on the right track just watching all this mental and emotional stuff run its course?

Answer: Yes, keep ever-watchful. Two natures really do exist within each of us even though one (lower) resides within the (Higher) other. Here is a rough gage by which to discern the two: "Lower self" feels itself ever incomplete. It endlessly pursues a sense of completion by reconfiguring itself, using its own content as its matrix. "Higher Self" seeks nothing; it is already complete.

Question: I can make myself sick with just the simple thought of a certain painful memory crossing my mind. Is there a way to defuse the hurt instead of sinking into it?

Answer: The next time some hostile state takes you over -- either in thought (as in remembering something someone did to you in the past) or in an actual moment of conflict with someone standing before you -- ask yourself the following question at the moment you can remember yourself to do so: Is this self that I am presently experiencing the me that I want to be? Or: Is this suffering self how I want to know myself? And then just come as awake as you can to the realization that you are not who you want to be at that moment, but that something foreign to your true nature has imposed itself on you and taken over your life.

Having done this, do nothing else except realize that while you may be temporarily powerless to stop the lower state from possessing you, you are empowered to recognize the negative state as an intruder. This awareness -- this conscious awareness of your true pained condition -- is what it means to put the light on the problem. That is your job. The Light will do its part if you will do yours. Persist until you are free!