Waking Up

If there's one thing that should be more than evident to everyone on the planet, it's that the level of pain in it is increasing. We'll prove this in a number of different ways before we're done with our talk, but we always want to move away from what's planetary and get personal right away. So let me ask you a question, and I'll state it in simple terms. How many of you suspect you're imbalanced? Human beings are imbalanced.

This world we live in is filled with increasing conflict. And the question is, is there any way in which we as individuals can become something that is not a continuation of this suffering so that by our own work we begin to be a different kind of human being? The answer is most assuredly yes, but to do so, we must first work at new understanding.

Almost every day I receive a letter, an e-mail, or phone call from an aspirant who wants to know, essentially, the following: "What must I do to succeed spiritually?" Or, in a slight variation on that theme: "What's the right way to do what I must in order to awaken?"

Part of our essential need to be at peace is to know that we are in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing, and to know it in such a fashion that nothing can come along and convince us that we are not. Have you ever thought to yourself "I'm doing the right thing at the right time," and someone said, "No, you're not," and then everything fell apart?...

Awakening to Real Life occurs in direct proportion to waking up from our own sleeping nature -- a fact which brings us face to face with some of life's oldest and greatest spiritual mysteries. The myth of the phoenix, the riddle of the sphinx, even the story of Christ's birth in a dimly lit stable of barnyard animals... all point to the existence of one nature dwelling in the midst of another...