Watchfulness

Our lives are nothing but a series of invitations, a series of moments in which we run into what we don't know. And in this experience of our own limitations, something good and natural takes place. In its constant stirring and seeking, life feeds back to us the boundaries determined by our present understanding.

As we're about to discover, the little phrase, "I see myself," describes a single action that has the power to change the heart of whoever is willing to embrace its practice. But, before we examine the exercise, let's take a closer look at what it means to "see ourselves" -- as we are -- especially when someone else has failed to please us.

We are created to know ourselves not by what we think about, but to know ourselves within God's ever-present, perfectly changing Life. The challenge for us is that we are habituated to thinking about ourselves and deriving a sensation of ourselves based upon the images that we consider.

No moment can be different than it is. We can't change a moment that comes. The moment (and its content) appears from within us, before us, and we are relegated to being able to see it but not to change the very thing that we're looking at as it appears. So that whether we like it or not actually means nothing.

The next time you run into some familiar blockage or begin to feel unsuited to face some new and difficult personal challenge, don't do what you've always done before. Don't try to think your way around it. You no longer want a way around your troubles because what goes around, comes around! What you want is to grow beyond the level of that disturbance. And to do that, you must not act from it.

All of our life experiences have been trying to teach us a certain grand lesson: Liberation from our captive condition (whatever that may be in the moment) cannot come by further deliberating it. We can see the wisdom in doing nothing toward our own troubled thoughts and feelings when we realize that the only way not to be dragged under by these negative states is to stay...

There is a higher relationship that has nothing to do with anything personal at all. It is the realization of the existence of strength, of majestic beauty, of power... and that realization is inseparable from the consciousness in which it appears. And that consciousness isn't personal. It belongs to what is Divine in a human being and it is a gift of the Divine.

Truthful self-seeing is the beginning of having an authentic life... one in which we learn that the initial bitterness of self-truthfulness is the front-runner of our ultimate spiritual betterment.

Your awareness of troubled thoughts and feelings roaming through you is the power that keeps their harmful and self-limiting influences from having control over you.

"Know thyself" is perhaps the oldest, wisest, deepest, and most succinct spiritual instruction ever given. In fact, it is our nature to know ourselves.

This world of ours, and all that transpires here, is a school for our spiritual education. Like any institution of higher learning, it has teachers, lessons, and many levels of learning; all serve to make possible the revelation and eventual realization of a timeless love that both creates and maintains the cosmos themselves. Our heartaches -- whatever their nature -- are heralds of this high...

We are meant to become an observer of ourselves, watchful of both the content -- and the intent -- of everything arising from our own mind and heart.