When your mind holds a picture of how your life should be, a sense of self is created that can never be at peace, and desperation replaces natural aspiration. Instead of looking for consolation in things outside of you, learn what it means to see your life through the eyes of the Divine. You'll find that something within you already knows what is real from what is false.

There are natural hopes born out of a natural attraction. But when the thing aspired for is the result of wishing to escape or fix who you are, then that hope becomes contradictory and actually sows the seed of conflict. When natural hope turns into something that formulates an identity, it becomes a punishment to you and everyone around you.

Everything begins now, and now isn't a "time to come." Now is the intersection of the Divine with passing time. The heart of that cross is Presence. It is where what is true intersects what can know truth.

Every human being is different and unique. It's one of the greatest mysteries that there is no end to the ways in which the Divine manifests itself through its creations. Every last element of each creation expresses a different character and quality of the Divine as it is acted upon by the Divine.

Notice your tendency to always be looking down most of the time, even when walking on level ground and with no obstacles in your path. When you're looking down you don't realize that real life is actually being stolen from you. The life that's being handed to you instead is one of sensation born of thinking about yourself and your life rather than actually living it.

Helping each other is waking up. The illusion is that we are all separate, individual people. As I'm awakened in myself to myself, I see the consciousness that is acting within me and know that I can't go along with it. And if I can't enable it in myself, I can't enable it in others either. Through your growing self-awareness you start to see what serves you and what doesn't.

Your present consciousness thinks in terms of getting things done so that it can be "over" and you can move on to the next thing. But real life is never done the way that nature wants you to believe. Real life is always being done, and you have a role in it, which is to attend to life while it's happening so that you can be purified by it.

Guy recalled a time from his early adulthood when he had worked with laborers and had observed them to be very lighthearted, despite the difficulty of their work and how little they made from it. He felt a certain kind of shame at his own discontent, and came to the realization that it would be a very different world if we could learn to love our lives differently.

Guy explains that in order to come into a real life, you need to work to stop passively giving into fear and start taking action that allows you to see yourself as you are. As you start to see the truth of yourself, you'll begin to discover possibilities you never knew were in you. Here's an exercise designed to help you be proactive in your inner work.

When you focus on feelings of loneliness, you become identified with the part of you that is producing the very condition you don't want. The more you talk to yourself about why you are alone and why people don't like you, the more you emanate an energy that actually creates distance between you and other people. The only way this comes to an end is when you start to understand that you are yo...