Special Lessons

Our eyes and ears, thoughts and feelings, empower us to move freely through the extraordinary web of life of which we're a part. But these gifts of perception, as considerable as they may be, are more like a looking glass than they are the keys to that secret kingdom of freedom we seek. With their aid, we can almost see into, and so confirm, that innermost realm where our heart senses we belong.

In one respect, at the heart of our predicament as a species of beings -- because it negatively impacts our possibilities -- is that we do not see the big picture. For most of us, the big picture is our problem, our heavy heart, our irritation with somebody else, or our own sense of inadequacy. The big picture is the weight of our past. And that's not the big picture at all. That is a self-pitying picture. It has nothing to do with what it is that we need to understand.

If our intuition can perceive that the peace we long for is inherent in this perfectly present moment we call the "Now," what is it that keep us from knowing the fulfillment of its promise within us? Let's look.

Whenever our world changes for the better, it does so for only one reason: somewhere, in some place, someone (just like you and me) is suddenly "changed." Like ripples radiating out from the center of a pond into which a stone has been thrown, the force of the awakened new perception -- this realization of what has always been one's higher possibility -- establishes a new reality. Everything is changed, forever.

Occasionally, for all of us, we accidentally enter into the flow of the Now. We could be skiing, skating, doing yoga, playing golf, and suddenly our activity aligns us with the flow of that moment. Emotionally we can enter accidentally into the Now when we look out and see the sun breaking through the clouds or we catch the evening light as it shades trees differently. Intellectually we can enter into the Now when we have an insight and an epiphany comes.

When you think of a single beautiful flower in springtime -- while it may stand with petals and leaves that look a certain way -- you'll never find a single flower the same as any other flower. Can you understand that the life of that flower is not the life alone that you see coming out of the ground? That flower belongs to a much greater life than the individual expression that you say is beautiful.

Nearly all of humanity is asleep to itself; six-and-a-half billion "sleep-walkers" who -- even as they move through life -- are all but oblivious to the reality of the invisible worlds within them shaping their lives.

Before we can experience the truth of a higher state of consciousness, before we can stand on the ground of ourselves that is the secret stuff of Reality, we are asked to quietly be who and what we are in the Now.

Unconscious desire is the root of corruption. What I desire, what you desire -- whatever it may be -- we can find a way, as surely as the sun will rise, to justify what we want. And because we can justify what we want, it means, at any given point in time, the end will justify the means. "I need this because I was treated like this when I was growing up;" "I need this because I'm not as attractive as someone else;" "I have to have this because I'm getting older"...

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.

The way the mind works now, it looks out and there's just this world with you that messes with it, and me that wants it right. It's all one world to me. But awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn't the only world.

Everyone can agree that no intelligent, conscious man or woman would ever intentionally hurt him- or herself. No one would choose to ache. Yet the fact remains that all of us do hurt ourselves every day when we harbor self-compromising thoughts and feelings like anger, stress, and resentment. Even at the simplest level, there is no doubt that fear and worry take an immense toll on our health and well-being.