This may help: Once you have become as inwardly quiet as possible, ask sincerely for God to show you exactly what you need to see about yourself. When you make this wish, make it fully. Work as best you can to be conscious of what it is like to remain you. This kind of honest inner seeing not only creates true incentive for self-change, but provides the new ground you need in yourself to continue your growth. The untold great spiritual secret concerning self-transformation is that we grow in proportion to our awareness of what we can no longer be.

We cannot plan a fresh start in life; if we want a new life we must do something new. We must act in the Now . . . beginning with calling upon the light of our new understanding to go before us. Here is what this means to us in practical terms:

The fresh start we seek appears only as our old self disappears -- only as we willingly die to who we have been. There are any number of ways to state this venerable wisdom, but the action required remains unchanged: If we wish to start our lives over new, the spiritual price is that we agree to no longer carry over our thoughts about ourselves from moment to moment. To this end, and to help us do what is needed to free ourselves, we need to see that while our habit of revisiting and then reliving past mental and emotional states may lend us welcome and familiar sensations, it also costs us our chance to know the newness of Now where our True Self resides in a state of natural peace and power.

The deliberate work of walking away from one's past is a prerequisite for recovering one's True Nature. But the false self will not sit quietly by as we work to break its hold on us. It may profess otherwise, but its dark nature loathes the light of Now because it is unable to enter into its newness. After all, how can it? You might as well try to take a shadow into the sun's corona! This thought-driven desire machine only knows itself by calling up and then considering its own images of past experiences. But in the living Now there are no well-worn images of former glories or future lights -- only the Spirit of New Life itself.

As we work to be in the Now and strive to leave the old thought-self behind us, it will cry out something like this, "But you can't live without me! Who will watch out for you and see to your well-being if not me?" And though it is necessary that you learn to craft your own answer to this trickster nature, this one is the enemy of all that is fresh, uncorrupted, and new. Here is one response worth remembering. Send this message out from your silently seeing heart to this deceptive foe of all fresh starts in life:

"What I need, you cannot give me. What I long to see, you cannot show me. And what I hope to be, you cannot make of me. This conversation has reached its end."

Then, remaining as awake to yourself as you can, just keep walking ahead into the new and unknown Now. You need remember only one thing as you go: if you keep the light of your new understanding before you at all times, those shadows that would keep you from making a new beginning will remain behind you. Let this truth be your guide and watch how easy it becomes to let go of all that was in favor of all that is new, true, and you.

As strange as it sounds, it is natural at times to lose our zeal for awakening. This sense of self-loss is actually a necessary step along the higher path. For many years, a person can work for greater wholeness, for a spiritual life, based on a partially unconscious desire to fulfill themselves with the image and the requisite feelings that attend such thoughts. Again, this is a natural progression. But as we work, this self and its desires will naturally fade, and with it seems to go our zeal for self-work. This is where it gets interesting. It is only when we persist along the path, in spite of our lukewarm emotions, that we begin to realize there has been something within us doing the work all along, and that it will continue to do so if we will simply allow it to. As this self-discovery grows, our faith becomes real in proportion to our realization of just how true this finding actually is. There is an Intelligence at work for us, within us, that wants more for us than we do for ourselves.