To look for tropical fruit in the open arctic is a waste of time. If you wish to see soaring birds, you need to lift your eyes from the ground. The lesson is this: without knowing where to look, you can't expect to find what you're looking for. Never is this more true than when it comes to looking for why you're still looking for ways to be stronger than those situations which continue to overcome you. The problem is you're looking in the wrong places. The solution is to turn around and look in a new direction.

Whenever we find ourselves feeling angry or worried in some way, we always ask certain familiar questions. But these personal inquiries are not what they seem. They are really answers disguised as questions; not actually asking anything, rather secretly confirming that we know where to look -- for who -- or what -- is to blame for our shaky feelings. And in this same moment where we're able to name the cause of our conflict-filled feelings, there's something else that's secretly confirmed which seals this unsuspected self deception: We're sure the source of what's making us shake, or ache, rests outside of us. And it's this unquestioned assumption which keeps us looking in the wrong direction; where we remain a perpetual victim in search of victory never found. Now here's the right direction in which to look:

When faced with any shaky, achy feeling, look within. Just ignore those pointed thoughts telling you where the blame falls. Let your attention fall back upon yourself instead by learning to ask your own questions about your situation. This is the only way to see that the real source of those painful tremors is not outside of you, but that it dwells within one of a hundred false ideas about yourself that you've come to believe are true. And when you see that you've abandoned yourself to a nature which can never be anything higher than a blame-inflamed victim, real Self Victory follows. Now, to help you learn how to look in the right direction, consider the set of special questions below created just for this special study.

Stop asking in secret defeat: When will these unpleasant circumstances in my life finally change?

Start consciously asking: What is it in me that only feels worthwhile as long as circumstances warrant it? Or, What is it in me that only knows how to meet life's events at their own level?

Stop asking in secret defeat: Why can't you see that you're wrong?

Start consciously asking: What is it in me that just doesn't feel right until it's certain someone else knows it is? Or, What is it in me that only knows how right it is by the measure of its anger?

Stop asking in secret defeat: Where is this scary situation going to lead?

Start consciously asking: What is it in me that can only hear what fear has to say about a possible event? Or, What is it in me that has no direction in life outside of being told where it's headed?

For extra benefits: Write down a few of your own usual questions, which you sense may point you in the wrong direction, and then turn them around to point yourself in the right direction!

The Spiritual Life is one great paradox after another. For instance: All things are possible with God... But without Him... nothing Real can be achieved. To state the same idea in different terms: God wants you to realize that what is yours... Is first His; and that only after you discover the Truth of this Celestial riddle are you given that Life which never knows an impossible dream.

In the quest for this new realization of your true relationship with God, there is no substitute for awareness. It is through awareness that Truth first invites you to seek that Life which is Timeless. By awareness is Truth's Path tread and its gate revealed. And when at last entrance is gained into that full New Life, it is found within your awareness. Summary: Would-be Angels earn their wings by increasing their awareness.

The problem for most would-be Angels is that the first thing they usually find in the Light of their own awakening awareness is darkness! Lots of things which they would rather not see, they begin to see unmistakably. Their developing inner eyes reveal that they are not self ruling. In fact, far from being strong and Heavenly, everything within seems strange and heavy; weak and filled with conflict. But this stage of seeing is a test. God wants His would-be Angels to want to live within Him more than they want to go on living falsely enthralled with themselves. The awakening of conscious awareness insures the right choice.

The 10 voluntary exercises below are for would-be Angels who want to develop their wings. Each is designed to help increase higher self-awareness. Special note to all would-be Angels: Have no concern for results. In these self administered tests your principle responsibility is to want to see, not to create the light.

1. Help to make the life of someone else go a little easier in spite of it making yours go a little harder.

2. Do that one thing which needs to be done even though there's nothing in you that wants to do it.

3. Refuse to criticize yourself -- or anyone else -- for not living up to your expectations.

4. Give no voice -- either within or without -- to any part of you that wants to complain about anything.

5. When you're absolutely sure that you can't take one more step... test your conviction.

6. Catch yourself in a dead run to get something done and voluntarily drop out of the race by deliberately assuming a casual pace.

7. During some peak personal stress point ask yourself: How is it possible for you to be so obsessed with the ways of the world and, at the same time, to be so sure that you're really an undiscovered Angel?

8. Take one difficult moment and use it as a place to start all over instead of as a time to sink into self pity.

9. Right in the middle of feeling as though the weight of the whole world is on your shoulders, look around for something else that you might carry.

10. Step out of the tide of some seemingly powerful personal event by seeing that moment as being only half of a complete cycle.

The Path leading to the Life of Truth has long been called difficult because it's thought of as being an all uphill journey. But the True upward Path is inward. And this realization holds a very powerful implication for those daring enough to consider it. For this means that Truth's Path begins and ends within what you already are.

This new understanding is of supreme importance for any individual wishing to know God's Life because... If the Path to Truth is already in place within us from start to finish... then we unnecessarily seek its beginning... and struggle in vain to reach its end. But this discovery does not mean that nothing is required of us to make our spiritual ascension. We must be willing to see. And then, in the growing apprehension of what stands before us, within us, voluntarily quit ourselves. A task made possible by our own realization that the only thing possibly obscuring our view is what we've mistaken ourselves as either being or needing. Which brings us to a spiritual finding as timeless as the Quest for Truth itself: Conscious surrender or self-quitting is the upward Path.

There are two principle ways in which to quit yourself. The first begins with working in the world by learning how to say "Yes" to those moments in your life where all you've ever known to do with them is to not want them. And this practice is a whole study in itself; requiring much insight and willingness to enter unknown, often uncomfortable places within yourself. The second way of self-quitting begins with learning to answer the whole world with "No!" Something that gets easier and easier to do as you see that who you presently are is secretly connected to what the world wants to offer you. Shattering this secret conspiracy is a major part of self-quitting. And it begins with learning to tell the world that you're no longer interested in its empty promises. Begin today telling the world that you're no longer interested in being you. For fast results use the following responses, but the best answers are always your own.

1. You are free to do whatever it is that you want, only don't ask me to want it, too.

2. Don't come crying to me about the same thing more than twice.

3. You're going your way and I'm going mine, which means you can stop asking me to come along with you.

4. If our paths ever cross in this life -- of this you may be sure: It will be on Higher ground than where we're standing now.

5. Don't ask me to listen to your conclusions unless I've asked to hear them.

6. Join yourself to whatever pleases you but don't expect me to join in.

7. Stop trying to share with me what you don't want yourself.

8. I have more important things to do than concern myself with what you say is important for my life.

9. You may call your fear and hatred anything you like, but don't expect me to be a part of your destructive self-deception.

10. Your whole act is to convince me that you have something I want, but I don't need anything that takes me having to be convinced that I need it.

Here are seven separate Higher Facts about the proof and the possibility of the Fearless Life. Taken alone, each of the following statements supplies insight into the seemingly impenetrable darkness that surrounds any fear. Taken altogether, these Higher Ideas reveal a whole New Understanding that penetrates fear's protective shell -- dispelling both the feared and the fearful at once. The Light that remains is Freedom.

1. You can either spend your life struggling to protect yourself from your fears -- which is the general existence of the unconscious masses -- or -- You can learn how to use your life to discover that, in reality, there is no self to fear -- and that the world perceived by this shadow-self is but its own unreal shadow.

2. How can something feel so real and yet not be real at the same time? Consider the child scared of the dark. His fear is real, but it's based in what isn't.

3. It is possible to know so much about the nature of fear that, one day, it simply runs out of ways to make you believe in its shaking.

4. Self-awakening, and the New Freedom that attends it, begins within seeing through what is not real, just as freedom from the terror of a nightmare begins with discovering you've been asleep having a bad dream.

5. No fact is frightening unless it runs into conflict with what you want. When this happens, the fear is not in the event -- but in you -- who has decided that in order to feel secure, life must jump through your hoop. So, the fear you feel is in your hoop, not the fact that life may have jumped unexpectedly.

6. It is in your power to discover that who you really are has nothing to fear, but that you make yourself fearful each time you look outside of yourself for some power to make you feel fearless.

7. Your only true enemy is those descending forces which want to use you, without your knowledge, for their devolutionary purposes -- a principle one of which is to keep you in living in the dark; to effectively blind you to the existence of another set of Ascending Forces which not only want you to know their Plan, but that want you to enjoy the Freedom that comes with becoming a conscious participant in it.

Always strive to remember that there is neither one thing practical, nor wise, about any state-of-self that punishes you; even when, as in the case of anxiety, it sweetly promises to release you once you've done its bidding. So, regardless of circumstance, know that the following is true: All anxious emotional states are secretly against what are your own True best interests. This means more than may be considered at first glance.

Pernicious and pressurized feelings not only compromise your physical health and happiness, but in your unconscious cooperation with their torment and tyranny, these anxious feelings also steal from you what is your God-given inner-potential to be a Real individual possessed with Real will.

All self-compromising inner-pressure has its unconscious cause hidden deeply in the secret chambers of our own thought-nature, which we continue to mistake ourselves for. The proof of this finding comes with seeing that anxiety is a latent psychic force within us: it pops out, and upon us, any time some exterior condition permits its painful appearance.

It's possible to learn how to use this same latent inner-tendency -- that now serves to punish you -- to not only put anxiety out of business forever, but to help you develop Real will and individuality.

Allow the following 5 practices to show you how to start reclaiming your own life. Work diligently with them. Use them until they reveal to you how to stop being used.

1. Whenever you're in a rush to get anywhere, deliberately drive 5 miles an hour slower than the legal speed limit. (Apply this principle to walking, or talking, as well.)

2. Wait until a natural pause comes into your conversation with others before inserting that pressing point you've been holding your breath to make.

3. If there's a task-at-hand that normally would take you 2 or 3 steps to complete, as in taking-in the grocery bags 2 at a time from the car to the kitchen, intentionally take in only one bag at a time.

4. When beginning to feel yourself late for some engagement, catch yourself about to hurry someone else along who's going there with you, and consciously refuse to do it.

5. With the exception of accidental or rude behavior on your part -- or -- if asked by your employer, refuse to excuse or explain yourself to any one -- for any thing -- about yourself.

Remember: the purpose of this specialized and personal inner work is to help you find those places within you where pressurized feelings are trying to squeeze you into their shape and into serving their world. There are dozens of inner opportunities daily where you can start to catch and cancel the painful effects of these latent psychic forces. Your conscious participation in inner exercises such as these, and those you help to create yourself, is the only way to awaken the will you need so that one day you never have to answer to any anxiety again!

Almost everyone feels dissatisfied with his or her life, but almost no one understands the real reasons why. And so it goes: For most men and women -- in spite of their best intentions, and sincere efforts, very little ever changes: except that is for the type of the dissatisfaction experienced, or what's being blamed for it. Now, here's the real reason behind all of this persistent and personal sadness: This world which you presently call your own isn't really your home at all.

Just as a high-flying eagle can't feel content as a captive in a cage, neither can who you really are find the fulfillment and freedom you long for in the lower levels of this world; a place of temporary and restrictive conditions which you've mistakenly come to think of as your home. This world and all of its various trappings may be familiar, but then so can any common jail-house become acceptable. Just ask one of their unfortunate inmates!

To break out of any prison you must first find a way that works. Following are a dozen new actions that have special powers to show you this needed Way. Be assured that you may follow them all the way... Up and out... Back to your real Home. Each instruction requires you take only one step at a time, but do your best to place yourself, each day, into as many of these personal practice-situations as possible. The Way back Home exists! Start your journey with these 12 steps. As you get your footing, create more steps out of your own new and growing understanding. Then step back and watch how the Path magically appears before your grateful eyes. Remember! Each one step, taken every day, reveals the Path, and teaches the Way.

1. Go through one agitating life-situation without saying, or doing, anything to try and change it.

2. Make one wish for something or someone besides yourself.

3. Face one fear.

4. Ask one time to see what you need to see about yourself.

5. In one encounter, where you're sure you're right, let someone else have the last word.

6. Notice and then refuse one urge to either spread, or listen to, any form of gossip, gloom, or doom.

7. Catch and swallow one complaint without letting others know you're struggling to keep something down.

8. Accept one moment of emptiness without making something out of it.

9. Sacrifice one sad, hostile, anxious, or defeated feeling.

10. Allow one great or beautiful moment of yours to live or die without your intervention.

11. Complete one task without compromise and to your absolute best ability.

12. Observe one face of a friend, family member, or everyday acquaintance -- at the same time that you place one of your personal demands upon him or her.

Recognizing the need for God in your life is the beginning of His entrance into it. And, as His is always the initiating action, what may feel like your need is really His secret invitation -- announcing itself as a hunger in the heart which nothing in the world can sate. How you respond to this interior invitation determines the speed in which He makes Himself known to you. And the best response of all is to be in waiting to respond -- for assuming this internal position means that your wish to be receptive outweighs that ancient anchor called worldly concerns. And should this elevated level of Higher Self receptivity seem impossibly distant for now, it doesn't have to remain that way because you can change your level. Which brings us to the purpose of this set of specialized instructions: The work of strengthening spiritual memory.

What is Spiritual Memory? Spiritual Memory is that part of your mind through which God first reminds you of His Life. A moments study proves this important spiritual finding. In your search for the Higher Life you've no doubt come upon a Truth and suddenly felt as though you had known the truth of it all your life; only that somehow you'd forgotten it! This wonderful awakening sensation is like unexpectedly running into and recognizing a long lost friend. And, in a sense, this is exactly what has happened; for in each such moment of higher remembering -- where you know afresh some Truth once lost to you -- you have also refreshed your relationship with that Truth's Source: God. This discovery can now be stated more succinctly: Strengthening your Spiritual memory helps awaken you to that Mind which holds it, and that Mind eventually reveals itself as being within and a part of God's Mind. What this new Truth reveals is that each and every time we can remember to remember God, it's the same as receiving, increasing, and accepting God's invitation to make His Life your own. Do your best to employ the 10 exercises below in their appropriate moment, and don't be the least bit concerned over the results. You can't fail at this exercise. Every effort you make to remember to remember God increases His interest in you. And God always gets what He wants!

1. Remembering to remember God when doing needful business with another person will also remind you that not only is it impossible to serve two masters and hope to succeed -- but that Real Success comes to you as you see the truth of this.

2. Remembering to remember God when someone starts to praise you will keep you from forgetting that whatever light you may have shown to win that applause is only a gifted reflection.

3. Remembering to remember God in the middle of condemning yourself reminds you that you are much too harsh to be your own judge and that there's a Higher Court of Appeal whose verdict is the standing order to start your life all over.

4. Remembering to remember God when taking your meals will help keep you from abandoning yourself to that nature which always abandons you after its consumed its desire.

5. Remembering to remember God in your travels reveals that wherever you may be going your dwelling place is always where your heart is and that no place is ever any better or worse than what you bring into it.

6. Remembering to remember God while being lashed about by your own storming thoughts and feelings makes it evident that you do not have to stand out in the rain.

7. Remembering to remember God in the face of a fear or loss reminds you that you've a choice in what you cling to, and that letting go of what is pulling you down is the same as turning in a higher, happier direction.

8. Remembering to remember God in the midst of a conflict or dispute helps to clarify that you can either go on fighting over what is impermanent -- or -- you can fight for your spiritual freedom by walking away from that inner neurotic nature and its compulsive need to win.

9. Remembering to remember God when doing those things you wish you didn't have to do connects you with Something that is always content to be right where it is because it is always pleased with Who it is.

10. Remembering to remember God when doubting that remembering God does you any good places your wish for what is true above your own suspicion that you may not be sincere -- which is the beginning of True Spiritual Sincerity.

No one can be free who refuses to see what actually lives within him. This is why Real self-healing begins with Truthful self-seeing. There is no other order, no other way. Consciousness of any unwanted condition in us must precede its correction, just as the rising sun dismisses the fear hiding in the darkness of night. This is why we must learn that anything in us that does not want us to see the truth about our actual unenlightened condition is itself a part of what is punishing us. We can learn to do much better!

"The medicine is bitter, but it heals," said the late great author Vernon Howard when it comes to seeing the truth of our lives. If we would heal the hidden hurt in us then we must learn that the initial bitterness of self-truthfulness is the front-runner of our ultimate spiritual betterment. Our work is to concede to the bright prescription of Higher Self-Honesty regardless of how it "tastes" to us in those moments when we see ourselves as we are.

Here now are nine eye-opening facts about areas in our lives where we have chosen not to see what must be seen... If we would be Free. Choose in favor of your freedom. Choose to see!

1. We close our eyes to the fact that the imaginary value we have placed upon our life only holds up for as long as others don't disturb our dreams.

2. We close our eyes to the fact that wherever we go, and regardless of whom we meet, we still seem to run into the same conflicts and experience the same negativities.

3. We close our eyes to the fact that what we call being sorry for our bad behavior really just means that we don't want to be bothered anymore by those who have been troubled by our unpleasant manifestations.

4. We close our eyes to the fact we blame others for what we call their selfish insistence that we serve their interests when the real pain in such moments is but our own resentment over our cowardly inability to just say "No."

5. We close our eyes to the fact that in spite of all of the pain it causes us, and others, we still believe that we know what it means to be a "winner" in life.

6. We close our eyes to the fact that just because we have mastered hiding some character fault of ours doesn't mean that it has stopped hurting those around us who cannot avoid being subjected to it.

7. We close our eyes to the fact that we would rather have the company of known liars and betrayers than have to go through our life by ourselves.

8. We close our eyes to the fact that we will only inconvenience ourselves (especially when it comes to answering the need of others) as a means of avoiding what we see as being a greater pain: their complaints!

9. We close our eyes to the fact that crying for ourselves out of self-pity doesn't change one thing about the nature of the self that is the secret source of all these tears.

For extra swift healing study these friendly guides with the intention of welcoming their light. Remember that our work is to see ourselves through the eyes of Truth and then leave Truth to take care of the rest.

1. Real Success is not measured by what you are driven to achieve, but by what you can quietly understand.

2. Letting Go is the natural release which always follows the realization that holding on hurts.

3. Why seek answers to tormenting questions when it is possible to realize there is no intelligence in torment? So simply drop those painful questions.

4. See the upset not as an exterior circumstance to be remedied, but as an interior condition to be understood.

5. Your secret strength knows that your secret weakness isn't really yours at all.

6. Letting Go is all about finding out what you are not, and then having the courage to leave it at that.

7. Instead of always asking how to get others to approve of you... learn to ask: What do I really want, the applause of the crowds or to quietly have my own life?

8. Chasing after a pleasure to ease a pain is like running after a breeze to cool you down.

9. Real freedom is the absence of the self that feels trapped, not the trappings that the self requires to make it feel free.

10. Letting Go of yourself is Letting Go of your problems, for they are one and the same.

11. The only thing you lose when you Let Go of something you are afraid to live without is the fear itself.

12. Go along with your longing to be Limitless.

There is an endless hole in the heart of most of us; a pit that demands our faithful daily service and that causes us, in our compulsion to fill it, to be pitiless towards those who stand in the way of this endless ambition. Most of us will spend our lives as slaves to this psychic abyss, driven in one form or another to satisfy in ourselves what can only be satisfied by our continuing struggle. But it need not be this way. We can be free of this futility; released from the meaninglessness of mindlessly, mercilessly, working for what lives only to perpetuate itself at the cost of our happiness. Such freedom has a cost. One's self must be known, its inhabitants realized.

All desire is mindless, meaning that this force of life arises out of powers that are subtler than even the most complex mental formulations that we can derive about them. But their present power over us -- that leads us to pleasure only to leave us in pain -- may be understood by a Light within us that lives beyond desire's irrepressible influence; a Life that is free of ambition and all of its aching because this awakened Wisdom understands, sees clearly, the impossibility of escaping from something that doesn't exist.

The following Key Lessons are advanced studies in ending the ache of ambition. Certainly the world around you, and most likely the world within you will take exception to the truths about to be revealed. Never mind the negative. What does not want you to see what is must cast its blackness to keep itself hidden. Nothing can hide from the Light of Truth. Our willingness to see by its Light is what leads us out of our petty, puny and self-punishing life, returning us into the Heart of Real Life where love and innocence rule side by side. We can begin by asking ourselves this next question... and answering it with all the honesty we can muster:

Who suffers more? The one who fails to become what his socially conditioned mind imagines is success -- so that he loathes his own life -- or the one who becomes successful as defined (and demanded) by his culture, and who then struggles the rest of his life to keep that condition in place? Once we see that both of these individuals suffer the same fate, but only call their aching by different names, then we will realize the possibility of a truly successful life! Now study these next 5 Key Lessons until their light sets you upon the Path to Freedom.

Waiting and struggling to finally become what one imagines will fulfill him is the secret avoidance of being what one is. Wanting to avoid what one is is the nullification of relationship with what is. Nothing can become something out of nothing, which explains perfectly why whatever it may be that we struggle to fill ourselves with today leaves us feeling so empty tomorrow.

All acts of "kindness" upon the path of one who is "becoming" are not acts of kindness at all, but clever contrivances on the part of his ambitious self to ensure that others will help him in his never-ending struggle to obtain his stated goal.

What is our impatience with others if not our negative reaction to their un-informed interference with our plan for reaching an imagined perfection!

There can never be any real rest for the one who feels that he must become more than he is, and here is why: the conditioned mind that drives him to achieve its desire no sooner experiences the sensations it imagined it would, then it must set out again in search of that source of stimulation that it has given to itself by naming, yet again, something else to become.

We give our ambitions great names because without the pleasure of these pre-packed sensations stored away within our own precious self-images, we would have to stand there, bare, seeing the fact that such endless ambition is only the futile attempt to escape the fear of emptiness.

A great poem, a timeless stanza of thought, a true writing that stirs and swells the heart; what are these precious forms save a moment of Love plucked from Time to stand as testimony to a perfection briefly remembered as the living foundation of all things.

The poet is presented the proposal, the moment where the Great Pain beckons him to marriage.

He is awakened from a slumber to answer this dark desire now upwelling in his aching heart. He answers by sacrifice. And if he will throw himself into this void then his words take on the character of tones; his sentences become lyrical, forged in the Light of his awareness as it plunges him into that unyielding desire that must know its mate.

The outcome is Creation; a new form is born that reflects the Formless.

Now manifest is a living art whose Eternal Parents have imbued it with their dual powers: first to evoke the heart to yield itself to an impossible longing, and then to fulfill that same emptiness with a new sense of wholeness beyond any further need.

We are the poets. We are the One. We are not only created to tell God's great story, but to know it, intimately, as our own.

If the nature of this world, if its reality is as we have been led to believe by our society at large, then one's daily dose of suffering is sure to be seen as undesirable and, above all, unnecessary; a thing to avoid at all costs, that with ample fortune or favor we may hope to escape altogether.

But if the Reality of our individual lives, its True Measure of Success is not to be determined by the amount of pleasure we may purchase and consume, but rather is founded by the degree to which we may transform and transcend our very souls...

Then we must learn to look anew upon our suffering and, though unspeakable, dare to re-evaluate our relationship with its undeniable presence within us.