What happens in the moment where life throws something at us, or nothing goes as we had planned? We know what happens. Instant negativity! We become disgruntled. Unhappiness over what is unwanted ruins the day. Why? Because now we're resisting the event, wanting nothing to do with it. And how many possibilities do we have in such moments when we resist life like this? None . . . except to slowly grow more and more negative.

But have you ever had a moment where -- right in the middle of what seemed like a bad dream -- you experienced an instant of awakening? Where suddenly you realize there is more than one way to look at this event? That you don't have to just look at it through your regret, or your resentment, or your despair over the loss of something? Then and there it dawns on you that life holds more possibilities than what that dark reaction is showing you. Said in slightly different words, you can see how every moment of life holds many different "worlds" within it -- light and dark, high and low -- and how our moment-to-moment experience is very much decided by which of these worlds we choose to embrace. Which brings us to this important key lesson: We cannot know any higher order of greatness, of freedom, than what our awareness of the world above us makes possible through our awakened relationship with it.

Let's look at what this idea means. Say that you want to be a great artist, you want to sing, be an athlete, a scientist, a great businessperson; it makes no difference. Each and every stage of a person's development places them in a series of relationships that by design must ultimately prove to be incomplete. You don't become a master of something by trying it one time, do you? You master something because you work at it in steps; and as you work at it, you recognize that you've taken yourself as far as you can take yourself with the possibilities that are present to you. Then what?

Now, when it comes to most human beings -- in that moment when they discover they've reached the limit of their present possibilities -- most quit right there, saying: "Well, that's all there is."

But, when individuals have a love for something, and they run into a natural and necessary limitation given their present level of development, they don't say, "That's as far as there is to go." That person understands -- because he or she can feel it living within them -- that something still greater exists. They just have to wait for it to come to them. And they work! They work with their limitation, not their excellence. They work through what they don't know -- not trying to prove over and over again what they do know -- because they're agreeing to allow the principles, the perfection, the powers from the world above them to come into them, educate them, and ultimately elevate them.

I don't know if you've noticed this, but when you really learn something, when you really see something, you're not teaching yourself, are you? When you really learn something -- which, by the way, can only happen each time you come to the end of what you know -- you're given something. You're taught that intangible lesson, whatever its nature. And this "teaching" you're given isn't in words; rather you suddenly become a part of that world above you whose perfection becomes as your own.

Now we have a beautiful idea: the way in which we grow, and the way we come to have something of our own that isn't in conflict with what anyone else has -- is that we grow into the world above ourselves. We realize new possibilities that have always been there, only we just couldn't see them because we were always looking in the wrong direction. That's the real rub to any new self-realization.

Has it ever taken you years to learn something? You're thick as a brick, and then finally something happens and you see it; you realize, "I wasted all that time wanting to impress people, to own this, to go there, to do that." And suddenly you see that the whole time you were doing these things that you thought would make you a "winner," you were secretly compromising yourself. All along, what you really wanted was to have something of your own that you didn't have to go somewhere for, that you didn't have to look in the eyes of other people to feel, and that you never could fear losing because it never belonged to anyone or anything outside of you.

So much of what we need to understand about our lives, and why we have the fear and worry in them that we do, depends upon being able to see ourselves as we are. No frills, and no self-supplied chills either -- just doing the work it takes to remember that what we really want isn't power to control the dark conditions around us, but to be part of a new brighter and higher world within ourselves where fear and worry no longer exist.