In the process, emotional and sometimes physical healing also take place, as a clearing of energy blocks from the energy field is a necessary and natural part of raising consciousness.
Christ is not a particular individual, but a state of consciousness: the enlightened state.
There is nothing special about the enlightened state. This may seem like blasphemy, since enlightenment is something every spiritually-oriented person strives desperately for.
This actualization has its own wise timing, and you are not in control of that timing, except that you can resist this actualization and, therefore, slow it down. But a certain readiness must be arrived at on the part of the soul before the awakening process is set in motion, and you are not in control of that.
Enlightenment is the full experience of here and now, without referral to your thoughts or feelings about it. When you experience this, you discover how very ordinary it is to just be here without all the thoughts and ideas your mind brings into life. You know this state because you were in a similar state as a child before you had words for things and before your sense of self had developed. You also experience it, if only briefly, several times a day. You already know Christ Consciousness. It is also called Presence. If you imagine that Christ Consciousness is something extraordinary and mystical, you will miss it. It’s not a state that comes and goes, like a spiritual experience or an altered state of consciousness. It is your natural state, the underlying hum of your existence, where love, peace, and wisdom flow from.
Christ Consciousness is known by love, peace, compassion, acceptance, wisdom, discernment, clarity, integrity, strength, courage, faith, trust, kindness, inclusiveness, and goodness.
When I suggest that you simply be in the moment, I mean be here without your evaluations and desires for the moment to be other than the way it is. The “I” is always discontent, always pushing for things to be different, always running away from the present moment into the past and future. When you stop doing that and just stay in your present moment experience, you land in Christ Consciousness, where there is nothing but love and peace.
Chapter 2 Behave as If You Are Enlightened
The only “honorable” way to relate to your feelings is to see them for what they are and treat them accordingly. Feelings must be dealt with in the same way you would deal with an out-of-control child. Like children, feelings need acknowledgment, acceptance, and nonindulgence. Feelings need to be sat with, understood, and neither pushed away and rejected nor acted out.
The wise parent gives the unruly child the needed hug and understanding but does not indulge the child’s bad behavior, which would only reinforce
Your feelings stem from the ego. They don’t serve you. They don’t serve your relationships. They don’t serve humanity. Feelings need to be acknowledged, understood, accepted, and mastered so that they do not drive your behavior or speech. Expressing your feelings and acting them out is not being authentic; it is identifying with and indulging your basest instincts.
Do they put you and others at ease? If they don’t, they are probably coming from the ego, the inauthentic, false self. This is a good and simple guideline for your speech and actions: How do you feel after you’ve said or done something? The answer to this isn’t a feeling in the conventional sense—an emotion—but a sense of your energy: Is it open and relaxed or contracted and tight? Check with your body, and it will tell you whether you are aligned with your authentic self or the ego. In every moment, your body registers this. Learn to notice how your body feels as you interact with others, move about your day, and think certain thoughts. This is your innate guidance system letting you know if you are aligned with Christ Consciousness or not. Let this sense of contraction or relaxation, not your emotions, guide your actions and speech.
Suffering is God’s way of telling you that you are out of alignment in your thinking or behavior—that you have missed the mark. That is the meaning of “sin.” It means that you have missed the mark.
You could say that being entrenched in the egoic state of consciousness is a lack of awareness. You are aware of only a small slice of life—primarily, the mental, emotional, and sensory realms. You think, you feel, and you sense. You may ask, “What else is there?” but what is most important—most real—about life is beyond thinking, feeling, and sensing. What is most real is Awareness, itself, and what it experiences on extrasensory levels. All the false self is aware of—all that is real to it—are thoughts, feelings, and sensations. That is its world.
Love is letting someone be as he or she is without judging, rejecting, or arguing. You can do the same with your thoughts and feelings.
Chapter 4 Resistance to Life
Although the ego seems like a thing, it is really just programming. Part of this programming is to resist life, to reject life. “I don’t like…” and “I don’t want…” are common expressions of the ego, which reflect this resistance.
Without this programming, your world would be experienced as indescribably beautiful, wondrous, and the great gift that it surely is.
You observe your thoughts, and you’re upset that you have them. You don’t like them. But remember what I just said: “Whenever ‘I don’t like’ appears, that is your ego. “I don’t like my thoughts” is just more ego.
instead of feeling bad about having them, which is the inevitable result of remaining in the mental realm. Choosing to turn away from your thoughts isn’t the same as rejecting them, as it might seem. What chooses to turn away from thoughts is the thought-free self: your true self. It touches thoughts—notices them—and then, without judging them or pushing them away, simply moves on to something more real than thoughts. Your true self is this close! It’s right here. You see, your true self is deeply in love with life—with reality. It relishes the juiciness of sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and the feel of everything it encounters. It is more interested in these and gets more satisfaction from these than from thoughts. Yes, there is some enjoyment in thinking.
What the true self loves most of all is experiencing whatever is being experienced about this beautiful world as well as creating, learning, growing, exploring, loving, and helping and connecting with others in meaningful ways. But your true self is also here to fulfill a certain life purpose.
Getting lost in the machinations and imaginations of the ego—its strategies, what it likes and doesn’t like, what it wants and doesn’t want, and its fantasies for the future and obsessions with the past—are just not that interesting to your true self. They are irrelevant to it and only of interest to your ego. And yet, there is no judgment whatsoever on the part of the true self about this programming we call the ego. So, when your true self encounters a thought that comes from this programming, it welcomes it and then kisses it good-bye.
the usual push-pull relationship with them: being both compelled by thought and resistant to it. Both stances come from the ego, and both keep you involved in the ego’s world.
The drama of the ego stealing the show again and again happens as long as it happens, until one day, “you” are done with it. The divine self is ready to awaken within you, and it begins to assert itself more firmly, more compellingly. Suddenly, you are extremely interested in the Truth, freedom, and becoming a living master. It is Grace that brings this timing about. Until then, your ego will win out most of the time. Those of you reading this message are past that point. Your thirst for the Truth has already been awakened, or this message would be of no interest to you.
When your default comes up with a judgment, you choose kindness instead. When it comes up with a complaint, you choose kindness instead. When it comes up with an angry remark, you choose kindness instead. This is the work before you. Even if you don’t initially feel kind when you choose kindness, kindness will show up once you choose it.
Kindness is its own reward, peace is its own reward, goodness is its own reward. This becomes obvious once you choose these often enough.
When you see this, it’s shocking, and you wonder why you didn’t see this before. But that’s how it is with clever dictators. They make you believe you need them and that they are telling the truth, when they aren’t. They tell you that you can trust them and that they are out to protect you and take care of you when they aren’t capable of doing this.
Eventually, you no longer let this voice define you or dictate your actions and speech. But this much detachment from the voice in your head takes time to develop.
timing. Life—the divine self—is supremely wise and in control of the unfolding of your plan, and all you need to do is be open to discovering what Life is showing you.
Life is to be enjoyed! You were born to surf! The ups and downs of the waves are part of the fun of surfing and not a problem, since you are no longer drowning in your thoughts and feelings. You belong, not only to the ocean, but to the sky, the sun, and all of the great beauty beyond the waves. Because you know the eternal light of your soul, the waves are not a problem but part of the beautiful experience you are having as a human being. When you know yourself as spirit, you wear your human costume lightly: Your humanity is accepted and can be enjoyed. The question is always: “How? How do I surf instead of struggle in the water?” The answer is: Find the “I” that is not struggling.
The one who is surfing is who you really are. That one is always surfing. So, all you have to do is find your way to your true self.
“I” is your false self’s truth, not your true self’s. This is how the false self is created, simply with such statements. Then, you have to see how false these “I” statements are. They are false because they are incomplete. Nothing you say after “I” is complete enough to capture the truth about you, about who you really are. That’s why this is called the false self. Your “I” statements create a false, incomplete sense of yourself, a pretend self. See the incompleteness. That’s all you have to do. For instance, if you say, “I’m not very good at that,” see that even if that seems true when you say it, it isn’t true throughout time and, therefore, not true. Moreover, it isn’t true because it is an opinion. By whose estimation? This is an arbitrary appraisal, a relativistic statement, based on nothing. It is a negative story about yourself—about the false self. And such incomplete and untrue stories are what the false self is made of.
This transformation cannot happen overnight. It almost never does. It takes time for the lenses of perception to be cleansed, for you to be able to see the world as it truly is. Once you are able to see more truly, what you discover and what you see is that everything is sacred, everything—including you—is connected to something so magnificent that it defies description. Some call it God, and so will I. God is in everything. Everything is sacred.
It is only important that you know that this perception is the truth and that you know you can call it forth once you have had enough glimpses of it. Much of your time, by necessity, is spent on the surface of this experience as you go about your day. When you are busy taking care of your responsibilities, it’s only natural to not be in this perception deeply but in a more “normal” mode of perception, where chairs are chairs and dirt is dirt and needs to be cleaned up.
You see, you are God as well as the laundry and the dirt, and when you deeply connect with the laundry and the dirt, God moves you in the world in relation to those things. God does the laundry and cleans up the dirt. God is in the world as you, as laundry, as dirt, and as other. All of these are connected by virtue of being God. When you treat things and others as sacred, you become aligned with the sacred, with the Divine within you, and behave accordingly. As a bridge to Christ Consciousness, I have been instructing you to behave as if you are enlightened. This is why this instruction works: When you treat things and others as sacred, you are behaving as if you are enlightened, and at that point, there is no difference! In that moment, you are enlightened, and all the benefits of enlightenment are yours.
Chapter 8 Being Good
“By their fruits, you will know them.” It is by your behavior that you show what your allegiance is to, whether it is to the ego or to the divine self. In any moment, your allegiance will be shown to be with one or the other through your behavior. There is no other option. You are either aligned with and doing the bidding of your ego or your divine self.
On this plane of existence, the truth is hidden. You have to search for the truth and discover your innate goodness, and why would you do that if lies resulted in feeling good?
Your soul has taken on the challenge of waking up to the truth by first experiencing the result of believing lies. Fortunately, you have been given lots of helpers—books, teachers, models, and your own intuition—to point you in the right direction.
When your energy feels expansive and your body feels relaxed and at ease and you feel content, happy, and accepting, you are aligned with your innate goodness. And when you feel the opposite—tense, contracted, upset, discontent, or negative in any way—you are aligned with the ego.
How to behave in any moment becomes obvious by the response you feel in your body when you behave a certain way or even think of behaving a certain way. If something you do or say causes you to feel contracted, stop and make another choice. Forgive yourself, apologize if you have to, and choose again. Apologizing will help wipe the slate clean so that you can start again. However, you don’t have to operate completely through trial and error, because you are also given intuitive guidance in every moment before you say or do anything. It’s just that most people let their default (the ego’s responses) override their intuitions, which are always nudging them toward goodness.
Once you are aware of the default and your tendencies to behave in certain detrimental ways, you can stop a second and then make another choice. Learning to stop for a second and choose differently is something that takes time to develop. The default is not overcome overnight. Even when you see the ego at work and you know better, you will still choose the ego’s response for some time before that space between a thought and action or speech is long enough for you to choose wisely, lovingly.
Nevertheless, this waking up out of the ego can be quite a lengthy process, and you have to be patient and compassionate with your human self as the default continues to win out at times.
Being good is the secret to happiness. Choosing goodness instead of the default is the secret to happiness. Here’s the hard part: No one can do this for you. It doesn’t matter how many spiritual books you read or how many retreats you attend or even how much you want to awaken, you still have to make the choice to not follow the default. As much help as there is on the spiritual path, it comes down to personal responsibility: Only you can choose goodness over the default. Furthermore, this choice has to be made in each new moment. Eventually, this way of being will become automatic, but until it does, a conscious choice has to be made against the path of least resistance. Fortunately, with each conscious choice, choosing against the default becomes increasingly easy, as new pathways in your brain are created. With each choice, the new pathway is strengthened, and the path of least resistance becomes less attractive and compelling.
here, although most don’t remember making this choice. It is important that you know this, or you might fall into feeling victimized by life. But you are not a victim of life, unless you believe the voice in your head.
Your goodness is the Divine alive in you and moving you throughout your day. This is who you are, no more, no less. This goodness, this love, is enough. It runs the universe—indeed, the universes!
The teaching is delivered into your “bones,” so to speak, not into your mind. Just as your egoic programming and other automatic responses to life could be said to “be in your bones,” the lessons of life are taken in by you on levels beyond and beneath the mind. You may not even be aware of what you have learned.