THE I B
The Art of Letting Go
The Practice In Between
The Art of Letting Go
The Practice In Between, The Art of Letting Go
Copyright © 2021 by Jim Bruton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author.
Printed in USA
ISBN 9798526713511
The Practice In Between
The Art of Letting Go
Jim Bruton
Contents
Foreword 7 PreFace 9 IntroductIon 11 chaPter one 13
My Near-Death Experience
chaPter two 19
The Art of Letting Go, Initial Experience
chaPter three 21
What is the Art of Letting Go?
chaPter 4 31
Work
chaPter 5 39
Emotional Shielding – Maintaining Your Balance
chaPter 6 51
The Past is Dust
chaPter 7 59
Logic & Emotions
chaPter 8 67
The Ending of Relationships
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chaPter 9 73
Aspects of Letting Go
chaPter 10 89
Integration & Coping, or “What’s Next??”
chaPter 11 95
Eternity & Being Present within It
chaPter 12 99
Ambiguity & the Need for Control
chaPter 13 105
Linear & Non-Linear Thinking
chaPter 14 121
Judgment & Free Will
chaPter 15 125
The Best Version of Yourself & Atonement
chaPter 16 129
Being Authentic - Even Atheists can be Spiritual
chaPter 17 139
Conclusion
Foreword
In my first book, The In Between, A Trip of a Lifetime, I shared my life before my Near-Death Experience, the plane crash leading up to it, and my changes in perspective that followed.
The global interest in paranormal and spiritual events and aspects of living led to many interviews—some on television—presentations and ultimately, this book, The Practice In Between, The Art of Letting Go. As people learned of my experience on the other side and how it changed me, they asked how they could use what I learned to make changes in their own life. As I considered this, it became clear to me that many people are trying too hard and many times trying to fit into models that simply do not fit. Many begin with religion, which struggles to remain relevant to our changing world and its values. From there, some become atheists, some agnostic, and those who continue to search do so outside the boundaries of faith that no longer feed their souls.
Much of the world believes that they are restless and unfulfilled because they need something else, something more, that will satisfy that hunger. Many are the lectures and workshops that seek to give them that one more thing that will make the difference.
The approach of this book is based on the assumption that we already have everything we need to become happy, spiritual beings. That is why instead of writing a book of steps on how to become that, I have written on the virtues of simply letting go of that mindset of needing the magical one more thing and just starting from scratch.
Since God made us, we already have a relationship with the divine. It is in the letting go of the dross that encrusts us that we clean ourselves up, become still and present, and see things as they are.
I hope your walk through this book will bring you closer to this state of being.
Preface
I wrote my first book, The In Between, A Trip of a Lifetime, after I presented a summary of my Near-Death Experience (NDE) at the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) conference in 2019. Many came up to me afterward wondering why they couldn’t find my book in the IANDS bookstore, or at the setup in the convention center. I decided that I had better write it.
A new-again friend, P.M.H. Atwater, demanded it. Dr. Mary Helen Hensley found me a publisher and agent and three months later, there I was looking at my book for sale on Amazon. I began writing my NDE down during my post-airplane crash convalescence in the hospital, so there were my earliest memories to draw from. I also used some of my post-NDE musings on the internet. This book, The Practice In Between, The Art of Letting Go, is a sharing of my personal effort to integrate my NDE and my evolving take on things in the coping that will likely last a lifetime.
The practice of writing about my life resurfaced things buried under years of dust and the life and experience that went off in one of a million directions at each important crossroads of decision. It’s also been an exercise in seeing patterns and meaning that were too subtle to notice before.
I read one time that in writing a book, there never comes a time in which the author can say they’re finished. They just give up. For me, it was trying to find a natural pause point in a story that unfolds every day.
I hope you will find enjoyment and meaning in what I’ve experienced and am trying to say. And that I offer some new insight into your own adventure here and in the Great Beyond.
JIm Bruton, June 2021
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Introduction
"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar.
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come, From God, who is our home."
Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Stanza 5, William Wordsworth, 1807
“I loved you without being loved by you, even before you existed.”
St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, 1377-78
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Chapter One
Chapter One
My Near-Death Experience
My vision comes into focus and I look up, seeing that I am on the terrace of a tall building. It is very open and everything is gray as if made out of concrete and in ruins. Buildings stretch into the distance, each partially destroyed but weaving together to create a post- apocalyptic skyline. There is no sound of any sort. It’s just that quiet. I look up to the sky, seeing clouds dark and heavy with the mother of all storms ready to unload everything they have. Everything—the ruined buildings, the storm-ready sky, even the air itself—seems to be waiting with the tension of an arrow drawn tight on a mythical bow.
Suddenly a wave of nausea runs through my stomach and I double over in pain and grab my gut. I whisper aloud, “I don’t think I can stand this!”
With these words I sense something to my left. There stands on the terrace not far away one of the eeriest sculptures I have ever seen.
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The In Between
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Standing out against the darkest parts of the brooding sky is a large egg-shaped sculpture. It appears to be made of curved bands of metal, crisscrossing in what seems to be a random pattern but in the overall form of an egg standing on its end. I can also see small whirling patterns and hear their whispering movements slow down within. This interruption of the place’s absolute stillness I know is due to my spoken words, and so somehow, this thing and I are connected.
Still feeling my stomach gripped in pain, I rise to my feet and do my best to walk over to the monolith. As I look through the open lattice work, I can see gears inside. They are suspended freely in space, but anchor to an invisible and unique pivot point defining their sweeping arcs of movement in every different and imaginable direction. I notice that these are sector gears, the kind you see in clock-like mechanisms. In contrast to a round gear, these are only a small part of an entire toothed circle, therefore with a beginning, middle and end.
Sector Gear
As I watch the otherworldly dance of the gears, I can see that some are very real and definite and others are ghostlike. They pass through each other without interference, and I can hear the whisper of a light, clacking sound as they ratchet around inside the egg. I take a few steps back to take it all in.
“What is this thing?” I ask.
A disembodied voice responds within my consciousness.
“This is the future birthing into the now.”
The otherworldly dance of the gears is complex—like a multi- dimensional model of time. They come to rest and I reach through a gap in the side of the egg.
This is the process of Becoming.
As I look at the gears, within my mind I see something like a video feed of future events. One brushes my outstretched hand and suddenly I double over in pain.
With a reflex, I rip the gear out, pulling it through the egg’s lattice wall, and throw it over my shoulder. The machine responds by spinning its gears around again, recalibrating for the loss of one, whispering its light clacking sound into a new configuration.
“What’s happening now?”
Each gear is the probability of a thought, word, or action in your future. Your destiny is resetting itself around what you have removed.
“How did I know I could do that? Pull that gear out, removing that future moment?”
Why else are you here?
“I have no idea. I don’t even know what this place is.”
You are in the In Between.
“In between what?”
Everything. The Impossible Now between the past and the future.
“That makes no sense whatsoever.”
It’s impossible in its short duration. Yet here you are, standing inside the eternity of a single moment. Do you remember who you are in the world to which your body belongs?
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Chapter One 17
I look blankly into space, squinting with the effort to remember.
“I have no idea.”
Then you see the truth in how the past is dust.
“OK. Why do some of these gears—these futures that I touch— make me sick and not others?”
All choices have unintended consequences, some unfortunate and some not. The pain each brings is your guide.
“Where are the gears that feel good?”
You’re not here to feel good.
A new gear swings into view. On this one I see a Ferris wheel and happy grandchildren whizzing by, fingers grasping their car, laughter... they smile at me, or through me, looking off into their own world.
Obviously, I let that gear pass by.
More gears emerge within view, some passing through others, several clear and definite, many less so and hard to focus on, though all bringing with them their clear images of meaning.
Each time they come to rest, I pull out a gear that I feel by my pain to be to my future detriment.
At one point I look at the growing pile of gears.
“It’s starting to look like if I don’t have a bad future then I have no future at all. Even though I now feel less pain, am I going to die sooner from doing all this?”
Your destiny has to fit itself around futures that aren’t meant to be. Your number of breaths are already counted. I will worry about your last one.
“I don’t know how comforting that is.”
Eliminating bad choices doesn’t mean you won’t make wrong ones. You won’t know they are wrong until after they pass. Since right and wrong are variables over which you have no control, the answers to what comes tomorrow are a waste. Better is understanding the beauty of how everything fits and re- fits together.
“What am I missing here, in my lack of understanding?”
What is clearly before you. Grace. No one deserves salvation. It can only be given by Grace. It is your birthright, but it must be chosen at the expense of the world that separates us.
“This fixing my future is painful. I feel ashamed that I’m not doing it with some moral compass. I’m only guided by pain. I don’t even know where or when these futures happen.”
Where or when are not important. Removing your enthusiasm to further chain yourself to the world isn’t as painful as carrying the crushing weight of those chains, once forged around you.
“It's as if this place was made so that I can do one thing and one thing only, with no chance to screw it up.”
If those with choices make poor use of them, then offering fewer possibilities could be called mercy.
You can’t change the past. But you can make better choices in the future. Everything is interconnected. And pay more attention to your relationships. Be gentle with everyone, as I am gentle with you.”
“Gentle? What’s gentle about all this?”
You prayed for something for which being here is the answer. And now the man who fell from the sky is not the same who flew into it.
I look up into the stone-gray sky and then out across the seemingly dead and abandoned city. I look back to the egg and reaching up, place my hand upon it. And I say, “I think I can live with this now.”
Chapter Two
Chapter Two
The Art of Letting Go, Initial Experience
I wake up in a rehabilitation hospital. The integration of my spiritually transforming experience, or coping by any other name, began almost immediately in realizing how differently I felt about so many things and how I responded to them.
One morning I awoke to find a photo of me taped to the wall, obviously put there by someone wanting me to remember who I was in an effort of encouragement and healing.
In case you are wondering from the photograph, my vague answer is that I was an independent contractor.
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With the Northern Alliance in northern Afghanistan, October, 2001
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I looked at the photo and reflected on how many lifetimes ago this already was. To those who knew me, this was the best version of myself—my match.com photo. But over the next few days, I began to feel differently about the man in the picture. Instinctively I was coming to see that my best version was the depersonalized conscious being in the In Between, stripped of everything.
Knowing neither joy nor sorrow, but flowing in the Impossible Now beyond time, in a perfect state of Letting Go.
Lying there in the hospital, coming to grips with my NDE, my mind suddenly began conversing with the In Between. The representation of alcohol was removed from me and held up for consideration. The In Between asked if I wanted to take it with me into my future or leave it behind. It said that if I wanted to keep It as part of my life, then It would carry the alcohol for me. If I wanted to leave booze in my past, then all attachment would be removed and the alcohol would have no pull on me. I immediately said without hesitation that I would leave it behind. The voice then said, “Alright” and the representation simply evaporated from sight. I have not had a drink since nor am I inclined to. I can go into a liquor store and buy a bottle for someone else or I can sit at a bar or attend a party where alcohol is flowing and not even think about drinking. It’s simply something other people do. This was my first taste of the power of letting go.
Chapter Three
What is the Art of Letting Go?
When you hold a baby, you are holding someone who has just arrived from The Other Side. Within the newborn are all the secrets of the universe. In the one generation represented by the embodied spirit you hold, we could resolve so many conflicts and abuses of power.
We are born with everything we need to be happy spiritual beings. And now, more than ever, we need to be.
I’m going to jump right in now.
While the world continues to chase the next big thing, what if we try a different approach? If we don’t like it, we can ditch it and go back to scratching in the dirt like everyone else, swapping stories of how we know someone who knows someone who heard of someone else who “made it.”
This alternative approach I call the Art of Letting Go. If you look the phrase up, you will find it has an easy yet elusive appeal of creating something as esoteric as an art around something so ephemeral as... nothing. Yet that’s exactly what it is. This was driven home to me during and after my NDE by the In Between—the otherworldly place to which I went.
This is the secret of becoming detached. Of owning your power to make good choices, moment by moment, that reduce the number of bad potential choices and their echoing outcomes.
This is about realizing that power within you. And how to call it out of others, sleeping secret that it is.
Chapter Three
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Chapter Three 23
There is an understanding that has no context—it is simply a state of knowing. That understanding gives rise to meaning and meaning backs into our individual lives to give us a sense of our unique purpose. Questions beget answers in a way that gives context to understanding, which becomes individually meaningful.
This is the In Between state of non-being. This speaks to the depersonalizing process of removing yourself from the equation, from the content of the processes flowing around you. You are not the center of any particular universe and once you understand this, you see that little of what anyone is doing has much to do with you personally. As the Tao Te Ching says, we are all straw dogs. Everything is a straw dog: the tip of an iceberg is what we see but our appreciation of it is misled by the 90% that is hidden from normal view.
Thoughts, especially in a dual mind where something is simplis- tically only “this” or “that,” are the source of distraction and confusion. We argue and struggle to reconcile our own enigmatic polarities. Meditation and even God’s Grace can lead us to a non-dual state of mind, where we think in terms of “and” instead of “or.” That simple change in perspective changes the world. Taoism represents the po- larities of Yin and Yang with a complement of each as a seed of the opposite within.
When we become still, there is no effort to be aware of; we feel all manner of probabilities swirling around us, at the nexus, the literal the center of our universe. Even now, in a fully conscious and engaged state of mind with the world, you can feel the possibilities of the various aspects of life you have set in motion—some more certain than others.
If anything is slowed down because other involved people are making outcome-influencing decisions, you can feel that potential outcome through that associated thread stretching from your gut into the cosmos, like a spider’s web. If something occurs on that strand, its movement causes a vibration that ripples a wave back to you—and there is information contained therein.
In meditation, you see your threads of cosmic spider silk stretching out in every direction to future moments on their way to the present. Some of these strands will represent possibilities of greater, some of lesser, focus and activity. With practice and repetition, you can begin to feel the certainties of their coming to fruition.
It’s all about probabilities.
Perceiving the pattern, you worry less about outcomes. You may still have to guide them, but you will find yourself caught out with no alternatives less and less.
If you worked hard on something but you’re not feeling those little vibrations, your attention and energies will naturally turn to those threads that do communicate future circumstances that are on their way.
To let go, start by allowing choices to unfold naturally. Wait as long as you can before choosing to allow the other possibilities to fully mature. This allows for the arrival of new information that might impact your decision. With your stillness create your vacuum, then release it in a chosen direction. This is what is done when you are still, present, and understand how you feel.
Know with clarity your need; this creates the vacuum.
Aim the vacuum with your intention. Like an archer, now release it and think no more of it, or you will no longer be present. The arrow will travel to its target on its own.
Shoot your arrow because you love shooting at the target. The outcome, winning a prize, is a totally different thing and distracts you from shooting perfectly. You have to choose between process and content, the labor and the fruit. Just focus on shooting and the outcome will take care of itself.
This is the future birthing into the now. Soon this is instinct and becomes a reflex.
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Nothing can happen unless you become still. Allow yourself to have no attachment to outcomes. You don’t have to see or know all possible choices you can make in the future, but you must feel them. You might not yet know what they are. All you need to know is whether they feel neutral or good or bad. If they feel bad, if they run counter to your values and emotions, dismiss them. To know which ones are not right for you requires being honest and knowing yourself.
Spiritual studies and quantum physics state that every moment is infinite with probabilities, our conscious decisions continually collapsing one of them into defining our present reality. All of these probabilities have a reality in which each is chosen, with every moment spinning off into an infinite number of directions. Each has its own timeline.
This means we, too, are spinning off into an infinite number of realities and outcomes, expressing our divine infinitude, only hinting at what “Children of God” actually means.
It’s at our still point of meditation where we become present that we realize we’re within the center of all probabilities.
Self-reliance builds intuition. To be spiritual, we do not need to battle the world. We do not plant a garden in the middle of weeds that compete for the same resources. Instead, we create a space and prepare the soil. It doesn't take much more than occasional attention after that.
It is the same in being spiritual. In the right space, very little effort is needed. We leave the world at the door and enter. Sitting in this contemplative, meditative space, if thoughts come, they come. If they go, they go.
The same goes for emotions. Do not attach your attention to them. Do not try to repress them. Let them arrive and let them leave.
It's like standing in a river, just letting the current and what it carries go around you, without grabbing anything, because these things are not you.
If you create the right meditation space in which to simply breathe, you will naturally become more and more contemplative.
It doesn't become something you do, but something you are.
This is how you pray without ceasing.
When you live life as a question, you no longer seek answers; you seek awakening.
This is where synchronicities play a role. As magical as they are, there is something ephemeral about them, where understanding is always just beyond your grasp.
This is them calling to you, to cross the chasm of ambiguity to the truth on the other side. In your stretching, you live in a way that considers the emerging truth and filters the days of your experiences accordingly.
As your experiences validate your dawning awareness and your- self as measured by it, you are able to restate lessons in your own individual life, giving them tangible meaning with living, breathing moments.
Now living it, even the vibration of your words and the strength of your body language have an authority absent before.
In this way, you bring it home. All else is counterfeit.
Again, this should be effortless.
Before my NDE, I was as guilty as anyone else of making life harder than it had to be.
Spirituality was a war with the world where I counted my bruises and fun that I didn’t have at the end of the day and was proud of it. If there was an opportunity to thump my chest, all the better. And I unfairly judged others who were not as hungry for a fight as me.
The reboot I got from my NDE was so ass-kicking that all this self- righteousness simply fell away.
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But you don’t need to die or nearly die to get to this place.
For those of us who have, it’s like a 2x4 upside the head. Those who are wiser may only need a whisper or a nudge.
Interestingly, for people who have NDEs, the horrendous events facilitating delivery of these spiritually transformative experiences become a footnote to a much larger story. Without the NDE, the accident or illness that delivers us to the door of death would be the story. Notice this the next time you listen to someone’s NDE.
I want to go back for a moment to feelings and emotions.
I recently read that meditation is taught in prison. As you can imagine, there is a lot of guilt in many of those who are incarcerated, as they wake up each day and go to bed every night looking at the world through a set of cold, steel bars.
Meditation becomes meaningful to them when feelings of guilt surface and they just let those feelings enter and exit, without reacting to them. Over time, the practitioners see that they are separate from their emotions, their thoughts, their minds, and their bodies.
They are now simply here to observe.
If they do not take possession of any of these thoughts or feelings, then there is no guilt to feel. Thoughts may be measured as good or bad, but raw emotions are not good or bad.
They simply are and indicate what is important to us. Some feelings only become “wrong” when we act on them.
If a person has the desire to do wrong, as the world measures it, even though the thought and emotion plague them every day of their lives, they will not have sinned if they never act upon it. Show me a court that can sentence you based on your thoughts.
Yet as we think, so we become.
Which says that this practice is within the Art of Letting Go.
Over time, by depersonalizing ourselves from our thoughtful and emotional activities, our attention naturally turns upward and inward and with each step toward the light, the pull of the world lessens.
Things naturally fall away and if they can only be expressed in this plane, then as they fall away, so do our attachments holding us here.
If you can find a community or even a teacher you resonate with, then you can test this. In their company, over time, do you perceive a change in how you think and feel about things? If the familiar sins and attachments surface in your mind less and less, you may want to spend more time with these people.
It may not be so much what they say or do, it may be more like when one tuning fork is put near another one that is already vibrating. If it is of the same frequency, it also will begin to vibrate. What effort was required?
None.
As you become still, you awaken into Observer mode.
Think of a cat sitting there, watching a mousehole in the wall. It waits, almost unblinking, without being distracted.
It is attentive and engaged.
But still and silent.
Waiting.
There is a readiness to move in an instant, based on its curiosity of when the mouse will reappear.
That’s how we sit in meditation. Or Walk. Or Drive.
Or Live.
Don’t just consider the question of life but feel it in all its perplexity.
When we try to answer a big question, such as “What is Life About” or even “Who am I?” we know we do not yet have the answer. Nor
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can anyone else really give it to us. They just give us their answer or
share their understanding.
But to ask the question is to admit we do not know.
We ask because we are the question.
We are a work in progress.
Not knowing grants that humility, helping us to awaken to the question.
And that makes the answer irrelevant. Awakening is relevant, the Flow.
The Becoming.
The Present.
And this is also within the practice of Letting Go.
There are many types of meditation. There is no best one. Some do well to sit or even lay down. Some walk. Some do it in practicing yogic positions or the movements of Tai Chi. It really doesn't matter, just find one that feels right to you.
Practice it as best you can.
Don’t be too hard on yourself when your mind resists.
If it does, bargain with it.
“Give me these 15 minutes and I’ll give you 15 minutes, after.”
Then do so, honor your bargain, and give the intensity-hungry mind the stimulation it needs.
Make a friend of it and one day, it will remind you to go meditate. Because it wants what comes after.
Chapter Three 29
Increase your time beyond 15 minutes once you have the trust of the mind.
Then it becomes a wonderful servant.
To the mind which becomes still, the entire universe will surrender. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
All the force of will you will ever need is found in the Art of Letting Go. Always live life in celebration of the individual spirit. For no one, no thing, can stand before the brilliance of a truly naked soul.
The In Between
Chapter 4
Chapter 4 Work
In our rushing around to get everything done, our attention is caught by some promise of a technique, tool, service or approach whose advertisement says that with this one more thing, we will gain a competitive advantage in our professions or more leisure time in our personal lives. If only we could get that one more thing: more money, more time, more happiness.... Instead of using the dividend of saved time to lessen our stress, we just pile more on, wanting even a taste of what is promised. Yet in this transaction we never get what we pay for. Never.
The elusive One More Thing is a mirage. The purveyors of such snake oil have made fortunes with little cost to themselves. For us, the price is with our last breath while still in pursuit.
The lie you have been fed in all of this is that you don’t have what you need to get what you want. This is the mantra of those who follow the false gods of Greed. Let’s call it what it is.
Educated and trained to decreasingly trust our instincts, we have been domesticated to such a degree that we no longer believe we have the native intelligence to figure things out on our own.
I remember seeing an advertisement on television one time for children’s running shoes, with the cautionary statement to take your child to the doctor to make sure they have the expert medical clearance to simply play.
Unless you are dysfunctionally self-absorbed, as the parent wouldn’t you already know if your child could play?
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Then there are the ads for erectile dysfunction medication that tell you to ask the doctor if you can survive sex.
All of these miracle medications come with such strange and fear- inspiring warnings that you wonder if you’re safer just dealing with your illness or condition.
This coughs up another lie: That survival is more important than living.
In Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, we do begin with survival and if that remains stable, we naturally aspire to have lives rich with culture, arts, and sciences. You know, the things that make life worth living.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Once you’ve evolved from surviving to living, few want to return to a life of less certainty, except for weekend campers or skydivers.
Always question Conventional Wisdom.
So much of what everyone thinks they know is nothing more than a few pages of truisms taped together to form a script for living.
Truisms such as:
• "Money can't buy happiness."
• "Some things never change."
• "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer."
• "It's the journey not the destination that matters." • "Everything happens for a reason."
• "Thank God it's Friday."
• "All things come to he who waits."
• "Patience is a virtue."
But truisms are only true in being half-baked.
Take time to think things through and you’ll find so many exceptions that you wonder how these short-sighted statements came to define our common psyche.
You’ll come to see the lie of truisms.
Truisms promise that if we pay money and spend time to buy one
more thing, we will attain our dreams.
We will be successful, handsome or beautiful, more productive, more wealthy, happier, and so on.
Our desks and computers are full of these promises that never delivered.
We’re still chasing the one more thing that turned into many.
And we’re hard-pressed to find anyone else other than those selling the one more thing who profited.
What if you revolt? What if you don’t need one more thing?
What if you already have everything within that you need to be successful?
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What if you can just figure out how to solve a problem with a minimum of oversight?
A truism sounds correct on the surface but scratch it and you find little to no actionable intelligence or substance underneath.
You will find prejudice, incorrect assumptions, fear, and herd mentality.
Truisms do not celebrate individual thought or spirit.
Truisms are cliches—dismissive statements said so often that no one questions them because they’ve lost all meaning.
Platitudes are also meant to sound wise and comforting, but they have no power – think about this the next time you hear at a funeral that “Time heals all wounds” and “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”.
So, Question Everything.
The One More Thing model paints a picture of someone struggling to get things done, to make enough money to pay the bills, to manage a career, and raise kids, not to mention keeping the marriage together. With a divorce rate of 53%, how successful would you call that model?
These promises preach from across the table, a podium, the television, or the internet that they will solve the problems that are a bane to your existence.
This approach is based on someone telling you what to do, how to do it, and when to do it.
What if instead of preaching at you, they turned this into more of a conversation?
What if the person barking their canned speech stopped, saw you as an honest-to-God person, took their chair from the opposite side of the table, and brought it around to sit next to you?
What if instead of telling you to follow their rules, they asked questions instead?
Revising the sales pitch above, what if the questions began in a general way but your individual and specific answers narrowed them down, tailoring the solution to you?
Wouldn’t that be better than trying to stuff you and your life into one standardized box, offering one unyielding solution?
This is the difference between chasing the next big thing and you being it.
Here are some examples where the buzz outpaced the reality:
A report published by Alcoholism Treatment Quarterly reviewed and averaged the data from Alcoholics Anonymous, over a nearly 30- year period.
81 percent of the first timers never make it back to the second month.
After 3 months, only 10% remain.
After a year, only 5%.
And in that same year, only 27 % of AA members stay sober.
24% stay sober between 1 and 5 years, and 13% stay sober between 5 and 10 years, with 10 years being the average length of sobriety.
Here’s another one:
Of the 500,000 Mary Kay consultants in America, only 0.2%, or about 1,300, are driving pink Cadillacs.
More people think about the car (and falsely, the income it represents) than whether the products are any good or not.
Amway is similar.
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These business models try to sign people up under them in order to increase their earnings—some by taking a portion of their team member’s earnings, some not.
These are businesses that have recruited millions of people with the promise that this One More Thing will be the Next Big Thing.
Whatever your experiences or opinions are of these business models, they were created in different times than now. The most popular sitcoms from then showed people living normal lives and working normal jobs.
Now, shows rarely show anyone working, but instead sitting around diners and coffee shops just yammering about “nothing.” We can all recall the classic Seinfeld and Friends TV sitcoms from years past.
We all know life is not a sitcom.
Yet that type of mentality is what you're up against today, whether
you are selling or recruiting.
And against that tide, not everyone has the personality to pull customers to them and be the stuff of legends.
You know, the good-looking, focused people in their booklets.
Realtors all pull from the same inventory, but some are more successful than others.
If everyone is selling the same thing—whether homes, lipstick, or home cleaning products—then their success is due to attracting and retaining customers who want to have a relationship with them.
In this sea of sameness, it’s our individuality that shines.
We just need to find that particular thing to do that we can make uniquely ours.
In comparison, if some well-dressed person on stage tells you what to do to be successful and the sacrifices you'll have to make along the
way, how personally invested are you in becoming their next poster child?
This is where asking hard questions and clear thinking and feeling help.
If you can entertain this practice with less than more desire and attachment, you have a fighting chance to answer questions that point to a truth, rather than beating yourself into submission by the sheer repetition of a mantra based on half-baked truisms.
Questions stimulate thoughts in a direction that creates a sense of connection, within yourself and the people around you.
These questions lead to truths, allowing for an inclusive non-dual appreciation beyond “this or that,” beyond being a “winner” or a “loser.”
You will fill in the gaps with new experiences, learning as you go.
You will eventually speak your truth, your understanding of the original question, with your own words and with your own authenticity.
No one can speak your truth more authentically than you.
This is the investment required to be successful—not in chasing the Next Big Thing but in Becoming it.
Have Faith in yourself and you will be who you are meant to be. You will be fine.
Just don’t let your truisms become your aphorisms.
Chapter 5
Chapter 5
Emotional Shielding – Maintaining Your Balance
We’re getting ready to get ready.
If you are feeling overwhelmed by all the emotional vitriol pouring out of social media; if the spin of television news makes you feel emotionally exhausted; if you find it hard to feel motivated or optimistic about anything; if even when things are going well, you’re standing in the shadow of sadness; if things that didn’t bother you before now do; and if sometimes you just want to crawl under a table, then this chapter is for you.
I want to show you how to deal effectively with emotional onslaught and get back on track when knocked off your center.
There is a lot of anger and confusion in the air these days. We live in a world where every battle is dialed up to 11, drowning out the truly important conflicts. All this rage, anger, and pain indicates a tremendous amount of self-righteousness. In this tactical position, you can’t see the bigger picture, the 10,000-foot view. Everything can’t be a rage, otherwise there is no conversation. Yet this is exactly where we find ourselves.
Within all of this chaos, there are some people making things happen, some who are watching things happen, and others are wondering what happened.
We are overwhelmed by waves of intense emotion from people trying to live with a virus that kills on a whim, leaving one person unaffected while asphyxiating the one next to them, both coping with the financial evisceration of less or no work and mounting bills like mortgages and rents and ultimately, taxes.
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We’ve been told not to work or go to school, or socialize, but our creditors and the taxmen still have their hands out, all while we anxiously stand by our mailboxes waiting on pocket change from the government.
I’m not saying that it isn’t appreciated by those who need it; I’m just saying the financial relief will last about five minutes ... then what?
Watch the news, no matter which overall spin you like—to the left or the right and no matter your persuasion—it’s clear we are all in the same boat.
We need to orient, then navigate our way through this stormy sea of emotion and power-grabbing.
Consider this: during times of limited resources, the worst is brought out in people. Think of every movie you’ve seen where people were on a sinking ship and rushing to not-enough lifeboats. You see the same type of desperation in people now—trying to move away from insanity to safety.
Or think of the former liberties in short supply as the fear of a pandemic separates us further, first in social distancing by staying home and now psychological and class distancing based on who has been vaccinated and who has not, who has proof of compliance and who does not.
Amidst the social angst and desire for things to return to the way they were, we’re concerned how some businesses are profiting from the pandemic and how the government is extending its power.
Bottom line: Empires come, and Empires go.
They always have and always will. Times change but people don’t. And until People—We—You and I—do change, nothing in this world will.
Every problem we have with each other we had a thousand years ago, and we will still have a thousand years from now, even when we colonize space or other planets. We will take with us wherever we go
all of the monkeys on our backs that drive us to make crazy choices and do unfortunate things.
All that our increasing levels of civilization have done for us in this regard is allow us a greater scale upon which to express those bad choices.
Despite all of this, there is a lot of higher consciousness moving through society now.
Most everyone’s angst on both sides of the table has at its roots the same need for connection: we seek fairness, we seek justice, we seek purpose and a sense of connection to others who believe and feel as we do.
Since we are increasingly diverse in color, wealth, access, culture, gender, language, and religion, the one thing we can address, and align on, is our values.
If you share my same values, I don’t care what planet you are from or how you live your personal life; we can find common ground upon which to build social connection.
One day when we’re both out cutting the grass or walking our pets, we might pause and chat. We then discover common and shared interests. We see our kids saying hi when riding their bikes and the next thing you know they’re playing together while the parents have a meal.
When that happens throughout a neighborhood and town or suburb, it builds cohesion and becomes an attractive place people want to move to.
It’s about Communication. Not Compliance. You can’t legislate this.
We don’t save the world by passing laws.
Social media shunning doesn’t bring people together—other than those looking for a common enemy.
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Our problem right now is that we are seeing the world and everyone in it in terms of “Or,” rather than “And.”
We need to rise above this panic-minded duality of “them or us” and “it’s me or them” and realize that if we do not come together, we’re done for.
Everything you and your family have worked for, your children have studied for, your ancestors have built, for which your congregations pray, your sports teams compete for, and those closest to you have died for, will be lost.
Civilization takes work. It needs constant maintenance. You can’t adjust it like a thermostat and go back to bed. Entropy rules the universe and every social institution therein.
Entropy is the Second Law of Thermodynamics and it says that things go from warm to cool, clean to dirty, young to old, working to needing repair, and basically, order to disorder.
Interestingly, it’s this same inescapable dynamic of the universe that also defines the arrow of time as moving in one direction from what we perceive as the past to the future. Quantum mechanics is proving all of this to be an illusion—both time and its direction—so stay tuned on further developments there. And who knows, maybe we will design a house that can clean itself. That’s the science of cybernetics or anti-entropy.
Where am I going with all of this?
I am bringing it all back to how, within the swirling patterns of information and emotions flowing around you and through you, you can keep your Center. How you can accept events and emotions when it’s time—then let them go when it's time. It’s a first step in how to be Present.
I’ve been asked more and more how you can put into practice the things I am saying, how to park yourself in the bubbles of perspective I’ve shared in my books, interviews, and videos.
So here is an easy example to consider and an easy practice you can try.
I began the chapter with how overwhelming all the emotions hammering us can be.
It’s like an energy overload and we need shielding.
Let’s begin with an example of the problem, then I’ll show you how to navigate it.
It works every time and I promise that it’s not hard. It’s just something to try when you’re next in that place, which will probably be before the end of the day.
Whether you’re in pursuit of a professional goal, a new job, a lucrative sale, or personal anticipation—like a big first date you’re excited about—you chase it, and then when you score it, you are over the moon with energy and excitement.
With other people involved, like a team at work or a sports team, the enthusiasm of your friends and family, the heightened energy of everyone else, reinforces your own elation.
Energy is off the charts.
It’s easy to let yourself get swept up in the "high" of such a moment.
Not long after, within a day or so, you crash.
First, you go up and then you come down.
Then you need another fix to get high again, another goal to achieve, and you’re whipped by the desperation to achieve it.
I call this, “The Thrill of the Hunt.”
Once I caught the thing, whatever I was after, it was like the dog catching the car it was chasing.
“Now what?”
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Somewhere between feeling elated and depressed, I studied the patterns of events for some insight.
Using the life experience of cycles, seeing how things go up and down or cycle out and back again, I thought that what I needed to do was moderate my excitement upfront if I didn't want to crash on the back end.
As soon as I hung up the phone after clinching some deal or another, my inclination was to become super excited, feeling emotions of empowerment, purpose, and expansion.
In those moments I would feel so on top that I was defined by such a moment.
That’s the trap.
Instead of saying, “I am feeling this thing,” we say, “I am this thing.”
That puts you directly in the front seat of the roller coaster.
Instead of being on the ride, you are the ride.
If you are the ride, how do you get off?
How do you keep it together when you’re high on success and mitigate depression while looking for the next big win?
Remember, it’s only our effort that we can be held responsible for (if that).
Success is either written in the stars or unwritten in God’s Grace.
Either way, we have little to no control over it.
Connecting our sense of self, our emotions, our purpose, to these intoxicatingly wonderful moments feels good at that second but puts you on course to crash soon after.
When you are next in this same situation, when whoever you are trying to score with says “yes” or you deposit that big, anticipated check in the bank, stand back within yourself and just watch the patterns of your emotions.
See what their natural reaction to all of this is.
Touch those feelings but don’t become them—it’s like trying to pretend you are Mr. Spock on Star Trek.
Don’t get swept up in the euphoria.
If you can’t resist or just don’t want to, that’s OK, but try to hold off for as long as you can before letting yourself get swept off your feet.
If you can do this, you are practicing being self-aware, and by allowing yourself to feel contentment but not indulging in the ego- fueling elation, you are practicing self-mastery.
Try to keep your emotions at arm’s length for as long as you can. It helps if you think of your success in terms of how you are helping others more than helping yourself.
Try to keep yourself out of the center of the equation.
You are where you are, succeeding as you are, with the people you are, perhaps not so much for your enjoyment as for the right use of what has been given you.
You feel the contentment of these moments, but they are not you.
Your work and your relationships are not you.
Your success and your failures are not you.
You are just here in the world for a little while, going through the motions like an actor reading from a script.
But the actor is not the character and after the show is over, they return home to family and hobbies, their own problems, and the next project.
If you are feeling any of what I am saying, if you are sensitive and especially if you are an empath, this is an easy way to see when and how to put up your shields up to protect yourself.
Practice this and you exchange elation for contentment and there is no crash after.
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You stay on course and in focus with the original task and you do not go chasing after the next high, never having completed that earlier task whose excitement you sucked dry yesterday.
If you can hold off falling into this vortex of emotion, you are putting up your shields.
This will help you from feeling overwhelmed by the constant and intense waves of emotions then and now.
You will keep your bearings as you move through situations.
Your mind will be clearer in sorting out your own emotions and keeping them separate from the masses.
You will also protect yourself from what I call psychic vampires, those people who seem to have a gift, if that’s what you call it, for siphoning off other people’s energy.
If you’ve ever felt depleted after being with someone, that’s what I am talking about.
After a while, your shields will pop up when needed or just stay up without effort.
It’s easier to lower your shields if you so choose than it is to raise them once you are already swept up in the moment.
If you don’t believe me, think of one super-emotional hot button you have, the one someone hits that triggers an overpowering emotional reaction before you can stop it.
That’s what we want to avoid.
If something pops up that requires immediate reaction, you can choose to react with logic and tranquility.
Like my mother said in the few hours after my father died when I asked her how she could be so calm and focused: “We can cry later.”
So can you.
As you get better at protecting yourself from being whipped around in the winds of your emotions, I would be interested to know if you see this next reaction happen.
You’ll know you are successfully protecting yourself when one of those former hot buttons doesn’t produce an immediate reaction.
The Quiet Observer within you notices you aren’t reacting the same as before and calmly considers whatever is presenting itself before you.
That “split” between your active mind that focuses tactically on the world and the calm, unjudging and observing mind that just watches is a key step in this practice.
You may have already experienced this split—usually in the first instance of a surprise, emergency situation.
The active mind is the outer clothing you wear to go out into the world.
The calm observer is more the real you—get to know it.
You can do this in exchanging your knee-jerk reactions for a patient consideration of whatever is going on.
For me, when asked how I feel about something important, I now tell the person I need some time to consider it.
I might take a day or two to walk around whatever we are talking about to see it from all angles, looking at all the patterns of information flowing through it as clearly as I can.
This is the non-linear approach to seeing something in terms of its processes and information rather than in terms of its momentary content.
A classic example is to remain calm if a stranger berates you (remember road rage?) for what seems no reason or when someone’s anger at you is out of proportion to the event.
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A standard mindset, working in linear time, may be to just yell back and start a shouting match (or worse).
But a detached non-linear mind will understand that this anger was present before the confrontation and will still be there after the convenient opportunity to vent has passed.
Maybe the person is simply an ass to whomever gets in their way, or maybe they are stressed with many things and you being in their way for a moment is the matchstick to their dynamite.
If you can watch them from deep within yourself, not reacting in kind to their anger, your calmness itself may end the confrontation before it escalates.
Give it your best shot—by holding your fire.
I remember one time I was trying to find a parking spot at a community theater, and I finally wedged my car into a spot that wasn’t ideal.
As I locked the car and began walking inside, a man who lived next door was sitting in his open upstairs window and drunkenly yelled at me that I wasn’t parked correctly, and he was going to call the cops and have my car towed.
I knew he was full of hot air, but I was moved to say, “Is that the best you have?”
He actually appeared to become reflective for a moment and said in a quiet voice, “Yeah”.
I gave him a kind look and continued on inside. Think like that.
Be the grownup in the situation.
My car was still there when I returned.
Another benefit to this approach is that in the heat of the moment, whether good or bad, things are said or done that cannot be unsaid or
undone—whether in your expanded feelings of success you make an overgenerous offer or in a low moment you say something hurtful to someone undeserving of that pain.
This aligns with my earlier suggestion that you gain more personal power to assess and act by holding off making decisions until the last possible minute.
Allow for all possibilities to play out on their own as much as possible with the least wasted energy of your own.
This is my cocktail napkin version of how I shield, based on the types of experiences I am sure we have all felt.
Next time everyone else gets swept up in a moment, allow yourself a taste of the moment, but mostly hold back and just watch from the sidelines how the process unfolds and expresses itself through everyone else.
If it is a barroom brawl, the benefit of this approach will be readily apparent.
If it something wonderful, then you will feel good things.
But you may still need to be the designated driver afterward.
It's like a bunch of roses: you don't have to buy them to enjoy the fragrance.
And that's the secret.
Chapter 6
Chapter 6 The Past is Dust
When you let go of chasing the Next Big Thing, you let go of the truisms that surround it.
Whether they are the mantras that priests of false gods have given you or the jaded truths of realization you paid dearly for in trying to run that race, letting go of the past is both an emotional and logical choice.
Dreams are sold to you emotionally and the rationale is sold with only the half-logic of half-truths.
Start fresh. The past is dust. Remember, you are already present because you are currently standing inside the eternity of right now.
It’s knowing this that makes you present.
Both emotions and logic can work quickly but intuition works instantly—you just look at something and you know it.
Learn to trust your intuition.
If you sacrificed a lot in chasing The Next Big Thing, and you’re paying attention, then it’s fairly safe to say that whatever got you “Here” won’t get you “There.”
Or else you’d be there.
Here is a truism for you: “No one builds a statue to you in your own village.”
In your village, everyone remembers every dumb thing you did as a kid, as an adolescent, and probably yesterday too.
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Every day, they see you in terms of your shared past.
Your fellow villagers might love all the dumb things as much as the smart things you’ve done to this point in your life.
But few will elevate you above others in the village as long as you stay solely in the village.
This is where the Hero’s Journey comes in.
The typical story follows the path of someone in the village who leaves its comfort and familiarity, meets others on a journey, has adventures, faces heartbreak and/or death, transforms—dying to their old self and awakening to their new one—does something heroic, and returns to their village.
If their deeds were celebrated, they might be recognized in their village with some plaque or maybe a statue.
Especially if the celebration of their heroism can be a means of revenue for others.
Not that we should be chasing the laurels for heroic deeds, but resting on them is even worse, reliving glory of days gone by.
The more we remove our egos from the equation, the more present we are, the more we see things clearly and the easier it is to see the path forward, untainted by our self-interests.
Examples of this are common, but since my area of interest is Near- Death Experiences, I’ll say to those with their own, you
share what you saw, heard, and felt on the Other Side, and even your closest friends or relations will not take a chance in allowing others to see you as higher than themselves.
They will be the first to say, “You’re not perfect!” and again, have a history a mile long of the dumb things you’ve done, the failures you’ve experienced, your lost opportunities, and the broken hearts you left behind.
When faced with that, I think it’s best to simply tell them they are right.
Tell them that you are imperfect and always have been.
But you don’t have to be perfect to have a perfecting experience.
The difference between the You of Now and the You of Yesterday is that your feet are pointed Homeward.
All you have to do is Walk.
You’re just sharing what you see along the journey and how you feel about it.
Who needs to be holy to do that? Who needs certification?
Dismiss your well-intending friends who will defend themselves by “keeping you humble” but who are in effect fighting tooth and nail to hold you back.
The powers of the world that want to keep us here are working through your past associations to focus on your failures.
It’s the new friends, perhaps within the Spiritually Transformative Experience (STE) or NDE populations, who won’t even know of your past, who may offer the greatest support.
They’re just excited to hear of your Experience, compare notes, give and gain wisdom, and see you in terms of your potential.
Now you have to look in your mirror of truth and also see that potential.
In Ancient Greece, the word “educate” meant “to draw forth”.
The idea was that a teacher didn’t put knowledge in your head, in accordance with later thinking in the West.
Their role was to remind you of what you already knew: that All Truth and All Beauty already exist within you; that their role, as an Educator, was to “draw forth” what was already there.
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Can you imagine waking up in a world like that?
Try it on for size.
This is why it is important to speak to people in terms of their highest potential.
If you connect with them on an empathic level, they will try to live up to that potential. Psychological tests have proven it.
You are calling it out of them. You are expecting the best of them.
And when you talk and act this way, you may be the only person ever to have believed in them.
Finally.
And that can be life changing. Maybe for you but especially for them.
They have their own detractors holding them back and like a revolutionary, you just gave them a taste of freedom.
Freedom from the chains of the past.
With this tool, you can reinvent yourself. You can choose what new ideas and situations to respond to.
What new senses of self do you want to contemplate?
What new clothes do you want to wear or new friends do you want to make?
This is part of living authentically.
Drop trying to live according to others’ expectations and discover your own.
Try new things and try them often.
Figure out what makes you tick.
You’re going to lose people over it. But they weren’t meant for you.
If you don’t march to your own drum, then you’re dancing to someone else’s tune.
You’re generating karma doing things you don’t want to do and accruing karmic debt you do not want to pay, probably because it means coming back to do the same thing all over again until you get it right.
So, get it right, now.
Start living authentically by being Present.
That means living moment by moment, trusting your intuition, your gut, and seeing all of the wonderful probabilities swirling through you and around you every single moment of every single day. This is the Now between the Past that is gone forever and the Future that is birthing into the Now.
For those who are interested in the Bible, this was driven home in Luke 17:21: “Nor will they say, ‘Here it is, or ‘There it is.’ For behold—the kingdom of God is WITHIN you.”
This makes me wonder when people talk of the Second Coming if it’s already here among us.
Why would I say that?
Because it is reckoned that 5% of the world’s population has had an NDE.
That’s sixty million more people than live in the United States.
25% percent have had a more broadly defined STE—Spiritually Transformative Experience.
To me, even 1 out of 4 people who now have felt a Oneness with Life speaks to Jesus’ truth of saying it isn’t a “Here” or “There” thing.
And as with God, it’s for everyone, not just the self-baptized.
The statistics bear this out when He says that The Kingdom of God is within us and among us. This, the waking up out of this bad dream, is the Second Coming.
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And no less paradigm-busting as was the First Coming. There is a Zen koan that says, “Of course the truth should make us uncomfortable.”
Even the In Between told me, “The In Between isn’t a place you go to or come from. It is simply a place you are.”
Don’t let the past hold you back.
See yourself as an emerging future of infinite possibilities.
You can step outside yourself and solve the problem for what is needed and good rather than what is desired and pleasant.
Just try it, considering—even as a mind game—what-if scenarios where you do something with less or no self-interest, just because you know in your heart it is the right thing to do or has the greatest chance of helping the most people.
If it requires unlikely suppositions, like removing the profit motive (charging what the market will bear) or the desire for power (imagining an outcome where people feel freer, not more enslaved or controlled), then push the whimsy all the way out to there.
In doing so, you’ll consider what people’s reactions would be, and it’s funny how you’ll have to see them in their best light—in terms of their highest potential.
The more selfless you are, the more independently you can think and act because fewer people can control you.
You have solved the problem of co-dependency because you no longer want anything from anyone.
That is the desired state.
To do the right thing because the equation solves for Need and Good with a correct answer, while the answer for only self-interest is wrong.
This will make you fearless, another threat to the status quo of “You are your past.”
No, you are not.
You are what you choose to be. Every single moment.
We’re not here to just have a good time.
We’re here to have a good time doing what we’re supposed to, and that is to grow spiritually and help others through being ethical.
That’s what the Right Use (or Way) of things is, or Righteousness, as consistently translated from Ancient Hebrew to the modern day.
Chapter 7
Chapter 7 Logic & Emotions
One of the things the In Between said to me, very clearly, as I left was, “Pay more attention to your relationships.”
As I was chewing on this guidance from the In Between while recuperating in the hospital, I enjoyed everyone’s attention; there’s nothing like not being able to do anything about work or the usual worries of the day to fully relax you and give you a fresh perspective.
If I hadn’t crashed my plane, three days later I would have gone to England to see my son.
Instead, I looked at my leg in its cage and the rods and screws running through my flesh and said to my nurse, “This may not be the vacation I wanted but it might be the one I needed.”
That was because the trip to England would have lasted only two weeks, whereas this new one was definitely going to be longer.
Due to a synchronicity just before I crashed, I was sent a check for an investment with a former employer.
Three days before I would crash my airplane and stop working for three months, I paid my taxes for the year and had a cushion to carry me through my recuperation.
It was like God saying, “Just because you have to suffer doesn’t mean everyone else does.”
So why did the In Between tell me to pay more attention to my relationships?
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Why didn’t it say, “Do better math” or “Be more logical”?
Could it be because I’ve always kept everyone at arm’s length and now, I was being given a timely reminder of what’s important in life?
I’ve often thought about how it seems that no matter our incredible achievements, we don’t come here to cure cancer, go to the moon, or really, to save the world.
We come here to have certain relationships.
The ones we reflect on when we’re dying and wish we’d taken better care of.
Missing out on giving that last apology isn’t something you want to carry on your shoulders the rest of your life.
One time when I visited my father’s grave on the anniversary of his death, there was a fresh grave near his.
On it were Happy Birthday balloons and a cake with sixteen candles, picked at by the bugs and birds.
On what remained of it, I could read the words of the parents wishing their 16-year-old a happy birthday.
I could really feel that grief and I thought, “Yep, I would be that kind of parent.”
How many things do you think were left unsaid that they’ll forever wish they’d taken time to say?
As a rule, I believe that if your parting words are, “I love you” or whatever is appropriate to the company you keep, if something tragic happens, then with those words nothing is left unsaid and nothing is left undone.
Those words are the most important you can ever say.
This may be of little comfort when you’re looking at your loved one in a casket, but I promise it’s at least one less thing to beat yourself up about.
I also can’t get a present for someone and wait to give it to them.
I have to give it to them now for all the reasons I’ve just said.
Let’s go back to the happy side of emotions.
I was enjoying exploring my heightened empathy in the hospital after my accident.
I had three to five doctors in my room every day and we’d talk about all sorts of things other than my medical case.
One night, around 2:00 in the morning, an older, matronly nurse came in to check on me and while I pretended to sleep, she actually kissed me lightly on my forehead.
I can’t tell you how touched I was by that act of kindness.
It was just beautiful.
This getting in touch with my emotions was something new to me.
Being an introvert, living in the middle of nowhere in Africa for years with only three other people, and then working in war zones, I’d built up a pretty tough shell and could easily entertain myself.
I think living in my head meant that when people were there, I could interact with them and form relationships but when there were no people, I had my mental landscape to explore.
At one point, someone asked if I was going to build more airplanes and I answered that if I did, my friends would likely finish the job the crash started.
That definitely seemed like an accurate exercise of logic. With emotions, some distinctions began to emerge:
To be called a logical person is a compliment.
To be called emotional usually isn’t.
Logic tells us what should be correct.
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Emotions tell us what is important.
Knowing what is important, to me, seems important.
And most of our initial reactions, especially when we’re startled, are emotional.
That would point to an instinct that promotes survival.
Sometimes I refer to the main axis of the sine wave that defines joy as the curve rises and sorrow as it falls.
Joy and Sorrow Sine Wave
The main axis is that line down the middle of the wave.
If the curve represents joy and sorrow, then the central line is acquiescence, accepting what comes without batting an eye.
When it is time to experience joy, you do.
When it is time to let it go, you do.
When it is time to grieve, you do.
When it is time for the grieving to be done, you let it go. How do you do that?
Pain is incredibly self-focusing and it’s easy for intensity to define a sense of self.
Just ask all the traumatized people who can’t escape their personal hells. They bring the fires themselves.
The next time you experience sadness, don’t say, “I am sad.”
That identifies you to the emotion and you become that story.
Rather, say, “I feel sad.”
This way you are only touching the emotion instead of becoming the emotion.
This difference will help you stay present and self-aware.
Here is why:
Remember in the story of my NDE, the Impossible Now?
The In Between said that was the split second between the past and the future.
Impossibly short and impossibly wide, across universes.
Just another word for “Now.”
This is where you stand, from that same self-awareness that protects you from getting sucked into the drama of being the sadness.
Of being unworthy. Of being depleted. Of just having had enough.
You don’t surrender your power when you say you feel those things.
But you give up everything when you become those things, for there is no end to them and they suck your energy dry.
You can choose to be sad, unworthy, and depleted all your life and when you die, you will be gone but all of that baggage will still be here.
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Using what I said earlier, the Impossible Now marks the transition from stimulus to response.
That transition, for most people, is that quick, impossibly now quick.
That is the power of our programming.
But in that space between stimulus and response is when you are at your most powerful, feeling the many choices you can make.
This is what quantum physics calls super-positioned probabilities.
When we finally choose, we collapse some associated probability into the Here and Now and that defines our path forward.
If you can, stay in the moment, the Now, as long as you can before making a choice of what to do next.
The longer you are in that state of potential, the more powerful you are.
Standing there, able to choose so many directions to go, you can feel their additive power building up as the moment for decision approaches.
Pushing that moment out until you absolutely have to decide, you have more time to consider more potential decisions.
You allow for last-minute information to arrive that could make all the difference in the world and in some cases, you may not have to choose at all.
The best choice surfaces in such a way that it becomes the only choice you can make.
More generally, I have mentioned the power of ambiguity.
Not over-defining things or requiring a neat and tidy fit into a simplistic model of duality, where something either is or it isn’t, allows for those additional power-infusing possibilities to come into the moment.
The more you push something into a rigid definition, the fewer alternatives, the fewer probabilities you can say there are defining that moment.
Yet opportunities are there for those who see them.
A lack of flexibility blinds you from seeing them.
Stay loose, stay chill, and let things play out a little longer before you make your final decision.
Put it off as long as you can, until the last minute.
It will be warranted many times over, I promise.
By waiting before you say anything or make decisions, there will be less that you later have to retract.
And that’s a plus.
Just as emotions tell us what is important, they also get a free pass on being called right or wrong.
Or they should.
Calling them right only reflects our desire and calling them wrong only bottles up the building head of steam.
They are neither; they just are.
Again, it’s how you react to them that makes for rightness or wrongness.
And then the feeling good or feeling bad that comes with your response to them.
We may feel it is not right to feel the rigidly intense and defining anger or lust for someone, versus a more ambiguous and flexible annoyance or desire.
While one Sunday School class or another might have mentioned the many reasons why that is true, it doesn’t help in the management of those emotions.
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It causes frustration.
The trick is to understand why you have those feelings and that brings us back to “Man, know thyself.”
When you get wrapped around the axle of your emotions, the questions you are likely to ask at the end of the day are defined by their color.
What did I do today to not feel like crap about my life? What did I do that felt good?
When you walk on that curving wave up and down of joy and sorrow, you define your world accordingly, using the peak of the joy as a reference for everything else. Look at advertising and gambling for example.
Resist the temptation of the siren song of intensity.
Let go of those intense feelings that come with flying off the handle, the excitement and anticipation of impetuous action, and the self- righteousness of ordained purpose—instead take a breath, suspend choosing to be anything or the need to immediately feel a certain way, and just let your emotions respond naturally to whatever is going on.
If you can do this, at the end of the day you won’t ask what you did that felt good or question the wisdom of what you did to feel less horrible about the choices you’ve made in the past that have brought you to this day.
Instead, you’ll ask what you did today that was worthwhile.
That sincerity is your authenticity.
That brings us back full circle to see that joy or sorrow are not the answers we’re looking for but oscillations on the wheel of life.
This is where logic finds balance with emotions. This is another aspect to the Art of Letting Go.
Chapter 8
The Ending of Relationships
Like most important parts of our lives, relationships have many facets, depending on you and what it is you’re coming to grips with.
I’ve had a few people reach out to me regarding the loss of an important relationship.
The death of a spouse is a terribly stressful event for an individual, but the near death of a spouse is the most stressful event for a marriage.
Or a death due to cancer, the rage expressed through the perspective of a mental condition, or frustration of one that’s physical.
The death of a relationship might as well be the same as the physical death of someone you love.
Why is that?
Because of how we defined ourselves within that relationship.
We introduced ourselves as a significant other in that person’s life. A parent, a sibling, a child, or a sexual partner of some magnitude.
As that relationship evolved and our place within it grew, we projected and injected into it our individual hopes, dreams, fears, and issues.
On top of that were the shared things that excited and scared us mutually.
Whatever challenges came up, we tried to tip the scale’s balance in a way that the promise outweighed the concerns.
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Maybe they had a bad day, maybe they had a bad childhood, maybe it was our fault, maybe they didn’t mean it that way, and so on.
And then one day we get our legs kicked out from under us when that relationship comes to a sudden end.
Even if there is a terminal prognosis and someone is given a definite amount of time in which to wrap up their affairs, we’re still not ready to see that relationship end when it does.
If someone is screaming at us through mental illness, we know it’s not the person but the illness that is crucifying us and we’re heartbroken—powerless to stop it at that moment.
Later, when the storm is over, if the other person acknowledges they have a problem, there is hope.
If they deny anything is wrong with them, there is no hope.
And you can see and feel your heart breaking as you know in your gut what is coming – whether today, next week, or next month.
When a loved one dies, many wonder as to their spiritual state on The Other Side—are they in heaven?
Are they happy?
Here is what many of NDE’ers think, based on our experience or understanding.
Take it for what it’s worth:
There is no damnation.
For those of our loved ones who die, if they go to an unpleasant place, it is of their own choosing based on the things they identify with at the time they lived and then died.
As in life, we go where we are attached.
Obviously, those who suffer identify with a host of negative emotions and thoughts, and their internal world will reflect that until that identification has run its course.
I say "run its course" because the reasons they identified with negative things had to do with their life and choices here.
On the other side, those things are no longer in our loved ones' lives—what was done to them or what they did to others—so they can't further control or be controlled by them.
That engine of negativity eventually runs out of gas.
At that time the soul realizes it went through whatever it had to and will look up to the sky and leave one realm for another—a happier realm.
Let's face it, a loving and merciful God would never take a child so wounded by its circumstances and punish it for all eternity.
That concept is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.
Instead, He will give them the love they need and see to their healing.
So please do not worry about your loved ones who pass over.
They are OK and they will be fine, as soon as they are ready, if not from the first moment they arrive.
Either way, you cannot help them with your worry.
It's now your job to move on.
Remember them in their best light, in your best times. Know that wherever they went off the rails in the relationship—whether the bond was broken because of death or a breakup—speaks to the statistical probability of derailment before either of you were born.
The real "them" was closest to the version on the best days you can remember.
Support their healing on the other side by sending loving thoughts based on those happiest memories. Seeing people in terms of their potential calls it out of them, and you.
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It’s already pretty easy to sanctify the dead—we see it all the time.
Keep it in perspective but try to remain positive.
For those who feel loss in terms of guilt, perhaps a parent who has lost a child, here is a thought, prefaced with the acknowledgment that I have not lost a child and do not profess to know the extent of that grief.
I mentioned having visited my father’s grave and seeing another nearby that was recent, of a 16-year-old child whose birthday would have been only a few days prior.
I thoroughly identified, empathically, with the parents’ grief as I looked at the tokens of love they placed at the grave.
Ever since that day, if I buy a present for someone, I can’t wait until some special day to give it to them.
That day might never come, so I give it to them right away.
I can’t imagine having a gift that would make them happy but missing the chance to give it to them.
My takeaway on that is to live life now and give each other presents sooner rather than later.
Especially the present of your attention.
Why is it so hard to let go of the pain?
I think it is because that is the last emotion left to us.
The person we love is not there to hold, to console, to love—through thick and thin. Pain is self-centering, and its intensity can redefine our sense of self.
We say, “I’m lonely” instead of “I feel lonely” and we become that story, one without a certain end date.
The pain of loss is all we are left with and to surrender it makes us feel disloyal, like we have abandoned the one we love.
We continue to suffer long after we should let it go, in some misguided sense of loyalty.
You were not put on this earth to suffer.
Your loved ones, in their now-expanded states of consciousness, would not want you to suffer.
Seeing us this way tears them up and actually pushes them away, so painful can it be.
They still have feelings, just not a physical body through which to express them.
It's a choice.
You can make it at any time.
It is natural to feel the loss, but don’t become the loss.
Accept your feelings as true and proper, then let them go when you are ready.
No one can dictate to you how long you should or should not grieve, but again, you weren’t put here to live in sorrow the rest of your days because someone precious to you died.
Look for the signs that it is time to rise again.
When I said that some events or circumstances are karmically determined before our birth, let me explain:
It's all about probabilities.
Some events or circumstances are nearly 100% certain and some less but slightly so.
If you can be Present, you will realize you are standing at the center of every single moment—and that crossroads is where you are seeing all the possibilities flowing through you and around you.
The ones that appear in focus are the most likely and nearest to the present moment.
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The ones in less focus are those less likely and/or further out in time.
You can feel in your gut a connection to some and not others—a connection that tells you which are more likely to be chosen—revealing something to you about yourself.
It is when you are in this state of potential that you are your most powerful.
Therefore, put off having to make final decisions until the last possible moment. This builds up your personal power to the maximum, you see more alternate choices, and you give yourself enough time to review last-minute information regarding the choices you do have.
And never part in anger.
Where appropriate, always make your parting words ones of appreciation, the kind of words you can live with for the rest of your life, as they echo around in your head after they are gone.
“I Love You” works very well.
With those words, you know that in the end, you said everything that needed to be said and did everything that needed to be done.
Synchronicity: A meaningful coincidence of two or more events where something other than probability of chance is involved.
Carl Jung That “something other” is You.
You can live a spiritual life with a spouse.
You can live a spiritual life without a spouse.
But it’s damned near impossible to live a spiritual life against a spouse.
Chapter 9 Aspects of Letting Go
EMPTINESS
Chapter 9
We meditate to reflect and calm our minds and to deepen our understanding of who we are.
This sensibility is not a conventional understanding of fact, but existential intelligence saturating us with experiences of what it is to be alive.
Consider what impermanence is—then move it from concept to experience.
We notice our world around us is always changing and so we have a concept.
But it is transformative when we experience it.
That is life.
Just reflect on your broken heart, sudden loss of a job, the unexpected death of friend or family member.
The reason I use these types of examples is because Buddha said it so eloquently:
Happiness is possible when we are attached to things that are unchanging.
Misery results when we are attached to temporal and transient things, and they change.
In this world, “The only thing that is constant is change.” Another truism, I know.
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But what might appear to be change from a view of suffering may be a state of ambiguity in which something is metamorphosing— natural from a higher perspective.
Do the caterpillar’s friends mourn its death when it changes into a butterfly, no longer living within the world of their caterpillar experiences?
The target is emptiness.
This is a challenging concept.
It is ambiguous, to say the least. And misunderstood, at worst. It is not the elimination of a sense of self, or personality.
This has to do with our relationship with self.
We are like a forest, a highly dynamic biological, mental, and spiritual organism, a complex of many events that are shifting constantly.
With that, what are we?
What is constant and what is changing?
Where are you in the middle of all this?
We are all aware of our individuality and uniqueness.
We extrapolate and exaggerate this into something cut off from the rest of the world.
And that separates us from our sense of interconnectivity.
Yet when others’ attention is drawn to our individuality, that sense of separation can make us feel alone and self-conscious.
Public speaking, for example.
This reveals to us the extent to which we feel the weight of “I.”
Emptiness seeks to dissolve that sense of separation, but it is less intense than our feeling of individuality.
Again, this place is all about intensity.
That’s why the illusion of self is so strong and pervasive, because emptiness, and what it means, is subtle in its expression of ambiguity.
Where is this self you have a sense of?
You are non-local; you are not any given where.
It’s only within a set of processes that you appear to be at all.
In being still, we are not limited to just here.
This is key to understanding emptiness.
There is a liberation of mind through emptiness.
It is not a place but a state of being.
Of freedom.
From egos, selves, objects, beliefs, possessorship.
You can enjoy the world, be intimate with a situation, taking what you need, without leaving a trace that you were there.
You move on.
Emptiness isn’t something you need to understand, per se, but is a way of being.
It’s more about who you are than a place you go.
You can become empty yet have a highly individuated personality.
Emptiness is actually the environment in which your true capacities can come forth.
That’s the paradox.
Emptiness is about stopping fixations and relinquishing opinions. A state of being of letting go.
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In a meditative space, you acknowledge your sense of self, but you let it come and you let it go.
You do not hold on to it.
This is about creating space in which the feelings of constrictions can’t remain forever.
Again, about letting go.
About being open.
Space is the absence of obstruction or constriction.
It is about liberation.
Nothing stands in your way.
What hinders you gradually is removed, or floats away.
Otherwise, your hopes, dreams, desires, and limitations entrap you.
Your investment in who you are may give you a temporary sense of importance, but it blocks you from moving creatively through life.
To abide in emptiness is to abide in an open sense of awareness. A letting go of opinions.
Therefore, it is dangerous to convention.
It might be confused with nihilism.
It is about letting go of those things that hold you back.
If this is not who you are, the question remains, “who are you?” You need an understanding of how everything is related.
Not separate bits and pieces but interconnected.
This is like saying you need to be aware of how “You are one.” And in a constantly changing and evolving way.
Many forms of meditation pay attention to the breath.
This is one way in which you are connected to the world.
And your brain supports that with its many functions going on at any given second, from your biological functions to your historical interactions and causal relationships based on your choices.
Things get complex very quickly.
This is what defines your uniqueness.
The many things that you interacted with to become you are different from what everyone else experienced in their becoming.
But this is how our senses of self come to be.
Self is therefore an ongoing story we tell ourselves with our own narratives.
This is how we project onto the world aspects of ourselves in order to see it in some meaningful way.
It’s a process, supported and reinforced by predictable outcomes.
But the future remains open—you never know how the story is really going to unfold.
You try to hold on to specific moments, but like a river, they continue past you, despite your attempts to grab hold of water.
The challenge to practice this is to accept that you are always in flux, never one thing more than a second, though defined as a distinctive personality.
EMPTINESS IS THE MIDDLE WAY.
Because it avoids the extremes of not interacting and over-indulgence.
You don’t hold on to existence or try to be non-existent. Emptiness is therefore deliberately elusive and resists definition.
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You can’t pin down that which is ambiguous.
Learn to make friends with it.
It is a doorway.
The door and its frame have value, based on the materials used and their size.
But the door’s utility comes from what is not there, as a passage.
The harder we try to look at something, the more difficult it is to nail down.
In our dual mindedness, we want to be able to say something is this or that because then we categorize it for later.
But it’s like when you wake up in the night to go to the bathroom and as you walk you notice how you can see things better if you don’t look directly at them.
Similarly, the question of who you are is hard to know directly but easier by inference, including saying what you are not.
You can go on forever trying to come up with a hard answer.
But one with some ambiguity allows others to color in the gaps, according to their own experience and understanding.
Emptiness is therefore not empty, but a process of ever deepening to see subtle things which were invisible yesterday.
Infinite in a sense of depth, below the surface of the obvious.
If you take any instance of your life and dig deep, you will find
revealed something that is mysterious.
Experiencing the expanse of mind and infinity of spirit doesn’t lead to discomfort but to a deep abiding comfort.
Emptiness on the surface doesn’t look warm and fuzzy, but in the end, brings peace.
Human beings create the issues we all have to deal with because of a sense of self and importance.
Within emptiness, you don’t need to take life so seriously. Everything is changing anyway.
But this can only be known by living this, not from simply studying
That may be why you chose to be born here at this particular time and in this epoch of the world.
COMPASSION
We are simultaneously by ourselves living in our own heads and living outside with a bunch of people.
Our operational centers are within our minds, where things are given meaning.
When we talk about our experiences with each other, those things are colored by our own inner worlds, but we have a need to share our worlds with others.
We are both solitary and social.
The inner world is where meaning and understanding emerge.
The outer world is where love and compassion are expressed.
Meditation merges the two.
And meditation is one of most selfless acts of love we can commit in service to others.
Raise one and everyone is raised.
The notion of self assists us in an unpredictable world, but it is a self-defense reaction to the pain of the world, the pain of living.
The experience of emptiness has an emotional component.
it.
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The constrictions of self fade into a fabric of relationships and interconnection.
We open ourselves to an unpredictable world of empathy and compassion.... love.
Even in the darkest night, a momentary flash of lighting from outside instantly and momentarily lights your way.
Then all is dark again.
Similarly, we see how things truly are in a flash—then return our attention to the world and its concerns.
Love is something that comes to us; we can’t plan for it.
People may plan their travel to a place, but they cannot plan who they will bump into.
Many a marriage has this story.
Someone goes to a friend’s home and meets someone else who is waiting for the roommate to arrive for their date.
For some crazy reason the roommate never arrives.
The visitor and jilted date pass time together, maybe grab a pizza so the evening isn’t a total loss, and the next thing you know, they’re getting married.
I have heard that story enough times that I suspect it’s a synchronicity.
It pays to be open to spontaneity.
EQUANIMITY
People compartmentalize others into friend, foe, and strangers.
When you begin a new job or your first day of class in a new school, you focus your attention on sizing others up.
Who is an ally, an enemy, or irrelevant?
We begin to categorize right away, and we keep doing it: “What can you do for me?”
We seek to control and constrict our lives to keep all the variables manageable.
That’s the architecture of society, and we hammer out the rules of engagement.
But when we do this, we don’t see people in their own right.
Equanimity says there is a real person, just like us, behind our projections of who we think they are.
Each with their own relationships, history, hopes, desires, and fears.
They probably didn’t wake up in the morning thinking of how they could frustrate you.
Equanimity positions you to see them more as you than not you.
Then you reflect on your interconnectivity.
When you have a joyous or stressful event with someone else, seeing them in this way removes you from the equation and you see that they are the way they are not because of you.
So don’t take it personally.
If they are a jerk, they were already.
If they are nice, chances are they were nice last week too.
So much of what is going on is simply circumstantial.
See beyond your own personal investment in every relationship in order to see those involved outside of terms involving yourself.
Everyone has a life that is just as important to them as yours is to you.
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You’re just among the supporting cast of thousands in their own play in which they are the central character.
Empathy is usually constrained within the range of things you value or with which you identify.
Those you do not identify with; you feel less empathy for.
Like a dirty beggar who looks scary.
It’s because you cannot imagine yourself in that same place as them.
Similarly, you do not feel a connection with those who engage in criminal behavior.
Removing yourself from the equation expands your field of empathy.
This becomes existential and experiential when you open yourself up to the pain and suffering of the world, but sometimes it can be a bit much.
Watching the evening news will show you your limits.
We see the world and everyone in it through our experiences with relationships.
We really do see each other across universes.
When we respond to another’s pain, we don’t first think to do so because it is morally right—we just react.
But imposed moralities get in the way of compassion.
It’s the difference between doing good because we should or because people are watching versus we did good and didn’t have time to think about it.
When we do good spontaneously, but then in a few seconds, start patting ourselves on the back, thinking about who is watching, how do I take credit for this, etc.... then that’s a problem.
Ego wishes to take credit for doing good, while self-centeredness is self-justifying, never seeing itself as responsible for anything bad, revising history to be the victim and never the perpetrator.
You can see how quickly we slide towards narcissism.
We need to awaken to the question that life presents to us.
Beyond that, comes responsibility.
Meditation may then move from a solitary activity to an engagement with the world.
Meditation is good, but no one simply becomes more loving to others without interacting with them.
You can’t learn to swim unless you get wet.
FREEDOM
Anything that leads to more freedom and less constriction, the better.
Liberating others is a good guiding light of decision and leadership.
Highly limiting thoughts are very self-oriented: “What’s in it for me?”
Think of it as Freedom from restriction versus Freedom to take specific actions.
From the Tao Te Ching, one of my favorite passages regarding leadership is:
True leaders are hardly known to their followers.
Next after them are the leaders the people know and admire. After them, those they fear.
After them, those they despise.
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To give no trust is to get no trust.
When the work's done right, with no fuss or boasting, Ordinary people say, “Oh, we did it!”
PRAYER
Ever since I was shown how things fit and refit together, I don’t pray.
I do talk with God, and I have asked for help in very few situations.
I wait for help to come from Him—through others, yes, but I know He is the source of the help.
I think the pain for me in prayer is how many people are asking for forgiveness and to be saved from their bad choices...before going out to do it all over again.
It is so transactional.
Even in the climax of a film, when a person who has lived a horrible life faces some great loss, they pray to God, promising to be good for the rest of their lives if God will only save them or someone they are attached to from dying.
In this greatest moment of nakedly sincere prayer, one that is supposed to move the audience to their core, the spiritually blind is still trying to negotiate with God, because this is the only language they can communicate with.
They cannot fathom a heart of love, humility and surrender in which they pray not for their will, but for God’s and their acceptance with it.
He who does not have a temple in his heart will never find his heart in any temple.
DESIRELESSNESS
When you are Present, you are inside a single moment. In a place where time stands still, you don’t change.
You stop identifying with the parts of you that change.
You simply observe what’s going on without judgment.
You don’t use your memory to tell you what you know, but your intuition.
You know what you need to know when you need to know it, and afterward, you just let it go.
You understand by getting the whole download and then opening its patterns and processes which say everything about it.
Here’s an example.
A computer can download a two-hour movie as 1s and 0s in a few seconds.
In that jumble of binary language, the story is all there:
The hero’s journey and the formula for what makes a good story.
The inspiring potential to change people’s lives and win international awards.
But we need a media player to translate that two-minute download into a two-hour movie that we can understand.
That’s how we process information here, the entire experience.
But where there is no time, there is only now.
On the other side, we don’t need the media player.
You don’t have to ask someone what they think or how they feel about something.
Because when you look at them, you just know.
At the beginning of time and at its end, quantum physics says there are two particles that are entangled.
Across a universe of distance and all that is time, they affect each other.
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Meaning that between them there can be no past and future, only the present.
And truly, that’s the only period of time in which we can live and act.
When you experience this in a moment of epiphany or transforma- tion, your sense of passing time changes.
Other reference points in life also change.
Staying in that Observer mode of non-judging, non-grasping, you are naturally Detached, without effort.
You feel fewer desires because they are associated with change and stimulation, things you feel less drawn to in contrast to the sublime.
It’s not about wrestling with your ego, your lower nature, or anything else; it’s about letting go.
And that is about sitting in that timeless place, not holding onto anything.
Letting anything that comes pass around and through you. Not chasing anything.
Not running away from anything.
Just observing.
Not reacting.
None of it is you.
All of these flows have always been here, flowing through the multiverse.
Sometimes they are taken and used as tools for achieving ends written into someone’s destiny.
But that’s all they are, impersonal tools in the trade of incarnating to experience whatever plane or reality we’re focused on at that moment.
Here and Now, you are within all the probability waves, at the crossroads of decision.
By choosing, you collapse one of the possibilities and move in the desired direction.
Or you can stay in a state of potential, which feels like a very powerful place--because it is.
Your will is free until it acts.
Then it will surf the causal wave it sets in motion and that is where karma begins.
It is with intention that we do anything.
An opportunity presents itself to us in life, and from this, our desires wake up and want to explore.
A job opportunity, a potential mate, a possible answer to a big question, and so on.
Once the fire is kindled within us, we begin moving heaven and earth to get to the goal.
That intention is what initiates new karma, planting seeds that will grow into things we need to account for, whether good or bad.
If we can’t account for them in this life, then we will in another.
And this is what forms the circles of the world, the links in the chains, either of gold or iron, which bind us here.
But if we can act without desire or intention, that is the closest we come to generating the least karma.
That is the middle path.
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This is where the razor’s edge broadens into a road you can easily walk on, because your focus is so fine.
The higher planes are sublime and sometimes ambiguous, and this physical plane is known for its intensity.
Like a drug, we love loud music, spicy foods, strong drink, wild sex, power over others, wealth beyond measure, fame and glory, and to not get caught and punished when we commit crimes.
Until we can perceive, then prefer, the subtle over the intense, how can we deepen to and stay within the higher planes?
Why would we want to?
David Byrne of the Talking Heads was right, “Heaven. Heaven is a place. A place where nothing. Nothing ever happens...”
Chapter 10
Integration & Coping, or “What’s Next??”
Here, we see life through the filters we want. There, we see life through the filters we need.
Everyone who shares their Near-Death Experience says how tailor- made, how individualized it was, right down to the most secret and subtle of meaningful personal details.
If you look at the outer life of someone, would an NDE appear to be a huge, unexpected quantum jump from their inner life, or the next, most natural next step in their evolution?
If they haven’t done anything “good” or “bad” to find themselves in the outer circumstances the world calls a predicament, then the jump isn’t so much the result of a pull from having done something right or wrong as a push to get them to where they need to be.
One realization is how powerful thoughts are.
With the inability to work distractedly as you did before (“multi- tasking”), sometimes single-mindedness seems a hindrance, but it is an advantage.
Your thoughts bear more fruit in the outer world even when you don’t appear to be directly involved.
This is also part of being present.
When present, you naturally become more who you are over there.
And after that, every day you are drawn more and more into being that person.
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If not, it is because you are trying to be like everyone else.
Whenever we push down our uniqueness because other people disapprove, we are less and less living the lives we are supposed to live.
We’re no longer living our lives.
We’re living theirs.
Growing up in the South and in the 1960s, life was all about conformity and non-conformity.
When I pestered my parents with questions about God, they sent me down the road to the Highlands Baptist Church, in Jacksonville, Florida.
The next Sunday morning, I put on my suit and walked past the few houses to the church, ready with all my questions.
I sat in the pew and saw the minister upon the stage, talking to a team of helpers and obviously too busy preparing his sermon to deal with me.
Looking up at the clock counting down to the service, I oriented myself by watching him, his body language and demeanor, looking at the crowd around me, and getting a general sense of what it was like to be in church.
My issue with most sermons is that for a kid—and I was 12 years old—“open your heart” means nothing.
Conceptually I had no idea what that meant or how to do it.
To know you want God but to be given the way in gibberish causes only frustration.
Add to that the impression it makes on a child to be called a sinner who will burn in Hell unless he unlocks the gibberish.
That was the usual message every Sunday.
Somehow the grownups took solace in this message, making me wonder all the more what was wrong with me in that I did not.
Anyway, I sat through the service, and at its end, I was ready to jump up and walk over to Reverend Coolidge, but everyone in the church was suddenly in line ahead of me to shake his hand, invite him to lunch or dinner, gain some counsel, or just get a blessing.
If I thought he was too busy before his service, there was absolutely no chance of speaking to him now.
I left and went home, determined to figure out a way to talk to him next week.
Next Sunday came and again I went to church.
I thought to sit where I could get to the preacher at the end of his service more quickly and nearer the front of the long line of people.
But now we had a new preacher going through the same prepara- tions as last week.
I looked at a woman sitting next to me in the pew and asked where Reverend Coolidge was.
She said primly, “We got rid of him.”
I asked why and she informed me that he did the unthinkable and married his daughter to a black man.
To her, that explained everything, so I could now end the conversation and look straight ahead, which she would simply interpret as shock born of righteous indignation.
If I was confused before I was totally flabbergasted now.
As I said, this was the South in the late 1960s, so it’s not a guess as to what the predominant racial attitudes were.
But it made no sense to me.
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Even then I knew that spirituality shouldn’t care about such things, and yet here were such judgments flooding the church, the only “Go- To” back then.
In this desert of no-spirituality, the one trickle I hoped to find dried up right there.
Stuck in the pew, I couldn’t leave before the sermon ended, but I didn’t hear a single word.
Best to lay low and run home at the first chance.
Then I could ask my mom to help me sort it out.
I never went back to that church.
My mother confirmed that Reverend Coolidge had indeed married his daughter to a black man.
Reverend Coolidge himself was Cherokee.
His younger daughter, Rita, was soaring in her music career and her slightly older sister, Priscilla, was also a rising star.
Reverend Coolidge married Priscilla to Booker T (Jones), of Booker T and the MGs, a legendary musical talent.
It was natural that two such people might meet and fall in love, and I understood that.
Yet the only thing anyone saw was color.
Having been raised in this time and in this place, I also understood the prevailing sentiment of the congregation.
But as a twelve-year-old in a racist, authoritarian culture, it mattered little what I thought.
In that there were no answers as to why it had to be that way, this is when I began to intuit the greater importance of understanding over answers.
The ability to articulate it this clearly wouldn’t surface in me for almost a half-century.
Now, after my NDE, I understand God was saying He was glad that I wanted to know Him.
But if I walked the ways of man and man’s religions, I would come out with more questions than I went in with.
If I walked with God, He would tailor my experiences, and where answers might fail, understanding would be given.
A simple indicator of this was driven home in my confusion trying to understand the sermons, which I’ve mentioned.
Simply put, most things said in the church didn’t provide me with actionable intelligence.
The congregation, who had surely made sacrifices in their lives to know God as they could understand Him, who had made enemies and friends along that journey, were now kicking out their minister for no worse a crime than marrying his daughter to a black man.
And that is apparently the lesson I went to church to learn, for it’s the only one that presented itself.
Any honor man bestows, man can take away.
Chapter 11
Chapter 11
Eternity & Being Present within It
Being present is like becoming a blank slate or a still, reflective pond.
If you look at something, it exists as a reflection in you. When you look away, it doesn’t.
Some NDEs don’t result in bringing back psychic powers.
Maybe the experiencers return with nothing more than a Connection.
The average person is interested in what you saw and what superpowers you now have.
But fewer ask, “What did you learn? How are you wiser?”
There are things you can’t share because people will think you’re crazy or because the experience is so personal.
We’re either Present or Distracted.
The difference is in how you process information.
Present, you process information non-linearly, taking in the whole enchilada in a moment.
Trying to apply a non-linear perception to a linear world that deals with time has surprising drawbacks.
You aren’t taking in information as usual and you don’t process it normally either; you perceive patterns instead of steps and intuit their relationships and meanings all at once.
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Being Present can be a challenge to your relationships, particularly with people who don’t understand.
Sometimes you have to go find your Truth in places the World warns, “There be Dragons.”
Answers and Understanding are both important, but we are neither the answer nor the understanding.
We’re the question; that’s why we search.
Once we are present, we’re the whole thing, the Question, the Answer, and the Understanding In Between.
When you are present, time stops and you are in Observer mode— not judging, not reacting.
Sometimes the worldly part of you is working through something but the real you calmly watches, without reaction.
You are at peace.
A COUPLE OF THINGS TO NOTE:
1 – Single-minded attention narrows your focus to a laser and expands the “now” toward infinity.
That gives your thoughts more power.
You see your thoughts manifesting more, and you see more synchronicities.
2 – Being Present makes it hard to process information linearly.
For example, when Present, try watching a movie as its scenes sequentially deliver step by step, one after the other.
You’ll find it impossible. You’re like an amnesiac watching a movie one frame at a time, forgetting what had just happened and unable to predict the frame to come.
It’s the same thing if you’re giving a talk: unless you’re flying without a net you may want to use prepared notes; you can’t play strategy games on your phone in the middle of the night because you can’t remember what you just did or why or plan your next move, because you can’t remember where you are going.
THE IMPOSSIBLE NOW
In the In Between was the Impossible Now.
It was “impossible” because of its incredibly short duration, and its infinite width.
By design and how you fit within it, you are forced to be Present, as In That Moment present.
Inside it, there is no past and no future but an infinite expanse across universes.
This is why it’s easy to get lost within it and experience difficulty even thinking or talking. There is just knowing.
Einstein’s equation E = mc2 essentially states that as we (as matter) approach the speed of light, our mass approaches infinity, distance contracts to zero and so does time.
Meaning, if/when we transition from matter to light, we are everywhere there is to be and in an instant.
This is the reason a blink in the In Between can be a week here. Max Planck, the “father” of quantum physics, was born before the
Civil War.
He believed in a non-personal God, as in He is our natural state.
Planck Time, where quantum phenomena are observed, is in the Impossible Now of the In Between, measured as 10 to the -44 seconds, or a hundred millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of 1 second.
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Remember the two entangled, interconnected particles, one at the beginning of time, and the other at the end of time?
Across an infinitude of space and an impossible expanse of time, whatever happens to one immediately happens to the other.
The interconnectedness of all things.
Therefore, within the “In Between” those two particles of immediate causality, everything else—The Present/The Impossible Now/Planck Time—exists.
In the passage of time within the In Between, you know you are light, because things you see representing life here appear at a standstill.
Either it is because there (as light), no time passes (as it doesn’t for light), or you move so fast (as light) that it’s like working on your car engine while it is running, because, at the speed of light, you could take the whole thing apart and put it back together again between piston strokes.
In a state of that stillness, a stillness where we aren’t collapsing one of an infinite number of probability waves into a present moment, we become light.
The more Still we are, in that Impossible Now between what comes next and what is turning to dust, the more we reside in a state of pure Potential, and the more we come closer to this powerfully unmanifest aspect, the Highest (Unmanifest) God.
In that suspended unexpressed state of all and equal probabilities, we are every place there is to be and in every time there is to be.
We are One with all there is.
Chapter 12
Ambiguity & the Need for Control
While living life, we’re constantly bombarded with ambiguities and in their uncertainty, each ambiguous circumstance is a Rorschach Test for us to project our inner worlds.
Positive people view those uncertainties in terms of opportunities and negative people see threats everywhere.
You know the old saying, to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It’s interesting how some of the most thought-provoking spiritual truths are seemingly the most ambiguous.
The Tao Te Ching is full of them, cover to cover, leaving many readers scratching their heads, wondering what fortune cookie company put that book together from its favorite sayings.
A doozy many Westerners may be more familiar with is from Job 1:21:
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.”
Depending on whether you just lost your job or won the lottery, that statement has equal amounts of gratitude and cynicism, as Job flip-flopped on where he and God stood.
For many who have had Spiritually Transformative Experiences (STE), especially Near-Death Experiences, the greatest ambiguity of
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that truth may come in its integration into your life where relationships are concerned.
To your spouse, you look and sound the same, but you aren’t— your personal values, your shared dreams and prejudices, may have just gone “poof!” and as you wake up every day wondering what has changed, your spouse is wondering where their husband or wife went.
This uprooting of relationships reverberates through the rest of our family, friends, professions, places of worship, and ultimately in how we measure the change in our sense of new selves to our old ones.
The old things fall away, and we find ourselves thinking and reacting differently in a constant state of amazement that some people call self-absorption.
As I told one would-be therapist, “It’s funny how self-absorbing a depersonalizing experience can be.”
Bottom line: An NDE introduces an ambiguity into the relationship and no relationship welcomes such uncertainty.
It leaves people wondering where they fit into this new puzzle, if at all.
To continue the reference to the Rorschach Test above, expect to better know your friends and family’s inner worlds by what they project out of them and onto the world we all live in.
If they accept your experience and are even curious about it, then that’s a good relationship to have as they can help you understand the ways in which you have changed from the person they knew yesterday, as seen from the sidelines.
But for those who react negatively or with scorn, it leaves you wondering about the nature of so many relationships in general and how they are transactional.
When you no longer offer what you did before, to them the deal is broken and they’re ready to walk away.
When this happens, it can offer an opportunity to view such circumstances with the new sense of self that’s creating the changes.
Through greater empathy, you can see the situation through the other person’s eyes and realize that there are no right or wrong, no good or bad people here—just overwhelmed ones.
It is understandable, maybe even justifiable, that they need to leave.
They didn’t sign up for this journey, but some other.
Not all people in relationships are interested in spiritualizing their lives over time, and here you are with this quantum leap, leaving everyone in the dust.
There are simply fewer common reference points to make sense out of life in a shared way.
If detachment is a result of your STE, then that can soften the blow a little as you readjust to understanding how solitary this new path can be.
That detachment coupled with empathy—this sounds paradoxical, I know—can give you a really different view of things.
Here’s my example:
I was married to a widow with three children. I had an NDE...and my wife left me.
During the process, in which her general frustrations with life were borne out and expressed through her relationships with me and the children, I realized that perhaps from even before we met, it was never intended I be her lifelong husband, but that I should be a lifelong father to her previously fatherless children.
Whether divorce is good or bad, it can be said that people marry for worse reasons.
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During our attempt at marriage therapy, she complained about my past behaviors, to which the therapist remarked that none of them were that bad or outside the norm of many marriages.
I asked if I had exhibited any of these behaviors since my NDE, which my wife would only reference as “the accident.”
Being a truthful person, she acknowledged that I had not.
To which I then said that this was because that person died in the accident and the person sitting in front of her was what she had now.
And with a nudge from the In Between, I said that as with most couples, our marriage vows said, “Until death do you part” and what did that mean when one of us died, no matter that we returned?
In my eyes, this ended our covenant.
We were no longer bound by that broken promise, and if we remained together, it would be because we were simply free to.
This truth was not received well.
Either way, it did not speed up or slow down the eventual disintegration of the marriage, and no vow or piece or paper was going to hold up that crumbling castle of sand.
One of the after-effects of an NDE is the reflection of looking in the mirror of truth; unable to delude yourself, the egoistic reflection of this world is replaced with the spiritualizing reflection of the other and so you begin to turn the projector off.
Less and less, you color in the world and people around you with hopes and desires as they fade away and you see things as they are.
Here, we see life through the filters we want. There, we see life through the filters we need.
In seeing how disconnected so many people are, how can you judge them harshly?
As we see ourselves and life around us in a new way, day by day, we have to adjust to the fact that many, if not most, of the people and things we enjoyed before no longer cut it.
Those attachments simply run out of gas.
For a time, we might be left with a sense of emptiness, wondering what can fill it. In the Tao Te Ching, it says that a vessel has value because of what is there (the wood or gold it is made of) and utility for what is not there (its carrying capacity).
That’s what’s going on here.
We are becoming aware of our capacity for spiritual utility and the sense of emptiness is the cleaning process away as the residue of the old is washed away.
With no other choice in how to live, living the spiritual truths of honesty, detachment, comfort with ambiguity (which some call faith), empathy, and a new sense of what love might be, allows us to fill in the gaps of our understanding with our experience of those truths, allowing us to restate them in our own words and own them in a way that when we share them, resonate with an authority born of first- hand experience, to which people respond.
To me, this is the core of the integration process.
While some references to it say this stage lasts up to 10 years, I think it may well last for a lifetime.
It’s a big pill to swallow. Gulp.
Chapter 13
Chapter 13
Linear & Non-Linear Thinking
Usual Question: “WHO ROBBED THE BANK?”
Linear thinking pursues answers through a step-by-step process that has a Go/No Go gate at the conclusion of each step deciding whether we move on or go round again.
Thinking this way lends itself to the binary of things are black or they are white.
Binary thinkers may miss seeing an opportunity or reaching a compromise.
Some patterns of information remain invisible to them.
They are inside-the-box thinkers because part of the process is “defining the problem,” which means “defining the box” and then working on it, usually from the inside.
What happens to your problem-solving journey if the primary assumptions or procedures break down?
This is how most of the world thinks.
It is also impossible to think or process information this way when you are Present.
Better Question: “WHY DO PEOPLE ROB BANKS?”
Non-linear thinking brings understanding by promoting thinking and problem-solving that extends in an outward expansion spiral.
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This provides multiple starting points from which one can study a problem.
Such thinkers can walk around the problem and find the way through, rather than trying to solve the surface symptom.
Most world problems are caused by other problems stacked on top.
Linear thinking keeps the mind sliding on the surface, going around in a circle.
Non-linear thinking goes deeper, spiraling through different perspectives, revealing other aspects of consideration.
This is a more evolved way of thinking.
It is also more natural to think this way when being Present.
Instead of following the breadcrumbs, you can see the loaf.
Your awareness of this emerges when you realize you aren’t using your memory to understand things.
You don’t need memory to perceive a complex and dynamic pattern moving in front of you.
When you are really Present, it’s with no memory of the past or anticipation of the future.
It’s with your intuition.
In fact, the more Present you are, the quieter you are.
In being still and knowing that “I am God” you choose the sublime over the intense, the silence over noise, focus over distraction, and dualities like joy and pain withdraw into the main axis of the sine wave of emotion; we walk along that axis, not chasing pleasure or avoiding pain, but accepting of either.
When we hear someone speak, their words give us answers, but from their nuance, inflection and body language emerge patterns of meaning.
We realize that the short or extended silence between their words is filled with equal amounts of information as the choice of words themselves.
Add to this their inflections and body language and you have a more complete picture.
Even when we chew on it slowly, we discover new layers and depths with each consideration.
Moment by moment, we are changing, becoming something else.
Part of this transition may be seeing more and more shades of gray between absolutist binary thinking.
This is because we are no longer blinded by that which we once thought we were: our desires and our fears.
Waking up like this in a sleepwalking world creates definite challenges.
Finding others like ourselves who are coping with this transition helps.
And the Quieter we are, the more power in the unmanifested potential we see, while the rest of the world celebrates cathartic explosions of attachment and vice.
I believe God couldn’t care less about most of the crap we get all twisted up about.
How we live our lives says how close we are to Him.
As we walk to Him, He runs to us.
If we are intent on doing something others judge as bad, He won’t stop us.
He will let us see how that path and those choices work out for us.
I can imagine Him saying, “When you’re done, come back, I’ll be right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
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Otherwise, trying to please everyone else, trying to follow many rules which seem arbitrary to you, means you’re living someone else’s life, not yours.
One more thing I want to share is a home-grown analogy regarding non-linear thinking.
Have you ever been in a meditative or dreamlike state and were aware of thinking about something too big to bring back?
Upon coming back, it is on the edge of your memory, but you can’t bring it to the surface.
There may even have been emotion associated with it and that can be stronger than the thought itself.
My analogy is this: Imagine you are living in a bottle.
The neck of the bottle is too narrow to crawl through, but you can stretch your arm up through it and into the great Outside.
If someone balanced an orange on the opening of the bottle, you would see a small section of the entire orange.
In reaching out your arm into the world beyond, you might be able to hold the orange in your hand.
Then you can rotate the orange, feeling its weight and texture.
You may even bring back its scent on your fingers, but you can’t bring the orange back into the bottle and you can’t leave the bottle to see the fruit in its entirety.
To describe the orange to someone in the bottle with you, there is only your limited process of discovery with which to use insufficient analogies.
But, if you could go outside the bottle, seeing the orange in that one moment would tell you everything.
That’s the difference between linear thought inside the bottle trying to procedure the discovery of the orange versus the non-linear
understanding and knowing an orange with a single glance, or a moment’s taste.
Here is how I’ve split a few hairs to categorize some things with linear and non-linear information processing:
Linear Thought: • Answers • Purpose • Content • Manifest • Words
• Logic
Non-Linear Thought: • Understanding • Meaning
• Process
• Unmanifest • Symbols
• Vision
I’ve shared my understanding of how answers give rise to purpose and understanding provides meaning.
Answers are usually the fruit of linear, procedural steps with Understanding being a non-linear breakthrough or “aha!” moment recognizing a pattern through the repetitive procedural process.
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It’s the same for Purpose and Meaning:
Yet how firm are you in purpose if you aren’t clear on the meaning of your purpose-driven actions?
A similar relationship exists between content and process, manifest and unmanifest, words and symbols.
Not to mention Logic and Vision.
For example, I am thinking of a physics lecture I once attended.
Our professor was discussing how differently a trip taken at relativistic speeds (approaching the speed of light) would look to the traveler and an observer standing still back at the launch pad.
Skipping to the end of a high-level overview, he wrote Einstein’s simple equation, E = mc2.
If you plug in values to this equation, you will eventually see that if you could propel mass toward the speed of light (186,000 miles per second, in the vacuum of space), that mass would appear to increase toward infinity, its time relative to us would appear to contract toward zero and the distance between it and whatever far distant target it is heading to would contract to zero.
If you hear that and are spiritually inclined, it more than boggles the mind.
If you take it a step further, this also says that for light itself, there is no time.
Perhaps this is why we, once we take leave of this mass, our bodies enter realms that have less or no mass and time flows differently.
I wonder if each plane we go through as we go further from the physical one has a slower passing time until we get to the still point in which it doesn’t pass at all.
Having conceptually stated his case, the professor then wanted to drive home the frame of reference aspect of the relativistic travel exercise: how life would look to the traveler and again, to the observer.
To best demonstrate this, he used math.
Most of us are familiar with the Cartesian coordinate system that uses x, y, and for a 3rd dimension, z.
There are other types of coordinate systems we can also use to locate things in space too.
In a two-dimensional world, you can use polar coordinates with a companion three-dimensional reference system called spherical coordinates.
It makes sense: polar implies movement along a circle and polar coordinates measure position as a function of distance from some reference point and at some angle above or below a reference direction.
And when you add a third dimension to a circle you have a sphere, enabling you to use spherical coordinates to locate your presence in space.
The professor proceeded to use the polar coordinate system to prove his theorem and it took three big whiteboards and most of the class to do it.
Finally, he proved his point and we thought that was pretty cool.
Then he looked at his watch and said, “now here is how it looks using spherical coordinates.”
We all thought his watch must have stopped because there were only five minutes left for the class.
He returned to the board and used one small area to write three lines in spherical coordinates. Doing that, he proved the power of another frame of reference over another.
By stepping outside the two-dimensional world of polar coordinates, to the three-dimensional world of the spherical, he could say in three lines what it took three whiteboards and 50 minutes to say.
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This drives home the appreciation of looking at things from different angles in search of the highest, most comprehensive, and fundamental perspective.
After my NDE, I began splitting hairs to a finer degree, resulting in these dichotomies.
In terms of content versus process, when you go to the movies next, think of how most people go for the content; the movie star, the genre of story, whatever they like.
Process is where you would watch the movie from a technical point of view, analysis of the script, the type, and timing of the music as a cue to understanding the scene, camera angles, lighting, composition, the focus of the lens on the subject, and even subtext at times and so on.
You measure the efficacy of all you analyze by the reaction of the audience.
You could get so wrapped up in analyzing the film that its content becomes secondary in importance.
Yet if you do this enough, you just might learn how to make a movie.
By looking at patterns you discover the underlying formulae that things and events use for their birth, duration, and expiration. DNA may look like a thing but the information inherent in it translates into a lifelong process of unfolding.
You have to disengage from the excitement of the moment to see the patterns operating beneath.
There are styles of speech meant to whip a crowd up into a frenzy, whether by preachers or politicians, and these are usually full of emotional triggers rather than logical ones.
Once you realize that, it is harder to be manipulated by the speaker’s objectives.
MANIFEST AND UNMANIFEST
In many religions and schools of philosophy, this distinction is made.
There may even be a changing percentage between the two, depending on where on the continuum is your frame of reference.
The higher planes are called the sublime and the lower planes, including the earth, are the manifest, defined by their intensity.
Our attention is drawn to one or the other, the excitement of a loud party, adrenaline-driven sports, attractive people we want to connect with, wealth, power, and so on.
Things which by their definition are desires made manifest and intensity measured on the cover of grocery store tabloids and social media “likes.”
It’s a merry-go-round and eventually the rider tires and wants to get off.
The excitement becomes repetitive.
Once you see it enough and become aware of the formulas that drive it, what comes next is less of a surprise and eventually, predictable to the point of boredom.
This is where the statement, “The Truth will set you free, but first, it will make you miserable” takes effect.
Just because you see the shallowness and predictability of the world doesn’t mean your eyes are yet attuned to the more subtle worlds beyond this one.
Until then, you may be drawn in preparation to books that take your thoughts in this direction and new friends who are also loosening their grip upon the world.
Eventually, the time will come when the richest foods, strongest wine, and beautiful forms will simply not hold your attention as they used to.
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As we think, so we become.
As you come to appreciate the subtle over the intense, seeing the invisible threads pull things in and out of viewable existence, your taste for food and appetite for excitement and titillation follow.
You become sublime yourself.
Returning to our books on mysticism and the higher planes, as we begin to experience these more subtle worlds, we begin to appreciate that our spiritual growth is woven into a path that takes us from places of greater manifestation to those of lesser, or finer, manifestation.
The Tao Te Ching says the Formless gives rise to the formed, and the Primordial was before that, which came into the duality of yin and yang. John Milton, the brilliant 17th-century English poet and philosopher suggested the highest form of God is that which is unmanifest.
When we contemplate the unmanifest, we begin to sense the power of potential.
I sense that this hairsplitting continues into the powerful difference between words and symbols.
When you sit down to a lecture, you can imagine there are people in the audience who may know the subject so well that they can predict every sentence the speaker will say.
For them, those who came to hear something new, the hour-long lecture may be painful, waiting for the speaker to arrive at every point they already know.
But when presented with a symbol instead of words, each person sees and experiences it in accordance with his or her own background and inclinations.
The people who already know the subject are not slowed down in their intellectual digestion of symbols.
In this way, to each, their own.
Think about it.
Dreams are more symbolic than literal.
It’s not often that you will have a conversation with someone when dreaming, as their mere presence suggests something to you.
Then, perhaps their actions, or yours, intimate something as well.
If you dream that you are taking a college test for which you are unprepared and also are sitting in class taking it with no clothing on, the message of being caught unawares and unprepared needs no words to drive it home.
If you fly in a dream, you may enjoy the ecstasy of being free of limitations, and again, is there a lengthy discourse or even a magic word that is the gatekeeper to that experience?
Probably not.
The language is symbolic.
I believe that the language in the higher realms is also symbolic.
As is music in this realm.
The quieter our minds are in our perceptions of those symbols, the more accurate our intuitions of their meanings are.
Our projected desires or fears influence our perception of reality with symbols.
A Rorschach test proves the point.
The first time I ever saw one, there was one pattern that made me feel like I was seeing an explosion of possibilities.
Standing back to look at this, you have to wonder, as we project onto others our desires asking, “What can you do for me?” and then interact with them to find out.
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What happens when you wash all your makeup off or lose your youth and vitality?
When your number of choices and opportunities begin to decline with age?
How then are we symbolized?
I say this to indicate that it is in our nature to communicate in symbols and to impart meaning even to the simplest things.
We want things to be rich with information, a discovery unto themselves.
We understand the spoken word has a certain amount of information, but there is so much more to add when we consider body language, nuance, inflection, emotion, vocabulary, and even the perfectly timed...pause.
Understanding the differences above provides the foundation upon which to see with non-linear understanding.
It allows the worldly appreciation of life here, just as everyone else enjoys.
It also allows seeing the intersection of probabilities before Choice collapses one of their waves into a moment of physical reality.
The longer you can stand within that state of potential, the more power you build up your own.
You’ve felt it; when you get two competing, but equally great, job offers or social engagements.
The longer you put off deciding, the more the excitement builds for both, until you are about to pop with anticipation.
To a point, the longer you wait to choose, the greater the anticipation on the part of the other parties as well.
Knowing when to choose is an art developed through practice.
It’s like creating a vacuum and then aiming it with your intention.
Nature will make all efforts to fill it.
I want to summarize by sharing two transcendental experiences I have had in being taught the difference between linear and non- linear thought through the immediacy of switching back and forth— for some reason that ability to change perspectives in a split second was important.
In early 2018, I awoke around 2:00 AM and saw the moving shadows of leafless branches outside my bedroom dancing on the doors of a wardrobe near the window.
As I watched their oscillating movements, my mind translated the patterns of movement into something like an old black and white movie.
Then my mind switched its perspective in some way that made me feel incredibly present and in so doing, I was aware of watching this “film” one frame at a time.
I was so lost in each frame that I could not remember the one preceding it (the past) or anticipate what the next might be (the future).
And then my mind began flicking quickly between the two viewpoints – from understanding what just happened to what was going to happen next, to being essentially an amnesiac in the movie theater, hopelessly lost in trying to understand the story, or the world, in a linear fashion when viewing everything in non-linear terms.
I chewed on this experience for a long time, gaining new insights into problem solving, varying approaches to a question, and how much intuition needs to be developed and trusted in perceiving deeper truths in any situation.
I became aware of how our intuition is greater than we can know.
Said another way, I became aware of how our ability to intuit is greater than our ability to know.
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Around the same time of year in 2021, I went to bed as usual but slept fitfully all night long.
As the depth of sleep is measured in stages, it was as if I couldn’t get past stage one the entire night.
At approximately 4:00 AM I was presented in my consciousness several pages, suspended in the air in an orderly left-to-right, top-to -bottom matrix.
I could see that there were words on the pages, but either my eyes or the words were out of focus.
I understood I was being shown the pages of this book, but I wasn’t allowed to read the words because that would be cheating—I had not written it yet.
As I looked at the pages, my perception was switched from the linear seeing of the words to the non-linear, pattern-based seeing, and in that viewpoint I gave more prominence to the rivers of white, as the flowing spaces between the words are called.
Then my mind began flipping back and forth between noticing the words and seeing the spaces between them.
I was then told that information is in the words, but understanding is in the spaces between the words.
This is in some way analogous to when people speak: the non- verbal communication helps us understand the information in their verbal delivery.
Even the properly timed silence of a pause grants us an extra second or two for the light bulb to go off.
I knew I was being told how to write the book, embedding this perspective into the pages.
That is why most of this book is written in a way that presents what are essentially one-line paragraphs.
The desire is to give you, the reader, a moment between sentences that is so rich with meaning that the extra moment in time will awaken you to understanding what I am saying here, or what the In Between is saying through me.
As I typed this book, I instinctively wanted to spread the words out this way but wasn’t sure why, until I realized I was following the blueprint given me.
I hope this manner of presentation is effective.
I believe this experience drives home the point that as we evolve, we surrender memory to tell us what we know as we increasingly rely on intuition.
That is the difference between linear and non-linear thought.
Our past is full of experience and bias that defines everything in front of us.
Letting go of that and using intuition allows us to see without as much filtering, to see things more as they are.
That is when we see the patterns moving around and through things and we see how they affect each other and are interconnected.
New insights are born that we would have never considered before.
This is what it is like to free yourself from the dual- (and narrow) minded contrast of the world and see the many shades of gray between the simplistic polar opposites that remain unawakened yet govern our world and our lives.
JUDGMENT
Chapter 14
Chapter 14 Judgment & Free Will
As you wake up into the new, post-STE or NDE you, you find yourself in a continuous rediscovery of self.
In these changes, you can consider all the implications more deeply.
In short, is what was true yesterday still true for you today?
Buckminster Fuller said that if you are doing the right thing, then
Universe will support you (not the Universe), and usually just in the nick of time.
Many times, in my past, help came at the last minute. Help probably came in a million other less-obvious ways of which I was oblivious.
With time and repetition, I gained some experience in seeing or sensing the patterns in which I was helped, and with that came less worry and more faith, even when waiting past the point of no return.
It became a game, in fact, using the last few minutes in which everything was about to turn to disaster, to look more deeply into ... everything...for recognizable patterns of the emerging help coming.
I realized also that waiting until the last minute was God’s calling card.
As I approached the one-year mark after my NDE, I was shown how Interconnectedness works through my relationships.
Watch the people and the relationships; take nothing personally.
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Watch how God works through people.
I realized God works through us and we have no idea what’s going on.
Think about that.
Everyone is on their own journey, and most of us walk with the illusion we’re in control for a few minutes of our day.
The fact that God can work through anyone to do what needs doing intrigues.
What is the person feeling right then?
Do they feel good, purposeful, confused, or nothing at all?
Seeing this as it happens, I’m now in a place to recognize it and ask in a way natural to the conversation.
Take someone who worries about the net-total each day of virtue and sin.
Now imagine that one day God used them to help someone.
During that moment, are they without sin?
Could those God-inspired actions ever color so outside the lines as to be, as the world sees them, unlawful?
After all, to go from being a law-abiding citizen to a criminal is sometimes with no greater certainty than the whimsy of a politician’s pen.
Just ask those who participated in the Underground Railroad.
In the bigger picture, since God can work through anyone at any time, where is the question of eternal damnation?
Is this a simple choice of us asking Him to fill our days not with the fruits of our desires or the purposes of our lives, but with the meaning of His?
Chapter 14 123 If so, where does judgment come in?
“Otherwise you fall into contempt of your neighbor if you judge his evil will towards you, instead of My will acting in him.”
St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, 1377-78 FREE WILL
How many times have you heard people ask if there is free will or fate?
To what extent has the illusion of free will contributed to our suffering versus making choices with a sense of being beholden to another person or higher purpose?
Yet for the play we call Life to move forward, this illusion seems necessary to the drama.
The first thought I had is that there is both free will and fate.
Fate is what happens to you throughout the day over which you have no control: suddenly losing your job, winning the lottery, a loved one distractedly saying something dismissive and hurtful, having or causing a traffic accident.
We may have a minor role of awareness or take some small action, but we have no say over the outcome.
But to the unexpected loss of a job, we can choose to become despondent or feel liberated; to the impossible winning of the lottery, we can choose to spend, save, or donate; to the loved one who doesn’t realize they hurt our feelings, we can respond with offense or forgiveness.
A traffic accident shows us as either an instrument of the cause or a party to the effect in myriad number choices of how to respond and therefore define our roles in the range of possibilities.
This is where another possibility—between free will and fate— exists, when God takes over and directs our actions, without us knowing.
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As much as for any other reason, this can occur in answer to our prayers.
God may help us by working through others, and He may also answer by moving us to act in unexpected and new ways.
We may have no idea why we’re suddenly inspired to go left when we’d usually go right, or thoughtfully listen when we’d normally fill the silence with our own comforting noise.
In those moments, God’s Will works through us.
I’m curious to meditate more on this, because this is where living within His Will, while not being necessarily conscious of It, comes together.
When I was aware, I was usually required to act very quickly without time to think about the opportunity presented to me.
As I’ve seen, when all else fails, God designs situations unique to us where there are no other choices than for events to unfold in an unavoidable way.
The only way to atone for our past is to change the course toward our future through our choices and decisions.
The future, as a set of probabilities, is more important than our past, which is frozen without change.
It is in the Now we choose, collapsing one of those waves of possible futures into a single moment of reality we call the Present.
In the end, God creates the Universe because He wills it into existence, moment by moment.
Chapter 15
The Best Version of Yourself & Atonement
Have you ever asked, “What is the best version of myself?”
It’s natural to reflect on the happiest or most productive times of our lives.
What if the best version of yourself wasn’t when everything was going right, but when everything was going to hell and you were getting your ass kicked?
Why are the heroes in stories not those who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths?
Why are the heroes those people who were knocked down repeatedly, sometimes only picking themselves up from the dust because if they didn’t, it’s clear that they would starve?
All of us know challenge and adversity.
We admire strength and determination not to fail, like the closing
words in Tennyson’s poem Ulysses:
We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Ulysses, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1833
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Do we love the hero for whom success comes easy?
Or the one who holds back nothing because there’s nothing left to hold onto?
When this life is done and we look back on it, will we judge ourselves by whether we won or lost, or in what we found within us that gave us the courage to try?
Being pushed to our breaking point shows us what we’re made of: our character, our heart.
This can be our finest moment, bringing out the best version of ourselves.
If that’s where our hardest won and greatest sense of achievement is, are we willing to return to the struggle to continue our evolution?
ATONEMENT
At some point, we grow tired of being judged according to our past.
Being around people who won’t let us grow and evolve, who keep holding us back with stories of every mistake we made in growing up.
Who are quick to remind us of our failures but never our successes.
The past is dust.
How else can you grow, or atone, but by making better choices in the Present, as the future unfolds into the Now?
In trying to do better, we reduce the number of actionable probabilities to choose from, which mercifully blinds us to other, unfortunate ones.
We may still make wrong decisions, but they don’t have to be bad ones.
A mistake is not necessarily a sin.
The need to atone is the need to evolve.
We return again and again to experience the joys and sorrows that can only be experienced here.
But it’s like the Uncle Remus story of the Tar Baby.
Once you touch it, you can’t untouch it. You’re stuck to it.
So how do we break that chain?
Ultimately, when our sense of detachment includes any sense of self.
Like a drop of water following the river, returning to the ocean to become oblivious to its individuality.
In the Bible, it says God will Himself wipe away the tears.
Not retribution or atonement.
While we travel to this point, we just need to live a life helping each other and putting no new stones in anyone’s path.
Whatever you think about His divinity, when asked about healing all the sick and dying, Jesus said sickness and death have always been here and always will be.
That is the way this world is.
So no, He told the zealots, He wasn’t going to kick out the Romans, because it wouldn’t fix anything.
He wasn’t here to fix the world. He was here to fix them.
All of them.
Chapter 16
Chapter 16
Being Authentic - Even Atheists can be Spiritual
It’s interesting, that when you stress test something, you find out what you really have.
Schools test our retention and analytic thinking.
Disaster Response tests indicate our preparedness for emergencies such as fires, floods, and earthquakes.
Failover Testing in data centers helps us develop our business continuity strategies during outages or cyber-attacks.
And sometimes an argument in a romantic relationship tells you whether it's based more on a string of Saturday nights than Monday mornings.
As the fallout from the pandemic settles and we adjust ourselves to a new and uncertain world, opposing positions expressed as all or nothing in every type of media, from television news editorials to social media compliance, have been surprising.
These types of polarizing positions and attitudes are usually what people revert to in times of emergencies—real or not—and stress goes off the charts.
When the house is on fire, you focus on getting out, rather than discussing with the family how best to proceed.
Long-range strategic thinking gives way to immediate tactical response.
In such a mental state, untrained people aren’t always at their best.
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The sharper the polarity of choices, the fewer options you see and the higher the stakes if you make a wrong decision.
That’s what panic is.
I’ve been in enough earthquakes that I know when to worry and when not to.
The last one I felt was in, believe it or not, Secaucus, New Jersey.
I was working in an office complex and for some reason, that day I grabbed a small empty private office near the front door.
During my work, I felt that slight tremor of a very small quake and immediately knew that in a few minutes, everyone in the building would be directed outside.
I saved my work, put my laptop in my bag, and went outside to wait for everyone else.
It took about 10-15 minutes but eventually, they all came.
The most remarkable thing about the event to me was a very well-dressed man who walked up to a group of his friends near me, mopping his brow with a paper towel, and said he was having trouble breathing.
I asked, “Because of this?” and he said, “Yes.”
I didn’t want to say anything that would make him feel worse, but I realized then how close to the wire, to panic, people might generally be.
And on any given day.
I admired his honesty but wondered if he felt that comfortable in his admission because he thought he wasn’t alone.
Still, it was an eye-opener.
I’ve seen other people in situations where an ambiguity increased and they began freaking out, to the point of hysteria.
I can’t fathom it except to say that perhaps some people are just born that way and others are conditioned through experience.
And then I’ve seen others who could stay calm in a storm at sea— they calmly dealt with whatever came up and didn’t seem fazed at all.
They might be so focused that they couldn’t converse, but the few things they said were amazing.
My mother, for instance.
When my father died, I swear she went into battle mode.
Within just a few hours we had together visited the funeral home and while waiting for someone to show up at the cemetery to help us pick out a burial site, I wondered how she could remain so calm.
She continued through the day executing everything that is probably in some book on what to do during the first day of someone’s death, but it was all instinct for her.
I was really in awe.
I am thinking about these things today because I see where they meet in our current events.
The conclusion I’ve come to allows another insight into why it is good to avoid a dual mind when possible and stick to the area in between “This or That.”
I wrote in my first book that after my NDE, I was aware that while God wants to have a relationship with us, He doesn’t force us into one.
If you want to ignore Him and pretend He doesn’t exist, your lifespan is so cosmically short that in a moment, you will return in the blink of an 80-year lifetime and the truth will be self-evident.
If you’re right and there is a God, He’s not the type who is going to rub your nose in anything.
If you’re wrong and this is all there is, no one will be there to do any rubbing.
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I’ve also felt the truth of, “You can’t row in two boats at once.”
If you are talking to God about your choices, you may well say how you want to live a questionable life because you like the sports cars, the money, attractive sexual partners, and power.
I think in such a conversation, as I’ve seen occur in life, God will just say, “You have free will and can make whatever choices you want.”
“If that is what you really want to do, then go see how it works out for you.”
“When you are done, come back; I’m not going anywhere.”
Extending this thought, I have come to believe that even if you are an atheist and live your life authentically, then you are living it spiritually.
There are many people who say they believe in God, but they don’t live a life that demonstrates the choices or the sacrifices you would expect if you were making the same similar declarations.
You don’t have to look far to find examples.
But what about the people who do own their shortcomings, who don’t justify them or dismiss their bad choices offhandedly, but totally own who they are, warts and all?
Isn’t there a humility there that makes such a person worth learning from?
Before anyone counters with an exaggeration—asking how a dangerous criminal lives authentically and spiritually—let me clarify that I am thinking generally about people who may be different or even quirky, but pose no threat to our physical safety or mental health.
People who live among us but may not have the same views we have: religious, political, sexual, business, and so on.
How unusual is it for them to be challenged about something in their behavior or other choices and with a disarming authenticity, acknowledge it, confirming it needs further work?
That’s like winning an argument, something else you hardly ever experience.
For me, I would rather know where you stand and hear you own your faults than have the same issue hide behind religion or a political doctrine, even if it is my own.
At least then, I know where you stand.
I appreciate your honesty and may even feel solidarity with you.
You also are setting an example for countless people to have the courage to address their own shortcomings and get to work on their growth.
There are more people watching you than you know so you are helping more than you can guess.
Living authentically goes back to Socrates’ “Man, know thyself.”
This is why I’ve told my kids not to ask, “Where is my perfect girlfriend or boyfriend?” but ask themselves how they need to be loved.
Don’t ask what you should do for a living but ask, “What makes me happy and feel fully engaged?”
Don’t ask, “What is my purpose in life?”
Ask what the meaning of life is, as you see it, and then back that into the question of what your unique purpose is, given your unique interests and abilities.
What resonates with you?
Just take a chance of looking at yourself.
Are there consistent patterns of self-sabotage you engage in?
Does someone, in particular, bring out the worst in you?
Do you leave other people feeling bad about things you say or do?
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Even if for only five minutes, be honest with yourself.
Since none of us is perfect, honest self-reflection will reveal ways in which we can do better.
And that is thinking Authentically.
Put this knowledge into practice, maybe first, in avoiding situations and people that bring out the worst in you, then trying different approaches to survive such encounters that don’t turn you from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde.
Do that and while you struggle to do so, you are living Authentically.
Is it more important where you begin, or where you end?
Living authentically, you’ll stop asking if things are the journey or the destination.
You will see they are both.
You don’t save the world by going to battle or passing more laws.
Saving the world starts at home, at the kitchen table, on the knee of a parent or at the feet of a grandparent.
Then it grows into living a life in the spirit of service to others, no matter your job or career.
Doing the things that make you feel connected to other people, helping those less fortunate.
Sometimes leading from behind, allowing others to think “it” was their idea.
Sharing the spotlight whenever possible, for no one arrived where they are alone.
I am not saying become passive and let people walk all over you. Some fights are worth fighting, if not for yourself then for others.
But when the odds are overwhelming and you just don’t know what to do...
...there comes a time to simply Let Go.
See the world for what it is, see relationships for the temporary comforts or distractions they are, and admit that’s it is just too much for you.
It’s been said that when the student is ready the teacher appears.
So how do you know when you’re ready?
Many are those who say, “Show me the way” but there are few who say, “Please, take me by the hand lead me as if I’m blind, because I honestly am.”
Which attitude hints at a readiness, a humility, to see things as they are?
It should be clear to anyone that those who only want to be shown the way are still too proud to be led.
Their ego isolates them from the truth.
That’s why the world has always been imperfect and always will be.
We can’t save the world.
We can only hope to save ourselves.
And unable to do even that, we need the help of someone who has already arrived at where we want to be.
If you think you can save anyone else, try treading water while pushing someone out of it into a lifeboat.
You will realize quickly that you need to first get your own self out of the water and into the boat before you can help anyone else.
And that requires taking the hand that is being offered you.
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The hand that is ready to pull you into the boat and save you from drowning is the same you need to lead you in your decreasing blindness and dawning sight, step by step.
The readiness for a teacher is grounded in humility.
How many people have you seen who need to brag about how much they know about something?
They need to be the smartest kid in the room.
It even happens when they go before a spiritual person asking for guidance or a spiritual apprenticeship.
Let me make it simple for you: whether you want to become an apprentice to a master artist or craftsman or a disciple of the Lord Himself, save everyone time by not telling them how much you already know.
In the grand scheme of things, you know what you know.
You do not know what they know.
Acknowledge that what you think you know would be embarrassingly small in comparison and save yourself the humiliation and just ask for what you want.
Bragging about what you think you know hints at an attitude of deservedness and entitlement to be chosen.
How can you fundamentally change with an attitude like that?
This is the person who wants to be shown, for they cannot be led.
When you finally come to where the luster of the world has paled and know that no matter how much fine food you eat you still want more; that no amount of alcohol can get you drunk enough; that
the overindulgences once consumed to excess now eat those who consumed them...
...that is the time to take the bread of the powerful and the weak...
...to squeeze one and then the other...
...and see from which pours blood and the other, milk. That....is seeing things as they are.
Then it is time to just let go entirely of this place and realize it’s always been about the drug we call intensity and listen for the faint call in the silence of the night within, its darkness occasionally lit by a small shimmering light.
Otherwise, why do we tell the dead to walk into the light if our own meditations are dark and without fruit?
What is it that we think we know, we yearn to know, and we are dying to know?
It’s been said that the hand of every good person, from Adam till this day, will rush to aid the man bent on reaching saintliness.
For all rivers flow to the ocean.
And the hand of every murderer, from Cain until this day, will rush to strengthen and steady that man’s arm who is drunk with murder.
And again, for all rivers flow to the ocean.
"Two gnostics were proudly debating over the secrets of mysticism and the rank of gnostics.
One was saying, ‘The man who is sitting on that donkey is God to me.' Another said, 'His donkey is God to me.’”
The truth is that most Mystics are drowned in fatalism, so getting involved in their words is a veil, which deprives one of attaining the real path.
The real path is another way...
When you hear or read words about Gnosticism, you become drunk.
It is that passion that has moved you. For that passion is the light of that veil.
There are seventy thousand veils of Light before reaching the Exalted God.
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Now you are submerged in passion, so how can you discuss the radiance of the True Light?
Even if you do, all of it will be just the passion...
How can anyone compare this passion with the radiance of God's Light?
Do not be satisfied only with your sheik's [spiritual teacher's] nice words, nice actions, nice character, and beautiful face, for there is something beyond all these.
Chapter 17 Conclusion
When two NDEers meet, we need no introduction; we recognize something in each other immediately.
In a moment, we comfortably engage in deep and personal conversation.
Thereafter if you and I do not see each other for a long time, we don’t miss one another because we have a sense of connection that is beyond space and time.
Sometimes, we can feel the emotional state of each other from very far away.
No effort was needed to establish this connection or to maintain it.
Our mutually tuned and resonating tuning forks keep each other going no matter where we are.
In time, we can discover another with an STE from just their photo, hearing their voice, or even a brief text regarding work.
I cannot explain it beyond to say it is.
I wonder if those whose NDEs and STEs have cost them their marriages would do better to search within their new community for a lifelong companion, as so much about each other is simply felt and understood and the need for control and ownership is lessened, if not gone entirely.
Who knows, maybe this will the subject of another book.
Seek that."
Maghalat-e Shams-e Tabrizi
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I hope I have done the title of this book some justice.
Religion is something we try and hang on to in the worst or most
uncertain of times.
We use it to define the pain of righteousness as a sign we’re on track, whether inflicted by our own hands, those who are attached to us or the world at large.
Spirituality is when we surrender everything, even a safe harbor in which to drop anchor, accepting everything as in flux.
This is what it means to Let Go.
If you ask me “What is the meaning of Life?”, I might answer with
silence because you are Life. What else can I add?
Just walk it, discover yourself and realize that you are nothing you
were told you are.
And when you die, everything you think you are is left at the door. You are more.
You are everything.
And when you have asked all of your questions, and when there is nothing left to be gained, where all roads end, there God begins.