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Fundamentally what we are is conscious awareness. Fundamentally what we do is exercise intent by making choices. Put another way: the fundamental substance is consciousness; the fundamental force is intent. These statements are true no matter what reality system we are in and no matter how things may currently appear “outside” of us.

Consciousness may elect to participate in experiences that provide rich constraints in which difficult choices may be made. Physical reality is one of those meaningful constraint-sets.

Yet even here, because focus is a part of intent, focus itself is a creator of momentum. When we focus on a certain perception, that perception grows. Physical reality is meant to give us the opportunity to have the experience that our nurtured perceptions yield to us.

It is valuable to recognize this phenomenon because it allows us to take back our power. How? We can move away from perceiving the world as a place that happens “to” us, and gradually shift our perspective towards recognizing that in fact the power lies within us. This may seem like a big leap in such an immersive and challenging environment; indeed in this reality it can take time to institute substantive internal or external change. But we do have the power to change our momentum in every single “now” moment. “Now” is always the moment! We can choose now to focus on the good instead of the “bad.” We can choose now to dwell on the love in the world, and not the fear.

We are not powerless to our circumstances, but are in fact powerful creators who are able even to commit ourselves to the temporary illusion of powerlessness.

If you have relinquished your power in your own mind, it is OK to take it back! Become familiar with how you are perceiving your experience. Choose to focus on the positive, even as you fully confront and embrace the negative. Your awareness is at the root of all of it. Change the momentum of your experience by intentionally choosing what you focus on and how you decide to interpret what happens in your life. You as consciousness have that very real power- it’s time to remember that you do!

“There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”  -C.G. Jung

It is holy when you finally actually, actually choose to face your deepest pain with full commitment.

Pain cannot kill you. Pain may be profoundly challenging to experience at times, but your awareness cannot be harmed by it. Your body can and will die, but suffering will not obliterate your spirit. In fact, there is tremendous power to be gained by facing all of what you feel. Choose to accept all of your experience, including pain when it comes! Do not justify it away or tell yourself a story to temporarily ease its presence. Even when pain feels insurmountable and completely overwhelming, go in to the storm. Even if you fear deeply that it will destroy you, plunge into the tsunami. Rather than being destroyed, you will come out far stronger on the other side.

When you make the journey into pain, do not judge the pain or its perceived causes. Rather, simply experience it and be present with the feeling itself. It is important that we feel our pain without any judgment at all. Often the stories we are telling ourselves about the pain only contribute to it as they simply layer new negative self-perceptions on top of an original fear. The original fear root is available to be processed and truly healed, if we are willing to actually feel our way through the branches (individual surface pains) one-at-a-time as they surface. The divine will always be there to guide and help us when we are truly willing to face our own darkness. To feel it is to heal it.

If all is not well, it is because you have interpreted that all is not well. Your evidence for all not being well may seem obvious to you. After all, it appears clear that suffering abounds and the world is in rough shape. You may even feel disdain for those who don’t see that things are “obviously” not well. How can anyone say “All is Well”?

In fact, consciousness has the power to place interpretation and meaning on anything. We come into the physical to experience the constraints of physical life, including the constraint of ignorance which causes us to have to interpret our experience. In response to our sense data we “buy in” to interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs, and then have the resultant experience that our interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs yield to us. That process of actually living through our interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs is what adds to Creation and is so meaningful to our soul.

At the fundamental level beyond all the interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs, the consciousness that exists is unharmable and capable of nearly infinite creation. Its ability to have the experience of limitation is simply a part of its creative power. The brave soul that jumps in to experience the darkness helps “All That Is” grow in its experience by providing profoundly valuable contrast and perspective. You are participating in that incredibly meaningful activity right now!

Beneath all the wants and “not wants,” sickness and health, sight and sound, birth and death: ineffable Beingness exists deeply. From that state, it is totally and wholly apparent that All is Well, and always will be.

If you cannot sense that right now from your current state of awareness, don’t worry- that’s a part of the game! Allow yourself at least intellectually to consider that the pains and fears and destruction of your life and the lives of others exist within something greater. If you fearlessly listen quietly within, beneath all your own interpretations, perceptions, and beliefs, you may just hear a voice gently reminding you that indeed, beneath (and through!) all the drama, all is indeed very, very well!

You are so unconditionally loved by God that you are permitted to almost completely forget that you are unconditionally loved by God. In coming to Earth, somehow the truth of God’s unconditional love that exists specifically for YOU has moved out of your waking awareness. Perhaps you have no recognition of it at all. Perhaps the concept of God’s unconditional love has become simply an intellectual concept for you, as an aspect of faith. Or perhaps you have had tiny partial glimpses of it, through personal moments of surrender and dedication to the divine. In any case, the truth of the unconditional love that exists for each of us remains largely obscured while we are physical: painfully, persistently obscured.

Yet, being brought to the brink of total ignorance about how much love exists for you is an extremely important and necessary part of your purpose here. You could not have your adventures in physicality, with all of the opportunities for mis-perception and personal growth, if you actively recalled all of what you are! The very purpose of physical life- growth of the spirit toward love- could not be accomplished with such recall.

Take some time then to simply sit in silence with yourself and the divine, and see if you can quietly feel even a glimmer of the real love that does exist for YOU (specifically you!), so that you may be encouraged. For you are what you are- which is a loved immortal spirit- even if you don’t remember it. Even if you’re so deep in your current personality that you cannot feel God’s love- comprehend at least intellectually as much as you can that today, right now, you are indeed an incredibly adored, cherished, powerful, and irreplaceable portion of All That Is.

From the other side, the spirit actually excites at the prospect of having to deal with such constraints as we experience here in the physical. When we’re here, though, often the incredible challenges of our lives seem insurmountable and crushing.

And yet, the spirit does transcend them!

Thus we can approach our deepest challenges with an understanding that we can in fact rise above (and through!) that which seems to thwart us, no matter what it is. We can embrace our difficult experiences, and use them as the counter-pressure they were meant to be. Metaphorically, we are on the weight bench- so we might as well lift the weights!

Doing so is a process not just of intellectual willingness, but of a deep commitment to have the intent to actually embrace our current experience, whatever it may be. We must be willing to feel. We must be willing to be honest with ourselves. We must be willing to be fully present. We must be willing to face our fears. We must be willing to remove the blame from others and the outside world, and instead accept responsibility for our own state of being. We must choose to experience what we are experiencing. In doing so, we may find that physical life is not just a challenge- but instead it is an amazing and precious opportunity for peace, love, and joy!

You deserve freedom. You deserve love. You deserve admiration, adoration, and respect. These statements are true! And yet, on a deep level, you probably don’t accept them. If you’re like the majority on Earth right now, you have established a system of beliefs and justifications to convince yourself that you are worthy, when in fact, you already are.

You’ve been conditioned to do this by society, or family culture, or perhaps by religious beliefs. You may believe you are a good and worthy person WHEN you perform the right tasks, or go to church, or act a certain way, or believe a certain thing, or maybe even when you pay your bills on time.

But the fact of the matter is: you are an awesome precious consciousness that is a part of All That Is. You are intrinsically worthy, a creation and fragment of God, an immortal awareness. You don’t need any Earth-bound words, actions, or justifications to establish your worthiness.

Except when you believe you do. Except when you interpret your reality within a system you’ve bought into that says you do. Except when you meet the constraints of physical reality with fear, and respond by setting up a system of action to justify yourself to yourself.

Loving brother or sister, please be gently reminded: it is certainly OK to embrace your own worthiness. I am not speaking about the empty worthiness we convince ourselves of when the ego tells us a story. Ultimately there is nothing to be found there. Rather, I am speaking about the inherent, intrinsic worthiness of Being.

Within that context please also be gently reminded that it is certainly OK to question your beliefs- including those that make you feel less than worthy. It is certainly OK to change interpretations that cause you or others pain. It is certainly OK to evaluate even the most cherished of what you perceive to be your “core understandings.” Even your “first principles,” or the basic “truths” you establish for yourself by which you understand reality itself, can- and sometimes should- be up for interpretation. You are worthy of doing even that. You are fundamentally free enough to do even that. No one can take that ability from you- though you can quite easily take it from yourself.

This reality is an experience simulation, built so that your awareness can truly experience what it is like when you “buy in” to certain beliefs and then make free-willed choices based on those beliefs. Yet recognize that free will choice is at the center of the game: you get to choose how you will see this world! And the world will respond to your choices.

So as you make your choices about how you will see the world, just remember: you do deserve freedom! And if you bravely let yourself have it, truly, you will!

Right now you are dreaming. You are having an experience in an apparently physical reality. You are receiving sensory data (sight, sound, touch, taste, smell) from an environment that seems external, your thoughts and feelings seem private, and you appear to be separate from those around you. While that’s all a very real experience, it may be helpful to understand that it is also a fantastic illusion!

You signed up for the illusion. You made a choice to come and have this experience, to live in this reality for a time, with all of its rules and constraints. But you probably don’t remember making that choice. You don’t remember because that’s a part of the deal when you come here: you accept a kind of “amnesia.” It may sound all too convenient to explain away such incredible statements with amnesia. But amnesia was a requirement because this experience would be impossible without it. In fact, this experience is about operating within some staggering constraints: including even, and especially, the constraint of not remembering all of what you really are.

Here in this reality, you experience yourself as- that is, you “are”- a human. You are male or female, young or old. You speak a language to communicate with those around you; you send symbols (words) to others who must interpret them in their own way and send symbols back to you. You get up in the morning, eat breakfast, do what you have to do during the day, and you use the toilet in the apparent privacy of the bathroom. You experience the pleasures and pains of the body. You have a name, a history, a list of things to do. You ARE somebody.

But in a far deeper sense, you are much, much more. You are an immortal being of conscious awareness. You are a spirit! You are unconstrained, unlimited, unharmable. You know on a deep level that you are an integral and fundamental part of the great all-comprising loving consciousness that we call “God.” You project your awareness into realities like this one to have the experience of being something within a special set of constraints, in order to grow your own being and participate in creation. Coming from God, the great foundational consciousness of unconditional love, at your core you also are profoundly loving, and you wish to expand and develop that capacity in yourself.

If these statements seem aloof and abstract, do not accept them! Rather, seek instead to simply discover for yourself if they are true or not. There are many ways to do so, and each is very personal and unique. But in general, meditation is a powerful first step: gaining familiarity with your awareness as it exists beneath the thoughts and judgments is a window to actually experiencing glimmers of wakefulness. Don’t take anyone’s word for it- listen within!

Science analyzes what is happening. It doesn’t analyze why. Note that many mistake “causes” for a “why.” Determining a cause-effect relationship between two things is not the same as truly understanding “why” that cause-effect relationship exists.

As an example, scientists may ask, why did this ice melt? And their answer may be, because its temperature rose above 32° F. They may then ask why did its temperature rise above 32° F? And they may determine an explanation for that too. They may further question that explanation, and so on, to perhaps even hundreds of degrees of questioning. In materialist science every question asked must report an answer that is physical, as science and its language is about the content of this physical reality frame.

However, materialist science will never arrive at a real answer by speaking in physical terms. Why? Because the entire physical reality system is derived from a non-physical source. There is nothing within the physical system that can explain why the entire system itself is occurring. Science may go deeper and deeper into the rule-set of this reality, and may even identify universal physical laws and make certain wide-arching conclusions, but it will never be able to explain the entire system from within it. As an example, if science wishes to explain the origin of the universe as the Big Bang, it cannot do so without yet still being unable to explain why the Big Bang occurred. (“We don’t know why, it just is that way” is not an answer.)

The non-physical source of this physical reality is consciousness. Thus, it is only through consciousness that a comprehension of the source- the Big Why- can be attained. Fortunately, you are conscious- so you do technically have the ability to attain it.

From our physical perspective, death appears to be the end of the person. Our senses behold a body that is no longer animated by the spark of life, and we no longer can interact with them in the ways that we know. What’s more- we cannot typically see to the other side to have any certainty that the person continues on- so we linger with fear, doubt, and sorrow. To us on Earth, death seems merciless and final.

What has died, however, is not the person. What has died is the constraints they were bound to. The body and its crude limitations are shirked. The old coat is cast off, and the spirit is set free!

Death is not the end. It is a beautiful new beginning! It is going home. It is a journey from the fog of the less real, to the clarity of the more real. It is an awakening from the dream that we call physical life.

For those of us still dreaming, the absence of the person from the dream can bring us deep pain. And yet in a reality that is built upon loving consciousness, those who have passed from us are truly no more than a thought away. For unlike the body and its crude outcomes which are so temporary, the love between two people is real, and it cannot die. Love is never lost. Love transcends the binds of matter. Love supersedes muscle and bone. Love is the force of incalculable power that fuels Creation itself!

Thus when someone we love experiences the death of their body, let us remember our love for them. Let us take consolidation that we have not truly lost them, for they exist right now not as less than they were, but in fact as much, much more.

For my uncle Jimmy, who passed from the Earth in the past hour of our time.

Really knowing yourself has nothing to do with whatever ideas are floating around in your mind. Fundamentally you are not your name, your body, your possessions, your affiliations, or your ideas. Rather than taking new ideas- even spiritual ones- and adding them to your idea of who you are in order to define yourself, instead turn your attention toward full present moment awareness of the Now. Even if you cannot sense it at this moment, your awareness itself- your consciousness- transcends the forms that it is currently beholding and identifying with.

Personally experiencing that is a matter of gently but consistently shifting your momentum of focus away from thoughts and judgments towards a quiet and full awareness of the present moment itself. We call that process “meditation.” Yet, meditation is not an action- it is simply purposefully setting intention toward being present in the current moment without judgment. In doing so, your awareness very gradually and naturally becomes less beholden to the “datastream” of the current physical reality. That may sound strange, but getting to know your true self is not a foreign activity. It is rather a subtle yet joyful movement toward that which is “most you” and most comfortable to you: being aware is the most natural thing in the world. If you permit yourself to simply dwell with your awareness regularly, you will find that gaining familiarity with your true self is not only possible, but is one of the most rewarding and freeing pursuits available to you while you are here.