You cannot fast-forward your life to just the good parts. Just like you cannot force a garden to grow faster — your life is a similar cultivation with similar seasons. No matter how badly you want the harvest of your dreams, it is not coming the second you make the wish. Immediate gratification is a dream killer! Be patient. The secret is to flow with the seasons of your life. This is how you reach the fullness of life's bounty.
Sometimes, right when you think your life is getting better, everything falls to pieces, and you end-up right back where you started. In those moments just remember, that right when your life has fallen apart, something unexpected will come along; a new person, friend, opportunity or discovery, that will help you put the pieces back together again. Don't hold together what must fall apart. The familiar life crumbles so the new life can begin. Things may be different, but you will love your life again in time.
Do you sometimes feel like being honest has held you back? Of course, no one wants to believe this, but in a seemingly dog-eat-dog world any of us can become disillusioned. It can seem that the honest people go nowhere, while undeserving snakes have slithered ahead. As much as this may seem true, it is only part of the story and in many ways it is an illusion. It is a common false impression because as you are moving-up, you sometimes, depending on where you started, pass through a strata of people who have not made it, many of them, because of integrity problems. So it seems like there is no integrity anywhere, and an honest person is doomed. There are also people at that level who are inexperienced with success and don't know how to actualize their visions; they are effectively dysfunctional. And then, there are people who are flat-out desperate. Some of these people have made less than noble decisions in lean times because they were operating from fear and a place of lack. I call it the three D's: desperation, dysfunction, and dishonesty. But if you keep steady and true to your principled journey, over time you can rise up through the fog of desperation. Real and deep success is a journey of total integrity. Like a plane breaching over the dark thunder-clouds with a blast of sunlight, eventually you break through to a new level, where it is the exact opposite and where nearly every successful person you meet, refreshingly, has a high standard of conduct; never perfect of course, but good. This is when you have found your tribe; those in your likeness. It takes patience, longsuffering, and a strong will to do good, but through it all, if you prove time and time again that you have integrity, you will eventually meet the success you always knew was meant for you. Stay true to your ideals and give them the gift of your wholehearted energy and effort.
The most powerful manifesting is realized by those who walk in love and create through love. There is no getting around this immutable truth; love creates and hate destroys. Love is the calm space of creation. People come from making love. Businesses are often built on the foundations of love and passion. The practice of love is the procreation of hope. Love is a lifelong practice. The master creators are masters of love. They inject, infuse and imbue everything they touch with the perfecting magic and miracle of love. Love is not just for people; it is also for animals, plants and even objects, which I know may seem strange to you. But what is love really? Love is a lens of an observer. Love is an attitude with action. One who walks in love sees the world through the envelope of their mission. As a servant of love every exchange passes through the practice. Through love, you see the whole world, not just people, differently.
Manifesting is accomplished by living with integrity and purity of heart and mind. Your mind, heart and soul can be pure — if you choose. It doesn't matter who you are, what you were or where you came from. You can choose to be anything you want. That's the beauty of life — you get to choose! This is how manifesting works — seeds that are planted grow. Who you are, what you believe, what you think and how you feel — multiplies. You are compounding in lack or abundance. You are compounding in anger or kindness. You are compounding in gratitude or blame. You are compounding in all things, attitudes, beliefs and choices. Every virtue you chose, your life will multiply in that goodness. What does manifesting mean? It means you are the artist and the art. Cultivate yourself. Take care with yourself. Love yourself. Manifesting is so simple. I can't stress enough that the opportunities are not "out there" — they are inside of you as a part of your own self-realization. Create a beautiful place inside of yourself and then begin to expand and build outward. As the beauty grows within you, let it touch every person you encounter and let it enrich the world around you.
Meditation can plunge you into the nothingness void by destroying your thoughts — allowing you to perceive the unified whole of yourself. When we step out of the domain of our dissected knowledge grid, we can access the genius instinct through direct inner experience. Something beyond knowledge exists in non-knowledge; this is where we go to uncover the unknown. The greatest finding in the non-duality state of nothing is peace. Look between the words, the seconds and your surest facts, and you will see you are looking from behind prison bars. Slip through your assumptions and become free from the tyranny of knowledge. Balance, symmetry and simplicity are ready to heal your painful disproportions; you were meant for completeness. Simplicity is the most complex concept you will ever contemplate.
Only when a person gives up trying to let go, does the release happen. Remember, what you hold firmly, holds you with equal resolve. Once you release the illusion of control, your innate being is allowed to emerge. The pathless path is easy for those who are sincere, and all obstacles will be dissolved within the free and open space of a childlike and open mind. One need only empty oneself of the "excess baggage" of thoughts, beliefs, standards and practices that have been accumulated over a lifetime, so that the fountainhead of knowledge can pour forth effortlessly into their human vessel. If you are willing to take the first step simply by choosing to release control, you will experience true freedom in every sense of the word.
Each person has in effect been kidnapped by their minds, but through meditation you can attain freedom and great peace by releasing control and by silencing the waring mind. The struggle before death is very similar to the mind before it touches truth through surrender. To the mind, surrender is death. The mind fears surrender as one fears death. The mind cannot remember the ultimate reality of what is, without first forgetting itself. As the mind relaxes into the openness of receiving; as it begins slipping away — suddenly comes a flailing panic, like the sensation of falling. Jolted back awake, the frightened mind steadies its command and control and reaffirms itself as the dominant reality. To quieten the mind, the mind must be seduced into forgetting itself. At the moment the journeyman believes he is now fully awake, he in fact, has fallen back asleep to consciousness. If you think you have things reasonably figured out, you are in a deep sleep. If you want to get a steady hand on reality, you are hopelessly lost. You can only really find yourself by losing yourself.
One must take care not to fall into the trap of the intellect by believing that you can liberate yourself from all of the mind-made actions, thoughts, ideas, and beliefs by using some other action, thought, idea, or belief to do so. The mind can never let go of the mind. That would be like asking it to commit suicide, which it will never do. For this very reason, I refer to the mind and intellect as a "cosmic house of mirrors," from which a person can never escape. As soon as someone tries to let go, then the act of letting go becomes another form of holding — holding the construct of letting go. Instead of setting you free, the mind keeps you imprisoned in an unsolvable maze.
Meditation attempts to escape the mind and its labels and understanding. The best philosophies for meditating are therefore non-philosophies — a philosophy of nothing. But even adopting a non-philosophy is the same as believing in a philosophy. It is just another form of holding, which is yet another obstacle to attaining enlightenment. The practice is simply a process of non-clinging to all boundaries and limitations; a process of not identifying with anything, including non-identification, until you become everything and nothing. This space can have no name, but is about balancing and hovering in your primal state of beingness, as you pass through the phases of consciousness through meditation on your sojourn.
