Nonfiction Book Recommendations #2

This blog post will summarize the main points of a life-changing self-development nonfiction book I would recommend to anyone on a transformational journey.

Book Recommendation #2 (Summary of Main Points): The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer

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Part I- Awakening Consciousness

"They (Shakespeare’s quoted words) tell us that to maintain honest relationships with others we must first be true to ourselves. Which “self” are we to be true? Is it the one that shows up when we’re in a bad mood, or the one that is present when we feel humbled by our mistakes? Is it the one who speaks from the dark recesses of the heart when we’re depressed or upset, or the one that appears during those fleeting moments when life seems so fanciful and light? From these questions we see that the concepts of “self” may turn out to be a bit more elusive than initially presumed.

Are the many aspects of my being all equal part of my “self,” or is there only one of me—and if so, which,, where, how, and why? …We are only interested in the intuitive experience of what it is like to be you. We are not looking for your knowledge; we are looking for your direct experience. The fact is, you already know how to find yourself; you have just gotten distracted and disoriented. Once refocused, you will realize that you not only have the ability to find yourself, you have the ability to free yourself.

In case you haven’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops. It just keeps going and going. Have you ever wondered why it talks in there? How does it decide what to say and when to say it? How much of what it says turns out to be true? How much of what it says is even important?

You have to step back and watch it converse. Notice that the voice takes both sides of a conversation. If you spend some time observing this mental voice, you will notice that it never shuts up. …And when the voice argues with itself, who is it arguing with? If you watch carefully, you will notice that it is just trying to find a comfortable place to rest. The best way to free yourself from this incessant chatter is step back and view it objectively.

Stop feeling that one thing it says is you and the other thing it says is not you. If you’re hearing it talk, it’s obviously not you. You are the one who hears the voice. You are the one who notices that it’s talking. There is absolutely nothing that voice can say that is more you than anything else it says—you are the subject and it is various objects in the form of various thoughts. There is nothing more important to true growth then realizing that you are not the voice of the mind—you are the one who hears it. If you watch it objectively, you will come to see that much of what the voice says is meaningless. …The truth is that most of life will unfold in accordance with forces far outside your control, regardless of what your mind says about it.

You will someday come to see that there is no use for that incessant internal chatter, and there is no reason to constantly attempt to figure everything out. If so much of what the voice says is meaningless and unnecessary, then why does it even exist? …What you will notice is that when there is an excessive buildup of internal energy inside, you want to do something about it. That voice talks because you’re not okay inside, and talking releases energy. However, you will also notice that it talks even when doing trivial tasks like walking down the street as it makes observations, judgments, inferences, etc. It is actually narrating the world for you. But, why do you need this? What you will notice is that the narration makes you more comfortable with the world around you. Like backseat driving, it makes you feel as though things are more in your control. You feel like you have some relationship with them.

If you can’t get the world the way you like it, you internally verbalize it, judge it, complain about it, and then decide what to do about it. This makes you feel more empowered. Reality is just too real for most of us, so we filter and temper it with our thoughts. You use it as a protection mechanism, a form of defense. Ultimately, it makes you feel more secure. True personal growth is about transcending the part of you that is not okay and needs protection. …You’re ready to grow when you realize the “I” who is always talking inside will never be content. It always has a problem with something. The bottom line is, you’ll never be free of problems until you are free from the part within that has so many problems. …When you get clear enough, you will realize that the real problem is that there is something inside of you that can have a problem with almost anything.

Just be aware that you are aware of what is going on in there. There really is a way to let go of the part of you that sees everything as a problem. You don’t have to think about it, or make into a problem, or into an enemy, or something to avoid, or analyze it, you just have to be aware of it.

Once you’ve spent a day with your externally-created friend (internal voice), what is the probability you’d go to them for advice? After seeing how often this person changed their mind, how conflicted they were on so many subjects, and how emotionally overreactive they tended to be, would you ever ask them for relationship or financial advice? How many times has that voice been totally wrong?

Who are you beyond the labels, roles, descriptions, experiences, stories, sensations, feelings, thoughts, etc.? Who is hearing, experiencing, seeing, feeling, sensing, thinking, feeling, touching, noticing, etc? Is there a silent presence, an observer, a consciousness, an awareness, that is witnessing everything including thoughts, feelings, sensations, and both inner and outer stimuli? Who are you, really? Who are you when your thoughts completely stop and there is only stillness, quiet, and peace in your world? Are you the experience (objects) or the experiencer (subject)? Are you the characters in the movie, or are you the blank screen that allows all of the characters to be experienced? Are inside and outside experiences competing for your attention, so who is the “your?”

When you are an aware being, you no longer become completely immersed in the events around you. Instead, you remain inwardly aware that you are the one who is experiencing both the events and the corresponding thoughts and emotions. When a thought is created in this state of awareness, instead of getting lost in it, you remain aware that you are the one who is thinking the thought. You are lucid. You have become an awakened being. You are now aware of who you truly are beyond the internal and external objects as your consciousness focuses on itself instead of on any internal or external objects. You realize that you are not who you thought you were—you are not the internal or external objects, but you are the one who is aware of those objects, you are the open space and awareness that allows these objects to exist and continually change in your presence.

Because all of the objects you’re aware of are synchronized, you get sucked in and are no longer aware of your separateness from the objects. The thoughts and the emotions move in accordance with the sights and the sounds. It all comes in, and your consciousness gets totally absorbed in it. Unless you’re fully seated in witness consciousness (aware that you are aware), you’re not back there (the witness) being aware that you’re the one watching all this. This is what it means to be lost.

Part II – Experiencing Energy

Every movement of your body, every emotion, every thought requires inner energy. Creating thoughts, holding onto thoughts, resisting thoughts, recalling thoughts, generating emotions, controlling or resisting emotions require an expenditure of energy. Why is there energy there sometimes, and at other times you feel completely drained? And, this energy doesn’t come from the calories your body burns from food. Notice, that food doesn’t really help your energy levels as you can be completely inspired and excited or in love and not require or have a desire for food, but at other times you can be completely mentally and emotionally drained.

What you’ll see, if you watch carefully, is that you have a phenomenal amount of energy inside of you. It doesn’t come from food and it doesn’t come from sleep. This energy is always available to you. At any moment you can draw upon it. It just wells up and fills you from inside. When you’re filled with this energy, you feel like you could take on the world. When it is flowing strongly, you can actually feel it coursing through you in waves. It gushes up spontaneously from deep inside and restores, replenishes, and recharges you.

The only reason you don’t feel this energy all the time is because you block it. You block it by closing your heart, by closing your mind, and by pulling yourself into a restrictive space inside. This closes you off from all the energy. When you close your heart or close your mind, you hide in the darkness within you. There is no light. There is no energy. There is nothing flowing. The energy is still thre but it can’t get in.

This is what it means to be “blocked.” That is why you have no energy when you’re depressed. In Chinese medicine, this energy is called Chi. In the West, it is called Spirit. That spiritual energy is what you’re experiencing when you’re enthused by something and all this high energy comes up inside of you. This energy is unlimited and what it needs most is openness and receptivity.

There is a very simple method for staying open. You stay open by never closing. It’s really that simple. All you have to do is decide whether you are willing to stay open, or whether you think it’s worth closing. You can actually train yourself to forget how to close. Closing is a habit, and just like any other habit, it can be broken. For example, you could be the type of person who has an underlying fear of people and tends to close when you first meet them. You could actually be in the habit of experiencing an uptight, closing sensation whenever somebody walks up to you. You can train yourself to open every time you see a person. It’s just a question of whether you want to close or whether you want to open. It’s ultimately under your control.

The problem is, we don’t exercise that control. Under normal circumstances, our state of openness is left to psychological factors. Basically, we are programmed to open or close based upon our past experiences. Impressions from the past are still inside of us, and they get stimulated by different events. If they were negative impressions, we tend to close. We are programmed based upon our past impressions such that all kinds of things can cause us to open and close. If you pay attention, you will see it happen regularly throughout each day.

The more you learn to stay open, the more the energy can flow into you. You practice opening by not closing. Any time you start to close, ask yourself whether you really want to cut off the energy flow. You simply decide not to close. At first it feels unnatural since your innate tendency is to close as a means of protection. But closing your heart does not really protect you from anything; it just cuts you off from your source of energy. In the end, it only serves to lock you inside.

What you’ll find is that the only thing you really want from life is to feel enthusiasm, joy, and love. If you can feel that all the time, then who cares what is really happening outside? …You simply realize that by defining what you need in order to stay open actually ends up limiting you. If you make lists of how the world must be for you to open, you have limited your openness to those conditions.

Do not let anything that happens in life be important enough that you’re willing to close your heart over it. You are only limited by your ability to stay open. If you really want to stay open, pay attention when you feel love and enthusiasm. Then ask yourself why you can’t feel this all the time. Why does it have to go away? The answer is obvious: it only goes away if you choose to close. By closing, you are actually making the choice not to feel openness and love.

As you as you define what you like and what you don’t like, you will open and close. You are actually defining your limits. You are allowing your mind to create triggers that open and close you. The more you stay open, the more the energy flow can build. At some point, so much energy comes into you that it starts flowing out of you. You feel it as waves pouring off of you. You can actually feel if flowing off your hands, out your heart, and through other energy centers (chakras). All of these energy centers open, and a tremendous amount of energy starts flowing out of you. What is more, the energy affects other people. People can pick up on your energy, and you’re feeding them with this flow. If you are willing to open even more, it never stops. You become a source of light for all those around you.

Energy can heal, and that’s why love can heal if you start to feel an illness allow yourself to stay open and receptive. Through meditation, through mindfulness, through awareness and willful efforts, you can learn to keep your centers open. You can do this by relaxing and releasing. You do this by not buying into the concept that there is anything worth closing over. Remember, if you love life, nothing is worth closing over.

What is it about the structure of the heart center that permits it to close? What you will find is that the heart closes because it becomes blocked by stored, unfinished energy patterns from your past. If the energy patterns that are coming into your psyche create disturbance, you will resist them and not allow them to pass through you. When you do this, the energy patterns actually get blocked within you.

Long term, the energy patterns that cannot make it through you are pushed out of the forefront and held until you are prepared to release them. These energy patterns, which hold tremendous detail about the events associated with them, are real. They don’t just disappear. When you are unable to allow life’s events to pass through you, they stay inside and become a problem. These patterns may be held within you for a very long time.

Story of a light blue Ford Mustang (causing a Samskara) on pg. 52

It is not easy to keep energy together in one place for long. As you willfully struggle to keep these events from passing through your consciousness, the energy first tries to release by manifesting through the mind. This is why the mind becomes so active. When the energy can’t make it through the mind because of conflicts with other thoughts and mental concepts, it then tries to release through the heart. That is what creates all the emotional activity. When you resist even that release, the energy gets packed up and forced into deep storage within the heart. In the yogic tradition, that unfinished energy pattern is called a Samskara. A Samskara is a blockage, an impression from the past. It’s an unfinished energy pattern that ends up running your life. Everything that did not make it through you, from the time you were a baby all the way to this moment, is still inside of you. This encrustation builds up and restricts the energy flow. If they build up sufficiently, you will find yourself in a state of depression.

Anything similar to an old event from the past that caused a Samskara can be activated again by a present-day experience and it affects your everyday life. The more Samskaras that are stored from the past and unprocessed will lead to more activating experiences (triggering) in the future that will affect your daily life. When a Samskara is stimulated, every part of the painful experience can be re-experienced (sights, sounds, smells, touch, thoughts, feelings, sensations, etc.) in a sensory snapshot. Yes, highly enjoyable experiences can be stored as a Samskara also if you attempt to cling to an overly positive experience instead of letting it pass through. Hence two kinds of experiences can occur that block the heart. You are either trying to push energies away because they bother you, or you are trying to keep energies close because you like them. In both cases, you are not letting them pass, and you are wasting precious energy by blocking the flow through resisting and clinging. The highest state you have ever experienced is simply the result of how open you were.

If old energies come back up because you were unable to process them before, let them go now. Allow yourself to just feel the feelings and sensations without going into thoughts and stories or any reactive patterns (freezing, panicking, numbing, daydreaming, rapid thinking, fighting, distractions, busyness, etc). Of course it hurts when it comes up. It was stored with pain; it’s going to release with pain. You have to decide if you want to continue to walk around with stored pain blocking your heart and limiting your life. The alternative is to be willing to let go when it gets stimulated. It only hurts for a minute and then it’s over.

So you have a choice: Do you want to try to change the world so it doesn’t disturb your Samskaras, or are you willing to go through this process of purification? Don’t make decisions based on stimulated blockages. Learn to be centered enough to just watch this stuff come up. Once you sit deeply enough inside to stop fighting the stored energy patterns, they’ll come up constantly and pass right through you. They’ll come up during the day and they’ll come up in your dreams. Your heart will become accustomed to the process of releasing and cleansing. Just let it all happen. If you slip, just get back up. It doesn’t matter. The very fact that you even want to go through this process of freeing the energy is great. You will get there. Just keep letting go.

When looking at these energy patterns within yourself, as well as in other living species, it is not difficult to see that the most primal energy flow is the survival instinct. During eons of evolution, from the simplest of living forms to the most complex, there has always been the day-to-day struggle to protect oneself. In our highly evolved cooperative social structures, this survival instinct has gone through evolutionary changes. Many of us no longer lack food, shelter, water, or clothing; nor do we regularly face life-threatening danger. As a result, the protective energies have adapted toward defending the individual psychologically, rather than physiologically. We now experience the need to defend our self-concepts rather than our bodies. Our major struggles end up being with our own fears, insecurities, and destructive behavior patterns, and not with outside forces.

Nonetheless, the same impulses that make a deer run away urge you to run away (to self-protect internally). Since it’s not socially acceptable to run into the woods and hide like a deer, you hide inside. …You know exactly how to close down the energy centers to avoid being too receptive and sensitive to the different energies coming in and causing fear. You are protecting your ego, your self-concept. Although a situation may present no physical danger, it may cause you to experience disturbance, fear, insecurity, and other emotional problems. So you feel the need to protect yourself; however this mechanism of self-protection will never set you free as it keeps your life locked away.

Ultimately, if you protect yourself perfectly, you will never grow. All your habits and idiosyncrasies will stay the same. Life becomes stagnant when people protect their stored issues. People say things like, “You know we don’t talk about that subject around your father.” There are all these rules about things that are not supposed to happen outside because they could cause disturbance inside. Living like this allows for very little spontaneous joy, enthusiasm, and excitement for life. Most people just go from day to day protecting themselves and making sure nothing goes too wrong. At the end of the day, when someone asks, “How was your day?” a normal response is, “Not too bad,” or “I’ll survive.” What is that telling you about their view of life? They see life as a threat. A good day means you made it through without getting hurt. The longer you live like this, the more closed you become.

If you really want to grow, you have to do the opposite. In order to grow, you must let your entire psyche surface. Every little separated piece of it must be permitted to pass through. Begin by noticing the tendancy to defend and protect yourself. But then you will notice that closing yourself requires tremendous energy and work. The alternative is to become conscious enough to simply watch that part of your being that is constantly trying to protect itself. You can give yourself the ultimate gift by deciding not to do that anymore. How often do you find yourself defending and protecting the weak parts of yourself (sensitive psyche)?

Once you’ve made the commitment to free yourself of that scared person inside, you will notice that there is a clear decision point at which your growth takes place. For instance, somebody says something and you start to feel the energy get a little strange inside. You will actually start to feel a little tightening. That is your cue that it’s time to grow. It’s not time to defend yourself, because you don’t want the part of you that you would be defending. You will eventually get conscious enough so that the minute you see the energy start getting strange, you stop. You stop getting involved in the energy. If it normally causes you to start talking, you stop talking. You just stop, mid-sentence, because you know where it will go if you continue. The moment you see the energy getting imbalanced inside, the moment you see the heart starting to tense and get defensive, you just stop.

What exactly does it mean “to stop”? It’s something you do inside. It’s called letting go. When the energies inside start to move, you do not have to go there. For instance, when your thoughts start, you do not have to go with them. That is what’s called being centered. If you aren’t centered, your consciousness will follow whatever catches its attention.

If you want to be free, then every time you feel any change in the energy flow, relax behind it. Don’t fight with it, don’t try to change it, don’t judge it, just become aware of it and allow it without becoming sucked into its energy vortex. Play with letting go and falling behind little things that bother you like someone beeps at you at a stoplight, or traffic jams, or little disturbing things throughout your day. The Self is watching the inside energies change in accordance to both inside and outside forces. All the energies that it watches will just come and go, unless you lose your center of consciousness and go with them. Thoughts and emotions become stronger the more attention you give them.

A wise person remains centered enough to let go every time the energy shifts into a defensive mode. The moment the energy moves and you feel your consciousness start to get drawn into it, you relax and release. Letting go means falling behind the energy (aware of it) instead of going into it. Just decide that no matter what the mind says, you aren’t getting involved. It’s not that you are trying to stop the energies from coming up inside. There is nothing wrong with feeling the energies of fear, jealousy, or attraction. They don’t make you impure or pure. They are not you. Become comfortable with just being aware and accepting of all of the so-called negative thoughts and emotions that may come up and float around in your brain and body throughout the day including any uncomfortable body sensations.

Part III – Freeing Yourself

The exploration of Self is inextricably interwoven with the unfolding of one’s life. The natural ups and downs of life can either generate personal growth or create personal fears. Which of these dominates is completely dependent upon how we view change. Change can be viewed as either exciting or frightening but regardless of how we view it, we must all face the fact that change is very nature of life. If you have a lot of fear, you won’t like change. You’ll try to create a world around you that is predictable, controllable, and definable. You’ll try to create a world that doesn’t stimulate your fears.

Fear doesn’t want to feel itself: it’s actually afraid of itself. So you utilize the mind in an attempt to manipulate life for the purpose of not feeling fear. You can do one of two things with fear: you can recognize that you have it and work to release it, or you can keep it and try to hide from it. Because people don’t deal with fear objectively, they don’t understand it. They end up keeping their fear and trying to prevent things from happening that would stimulate it. They go through life attempting to create safety and control by defining how they need life to be in order to be okay. This is how the world becomes frightening.

This may not sound frightening; it may sound safe. But it’s not. If you do this, the world truly becomes threatening. Life becomes a “me against it” situation. When you have fear, insecurity, or weakness inside of you, and you attempt to keep it from being stimulated, there will inevitably be events and changes in life that challenge your efforts. Because you resist these changes, you feel that you are struggling with life. You feel like this person is not behaving the way they should, and this event is not unfolding the way you want. You see situations that happened in the past as disturbing, and you see things down the road as potential problems. Your definition of desirable and undesirable, as well as good and bad, all come about because you have defined how things need to be in order for you to be okay. Who said that the way life naturally unfolds is not okay? The answer is fear, says so.

As you grow spiritually, you will realize that your attempts to protect yourself from your problems actually create more problems. If you attempt to arrange people, places, and things so that they don’t disturb you, it will begin to look like life is against you. You’ll feel that life is a struggle and that every day is heavy because you have to control and fight with everything. There will be competition, jealousy, and fear. That’s why you have to worry so much. That’s why you have all of these dialogues going on in your mind. You’re either trying to figure out how to keep things from happening, or you’re trying to figure out what to do because they did happen.

The alternative is to decide not to fight with life, with what is. You realize and accept that life is not under your control. Life is continually changing and if you’re trying to control it, you’ll never be able to fully live it. Instead of living life, you will be afraid of life. Fear is the cause of every problem. It’s the root of all prejudices and the negative emotions of anger, jealousy, and possessiveness. First you defend yourself, and then you protect yourself by yelling or arguing with someone when they trigger you and then you make threats or demands on them In an attempt to keep them from doing it again.

Life is attempting to help you by surrounding you with people and situations that stimulate your growth by stimulating or triggering you to take a look at what is going on inside of you. If you get lost in your disturbance you’ll go into survival mode and try to fix things and may regret things you did or said later as you are acting out of a “reactionary” survival mechanism instead of a more wiser awareness and stillness that is able to withstand and allow whatever is arising from the deep depths of the heart when major disturbances occur in life. Always let go as soon you realize that you didn’t.

If you don’t solve the root cause of the problem, but instead, attempt to protect yourself from the problem, it ends up running your life. You actually feel that if you minimized the pain of the problem, you’ve solved the problem. But it is not solved. All you did was devote your life to avoiding it. It is now the center of your universe. It’s all there is. In the case of the heart, we have more than one thorn in our hearts. We have loneliness thorns, rejection thorns, abandonment thorns, body appearance thorns, failure thorns, intelligence thorns, etc. They can be removed if you are willing to accept and be with the pain and disturbance without doing anything about it—just feeling it.

What is it that you can say or do to not feel the loneliness? Notice that you aren’t asking how to get rid of the problem; you are asking how to protect yourself from not feeling it. You do this by avoiding situations or by using people, places, and things as protective shields. You have removed the root of loneliness. If you find someone to be in a relationship that diminishes the loneliness, you will worry about them dying or leaving you to avoid being stimulated by those feelings, so you will manipulate, worry, control, be passive-aggressive, be clingy, needy, demanding, etc. in order to try to hold onto the relationship and even the feelings of loneliness that will creep up even when you are in the relationship, but the person is doing or saying something that makes you feel lonely again. So the original loneliness thorn, becomes multiple problems. You worry about how you act and dress. You worry about what other people think about you. If you are attracted to someone, you will ask yourself, “What do I need to do in order to please you”?

People allow their behavior to be drastically affected by their inner thorns that they are constantly avoiding. What you really want is to have authentic, loving relationships; however, the relationships thorns constantly get in the way and cause dishonesty, manipulation, control, avoidance, grasping, fighting, running, and general in-authenticity.

How do you free yourself? You free yourself by finding yourself. To free yourself from your thorns, you simply stop playing with them. The more you touch them, the more you irritate them. If you want, you can simply allow the disturbances to come up, and you can let them go. The problem is, you either completely avoid situations that would cause them to release, or you push them back down in the name of protecting yourself. What you can do is notice that you noticed the disturbance.

The prerequisite to true freedom is to decide that you do not want to suffer anymore. You must decide that you want to enjoy your life and that there is no reason for stress, inner pain, or fear. Every day we are either feeling it, or protecting ourselves from feeling it. People do not understand how much they are suffering because they have never experienced what it is like to not suffer. You are either trying to stop suffering, controlling your environment to avoid suffering, or worrying about suffering in the future. You only notice your suffering when it gets worse than usual.

Why are you always having worrying, troublesome thoughts? You think like this because you’re not okay inside, and you’re constantly trying to make yourself feel better. To end suffering, you must first realize that your psyche is not okay. It is truly a gift when you realize that you don’t have to put up with, or protect, your psyche. Just watch and you’ll notice that your mind is constantly telling you what to do or it has some commentary or judgment going on.

The fact is, however, external changes are not going to solve your problem because they don’t address the root of your problem. The root problem is that you don’t feel whole and complete within yourself. If you want to be free, you have to learn to treat your psyche like any other addiction. You are capable of ceasing the absurdity of listening to the perpetual problems of your psyche. You actually can live life instead of fearing or fighting it.

One of the essential requirements for true spiritual growth and deep personal transformation is coming to peace with pain. Once you can face your disturbances, you will realize that there is a layer of pain seated deep in the core of your heart. This pain is so uncomfortable, so challenging, and so destructive to the individual self, that your entire life is spent avoiding it. Your entire personality is built upon ways of being, thinking, acting, and believing that were developed to avoid this pain.

Since avoiding the pain prohibits you from exploring the part of your being that is beyond that layer, real growth takes place when you finally decide to deal with the pain. You must look inside yourself and determine that from now on pain is not a problem. When you feel pain, simply view it as energy. Every single time you relax and release, a piece of the pain leaves forever. There is also tremendous joy, peace, love, and beauty inside of you. But they are on the other side of the pain.

Part IV – Going Beyond

When you are defending, you are really defending the interior walls that you built to protect yourself. You are hiding inside. What if somebody challenges your self-concepts and punches a hole in your wall? What do you normally do? You normally will defend and protect yourself by patching the hole in your wall with more thoughts, thoughts on top of a wall of thoughts. You can get out by simply letting everyday life take down the walls you hold around yourself. You simply don’t participate in supporting, maintaining, and defending your fortress.

Right now you are using your analytical mind to break the world up into individual thought objects. You are then using the same mind to put these individual thought objects into relationships to each other. You do this to feel a semblance of control. This is seen most clearly in your attempt to make the unknown known. Your views, your opinions, your preferences, your beliefs, your concepts, and your goals are all ways of bringing the infinite universe down to the finite where you feel a sense of control. You must now struggle day and night to make the world fit your model, and you label everything that doesn’t fit as wrong, bad, or unfair.

If anything happens that challenges how you view things, you fight, you rationalize, you defend, and you get frustrated and angry over simple little things. If you want to go beyond your model, you have to be willing to not believe in it. The model you’ve built is fragile and tenuous when you encounter major life disruptions (illness, death, etc.) that crumble your “view” of the ways should be, or have to be in order to be safe, comfortable, secure, and certain about how your world unfolds day-to-day. There’s a reason for everything you do. See what happens when you don’t do the things that make you comfortable (dress, hair, makeup, coffee, cigarettes, etc.). You are constantly trying to stay within your comfort zone. You struggle to keep people, places, and things in a manner that supports your model. Something happens outside of your model and your mind immediately goes about seeking a way to fix it in order to feel more comfortable.

Part V – Living Life

You have a deep set of preferences that get in the way of happiness. Do you want to be happy from this point forward for the rest of your life, regardless of what happens? The real question is whether you want to be happy regardless of what happens. There is no rule that says you have to close your heart. You should examine what it is inside of you that believes there is some benefit to closing.

Things are going to happen to you, and you’re going to feel the tendency to close. But you have the choice to either go with it or let it go. You mind will tell you that it’s not reasonable to stay open when these things happen. But you have limited time left in your life, and what’s really not reasonable is to not enjoy life. Stress only happens when you resist life’s events. If you don’t have fear or desire about an event, there’s really nothing to deal with. You simply allow life to unfold and interact with it in a natural and rational manner.

Once the personal energies pass through you, the world becomes a different place. People and events will appear different to you. You will realize that you have talents and abilities you never saw before. You whole view of life will change. Every single thing in this world will look like it’s been transformed. This happens because as you let go in one situation, it affects your clarity for other situations. Any time you’re having trouble with something, think of death. A wise person realizes that at any moment they may breathe out, and the breath may not come back in.

Take a moment to look at the things you think you need. Look at how much time and energy you put into various activities. Imagine if you knew you were going to die within a week or a month. How would that change things? How would your priorities change? How would your thoughts change? What are you doing with your life? Are you wasting your time? Death is a great teacher. So why not be bold enough to regularly reflect on how you would love that last week?

At this point you should ask yourself why you aren’t living that way. It’s not what you doing; it’s how much of you is doing it. What is it that won’t let us live our lives? What is inside of us that is so afraid that it keeps us from just enjoying life? Learn to live as though you are facing death at all times, and you’ll become bolder and more open. What actually gives life meaning is the willingness to live it.

If you challenge yourself to live as though it were you last week, your mind may come up with all kinds of suppressed desires. It may start talking about all the things that you’ve always wanted to do, and you may think you had better go do them. You will soon see that’s not the answer. You have to understand that it is your attempt to get special experiences from life that makes you miss the actual experience of life. Life is not something you get; it’s something you experience.

You fear death because you crave life. You fear death because you think there’s something to get that you haven’t experienced yet. Many people feel that death will take something away from them. Death is giving meaning to your life. It is scarcity that makes things precious. If you are living every experience fully, then death doesn’t take anything from you. It doesn’t make any difference when death comes because their experience is already whole and complete. You should be experiencing the life that is happening to you, not the one you wish was happening.

No discussion of living life as a spiritual path is complete without addressing one of the deepest of all spiritual teachings, the Tao te Ching. The “Tao” means “the Way.” It is a treatise on the balance of the yin and the yang, the feminine and the masculine, the dark and the light. It really is about moderation and balance. For example, it is good for a person to eat sometimes; however, the pendulum can swing from gorging yourself to death, to starving yourself to death. Those are the two extremes of the pendulum: the yin and the yang, expansion and contraction, nondoing and doing. Everything has two extremes. Everything has gradations of this pendulum swing.

If you find yourself wanting to be so close to someone that you are always together, means that your pendulum has been swung in the opposite direction for too long. You’ve had too much time alone. Your pendulum has swung off-center. The same principles drive everything in this world. If you pull a pendulum out one way, it will swing back just that far the other way. So where is the Tao? The Tao is the middle. It’s the place where there is no energy pushing in either direction. The pendulum has been permitted to come to balance concerning food, relationships, work, sex, money, fun, doing, not-doing, and everything else.

The Way is the place in which these forces balance quietly. And indeed, unless you go out of the Way, they will tend to stay in peaceful harmony. If you want to understand the Tao, you must take a closer look at what lies between the two extremes. This is because neither extreme can last. How long can a pendulum stay at one of its outermost positions? It can only remain there for a moment. How long can a pendulum stay at rest? It can remain there forever because there are no forces moving it out of balance. That is the Tao. It is the center. But that does not mean that it stays static and fixed.

First you have to realize that since everything has its yin and yang, everything has its own balance point. It is the harmony of all these balance points, woven together, that forms the Tao. If you want to imagine the power of the Tao, examine how much energy is wasted swinging sideways. It’s not efficient to wildly oscillate around a path. If you do this, the energies that used to be wasted swinging sideways will get pulled into the center. This concentration of energies is used to accomplish the given task much more efficiently. This is the power of the Tao. When you stop swinging between the opposites you’ll find that you have far more energy than you ever imagined. That which takes somebody else hours will take you minutes. Basically, you waste tremendous energy at the extremes. You will be that much less able to use your energy for living life because you are using it to adjust for the pendulum swings.

The pendulum will stop swinging to the extremes if you quit feeding it energy in order to swing to the extremes. Don’t participate in the extremes; leave them alone. You won’t be fixated on certain things or caught up in thoughts about the opposites. For the being who is in the Tao, events take place and last just as long as they are taking place. You don’t follow the extremes (i.e. being mad for an hour because someone cut you off in traffic), so your energy comes back to the current moment. When the next event happens, you’re there. If you have all kinds of reactions going on inside because you’re involved in the extremes, life seems confusing. You must reach the point where your whole interest lies in the balance and not in any personal preference for how things should be.

As you release the lower vibrations, you naturally stop thinking they’re you or that there’s anything you have to do about them. As you let go of them, your Spirit drifts upward. What does it mean to drift upward? It’s an experience of being drawn further back inside yourself. You’re no longer held down to your earthly self, so you begin to feel more spaciousness inside. You feel that there’s more of a distance between you and the thoughts and emotions inside of you. How does it feel when you drift up? You don’t feel as much anger, fear, or self-consciousness. You don’t feel resentment toward people. You don’t close or get tight as often. Things still happen that you don’t want to happen, but they don’t seem to touch you as much.

What does it feel like to identify more with Spirit than with form? You used to walk around feeling anxiety and tension; now you walk around feeling love. You just feel love for no reason. Your backdrop is beauty, appreciation, love and openness. You must release the personal self. As you go deeper and deeper, you will start to notice a phenomenal thing—you are no longer judging. What if people didn’t have to dress the same, behave the same, or believe the same? Now I can feel more love, more compassion, more understanding, and more admiration for all the different expressions and actions of my creation. Love sees nothing but beauty in its beloved. There is no impurity.

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