I was looking around YouTube recently to find a video I'd seen a while back made by a woman with autism who was trying to describe her interior experience of the world. Couldn't find it.

What I did find was a whole bunch of videos people have made of their children before being vaccinated in the United States, and after. For a long time, many of us have suspected that childhood immunizations can be harmful, and that they can cause a variety of neurological and immunological problems in some children. But after being repeatedly ignored by the medical establishment, parents have taken the situation into their own hands by documenting the damage. Most recently displayed is the heart-rending and sometimes fatal damage done by the vaccine Gardisil, which was being proposed as mandatory for school aged girls, and the more rare, but still existent damage caused by the H1N1 vaccine.

As happens on YouTube, I began to click around and found myself uncovering a huge number of very intelligent and educated conspiracy theorists talking about the big pharmaceutical companies as being involved in a plot with various governmental bodies to control and limit the population of the planet to certain races and demographics. This plot involved everything from genetically modified foods to flouride in the water to childhood immunizations and various forms of "preventive" medicine, all promoted as health-giving but all ultimately damaging to the integrity of the human organism... making it difficult for the human being to learn, to communicate, to fight disease, and to reproduce.

The more I read, the more I could feel my mind being sucked into a state of paranoia and anger. And then I caught it. Us vs. them.

There is nothing the human ego (the part of us that is identified with the body) loves more than a good "us vs. them" scenario. It evokes a dark and sickening feeling of solidity... the dream not only becomes real, but it becomes a nightmare in which the forces for good are pitted against the forces for evil. In times like this, the temptation to become involved in this type of ego-solidity is very strong. As with all ego drives, the desire is to destroy the opposition and emerge triumphant. To me this is an absolutely abhorrent feeling.

Who we really are cannot be harmed. The only way out of this kind of ego trickery is forgiveness. It's literally the only road that can deliver us from the smoking ruins. Perhaps the conspiracy theorists are right. It doesn't matter if they are. Within the game called life on earth, only the paradoxical approach of forgiveness can dissolve the dream and offer release. Mistakes are made, errors are committed. None of them are real, and the only way out is love.

This is an odd time of life for me. Busy at work, busy making some kind of transition into a different sort of work. Operative concept: not blogging, that's for sure.

But I'm in the mood for absolute honesty at the moment. Those of you who have been reading for a while know that every now and then I talk about near death experiences. Usually, I've combed one or another NDE web site and seen something that intrigues me. As I tell my poor, devoted, most-beloved husband, I have always had one foot in the grave.

What I mean by that is that ever since I was a tiny, tiny little girl, I have had a memory of where I was "before this." This memory is now validated by all of the near-death-experiencers who are  making their stories known. 

For many years, before the birth of my son, I more or less had what I would call a smooth relationship with life. I refused to engage. There were no teeth on my gears. In this state I was callous and uncaring and afraid. Once my son was born, I grew teeth and engaged, and it is to him that I owe a huge debt of gratitude.

Lately, though, my astonishment at being here (I could have called it disgust at any number of points in my life) has changed to appreciation. Appreciation for this experience. Contentment with this experience. Love of this experience, even, with all of its drama and ups and downs.

I have no fear of death, but I have, at many times, had a great fear of life. Being in these meat-sacks... being physical, has always been a challenge for me. I know that what is native to me is to be disembodied, to fly, to be without form. I remember.

But I have come to trust that there is a reason, and a good reason, behind my being here. As there is a reason and a good reason behind YOUR being here. Take a deep breath and feel the validity of your being. There is no mistake. No mistake. 

There is nothing for you to earn, nothing for you to achieve. Just to be here, being who you are, is enough.

We find ourselves here, in these human bodies, living a human life. We are identified with our bodies because all we remember, generally, is this one experience. It's like when you are asleep at night, dreaming, you are only aware of that one dream. You're deeply focused within the one experience.

Think of your mind as being a radio with two stations. There is the chatty, discursive human mind, and then there's something else—a spacious, silent, totally nonjudgmental awareness of the whole situation. In ACIM terms, these two aspects are called the ego and the Holy Spirit. Sometimes they are referred to as the false self and the true self.

We are told that the false self does not exist, and yet it's a wildly untamed, meddling, grasping, rejecting pain in the ass. Also—it never shuts up. It wants, it competes and it creates problems that don't exist in order to get you to run around trying to solve them.

This ego is the mind of the body. Or rather it's the mind caused by identification with the body and its trials and tribulations. It's similar to playing a video game and identifying with your character, or your avatar, except it's a much deeper, more realistic game.

So there's You, with a capital Y, our silent, luminous, shared Self, and there's the body, and then there's the combination of You and the body-mind, which creates the self we know as "me."

"Me" is in a whole mess of trouble, because "me," believing itself to be this body, feels terribly endangered. And me IS endangered, because me is temporary. Me is a cloud, a thoughtform, a magic spell, a figure in a dream. And yet, wonderfully, quixotically enough, it is here to be experienced.

The important thing is that if you are suffering because of this experience of me-ness, you understand how to shift your attention to lessen the pain, should you be inclined to do so. You need to be able to find the dial and shift to the other station. This is mindfulness. That's all. It's like receiving a code that gets you to another level in a video game so you can avoid having to play your way through all the lives, deaths and rebirths.

There are many different codes to help you do this. Here's one: You are not your body. You are an eternal, shining being with no negativity whatsoever. This is a very real-seeming dream and the underlying emotion here is fear. Yet even here within this odd virtual reality, what is beautiful and what shines is because of You. All the beauty and love and light is You, shining through.

Here's another: Forgive. Stop resisting and judging what is. Let it go. This is perhaps one of the most magical codes of all because it completely disengages the "me" mind. The me-mind cannot exist without the idea of opposition to the here and now. It is completely suspicious of contentment.

The inside of your mind is an economy—a relationship—like a family or a dog pack or a workplace or a team. If there isn't balanced leadership, then any old thought (and usually it is the most disruptive, troublesome, obsessive ones) can get into a position of control.

In most of our minds there is an incessant internal commentary occurring—incessant internal verbalization. Sometimes this commentary is harmless or even qualitatively uplifting, but most of the time it is judgmental, defensive and obsessively attentive to the past and future.

When we give attention to the internal commentary it can do one of two things, depending on the kind of attention we give it. There are two kinds of attention: identification and awareness.

Identification means that as you turn your attention to the internal commentary, you are believing it. You are saying "this is me" to it. You are feeling that it is speaking the truth from you and for you. You and the internal commentary are one.

Awareness means that you are standing away from the internal commentary. You are observing it, rather than believing it or identifying with it. You are neutral, just observing. You do not feel that it is "you."

Giving the internal commentary identification will intensify it. Identification is like rocket fuel for the internal dialogue. It comes alive and feels "true." It begins to plan and spin out and it takes over the body and gets into a position of leadership. You have given it this power—power it is not meant to have.

Giving the internal commentary awareness will slow it down. It becomes calmer and more transparent. Awareness stands back and watches the inner dialogue and, as it watches, the inner dialogue begins to fade, dissolve, lose power. Awareness keeps power where it should be. The inner dialogue is never meant to be in control.

A quote from Mindfulness, Bliss and Beyond, by Ajahn Brahm: "Just as gasoline is the fuel that propels a car, so discontent is the fuel that moves the mind. When a car runs out of gas, it gently rolls to a stop. One doesn't need to use the brake. In the same way, when the mind runs out of discontent... it gently comes to a stop. One doesn't need to use the brake of willpower. The mind comes to a state of stillness quite naturally."

And of course, when the mind is still, the problem disappears. It's a mobius strip of an idea—the very best kind. Forgiveness, in A Course in Miracles is this very idea: "Love holds no grievances." or "Your brother's errors are not of him, any more than yours are of you. Accept his errors as real, and you have attacked yourself."

So what does it mean when the mind is moved by discontent? It means that in whatever way we are saying "now is not good enough," we are at the same time creating the feeling of "not good enough." Without the thought, "now is not good enough" the experiential not-good-enoughness of the moment does not exist.

If you follow what I am saying, it should be clear that there is cause and effect operating in this equation. You invest the thought "now is not good enough" with identification, which gives it the breath of life and creates the embodied experience of discontent. But now that you have identified with the thought, it does a kind of dastardly thing. It says, "You need to fix this!" and proceeds to create a feeling of solid selfhood, dedicated to completing the task.

So the very thought, without which there would be no discontent, then tells you how to fix the "now" to make it better—only the advice it gives you is guaranteed not to work because the problem is imaginary. As Guy Finley says: The doctor who gave you the poison in the first place is now trying to sell you the antidote.

What the evil doctor sells you is a list of "if only" proclamations. If only I had more money. If only I had a relationship. If only I had a thinner body. If only I were better looking. If only I were enlightened. And so on.

We buy into this delusion because once we have identified with that aspect of the body-mind, we believe that happiness is a process of accumulation... of getting. Getting experiences, getting stuff, getting enlightenment.

Ajahn Brahm relates a great little traditional story about a smart Buddhist donkey and a carrot on a string. I'll paraphrase it here: If you find yourself hooked up to a cartload of junk by your master the discontented thought, and you're pulling it along frantically because it has promised that if you keep running you'll get the carrot that is suspended on a string two feet in front of your face by a stick attached to your halter, here's what you do: have some self respect and stop short. Just stop!

The carrot will swing out like a pendulum, seemingly further away than ever, and as you remain motionless, completely content to be resting, and utterly letting go, not caring one way or the other, it will swing back towards your opened mouth.

Everyone has had the experience of feeling discontented with a life situation and then having it become so much worse, that the set-up you were unhappy with starts to seem like a pretty good deal in hindsight.

You think to yourself, geez, I didn't know how good I had it until the little I had was taken away. This is the way things tend to happen to us humans, because we tend to fixate and dwell on what's wrong with a situation—or what seems to be wrong with it. And by now, you've probably figured out that as you fixate on what is wrong, you attract to yourself more of the same. It's an entirely neutral law, this business of "that which is like unto itself is drawn" and yet even when we can see that because we are focusing on the negative more negative things are happening, we find it difficult to just stop.

We become obsessed with pointing at the problem, and through the magic of our divine attention, the problem grows.

This is the runaway horse aspect of the mind. Just as it requires some effort to tame a horse or train a dog, it requires some effort to get the human mind under control. Or let's put it a different way because the word "control" is not a politically correct spiritual word right now—it takes some effort to tame the mind and get it to be workable, instead of a nuisance. It take some effort to turn the mind into more of a friend than an enemy.

Most of us have an adversarial relationship with our minds. The last thing we want to do is to be present in the moment—to be mind-full. We prefer to be entertained—taken out of the moment—to be mind-less. Because we spend so much time being mind-less, we lose the ability to focus and control the mind. We don't even know, really, that such an ability exists!

Focusing attention in the present moment begins to feel at best like a chore and at worst, frightening. In between being a chore and being frightening there seems to be a vast field of boredom. We look at children who can't sit still or focus and say that they have attention deficit disorder, but the truth is that we all have a deficit in the area of attention. We really don't want to look inward at the mind, learn how it works, and get in shape.

Yet the mind itself is not to blame. It's just mind-stuff. Undisciplined and conditioned by the culture in which it finds itself, it prefers to wander and be entertained. Deep within, however, the mind is a working dog. The mind is a border collie waiting for orders and training. Kept inside with no real job to do, it just tears the house apart. With training comes a sense of upliftedness. It's the same dog either way, but with training, there is less suffering.

One simple trick you can teach your mind is to be aware of the fault-finding mind. The fault-finding mind is the dog that the second you close the door of attention behind you, begins to shred everything in site. Just noticing this mind at work—pointing at the negative, complaining about what is, considering how this will not do, this is not good enough—just noticing this mind, robs it of its power. Without the fault-finding mind yammering in the foreground, there is a quiet feeling of natural contentment, of peaceful observation in the background.

Noticing the fault-finding mind exercises the muscles of attention. This produces the same kind of feeling of contentment that exercising the body does. You're not just going along, allowing the mind to gorge on the junk food of complaint. You're stopping that addiction by shining the light of attention on it. It can only carry on in the dark of mindlessness.

Yes, there's a momentary feeling of deprivation as you lose the sensations of solidity created by opposing what is happening in the now. But sticking it out past that sense of deprivation returns to you all the energy that had been consumed by opposition, and that energy returns to its natural state, which is mindfulness, contentment, peace, awareness.

I find lately that if I have anything to say, it's so ridiculously difficult to put into words that I seem to lose the desire to say anything at all! I wanted to say "redonkulously" because redonkulous seems to capture the essence a bit more accurately.

If I could say one thing to everyone out there reading, it is this: There is nothing wrong with you. There actually cannot be anything wrong with you.

A friend told me the other day that her daughter took a self-defense course in which the teacher said that one great way to disarm an attacker is to say something completely unexpected. So instead of screaming, "No! Please don't hurt me!" or "Help!", you scream ARE YOU HERE TO WATER THE PLANTS!?

The incongruity breaks the spell, or might, and gives you a moment to break away. What is being broken is the mindless story the attacker is telling himself about what is happening and what he wants to happen. He is mesmerized by the dream of his own story, and the illogical thought sequence makes him stop momentarily and say, wait, what? It introduces a moment of enforced mindfulness in which he realizes that you are not participating in his dream-reality. This is disorienting momentarily, and then of course, enraging. So you really have to slip away during the brief disorientation phase.

To a human being, the one truly incongruous thing you can say is "Everything is exactly as it should be!" This is because in the human dream, nothing is as it should be.

Yet when we succumb to the sense that nothing is as it should be it's just a failure of attention. It is what happens when we begin to be carried away by the thoughts in our minds as though they were true statements about reality. Below the layer of noisy thought—below, above, between it—is the silence in which they occur. Direct your attention to that silence.

Without the thought that something is wrong, nothing is wrong. When you bestow your attention upon a thought that causes suffering, and you ride along with it, you intensify its existence. We are lazy about where we place our attention and our attention is extremely powerful.

It takes no effort at all to continue to suffer. Suffering is the lowest common denominator. It does take some effort to move your attention away from the loudest, most prevalent sensory experience to that in which it is occurring. This is how you break the spell.

One thing that's kind of hard to get your mind around if you aren't having the experience of it on a regular basis and really, who does, is the idea that we all share a self. This isn't something that the thinking mind can understand. But it can misunderstand it mightily and I thought I'd try to correct some of the misunderstandings, or at least point them out. Come at it through the back door, so to speak.

The idea of the individual self is looked upon with disdain in spiritual circles. One is not supposed to have an individual self and perhaps people try to understand that the individual self doesn't exist and try to pretend that they themselves don't exist... I don't know. There seems to be a lot of variety of interpretation around this point.

But the truth is that the "I Am," MY I am, and YOUR I am, are the same. We have the same experience of I Am. Not the same in detail or coloration or nuance perhaps, but at the root, yes, the exact same experience. This is a shared self. As has been said, there is only One of us here.

And yet the glory of this experience of oneness is that YOU are not diminished by the understanding. You are partaking of the shared self completely, and yet the self you identify with as a human—the wrapper—the body—with all its wacky intimate tendencies and habits—that you, although temporary and illusory, also exists as a perceivable self. Only THAT self is not real.

It's not real, and yet it's there, like the you in a dream. It's there, and yet what is saying "I am" is not that. Not the wrapper. Not the body. What is saying I am is the same as everyone else's self.

Rather than being kind of a bummer, or a feeling of loss, this understanding of oneness is accompanied by an increased, rather than decreased, feeling of existence. You exist in a larger gestalt, rather than the tiny isolated one of the body-you. Believing that the individual body-you is all you are is painful.

On the other hand, experiencing the big You, the shared You, is a riotously joyous experience. It's a feeling that your entire nature, everything you are made of, is good news. It's not a somber spiritual experience that only a few can have. It's your true nature and mine. Everyone's. The same.

Yet the little "yous"—the human wrappers with all their funny differences—are not bad. There's nothing bad there. It's like a virtual self—like an experiment—and there's great beauty in it. It's very poignant. It's a wrapper around a tiny bit of what you actually are. It's like we are pretending that we are only our big toes.

And as this motley collection of big toes we have the opportunity to love each other. Quelle surprise! It's a wonderful thing. Of course, if we remembered Who we truly are, we'd love each other automatically. But the forgetting gives it an interesting twist. The forgetting adds suffering into the mix. A very interesting and awful twist.

Let's say you were born a few hundred years ago in a large, fertile valley surrounded by extremely tall mountains that were so difficult to climb and so inhospitable that no one had ever successfully escaped the valley, except by death.

Not in your lifetime, but perhaps in the lifetime of your great grandmother, or just existing in the sagas that were told at night during evening work, were tales of people who had seen the exotic world on the other side of the mountains. No one living had ever been there, or known anyone who had, so really it was just an ongoing story in your collective minds, which were shaped completely by the only things you could say for sure existed: mountains, sky, valley.

This is very much our situation in these bodies, as humans, in this dream of life. And our vocabulary—that which shapes our thoughts—is a function of our situation. We do not have vocabulary for anything else. Everything about our thought processes is limited by the fact of their birth in the dream. Our thought processes only work for the valley. They are a closed system. Our thinking is dream thinking.

Last night I had a dream in which I was trying to tally up an extremely large order I'd received from a good customer. Knowing that she'd gone way overboard in her ordering, I was trying to figure out how much she was paying per piece, thinking that somehow the more she ordered, the less she was paying. We have no volume discounts, so there was no real reason to do this, but in the dream I thought there was.

Because I was not lucid and my thinking was dream-thinking, I was trying to do this by using a dream calculator and by writing things down with a dream pencil on a dream piece of paper. If you are at all aware of the ground rules of human dreams, you'll know that one thing you cannot do in a dream is accurately use a calculator or write anything down, because everything you write down and everything you read on the calculator screen keeps changing. In the human dream-world rules, it states that nothing written in letters or numbers remains the same the second or third time you look at it.

However, because I was not lucid, and because my mind was a function of the dream world, I was unsuccessfully engrossed in this exercise for what seemed like a very long time until finally my attention shifted to something else within the dream. Most important in my failure-to-notice was not the fact that the calculator and pencil did not work. My most important failure of attention was that I had created a problem that did not exist and was attempting to solve it.

This is the nature of the spiritual search. We use the mind we have. The mind we have, by its very nature, creates a problem that does not exist. Then we try to solve it. The tools we have at our disposal are our dream minds. They simply do not work. But the most important thing to realize is not that they do not work, but that the problem is not real.

Yet we keep on trying to figure it all out using the same pencil and the same calculator. The more we employ the technologies of the dream, the further into it we go, until we begin to live lives totally obsessed with the details of the dream, combing through them like rag pickers, trying to find something that sparks a feeling of recognition.

We need to stand up straight and have some self-respect and question the premise of the problem. The ego loves to send us on wild goose chases. The ego is the dream mind. It wants to keep you entangled in problems that don't exist, and keep you turning towards it for solutions until your life is over and you have spent the whole thing within the dream.

And yet, this in itself is also not a problem. The only problem is suffering. When you were a kid and you played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, you weren't really worried about the fact that you were wearing a blindfold. You knew that eventually the blindfold would be removed, and that the donkey's tail was not a real goal.

The purpose of all true spiritual teachings, no matter their methodology, is to lead you to a point of recognizing your own nature. That nature is always here, whether or not you recognize it. The sun continues to shine, even if you close your eyes.

The experience of feeling separate (feeling, not being separate, which is impossible) from your own true, divine nature is traumatic. It's frightening. Sometimes I think all of us here in this dream of life on planet earth are suffering from post traumatic stress disorder.

Can you imagine how traumatic it would be to be caught in one of your nighttime dreams and feel as though you had no hope of awakening? What if you felt that the only way you could get out of the dream would be to die within it? What if you began to believe that you had originated within that dream and you completely lost all memory of the self you had been—safe at home asleep.

That's the situation we are in here.

We have completely forgotten who we are and have become totally identified with the characters we are playing in this dream-drama of life on earth. And this is as it should be, until the fear and suffering begin to become counterproductive.

The purpose of all true spiritual teachings is not to actually teach you anything. You do not need to learn anything. But you need to remember—to see, to notice—that your attention has become trapped by a projection and you've gotten temporarily lost and identified with that projection. All spiritual teachings do is help you free your trapped attention so you can remember.

When your attention is trapped you make assumptions according to that level of entrapment. You believe that the projection is real and this creates a platform from which you begin to judge. As you judge according to the perceptions of the dream, you solidify your place within the dream. Your judgments contribute to the solidity of the dream experience and the seeming reality of your dream self.

So the process of awakening to the state of grace that is your true nature, is a process of suspending judgment. It's a process of not-doing. Of stopping doing. It's a process of realizing that anything you do (in your desire to awaken) on the basis of the perceived projection has to be a deepening of that projection. There's really nothing you can do to help yourself. But there are many habitual reactions that you can stop doing, which allow the help that is always there to arise within you.

This is what ACIM calls forgiveness—the realization that you cannot judge and act from that judgment without deepening the entrapment of your attention and intensifying your feelings of isolation and separateness.

It is what you stop doing that frees you, not what you do.

There is nothing wrong with desire. It's an inevitable part of being in a human body. When someone clamps a hand over your nose and mouth, you want to breath. If you are out enjoying a bonfire and a spark lands in your hair, setting it on fire, you want to put it out. Desire is the human experience of contrast—of lack.

If you are miserable, of course you want to be happy. If you cannot feed your children because you have no means of income, of course you want to feed your children.

If you are hungry and someone sets a plate of food in front of you, chances are, you'll happily give up your hunger and eat. Hunger is not seen as a terrible thing in this situation, but as an inevitable part of life.

All of these things involve manipulations of physical matter. Transportation, really, of one thing to another thing. We all know how to do this, by and large. It's all about "getting."

Where we go wrong is when the wanter—the part of you that is in charge of "getting"—becomes involved in the spiritual search or in any kind of emotional transaction involving ephemeral non-physical qualities.

The wanter works by getting you to focus on what you do not have and through that focus, arrive at an idea of what needs to be obtained. If you are hungry on your way home from work, you begin to imagine the type of food you are going to cook when you get home. Desire leads you to this visualization. If you are reading this blog, chances are good that you do not struggle overly much with access to sustenance.

But chances are also good that you do struggle with access to God, or to peace of mind, or to enlightenment. The reason for that struggle is that you have put the wanter in charge of the process. The wanter looks outside of itself and tries to find. This is what humans do. Humans believe they are separate and apart from each other, and that things are finite and must be amassed. It's part of the game.

What we who are in human form often do not realize is that these intangibles—peace of mind, enlightenment, God—are not additive. They cannot be added to you. They are already a part of you, already within you, integrated into and one with (not separate from) your being. You, as you are, right now. Plain old you.

The reason we cannot experience this is that we have put the wanter in charge and it's looking outside of your experience right now. It's looking outside, as though these were physical quantities, rather than already existing vibrational ranges.

When you want these things—like peace of mind, or enlightenment, or God—you begin to vibrate with the lack of them. You vibrate in such a way as to say "I do not have these experiences in my repertoire." That which is like unto itself is drawn. As you vibrate with the lack of enlightenment you attract more of lack of enlightenment. As you vibrate with a lack of love you begin to attract to yourself more lack-of-love—more of a sense of poverty, scarcity, aloneness, separation.

This is why we place an emphasis on the present moment. On this, right here, right now. On just this. On stopping. It's because you need to stop vibrating with what you believe you do not have in order to see that you have never lost it. You need to put the cart firmly before the horse and behave in a way that confounds the wanter. You need to be a haver. A plain old ordinary, appreciative haver in whatever little ways you can, to experience the deep and incredible richness of this, right here, right now.

Plain and simple, it is the experience of being the wanter that makes you feel as though you are separate, as though you do not have. When, in this intangible search, you act from what you want for yourself, you lock yourself into a closed system in which there is no solution. You cannot get what you already are.

Appreciation is a fantastic tool you can use to help yourself if you are suffering. Even when the mind is caught up in circular, tormenting thought patterns, you can use appreciation to slow down and shift your focus, little by little. But you have to be willing to do it—to go through the process.

Even if you are in pain, try to notice something right here and now in your experience that you are glad about. Maybe it's the bed you are lying on. Imagine if you couldn't lie in a bed and had to lie on the floor. Feel how the bed is supporting you.

If you are lying on the floor, and the floor is dry, feel how wonderful it is that the floor is dry and not wet. Just being dry is a great thing. Notice how you resist doing this and how deeply you want to cling to your suffering. Then do it anyway.

You get the idea. Find something. The most mundane thing. Be happy that you can brush your teeth, or that you don't have a headache. Be happy that at least you can walk or that you can see the color blue, or that you just heard a bird sing. Listen and look. Find something you'd miss if it disappeared right this instant. Just notice.

It doesn't have to be any big splashy feeling. Just some small sense of appreciation is what you're after. This isn't something meant to make you feel guilty. It's not a way of achieving anything. It's a way of extracting your attention from the trap it's in. You may even find yourself capable of appreciating pain.

Freeing your attention from where it gets trapped is a continual moment-to-moment necessity in this life. It's constantly getting snagged and trapped by one mental story or another.

Appreciation is one way to bring yourself back here. Bring yourself back out of thought, out of the seeming problem, to the homely, humorous and completely mysterious comforts of the present moment.

I sometimes like to read accounts of near-death experiences. One I read earlier this month has stuck in my mind. In it the narrator talks about the changes in her quality of mind as she began her return to the body—or her re-entrance into the dream of being in a body. Whatever it may be.

She talks about being in a feeling of complete and joyful universal understanding; of being able to simultaneously hold within her experience many different selves and yet know without a doubt that they were all one, all in complete communication with each other without words, and yet were all simultaneously one with All-That-Is or God, without any aspects of time or space or separation. As she began to return to the body with which she no longer identified, she could feel the loss of mind bit by bit until she re-entered what we call our usual human mind—one that is beset with patterns of endless circular thoughts.

I like to think of it as entering a swarm of bees.

Within this swarm-of-bees mind it's important to understand that all thought is a bee. You can't get the bees to settle down by thinking. There is absolutely nothing that can be done with thought. Every thought you think adds a bee to the swarm and excites its motion. Once you get the hang of this, what remains is to systematically investigate what is stinging you.

As you notice more and more closely what is and what is not thought, you come to realize that all thought, without exception, contains within it a subtle painful reference back to a body-self that you supposedly are. All thought wants you to do something to change what is happening right now—either by rejecting it, fixing it, or clinging to it.

The swarm-of-bees mind, is the human mind, is the ego. There is no possible solution within it. Involvement with the swarm, the sensation of the swarm, the continual striving and stinging of the swarm are all the experience of believing that we are these bodies, we are these temporary limited, endangered selves. There is no endangered self outside of the swarm.

So—what to do about this situation. This is where it gets tricky. Any plan of attack adds more bees. Even a plan to stop thinking adds a bee. It's an ever-escalating situation.

The solution is difficult to describe in words. Thought requires words. So the solution is more of a shift in focus than anything else, and it's a shift that is so simple and easy it defies reason. The solution is to just relax into this, here, right now. This here right now, without exception. This plain old now, right here. Take a deep breath. Thought goes on, it's okay, but you'll notice if you do this that thought cannot exist in the present moment. It doesn't happen here.

This is why the present moment feels so empty at first—there's no swarm.

As you release your grievances against the present moment—whatever and whoever is happening in your life right now—a subtle sense of appreciation seems to grow. It was always there, always there, but the buzzing of the bees masked it. As appreciation grows, the buzzing seems to become more distant, the environment less claustrophobic. The swarm is still there but at a greater distance and its buzzing is much less energetic and convincing. You realize that it is your attention to and identification with thought that makes it seem real. You feed the swarm by identifying with it.

The world seems to have more spaciousness now, more air. Life feels more open, safer. But all of these things are effects, not goals. They cannot be approached with thought. There is nothing you can do to make them happen because they never stopped happening in the first place.

Some of you may have heard of EFT, a healing technique based on tapping certain acupuncture points on the body while saying phrases related to the particular physical or emotional problem being addressed. There's a touching movie about this technique, if you are interested, available here.

I'm not writing this to promote EFT, but to emphasize that EFT is effective because it is aware of the human mind's resistance to paradox, and it takes this resistance into account first and foremost. This is the exact same process as A Course in Miracle's idea of true forgiveness.

In terms of physical or emotional pain or trauma, EFT utilizes what it calls a set-up phrase, while tapping on certain points in the body. Say the problem is a headache. The set-up phrase might be, "Even though I have this beastly headache, I deeply and completely love, accept and forgive myself."  If the problem is cancer, a set-up phrase (I'm over-simplifying here) might be, "Even though I have cancer, I deeply and completely love, accept and forgive myself."

The first thing that is taken into account is the human mind's tendency towards resistance. When anything unpleasant occurs, the human mind does not accept—it resists. And it is this resistance that keeps the object of resistance (the problem) in place—the way a steady wind might pin a fallen leaf to a wall.

To the human mind, to accept a painful situation as totally fine and worthy of love, is unconscionable. This is the paradox. This is also why it's so difficult to forgive people, places and situations—to see them from the safe-whole-and-healed point of view of the higher self, spirit, holy spirit, all-that-is. When we forgive and accept things, even though they seem to be impaired or injured or causing pain, we are viewing the situation from the point of view of that which is completely whole—that which knows it is not subject to this virtual dream scenario we are calling human life. This Self feels as safe and snug in relation to our human aches and pains as we do on the couch when watching a movie in which a character seems to be harmed.

Furthermore, it knows that the only way to heal what is not real is to see it as such, which is the meaning of forgiveness. Hence the "even though."

In terms of non-duality, the even though puts an end to seeking behavior. It allows the frantic, seeking, searching human mind to feel acknowledged and forgiven. Resistance to paradox is resistance to healing. As humans, in response to the feelings of separation and pain and loneliness and darkness, we are always, always, always heading in the wrong direction because to us the right direction feels wrong.

When we stop moving away from what we fear "is not it," something magical happens. We begin to see that it is the act of rejecting that creates the sense of not-okayness which characterizes our lives. In ACIM terms this is "making the dream real."

For the human mind it is very difficult to stop this knee-jerk resistance to what is. Fortunately we have those two magic words, "even though." For example: "Even though I am not enlightened and have indigestion, and am just a fucked-up human being, I deeply and completely, love, accept and forgive myself."

We all understand, just by being alive right now and on the internet, what it means to create a virtual world. If you haven't had the experience of creating an avatar and identifying with it, you can at least imagine what that might be like. Some people enter into business or emotional relationships in Second Life, or they go to school in Second Life. Big corporations have branches in Second Life. I suppose you could even get married in Second Life, if you wanted to.

Working and interacting within a virtual world means adhering to a set of rules established by the world itself. It means accepting the limitations of the paradigm by which the avatar is created.

Into this virtual world we call human life, or physical universe, we project a small part of ourselves. We identify with a body and we accept the limitations it, by its very nature, imposes. We squeeze ourselves into a mind that identifies with the body-appearance—a temporary mind which feels separate from everything around itself.

And most of us, for most of our lives, identify with this mind as though it were the real "me"—as though it were actually the totality of our being. There is nothing really mystical about this, although from the point of view of the human mind it is certainly mysterious. Yet there is always, within the identification with the human mind, a sense of being incomplete, in the dark, and alone. Imagine what the existence of a thought-form—a temporary configuration of energy, like a cloud in the sky, would feel like.

You know that quote from de Chardin: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience." To me this seems like a literal truth.

We are not human. We are having a human experience. This is what ACIM means when it says, "I am not a body, I am free, for I am still as God created me." There is great freedom in understanding this. Fear and worry belong to the virtual body—to its sense of impending doom—to its sense that it is a temporary appearance and dissolving from the moment it is born. It is not who we are.

When you first become aware of the ego—the human mind—it is always as a force for suffering, clinging, resistance, competition. And yet when you begin to see that the human mind, the ego, is the sound of a temporary thought-form struggling to make itself heard, it evokes compassion within the greater "you."

This thought-form is the idea that there can be anything separate—anything not lovingly cradled within the whole—anything not a part of God, of What Is. It's an echo from the flip side of love. Here in this virtual experience, there is the possibility of feeling separate from All That Is—of thinking that you are an actual separate being. This is the experience of fear.

When we identify with the body we fight for our existence because we feel temporary. We compete for resources because we believe they are finite. We try to awaken or become enlightened because we believe that this is somehow a way to make our existence permanent or at least end our pain. We feel tremendous guilt because we somehow get the sense that we are forgetting something—we somehow believe that what we are doing is wrong—that our transgressions in the name of the poor separate-feeling thought-forms are real.

What we have forgotten is that our existence is permanent. We are not human. We are that within which this human experience is occurring.The desire to nail it down and figure it out is a human mind-trait—a spin-off of fear. There is nothing to fear. Any thought that resonates with fear is a human mind-thought. All you need to do is to be aware of this. Just notice it.

In terms of the Second Life analogy, we have gotten so engrossed in the game that we have actually entered into the virtual world and forgotten the 'me' who is sitting at the computer. In terms of this virtual life we call planet earth, we have entered so completely into it that we have come to believe we will cease to exist when this body dies—we have completely forgotten that we are not temporary. We have done this for reasons of our own. Those reasons belong to our one Self and cannot be understood by the human mind within whose limitations we find ourselves.

Any self-tormenting voices within your head are the voices of the dissolving human thought-form trying to make itself eternal. Go silent, turn your attention towards the silence within you. Observe this virtual world. Enjoy it if you can. Know that it's also okay if it's not your cup of tea. The best way to disentangle yourself from the fear reactions of the human mind, if they are getting to you, is to turn your attention to the present moment—the silent awareness within you. It's always there.

Also of importance is to understand that we are not to blame for the coarser aspects of virtual human reactions. Certain types of emotions are simply a product of the environment. By disassociating with the human tendency to judge—by loving and accepting ourselves and others even though we have forgotten who we are and have been jealous or angry or violent or selfish... by loving ourselves "even though"—we release fear. By completely accepting this situation, with all its ambiguity and imperfection, just as it is, we release fear. When fear is released, the focus automatically defaults to love—the memory of who we are.

If you have ever become lucid in a dream, stop to think, now, about what actually was happening. The dream character—a body of sorts—is suddenly or gradually inhabited by your waking style of awareness (the onset of lucidity).

This waking awareness then exists side by side with the dream character's mind (which is entirely convinced of the reality of the dream and which has no other reference points) within the dream character's so-called body.

It is NOT that the dream character "wakes up" or achieves some kind of new awareness. The dream character does not change in any way. But it is infused or inhabited by your waking state of awareness. There are still two of you there in the dream, so to speak, and when attention becomes lax, the dream character's more limited awareness takes over and you revert from lucidity back to dreaming.

As you then awaken from the nighttime dream, with its varying degrees of lucidity, into this waking dream, you can see through recollection that there was the projected dream body, which had its own very narrow circumscribed consciousness with which you were identified, and the lucid mind, which, through your waking intention and discipline you inserted into that narrow dream-body self, in order to expand the experience of both the waking "you" and the sleeping "you."

Again, the dream self did not awaken. What happened was that a greater awareness, which was always there (since of course dreams take place within your mind) came to the foreground. What ensues is a vivid exploration of the dream environment—an exhilarating experiment in the manipulation of consciousness and an expansion of experience.

All of these selves... the dreaming body-self, the lucid awareness experiencing the dream environment, and the so-called waking self who opens her eyes in bed in the morning... all of these selves are within one mind. Yet none of them are experiencing the whole or native state of that mind because they are all more or less identified with the state of being within a human body.

The you who is identified with the human body cannot awaken and never will awaken. This "you" is a temporary phenomenon. It is only when you begin to see that you have allowed your attention to be trapped by the idea of actually being that body which you inhabit that you begin to sense that there is another "you" and that, in fact, the phenomenon of "you" is not limited in any way. It is multiple and single at the same time. It is completely shared and yet inviolately individual. It is eternal. It expands in ever increasing gestalts of awareness that are existing simultaneously with this very limited experience of the dream of human life.

Looked at in another way, the dream character (you in a non-lucid dream) is completely convinced of the reality of the dream drama. It feels more or less victimized—by the environment, by the other characters in the dream and by the changeable nature of the dream. Even in a so-called happy dream, there is an undertone of fear, because nothing is stable long enough to be relied upon, and there is a sense of being isolated within a body (fictional though it may be).

When lucidity enters the dream, the dream character is suddenly freed from this limited sense of powerless victimhood by the lucid awareness's understanding that none of this is real, and more importantly that its identity is completely independent from the dream body and its environment. So the fearful awareness of the dream character is replaced by the fearless awareness of the lucid emissary.

Within this waking dream we call life, there is also a lucid emissary. That lucid emissary is also you—infinitely more you than the part that has mistakenly identified itself with the body. The part that identifies with the body is called the ego. It truly believes that it is this body, and that it will not survive the dissolution of the body-formation any more than a character in a video game survives the shutting down of the computer. Its consciousness is just like that of the dream figure in a non-lucid dream.

The main characteristic of the lucid emissary is fearless love and indiscriminate, nonjudgmental appreciation, of this, just as it is, right here and right now.

The main characteristic of the dream-figure (human) identity is competitive, discriminating judgment, a refusal to be satisfied with "this" here and now (because it senses its inherent lack of reality and its own temporary nature) and the resulting fear of dissolution, which it interprets as punishment. It actually has no independent self other than these very characteristics, which it maintains through a constant communal stream of non-stop self-referencing mental chatter.

You are not the human. You are the lucid emissary. You are also the mind within which all of this is occurring. When you find your attention trapped by worry, fear and anxiety about tomorrow, or resentment over today, you have forgotten, temporarily, who you are. You've allowed your mind to become distracted by the concept-production mechanism of the human mind. This happens. It's part of the dream-territory. If you are in distress over it, just go silent. Withdraw your attention from it. Shift your attention to that which is not the incessant internal dialogue. Just come back out of thought, out of concept, to this present moment. Relax into the silent, loving lucidity of your eternal identity.

It seems to me that on the so-called spiritual path, people get terribly caught up in ideas of better or worse, accomplishment vs. failure. People feel inferior for not having realizations. People feel that others are better than they are, or vice versa.

The most important thing to understand is that there is nothing wrong with you. Any idea of better-or-worse, any idea of success-or-failure that contains within it even a grain of self-hatred, that contains within it even an iota of the feeling that you are not good enough—is simply incorrect. It's just an incorrect thought-form that you've mistakenly identified with.

Yes, there are understandings to be remembered, but they have nothing to do with your inherent worth. Oneness does not mean loss of the sense of self. It means a remembering that all is given—that you exist and yet you are never separate, never unsupported, never without connection to your source.

No so-called spiritual achievement that does not resonate with this light of warmth and compassion—this absolute sense of love and belonging—is of any true or lasting worth.

This is not a contest or a competition. This is all about remembering love.

Most of you probably understand what I mean when I say that you are not your thoughts. You probably have experienced standing back and noticing, becoming cognizant of, the thoughts that are passing like clouds through your mind, and getting a distinct sense that they actually have no more to do with you than the traffic on the street, or the sounds on the radio, or whatever seems to be playing on network television.

Thoughts happen. They range from the sublime to the truly frightening. The entire arena of thought is really very much like the whole internet, or like YouTube. It's largely junk with some interesting observations thrown in. However, every conceivable thought, no matter how lofty, has something in common with every other thought, no matter how base—and that common denominator is the nature of its origin. All thought begins with the delusional yet very real-seeming experience of the separate self. Thought arises simultaneously, is co-emergent with, the experience of separation.

So the very origin of thought is on shaky ground to begin with. It's a lot like thought in a dream. In a dream, thought is arising based on the dream drama, as though the dream drama were actually real. When you awaken from the dream you see that not only wasn't the dream drama real, but any and all thoughts or emotions associated with it were completely meaningless because they were based on the belief that what was not happening in reality, was.

The thought-stream, the internal dialogue, the storyline, is sometimes called the ego, or the mechanism of ego. When listened to as though it were real, it creates a sensation of solidity. It creates a feeling of stable identity that can stand as separate from the identities of other people, objects and occurrences.

All thoughts, when identified with, when given that injection of energy that comes when you hop on and follow along with them, create form on some level. Whatever you include in your attention creates form on some level—so powerful is the force of your attention.

When you watch a little YouTube video, sometimes it amuses you and for the next few minutes the world seems brighter. When you stumble upon one of those "God, I wish I hadn't seen that." type of YouTube experiences, you may find that for the next few minutes your world seems darker.

In exactly the same way as you choose what you expose yourself to on the internet or YouTube, you can choose to be aware of the quality of the thoughts you choose to inject with the powerful creative force of your own identifying attention.

All of this presupposes that you are actually noticing that there is thought, and then there is no-thought, sometimes called "the space between thoughts." To me it feels like space, period, in which all that seems to appear, occurs. A living, cognizant, shimmering silent aliveness, the love and grace of which can inform your choices.

In order to even become aware of this situation, it's necessary to spend some time turning inward and noticing what is happening in your mind. Imagine if you had no idea how to change the channel on a TV, or stop a nasty looping YouTube video, or even turn off a computer or a radio. It's the same thing. It's necessary to use the blessed power of your attention to turn inward and notice the workings of your own mind, on a regular basis. It requires a little bit of effort, similar to the effort required when you learned to brush your teeth every day, or eat right, or get some exercise. Same type of effort.

If you are suffering, and if your world seems dark, you have been (justifiably so, it may seem) identifying with dark, unhappy thoughts and they have attracted more thoughts like them. This has done nothing to harm or change that shimmering essence within you, but your access to it (or its healing access to you) is limited by the fact that your attention is trapped. Learning to shift those atrophied muscles of attention—to understand that you are not a victim of circumstances—can be difficult at first. It's a lot like learning to use a once paralyzed limb, or learning to overcome an addiction.

Eventually you begin to understand that whatever you give your attention to, grows. Your attention is like the sun, rain and nourishment all rolled into one. And as you withdraw your attention from something, it begins to wither. So as you turn your attention away from the thought stream, to the space between thoughts (also called the now, or the present moment, just as it is) your experience of that space grows, and the thought stream in your proximal experience quiets down and becomes less and less obtrusive. These things happen on their own, the way muscle grows when you exercise. It's just the way it is. Nothing about you has changed. You have just freed your attention from its entrapment in thought. It will drift back again and again and again, but each time you notice it, the freeing happens more and more easily until eventually it is automatic.

A few weeks ago it was really windy here and my husband and I went down to the lake to watch the waves. The light was such that the water was a particular malachite green that occurs on Lake Superior, and as the waves broke they were marbled with areas of aeration created by air trapped in the cold—shades of lighter green that appeared and dissolved. My husband called these lighter patches "footprints." Each wave was different in how it broke on the rocks—leaving a unique pattern of footprints and then subsiding into the whole.

We (we in usual terms) are the wave. A seemingly separate, frothy expression of the big "is-ness." This expression that we are is not something degraded or inferior. The wave is not something that does not exist. But it is something that, like all appearances, is temporary and does not in itself have the ability to create and sustain an identity.

Thought is a product of our experience as wave (body). All of our concepts and perceptions are the interpreting of experience from the point of view of wave. There is nothing wrong with this, but it leads to the experience of suffering when we mistakenly believe that it is somehow the body that is generating our sense of identity.

Thought belongs to the body dream—the dreaming of wave. Thoughts are a product of our attention being trapped momentarily by the wave. Believing and experiencing itself to be separate creates the sense of two-ness from which thought as an effect emerges, the way mist sprays from a breaking wave. It's a shattering and fragmenting—a spray of droplets, each a pattern in itself. Without this sense of two-ness, thought, as we experience it, does not exist.

If you believe yourself to be wave, and believe that your identity is being generated by the body, then the droplet sprays of your thoughts are tinged with the color of fear. If you understand yourself to be the lake or the ocean from which the wave emerges, your thought-spray is more an experience of temporary exultation. If you understand yourself to be the whole of being from which all ideas of ocean and wave emerge—commentary ceases.

Each day, minute to minute, we are wave, droplet, ocean, universe, nothing. Identity appears in infinite ways, always the same but always different. There is no need to try to limit the sense of "me" to one or another state. No need to try to be always one way as opposed to another way. The whole ball of wax is fine. If you find yourself suffering and wish to change that, do some inner housekeeping and look at how you are attaching to thought, and from which state of being that thought is emerging. When the dishes are dirty, we wash them. If your thoughts are giving you problems, look at them.

The looking itself is freeing. That's the miracle of attention. This is about intention, yes, the way lifting your hand to your mouth to drink some water is intention. It's about imagination the way imagining that the sensation of thirst can be quenched is about imagination.

What it is not about is any kind of permanent achievement. The idea of achievement is purely a wave-thought. You can identify wave thoughts by the fact that they have opposites. Achievement is about the wave (1.) desiring to be loved by the ocean because it has forgotten that it is the ocean, and (2.) struggling to make itself permanent (and therefore safe) as a wave (a permanent wave!), which is our sad little human adventure.

When you bring your attention fully into the present moment, your present environment, motley though it may be with all its seeming chaos and smells and uncertainty, the crumbs in your keyboard and fact that you need a haircut, the kids and all their problems and the whole money thing... when you bring yourself fully here and just allow the litany of thought to quiet down, slow way down... it becomes possible to see that what you have been chasing, be it awakening or enlightenment or wealth or love, is illusory, and that the chase itself is not only the suffering you have been experiencing, but the very thing that has been keeping these qualities from your life.

Stopping—turning one's mental back on the chase, the seeking, the hoping for something other than this—requires a certain kind of self-respect. We are mortally afraid to say "this is good enough, this is it" because we fear that by saying so, by resting right here and appreciating this, we will cut off our chances of ever getting anything else—and ultimately, at our core, of ever being reunited with what Is, with God, with Truth, or however you wish to put it.

The secret is that the entire problem lies in our resistance to this "is." We want some other "is." Truth is never found anywhere other than right here and right now. And it is this we refuse to accept. Yet without this fundamental acceptance, this fundamental relinquishing of judgment—right now, and only right now—there is no hope of noticing that wherever you put your foot is sacred ground.

It is the resistance that blocks the awareness. Yet even saying that, it seems like I'm talking about something special that you need to do, in order to get something special that is other than this, right here and right now. That's an unavoidable consequence of language.

The chase, the resistance, the argument, the judgment, the concept, the idea—it's all occurring at one level—all occurring in thought. It's all thought. There is no solution at the level of thought.

When you face this conundrum, you notice that all seeking is a function of the thought-self, and its continual, unreliable, self-contradictory concepts. That's where the self-respect comes it. That's when your grasping hands begin to open and their emptiness is felt to be the essential gift that it is.