Consciousness is not the power to control the material world: it is the absolute power to be free of it.

We become what we agree with and love. Therefore, we must choose to love what we wish to become. We must behave now as that which we wish to be. To reach the existence we want, we must behave the same as those entities who now enjoy that existence. Each of us has the responsibility of choosing the kind of love we wish to know, the reality in which we wish to live, the other beings with whom we wish to relate.

You will not be able to rise above your present vibration level to stay until you love the way you are now.

It's an interesting mental exercise to turn the whole game upside down: the problem is not how to free yourself from the mass level, how to get enlightened. The real question is: If you are a completely free and self-determined being, how did you lock yourself into a body to play games on the material plane? How did you get yourself and others to agree to this game? How did you get it to be compulsive? Several times when I've spaced out, I flashed: Well, if it's that easy to get out, I might as well go back and play the game. Maybe that's the ultimate temptation. And maybe no one really wants to know how easy it is, nobody wants to upset the game. We may all be playing let's pretend, hide-and-seek.

You are the sole cause of your level of existence. Your internal condition is never programmed. The experience of being forced or controlled against your will can occur only when you make yourself dense, when you contract your awareness.

Enlightenment is any experience of expanding our consciousness beyond its present limits. We could also say that perfect enlightenment is realizing that we have no limits at all, and that the entire universe is alive.

If your feelings fade after a deeply loving experience with someone (which is especially likely if you were high on marijuana or LSD at the time), you can understand it as a fading out of being in the same space now that you are both vibrating on a lower level again. When you know that, and know that the low mood can pass just as easily as it came on, then you are less likely to make big decisions and get into arguments because of it. You just relax your mind and watch it go by.

It is quite natural, in pursuing enlightenment or just in trying to be happier, to look to your everyday experiences for signs of results. Indeed, your daily life is nothing else but an expression of your spiritual condition. Your life will change as you become more loving, but not in ways that you can exactly predict. What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens. There is a good attitude to take towards any goal: It's nice if it happens, nice if it doesn't. Long before you get to where you can confidently make choices for the future, you may find that you are no longer interested in predicting much. You won't mind letting go of one beautiful experience because love will make the next one just as rewarding.

It's all right to have a good time. That's one of the most important messages of enlightenment.

You can't feel pain until you're stupid. Pain is the experience of not being able to get into the same space with others. But all you need do to get free of pain, to get un-stupid, is to be willing to be aware of anything that enters your consciousness.

Try these sayings during meditation: I surrender to this reality. I have no resistance to this reality. I am one with this reality. I surrender to the justice of our equality. I have no resistance to the justice of our equality. I am one with the justice of our equality.

Self-Improvement

The ego, the mental structure, "feels better" when it has to contend with the tension of threats to itself. We feel "high" and energetic when tested by negative possibilities: hard work, discipline, sky-diving, racing, wars, illness, fasting, asceticism, gambling, drugs, careless driving, arguing, paranoia (invented threats), contending with the devil and black magic, and so on. Of course, if the negative definition goes too far, the structure will collapse, but somehow that doesn't bother us. We love to worry about dangers to human survival. (Unless it is a real one, like the atomic bomb or germ warfare. Then the risk is "unreal," we are reluctant to think about it.)

As a normal process, we define ourselves, we find out who we are, by what we disagree with. And we identify others by what is wrong with them: we keep looking until we find some difference between "us" and "them." Virtues in others are invisible, not really interesting.

Even if you are not just testing your structure, the motive for purifying yourself--that you feel spiritually impure--will prevent any genuine gain until you learn to love the impurity you started with. Can any being seriously think that he is going to pass through the infinity of time without ever making another mistake? Quite often a flash of enlightenment will give you this message: Go back to where you started and learn to love it more.

There isn't anything "wrong" with using negative events to define your ego, as long as you do it consciously, because you want to. The only wrongness in any activity is being withdrawn from awareness of what you are doing. We can play these same silly games with a lot more pleasure when we are aware of what we are really doing. When you offer people spiritual solutions--or solutions of any kind for anything, for that matter--you are asking them to give up what makes them feel active, alive, defined-their ego structure. Be careful--it's dangerous!

Never pull your attention away from a scene impulsively because it looks ugly, unpleasant, or painful. Make a conscious decision, the words are enough, to love yourself for seeing it as revolting. If possible, keep your attention on it until it turns beautiful, or at least until you are indifferent to it. You don't have to go looking for bad scenes to test yourself, or remind yourself of all that is wrong in the world, but once a scene manifests itself in your presence, become as fully aware of it as you can. When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven.

Anything that really frightens you may contain a clue to enlightenment. It may indicate to you how deeply you are attached to structure, whether mental, physical, or social. Attachment and resistance are appearances with the same root: when you resist by pulling away your awareness, the emotion is one of fear, and the contraction is experienced as a pull like magnetism or gravity; that is, attachment.

It is a nice truth that the way that will relieve your woes on the physical plane will also take you to the highest spiritual realizations. And the way is simple: No resistance.

No matter how confused or stupid or unloving other persons may appear to us, we have no right ever to assume that their consciousness is on a lower level than ours. They may he realizing far deeper dimensions of love. The way we see them is an explicit measure of our own vibration level. The very people we now see as vulgar, unenlightened, stupid, rip-offs, insane--these people, when we learn to love them and all our feelings about them, are our tickets to paradise. And that is all we need to do--love them. We may express that love or not as we wish, in any way we wish. It doesn't even matter how we treat them. But we must see them and love them as they are now, for we cannot deny them the freedom to be what they are, just as we must love ourselves as we are now. Giving others the freedom to be stupid is one of the most important and hardest steps to take in spiritual progress. Conveniently the opportunity to take that step is all around us every day. Those of us who pretend to greater knowledge than our brothers, who report more enlightened experiences, have more to explain precisely because we know more.

A selection of reminders from the text:

• We are equal beings and the universe is our relations with each other.

• What am I doing on a level of consciousness where this is real?

• No resistance.

• Love it the way it is.

• Love as much as you can from wherever you are.

• Whether I am conscious of it or not, I am one with the cause of all that exists.

• Whether I feel it or not, I am one with all the love in the universe.

• Love is the only dimension that needs to be changed.

• Go beyond reason to love: it is safe. It is the only safety.

• All states of consciousness are available right now.

• It's always within us to relate this way.

• Enlightenment doesn't care how you get there.

• Whatever you are doing, love yourself for doing it.

• There is nothing you need to do first in order to be enlightened.

• This, too, can be experienced with a completely expanded awareness.

• I wouldn't deny this experience to the One Mind.

• What did you think it was that needed to be loved?

• When you learn to love hell, you will be in heaven.

• Thank you, brothers and sisters, for letting my consciousness be in this place.