Life is Nothing Personal:

The View from the Soul

Universal Truth...Yeah, Right!

Isn't this an amazing place to live? So rich and full is this world! Imagine the creative genius necessary to think up such complexity and beauty. Look at the world outside your windows. Every cubic centimetre of space is teeming with stuff, the stuff of life. This is all so large and so complex. The thought that you have created this vast panorama, physical, emotional and mental, is frankly pretty hard to swallow isn't it? How large would you have to be to create such a thing? Heck, you don't even have the slightest notion of how this world goes together, what it really means or how it works. How can you imagine having created it all in the first place?

Perhaps, though, you can imagine it. Doesn't the world you experience in your sleep, dreaming, hold an incredible degree of complexity too? That certainly feels more like your creation than like an independent, objective universe. It changes constantly and while it seems genuine while you are dreaming it, it quickly fades into nothingness upon waking. The world outside your self, though, seems more concrete, more stable. When things change, they seem to do so more slowly and according to reasonable patterns. They seem to. Except when they don t. We remind you that shift happens!

We spoke in "Metaphors" about the vision that creation is already fully formed. Infinity holds all that was, is and will be within its folds. As you experience each moment moving into the next, you are not so much responding to it or creating it as you are choosing what to experience next. You choose from the infinite varieties of possibilities already available, all of the choices that an infinite universe can hold. You are so convinced of your limitations, your ignorance, that to conceive of participating consciously in this choosing seems flatly impossible. To believe otherwise would require you to genuinely accept your own divinity. Still, you are creating a universe to occupy that is shaped by your beliefs about reality. If you believe your world to be an objective fact that you must deal with on its terms and not as you would have it, so it shall be. If you believe your world to be an idea construct that you have created and projected outwards from your soul and then thrust yourself into with your growing consciousness, a world that has grown more complex as your awareness has developed, thus shall it be.

Look closely at an object in front of you. Any object will do. As you look at it, you can still see parts of your body and many other objects in your visual field. Can you see just who is seeing these things? Go now and peer into a mirror. Focus right in on your eyes. Who is seeing those eyes? Are the eyes seeing themselves? Is that who YOU are? Who is feeling your body? The sensations that fill your awareness whenever you turn your attention to them, who feels them? Where is your experience of life taking place? Let yourself drift into a meditative state while you ponder these things. Actively search for where you are. For just a moment, send your mind to another room to look around. Try not to project your memory of that room onto what you perceive there. Can you imagine that the portion of you that experiences life is purely a function of biology in an objective concrete world? Does not the part of you that is experiencing this very moment seem larger and more complex than a simple physiological function? Play with this awareness. Conjure scenes in your imagination and try to experience them as being as real as your daily life experience. Allow the spectrum of emotions and thoughts to be included you might an encounter with the "real" world. Those feelings and thoughts are as independently real as the chair you sit upon and yet, they are not the you that is experiencing them, are they?

This portion of you that experiences this moment is to become the central focus of your existence. That is what your movement into growth is all about. The things, people and circumstances that you perceive outside your self are no longer the central focus of your attention. You are in this space with these words because your focus is turning upon its self, your self. You still forget often that here is where you live, not "out there." You still treat the manifestations "out there" as more real than you are. This is changing, though. You are beginning to realize that you who experiences life, life in your body, heart and mind, within the world outside your self, you are what is real. All else is being created from spirit like holograms are created from light. Your choice in each moment of what to experience determines which manifestations you call into your experiential self. Let go of the idea of a limited permanent reality and look to the part of you that experiences life while it experiences life. You will find that such widening of your awareness is very possible. You can feel the chair beneath you AND attend to the you which is feeling the chair at the same time. Consider that it is the you feeling the chair that creates the chair by feeling it. It is the you seeing the glorious sunset that creates the sunset. It is the you surrounded by people that creates the perception of people surrounding you.

Our point as it has always been, is that it is awareness that creates reality. Reality is a perception, multidimensional in nature, not a concrete objective fact. It is not some objective superhuman awareness that created all of this and plunked you down in the middle of it to flounder helplessly. It is awareness, you, that creates all this in this very moment. In order to find within yourself the source of all this creative power, the awareness that you are, look now to the part of you that hides in plain sight. The part of you that experiences is at once the most familiar part of you and the most ignored. You only occasionally stop interacting with the world outside of you to ask, "Who am I?" To honour this portion of your self has been almost forbidden by all who have authority in your life. How easily and how often do you offer yourself fully experienced pleasure? How often do you let go of the world outside of yourself and fully experience being you? As we discussed in the very beginning of this writing, only in genuine silence is the real you available to be experienced fully.

Try a little experiment with us. Walk around for a while and hold your attention on your experiential self instead of what it is experiencing. Go looking for you. Instead of feeling the air on your skin, seek out the source of awareness of the air on your skin. Instead of thoughtlessly experiencing your senses, go after the awareness that is experiencing them. You are large enough to hold both at once. You can manage the mundane while focused on the sublime. You have lived the mundane all of your life.

It is pretty much automatic now. Expand yourself into who is having the experience of your life. Don't expect to find a location or a shape or anything akin to physical attributes. You will have to feel your way there, more an emotional approach than a physical one. Immerse yourself in this focus for a while. The physical world will take care of itself for the time being. Become familiar with the feel of this focus. It is more subtle than your usual consciousness. It is not beyond your reach though. It is here that we shall work to create the reality of your choosing. Leaning this terrain will have vast practical uses. Go now! Go do this practice for a while before reading further.

Not so easy is it? We thank you for your effort. We assure you as well that the effort will have many rewards. Practice as often as you can remember to. This is a most effective way to reach out to your own soul and discover your true identity. Much of what follows will be predicated on establishing this working relationship with who you really are. You have seen how very compelling your sensory input can be. It almost blots out your awareness of your own self. You will find the same to be true of your thought and feeling experiences as well. You simply have not been taught to look for your self amidst the input from your senses. You have been taught in many ways that your self is less important than the world around you. That can be hard conditioning to overcome.

We offer you now a vision of reality which you can only grasp from the perspective of that portion of your psyche that experiences life. It is from there that your projection onto the fabric of the universe takes place. That projection might be formulated and influenced by other, more subtle aspects of the self, but the actual projection comes from the experiential self. This is closer to the you that you identify with so we start here. Mostly unknown to you, you actually experience reality before your senses are touched by it. The cause and effect are not separated in time as you suppose. You have merely insisted that they be so because accepting true creative responsibility is deeply frightening. The experiential self you now seek engages itself in conversation most concrete. It creates life, not simply reacting to it. It chooses what to experience out of the infinite possibilities and presents those choices to your conscious self. You then perceive what appears to be sensory data about a solid world. If you become aware of the more subtle impulses of the creative self, you will catch this process in action more and more. You will get to observe the choice being made as the image is perceive. By learning to be a conscious participant in this process of choice, you will develop a much closer relationship to your experiential, creative self.

As per usual, there is a two pronged approach to this work. The passive, receptive approach is to observe your self carefully and often as you experience life. Learn to hold both awarenesses at once as you think, feel and sense. It is like being behind yourself, watching, as you go through life. It is also incredibly refreshing, taking much of the angst out of circumstances that once were sources of large sweeping emotion. This process uses the same skills that you need in meditation. You have learned much about allowing experience to take place while you dispassionately observe. You have learned to go quiet inside and suspend judgement. Apply these lessons while you connect with your experiential self. Observe your own inner workings in action. Expand your conscious awareness by including this perspective more and more often until it becomes "normal." One of the most challenging aspects of the passive side of the coin is that of accepting responsibility. What you perceive of your world in each moment is precisely what you want to perceive. Often, what you want is so fraught with conflicting unconscious motives that your world seems pretty much divorced from what you consciously think that you want. Make the leap to accepting that you created what is anyway. Take on the power to change it if you will. This leap is a moment by moment exercise and it needs practice for it to become automatic. It eventually does become your norm. Finally, an open and receptive mind is needed to make room for a new approach to reality. Suspend your disbelief for a while. Consider the possibility that this empowering idea might have merit. You don't need to swallow it whole. Simply, be open to explore the potential of a reality which you can shape and expand and change to suit your deepest desires.

The active side of the coin is very much like the skills you have learned in meditation as well. You have learned how to insert your conscious self into the flow of thought and feeling in meditation by asking questions, listening to the answers and bringing back the memory of your experience without disrupting the motion of the experience itself. To insert yourself into the flow of the experiential self, becoming a conscious participant in creating your reality, is every bit as joyful and exciting as the "mystical" experiences you can touch in meditation. It is much the same process. We have some hints to share on this learning process as it is a more surface activity than the passive side.

First, just as in learning to participate and direct, in part, your meditation experience, believing that you can do so is crucial to the effort. We have offered a description of reality which can be seen to place just such power into your own hands. You create your own reality. You have heard this hundreds of times by now. Perhaps you have not heard how as of yet but you are familiar with the idea. For most it seems, the major barrier to accepting such an insight wholly is the seeming requirement of accepting responsibility for one's own experience. That is an awesome consideration. It implies power beyond measure. Can being human really be so superhuman? Of course, if this is true of all humans, it is not so extraordinary is it? We suggest that it is merely an unconscious mechanism that functions at a more subtle level of your being than you normally reach out to or touch. If you begin to look at your life as if you had, indeed, created it in its entirety, you will find plenty of evidence to substantiate this opinion.

Imagine for a moment that the God you were raised to believe in is a purely loving and omnipotent God. Imagine what love from such a God might be like. Would not an all loving and all powerful God not joyfully grant you all that you ask for? Would not your every desire be immediately bestowed upon you if God were such a God? Consider how incredibly conflicted your desires really are. If you look honestly at your life, might you not conclude that you have precisely what you have asked for? Are not the conflicts in your beliefs about life and how you fit into life not displayed with uncanny accuracy in your present state of being? Does not your desire do battle consistently with your doubt about how much of what you desire you really deserve? Is it not reasonable to believe that God has granted you evidence for both beliefs even though they conflict so deeply. You want love but you doubt that you are lovable. You want wealth but you believe you must earn wealth and that you have not done. You want to know who you really are but you have much fear about expressing your self that you might be rejected by the world. As long as you hold a belief that you are somehow not enough to be loved or to be wealthy or to know your spiritual self, how can you but experience both the desire to be loved or wealthy or wise mixed with experiences of their opposite attributes? If you can adopt the belief that God so loves you that He/She/It will grant your every desire to the extent that you desire it, you can change your life right now. The power to decide, to choose who to be, what to live out, is yours in the blinking of an eye. And so, the responsibility is yours. No one else is to blame for the state of your life right now, not even God. Each precious moment of experience has been your choice all along. Perhaps you have not chosen in full wisdom but then, you have not chosen in full knowledge of the potential you carry as a being. That is no longer true. From this point on, you can choose your experience.

The next step in learning to consciously participate in the creation of your life experience is to create within yourself the belief that you deserve to experience what you want to experience. This is not as easy as it might sound. You will be practising this every step of the way from now on. Adopting these two beliefs, that you can consciously create your reality and that you deserve the right to choose what you create, well, these are the epitome of self-empowerment. We ask that you seriously consider what lies beneath any arguments that you pose against these two beliefs. Might there not be fear at the root of your objections? Look at those fears closely. Don't look away and assume they are correct. They are fears and, as such, they cannot describe a universe built upon the body of an all loving and all powerful God. Choose as freely as you can between your fears and your power. There are many layers for you to explore while you learn how to create what you want. You will confront fear many times as you go. Build upon your successes and the universe in all of its infinite diversity will begin to open up to you.

Step three in this creation process, building upon the first two steps, is to choose what to create. What are your dreams? Go back to the conversation about your primal intent that we discussed in chapter two. Your specific desires in the moment all spring from your most primal desire. Even the fears which seem to move you farther away from your dreams spring from this fundamental layer of desire. To select the dreams which would most fulfill you when they are realized, measure them against your primal desire. What dreams expand most readily and most fully toward the vastness of your primal wish? What activity in the immediate moment brings you most fully and swiftly towards that desire fulfilled?

We refer here to our friend once more. In our work with him, he has come to embrace that what he wants more than anything is to be aware, to know what is going on, who he is and how he fits into the scheme of things. His primal intent, then, is to be consciously aware of All That Is. That is the desire that drives his life at all levels of his being. As we have suggested, the primal desire comes from a most universal portion of the self. All of the details of his life experience then have sprung from this primal wish. Layer upon layer of internal conversation, replete with conflicting beliefs, have fleshed out his experience of fulfilling that desire. He has chosen how, when and how much to fulfill that desire. As he becomes more of a conscious participant in this process, which is in itself a fulfilment of that desire, his awareness of self, conflicts and all, grows. This writing is a fine example of his conscious choice to fulfill that primal intent. The act of writing our words springs from his desire to know and to open himself to whatever might offer that knowing to him. By offering these writings for sale, he makes a motion to support the continued exploration which his contact with us affords him. He experiences these writings as a motive force for his own growth. We offer ideas which push him into a larger universe and a larger definition of himself. This is precisely the reality he wishes to experience and so...

As you go about choosing the reality you want to experience, the more you align your choices with your primal intent, however you wish to phrase it, the faster will be the process of fulfilment. The resources of your whole self become available to you and your reality will change most readily. The only impediment is your paralysing fear. Remember that fear too is part of the wholeness of you and do not fight it. Embrace the fear, own it and then move through it. Fighting the fears that come to the surface while you do this work will only bind them to you more closely and they will loom much larger as a result.

Make a list of whatever you dream for yourself. Right now. It is kind of like a Christmas wish list. You have an entire universe of possibilities to choose from so don't hold back. Don't censor yourself in any way. Those daydreams that occupy you in quiet moments, when you are driving or sitting alone and waiting for something are to be included here. Often they are the most real of our wishes. The wishes you never share, too, can be written down here. Nothing is impossible or unavailable to you. Write it down. You will edit and refine later. Write your list by free association, whatever comes to you that you want to experience. There are so many ways to experience life that you cannot assume anything to be out of reach. Write it down!

Once you have made your list (and it might well be a loooooong list) you can begin to look for patterns in the various attributes of your dreams. Start to lump together (synthesize) the desires that are connected. If, for instance, you desire to be successful in business and elsewhere on your list you wish to be philanthropic, these are connected through wealth. Group them together under that heading on a separate piece of paper and go back to the original list. Perhaps another category of dreams fits into wealth. When you find it, add it to your second page under wealth also. Perhaps success in business means to you providing a socially meaningful service. Elsewhere you might have written a desire to uplift others, your family or humanity in general. You might bring these together and even add them under the heading of wealth. You may see that your desire for wealth is coming from your desire to nurture those around you and that wealth is a tool for fulfilling that desire. Perhaps your desire is merely for wealth and comfort and luxury. That is OK too. The point is to lump like things together until you reach a more universal feeling. Perhaps you have a desire for a new intimate relationship and later in your list you write down a wish for better relations with family or friends. These too are connected and you can put them together as well.

As you draw the seemingly disparate items on your list together into categories of feeling, wealth, love, service and so on, you may more easily see that they are feelings closely associated to your primal intent in life. The most basic desire that runs its threads through every fibre of your life, shines through each of your desires. If you have struggled to put words to that desire until now, you maybe able to use this listing process to grasp its common denominator. Take your time with this refining. There is no rush. Have an open mind and look for how these individual wishes connect to who you are. If you have a few items about love on your list and a seemingly unconnected item or two about money, look at what having money means to you. Perhaps its central value in your life is to bolster a sense of security in your mind. Can you see how feeling secure can be connected to your desire for love and intimacy? In some cases, of course, the desire for money is impressed by your culture. It is connected at a deep feeling level to primal intents but your culture has turned your attention there to offer such appeasement to your fears as a sense of security. While all of your desires in life spring originally from your primal intent, some will be manufactured from your fear of not attaining what you want most dearly. The fear of not being safe can be a significant barrier to being open to loving and being loved. If you work steadily at opening yourself to love, your security issues will be taken care of as a matter of course. Remember then, these issues, like all issues, are internal issues. Your experience of life is about you. It is not about the world outside of you. You have created that. Security comes from believing in yourself. When you trust in your own creativity then you know that you are safe as you always have been.

Now, this process will take practice, like all valuable activities. We suggest that you take it very seriously, especially at first. Invest the time and attention to narrow down your desires to their most basic elements. As you begin to translate your specific dreams into feelings of desire and fulfilment, you will find the details to be less important. In fact, the details can impede your achievement in this work. As you progress toward making your dreams come true, you can go back to the start and pick more specific aspects of your dreams to address and refine. At first, though, use broad strokes to find more immediate success. Looking for love, for example, is easier than looking for a lover. Opening to intimacy with everyone in your life will be met with more success than looking for Ms or Mr Right to fulfill your desire for intimacy.

Before we move on to the next step, we will refer back to step one again to remind you that the most important attribute you can bring to this effort is your belief that you CAN make your dreams come true. If you do not believe it possible, you will not even really try. A half-hearted effort will, in fact, assure you of failure and reinforce your belief that you cannot do it. That, of course, is your prerogative. We suggest merely that you be conscious of your true motives as you go along. Hold steadfast to the belief that it is possible, just possible, and you will begin to see evidence to substantiate that belief. If you only believe it theoretically possible (but not likely for you personally) than you will see small holes in the fabric of your perceived reality that maybe this idea can fit into. If you believe that it IS possible and that you may just qualify for the rewards, you will find more than holes. You will see examples, small ones at first, that strongly suggest you believe it even more strongly. Your confidence will build with every success, if you invest yourself with your belief. Suspend your disbelief in this idea as a beginning. Take it as a scientific experiment and just see what begins to surface. You have little to lose.

The fourth step in the program is to begin to imagine how you would feel if you, in fact, succeed in realizing one of your dreams. So, pick one. We suggest, again, a broad stroke or general category such as love or abundance or awareness etc. Within such categories there is much room for success and learning. You will be looking for how much of what you want that you already have. This is a vital ingredient in your success. Once you have chosen a dream to focus upon, remind yourself that you do, indeed, have a right to have that dream come true. You will need to do this loudly and often as you go along. You may be amazed at how much resistance you will catch yourself throwing up in your path. All of the feelings which your fear of not getting what you want inspires will bubble up to the surface of your consciousness as you work to conjure the feeling of success. Take these fears as they come. Remember that this is your right as a human being, creator of your universe. Your confidence will grow with practice.

Conjuring feelings is not as difficult as it might seem. You have been doing this all of your life. Through the filters of your thoughts and beliefs, you have chosen how to interpret and respond to the world around you. You have decided how to feel at every turn. Some responses have become reflexive and automatic, like saying "Awwwwwww!" when you see an infant asleep in its cradle. Still, your response is a decision. By choosing new criteria upon which to base your decisions about how to respond to life, you make a choice to feel differently. Making your dreams come true is a very new criteria. No more blaming any manifestation outside of yourself, not other people, situations, the weather or even God. You are choosing to be responsible (and good for you!). This is where the work you did to discover your experiential self comes into play sharply. You will be focusing your attention upon your feelings as you explore the content of your dream. Use the details you imagine to inspire the feelings of those details achieved. Keep referring back to your internal experience of these feelings. Nothing outside of yourself is important compared to how you feel in the moment. From that experience, the rest of life springs forth.

If you have dreamed of true love, skip right over all of the criteria you have developed for the ideal partner. Zoom right in on how loving and being truly loved would feel to you. Imagine looking into another's eyes and having them say those words you have fantasized hearing. Feel your heart expand. Feel your fears of being unloved and alone forever begin to wash away. Feel the desire to give of yourself to another well up inside you to the point of exploding outwards. Feel the absolute safety of being held in their loving arms. Use you own list of circumstances to conjure more feeling. Let go of the details as your ability to recall these feelings grows. Recognize that with these feelings filling your heart, your dream is true right now. All that you need do is learn to feel this way all of the time.

If, perhaps, you chose wealth as your dream, you would do much the same by imagining yourself wealthy beyond measure. Imagine yourself feeling such wealth in the deepest part of you. Without question or disbelief, explore that feeling. Let your imagination wander through any and all circumstances from the perspective of being boundlessly wealthy. Everything you ever wanted to own is within your grasp. Feel that abundance totally. Don't let yourself argue with the feeling. Don't entertain the "Yeah, but's!" Focus tightly on the feeling of wealth and commit it to memory. Recall the feeling often. Look at the world around you from within that feeling. Chances are that up until now you have, instead, looked at that feeling from the world around you. As you have looked at being wealthy from outside the feeling because you have held the feeling of not being wealthy. Now, hold the feeling of wealth and look about you. Living within that feeling, your dream has come true.

So, now you say, "Yeah, but!" You have always thought that wealth was about money and material goods. You have always thought that love and loving was about other people. Surprise! Wealth, love, growth, knowledge, everything in fact, is all about YOU. Remember again our work with the Experiential self? You are not to be measured by your body or by things or people outside of yourself. You are not even measured by God. You are that which experiences life. Feelings that you experience which are inspired by your own conscious choice are no different, lesser or greater, than feelings that you experience which are inspired by people, circumstances or God. It is you who experiences and you who chooses what to experience. Those things outside yourself are created by you anyway. The crucial matter is the degree of emotional (energetic) investment you have made in those feelings. You have believed that the world outside of you is more real than your imaginative world. Therefore, you have allowed yourself to feel your response to the world outside yourself more fully. If you choose to grant your feelings, which are chosen by you consciously or not, to be as real as your knee-jerk, unconscious reactions to your interpretations and perceptions of the world outside you, you can become a conscious participant in creating your reality. Your feelings are real! They are as real as any other aspect of your experience, no matter how they are generated. More importantly, they are very creative. Your emotional investment of energy shapes your perception of the world around you and thus shapes your reality.

As you follow this exercise by filling your awareness with how you most dearly want to feel, begin step five by looking at the world from within that feeling. Begin looking for circumstances in your life that illustrate your desire fulfilled. Look for the situations and events that justify feeling as you do. Look for every example you can find of how much you love and are loved in your life right now. You will be amazed at how much of what you have wanted is already yours. You have wanted it, in spite of your conflicting feelings of self-doubt or fear, for a long time. It has already been granted to you as much as your conflicts will allow. Looked at from the perspective of wanting, your life will surely seem empty of what you want. Looking at life from the perspective of having what you want, you will find many examples of it, in the small things as well as in large ways. Throw yourself even more into those examples as you find them. As you encounter the people that you love, open yourself to loving them even more. That is the feeling you want, isn't it? When you are with someone who loves you, open yourself to feeling their love as much as possible. Bask in it and remind yourself that you deserve it. There will be fear coming up to warn you of the danger of being vulnerable. The more you trust the more trustworthy the world becomes.

The principles are the same if you choose wealth as your dream. Look for every example of how wealthy you already are. Consider how easily you live, how much you have, how secure you are. Notice every penny that comes your way and bask in the feeling of abundance. You have more than you need right now. Let go of the demands that wealth come in some particular form. You do not have to get a raise in pay or a new job or hit the lottery to feel wealthy. You can feel wealthy by choice. You can feel wealthy when a friend gives you a free meal or a nice gift. You can feel wealthy when you find a chunk of free time to play that you had not anticipated. You can feel wealthy when you discover that you CAN afford to buy something that you want or need. Indeed, with every penny you spend, choose to feel wealthy to be spending it instead of impoverished by reducing your cash in hand. Look for your opportunities to feel how you want to feel. Throw yourself into that feeling. Let go of your prerequisites and give life the chance to fulfill your feelings. Acknowledge that in your heart you have realized your dreams.

As we have said before, the world you perceive "out there," is a world built upon the foundation of your beliefs. What you believe the world is, is what you see. If you believe you must earn your wealth in the world, then you will not see the abundance around you that is just there for the taking. If you believe that love must be bought or earned, then you will not see how much love is there for you just because you are you. If you believe that you are at the mercy of a world that is out of your control, you will see only that you have little or no control. Any of these beliefs can be changed and so doing, the world will change. The choice, as always, is yours.

Stage six is where you foster an attitude of gratitude. Nothing can crystallize your belief that you have something in your life like gratitude can. The two attitudes feed one another and both grow. This is like companion planting in your garden. Putting beans and corn together in the same space, one produces what the other needs to grow and vice versa. Both, then, grow better. Gratitude expands whatever it touches. It inspires more emotional investment. It takes so little to foster such an attitude as well. Simply appreciate what you have right now. Feel it fully in the moment. Take none of it for granted. Accept your feelings as genuine and thoroughly real. Feel sincerely thankful for how good life is in the moment, every moment. This act alone will expand your life and bring you careening toward fulfilment.

Don't underestimate how important this stage is or how challenging it may prove to be. Fully feeling what is right now is no small task. What if what is right now is painful? What if you don't like what is? Embrace it! Open yourself to it and accept it as perfect, just as it is. That doesn't mean you have to hold onto it. In fact, your attempts to hold pain at arm's length have resulted in holding on to it much longer and more painfully than necessary. By embracing your experience, feeling it fully, you can then release it and go on to the next moment's experience. Push it away and it stays there, at the edges of your awareness, for as long as you hold it away. That can be a lifetime. Yuck!

The seventh stage happens all by itself. Only you can prevent it from automatically creating your feelings fulfilled. You can, in fact, stand as a barrier to all the rest of the process and create total failure. Simply refuse to believe it possible to make your dreams come true. Simple as that! There is no blame implied, either. Such a choice is perfectly valid. We only offer insight if you choose to accept it. You have every right to deny yourself what you really want. All of your reasons to do so will come up for your exploration throughout this process. You can give in to any and all of them if you choose. The point is that you choose. Deciding yourself a victim of reality is a choice after all. Deciding not to do any of this work is a choice as well. Deciding that you do not deserve to be happy or wealthy, loved or spiritually blessed is your right as a human being. It is not obligatory. It is a choice.

We have described before that the world outside of your experiential self, be it your physical body, your immediate life circumstances or the planet you perceive yourself living upon and read about in the newspapers, formed itself around the patterns you have selected with your thoughts and feelings and beliefs. You choose what to perceive. In fact, the cells of your body could merrily disperse into the cosmos if not for your conviction that they align to the idea of you, your belief in your body as an integrated whole through which you life. Because you have chosen a new pattern of thought, feeling and belief through this exercise, your perceptions of the world have changed. Therefore, the world, your world, has changed. It will continue to change as fast as your beliefs in its ability to change become transformed. You have certain fears about change that come into play here and attempt to hold your world stable. Take credit for these fears, own them and accept that they will slow the process of manifesting your dreams. To have your world transform in a twinkling of an eye would be pretty terrifying after all. Wouldn't it? So, expect it to unfold in its own time. That time is only restricted by your choice to speed it up or slow it down. That choice is made on an unconscious level most of the time. You may decide to be a more conscious participant in that as well eventually.

Expect, as well, that change will unfold in its own way. You cannot predict how your staunchly held feelings will manifest themselves in your life. It is enough to know and believe that they will. Your life has always appeared consistent with your true feelings about yourself. Those feelings that you have focused most strongly upon have always been reinforced by your life experience. There is no reason to assume that it will be different than that now. Remember, you do deserve to have what you most dearly want. Just be receptive to being surprised by what shape your desires will take. As new examples of your dreams fulfilled appear before you, go back over the steps. Inflate your feelings of fulfilment by really feeling them and bolster them with gratitude. When the "Yeah, but's!" and the "I can'ts" pop up, point out these manifestations as proof, to yourself, that the process is working. Fight for the right to be happy and fulfilled. The only opponent you have in this fight is yourself. What you are fighting is a lifetime of conditioning that has taught you who to believe that you are. That conditioning is a box which you no longer fit inside. You are tearing that box apart at the seams like a shirt two sizes too small. You are growing!

This entire work is built upon a view of the world that we have offered to you and have attempted to describe its implications to you. We have not done so because this view is THE TRUTH, the only truth. The TRUTH, as we have discussed, is wholeness. As such, it cannot be manifested into thoughts or feelings or three dimensional terms. We have offered this view of reality because it is happy making stuff. It is a unifying perspective that affords the reasonable possibility of enlightenment and joy. Building upon this cosmology can result in all of your most cherished goals, no matter how lofty they may be, being realized in your lifetime. It is certainly not the only way to define existence. Look around you and you will see the results of myriad definitions in action. Each portion of creation embodies a unique perspective on reality. The uniqueness is obvious from the unduplicated forms of each individual manifestation. No two physical expressions, persons or things, are identical to each other. Each defines itself uniquely. Conversation will prove to you that people differ wildly in how they perceive reality. Each person's truth is as valid as every other person's truth. Each truth creates a universe.

Infinity is a very large place. There is room aplenty for every imaginable way of perceiving reality to create its own universe. Every spark of awareness in all of creation expands infinitely. This is the sum total of universal truth. Everything else is too complex to be anything other than relative and unique. You are made of this primordial, expanding awareness and so you do have access to its universal beingness, its oneness of awareness. It is what lies beneath and powers your individuality. Your pathway to that oneness of being is strictly your own. No one else's path will be identical to yours. Eventually, you will give up looking, even, for similarities as your trust in your whole self grows. In the meanwhile, you go from one definition of reality to another, stretching and expanding and growing into your wholeness. Ours, now, is just another in that expanding cycle of definitions. As you grow into your wholeness, you will make room for even more enlarged philosophies. You can, however, let go of your quest for Universal Truth. Your personal, individual truth is infinitely large too. It will bring you back into oneness just fine.

Your definitions of reality into which you invest your beingness create the reality that you experience. That means that every item of your world, its people as well as its seemingly solid and independent matter, is create by you. How you assemble your perception is unique to you and speaks to your internal world. There is room in infinity for all of these people and things that you perceive, to have their own reality, their own universes of experience. That does not mean that what you perceive of them is what or who they "really" are. You can let that go too. Every perception that you experience is of your vast and spacious self. No person or object exists in your world from moment to moment save that you conjure them and place them there. Your conjuring them out of the vast imagination of your wholeness gives them independent existence. They, in turn, create an infinite universe of their own. You are that powerful as a soul. Now, other people may just be independent spiritual constructs just like you. What you experience of them, however, is your creation and that too has independent and infinitely expanding reality.

Following this definition into your life, you can see that seeking validation for your ideas about reality from the people and things in a world that you have created yourself is kind of hollow and perhaps a waste of effort. Moving beyond your fear and distrust of your own soul and into the power of creation that is wholly yours will free you from such concerns. The intentions of others and the meanings of their actions are entirely what you decide them to be. If your conscious mind decides that someone intends A by their behaviour and your wholeness decides it means B, well, you will have a merry time sorting this out. This describes much of your experience until now. The more willing your are to accept the agenda of your soul, the easier your life becomes. Every moment of unconditional acceptance of any aspect of your life offers so much love and trust to the whole of your self. Because there is nothing that you experience outside of your self, all experience is valid. This is YOUR universe, yours alone and you get to make up the rules. Play with it and make up the rules that you like, that fulfill your dreams and lead you to the awareness of who you really are.

Using the rules that we suggest will not assure you of reaching all of your goals. That is entirely up to you. Your will is crucial to every moment of your existence. We simply offer you reason to believe you can reach all of your goals. Looking at your life from the perspective of your whole being, your soul, it is a much different experience then going from moment to moment as you do now. This perspective is akin in some ways to the idea of a life review after your death. In that concept, you explore your life's experience from the perspective of the wholeness of it. Your soul embraces the wholeness of your life in each moment that you experience as, isolated and linear, individual points of existence. Your soul knows the past and future of each moment as it expands infinitely. Your soul experiences each of the infinitely expanding alternatives of you. All of your most cherished goals are already experienced in full by your soul. Your success as a human being is guaranteed. You have already succeeded beyond your wildest imaginings. Your soul experiences the infinite wholeness of you even while you are focused on small individual bits. Your individually experienced life stream is one of an infinite number of "yous" experienced by your soul. What you think of as one of a series of lifetimes to reach some goal you have conjured, your soul knows it is this one lifetime, experienced to its fullness that completes its experience of this plane. No reincarnation necessary, just right here and right now in its fullness.

We discussed in "Metaphors" how each moment of your present expands into past and future lives. That is how you come to experience the concept of reincarnation. The problem with such a scheme is that those pasts and futures change with every change you experience in your present. Those other "lives" are stories about living that exist within you and as such, are very real. They are as real as your present but you are not required to thrust yourself into them physically. If you could release your need to hold your past stable to insulate yourself from change in your present, you would see a very different picture of the flow of time. The concept of reincarnation is a humanization of a spiritual phenomenon. Even the history of humanity that you presently believe to be stable, unchanging and true is merely a story that you use to describe your reality. Ancient Rome is no more true than stories of Atlantis save that you invest them with more belief. You can imbue these stories with a kind of solidity with your belief in them just as you do with the chair you sit upon. The stories you tell about people and the actions of people speak volumes about your state of being. The stories are entirely about you. The truth of all stories is determined solely by your belief in them. The meaning of our title, "Life is Nothing Personal," is that no story, be it physically present right now or an imaginative tale you faintly remember hearing, is the more real. Both have genuine reality. Only your belief distinguishes the one from the other.

You create your reality in its entirety in every moment. Relax your resistance to change and your reality becomes more fluid, allowing its essential spiritual nature to become more apparent. Let go of your need to see things outside your self as more real than you are willing to be and you divinity becomes obvious. Let go of measuring yourself against what appears to be outside your self, up to and including God. Your universe is entirely made of you, God stuff. It is not sitting in judgement of you in any of its parts. You may perceive it as judging you at every turn. That is a choice you make. Make another choice and take on the power as a conscious participant. There is no universal truth to measure yourself against. You get to decide what is and is not the truth. Choose a truth that fills your soul. Enjoy your reality.

1. Step #1 Foster a belief that it is possible.
   Step #2 Foster a belief that you deserve it.
   Step #3 Choose what your dreams really are.
   Step #4 Imagine the feeling of your dreams fulfilled.
   Step #5 Live your life from within that feeling.
   Step #6 Foster an Attitude of Gratitude.
   Step #7 Get out of your own way!

On to Chapter 6