Day 2 Welcome Back!
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Over the next few days, we're going to be taking an
interesting and rewarding journey together. You'll learn
exactly what is needed to remove all stress from your life,
and find your highest fulfillment.
OK. Let's get started. So how do we master the Art of Inner
Exploration? How do we gain all the benefits you read about
yesterday? Things like stillness, peace, contentment,
fulfillment, freedom from fear?
You've seen that everything in that list is an "inside job."
You can't go to McDonalds to get these things. No one is
going to give them to you for Christmas. No amount of
searching in the world will help you find them. Why?
Because they're all inside of you. And that's where you'll
find them.
How to do that? Well, obviously, it takes some self-
investigation. It's a process of finding out what makes you
tick. And not just on the surface, but at the uttermost,
deep levels of who you are. It means "going within" all the
way, deep, deep, deep. And seeing what's there to be seen.
Does that sound a little scary to you? I mean, who knows
what you'll find when you go there? Are we really talking
about uncovering every single aspect of ourselves, with
nothing at all remaining hidden anymore?
Yes -- that's exactly what we're talking about. Let's start
immediately. You'll probably notice something right here,
and now. Did you notice that when I mentioned "uncovering
every single aspect of your inner being," that there's some
part of you which is uncomfortable with that? That some part
of you may even be fearful about doing that?
Listen -- that is not a bad thing! That's totally natural.
And expected. Let me tell you what's so great about what
you just noticed...
Whatever you noticed... is just a part of you. There are
many parts of you. There's a part which is fearful about
all this. There's a part which is overjoyed about the
prospect of going deep within. And there's also a part of
you, which couldn't care less. As we go further into this
self- exploration, you'll find many parts of yourself; some
that you hadn't even suspected were there.
But the beauty of all this is that you have a choice. In
fact, the major discovery of self-freedom is that you always
have a choice, in every moment. You have a choice which
part of yourself you wish to focus upon, which part of you
that you wish to pay attention to.
Whenever fear or mistrust arises, you have the choice to put
your attention on that -- to choose for fear as how you're
creating your life, at this time. OR you can put your
attention on the other parts of yourself -- the ones that see
the beauty, joy and wonder of life.
The fact is -- you can choose for things like praise,
gratitude and love whenever you wish. You're not forced to
pay attention to the fearful, mistrusting, "negative"
aspects of your life -- unless, of course, you'd prefer to do
that. Freedom means you're free to do anything you want.
But if you see that you DO have a choice -- will you choose
fear -- or will you choose something else?
And that summarizes the basis of this course. First, we
talk about powerful tools you can use to see all aspects of
yourself, clearly. Some people have been known to sit
peacefully, for many hours at a time, to go within, but it
could take many years to uncover all of your inner world
that way. Some people even say it needs to take lifetimes.
But with the proper tools, with the inner searchlights, you
can get results amazingly quickly.
As that occurs, you get to express whichever aspect of
yourself that you want to pay attention to -- through the
power of your choice. Then as you choose more and more of
stillness and peace, you get to open up more and more of
yourself. Until the day you find -- there's no more to fear,
there's no more problems, -- there's nothing but the freedom
of utter fulfillment and love.
And once again, I'll repeat -- this can be as difficult or as
easy as you wish -- it's your choice!
So why don't you experience all of the benefits we described
yesterday, right now? These things are your birthright!
When you were born, you came into the world, completely free
and innocent, totally peaceful and happy. You can see that
is obvious, whenever you hold a new-born child. So what has
happened in the years since then so that you don't
experience complete joy and freedom, in every minute of
every day, of your life?
There's a very good reason for that! And once you know the
reason, you can choose again. You can stop being a "victim"
of your life, and start being the "creator" of your life.
Let's take a look at what has happened in the years since
you were born...
We come into life innocently. As children, we live
completely in the present moment. There's no regret about
what happened yesterday; there's no worry about what may
happen tomorrow. And perhaps most important -- a baby has no
habits, no ingrained way of looking at things. A baby just
experiences things as they happen with no preconceived
ideas.
Because the baby doesn't attempt to live in the past or the
future, the power of a baby's mind is awesome. Consider how
quickly infants master a complex language. Adults generally
can't learn that quickly. Why?
Because an adult's mind is absorbed in so many habitual and
preconceived ideas about "how the world must be." These
beliefs and judgements keep the mind running in thousands
and thousands of thoughts every hour and every day. Let's
just take a moment here for a little reflection. Ask
yourself these questions:
* Is there a part of you (or a lot of you) that wonders
what will happen to you tomorrow, next week, next year,
ten years from now?
* Is there a part of you that regrets some behavior you
did in the past, and judges it as unacceptable?
* Is there a part of you which is so much absorbed in
some other moment that you're not really appreciating
what is happening in this moment?
This tendency to live in "some other moment" is a habit of
the mind. We're constantly evaluating what happened in the
past and what may happen in the future. These evaluations
are based upon ingrained beliefs and judgements we've picked
up in the course of our life.
It's important to know where all these beliefs and
judgements came from. Because once knowing *that*, then we
can choose for something different. We can live a life free
of all erroneous beliefs and preconceived judgements.
Where did all these beliefs and judgements come from?
Well, one source is our parents. As infants, we only desired
love. But perhaps our parents weren't ideal and couldn't
give us all the love we needed. Maybe our father had a bad
day and shouted at us for leaving a toy in his way.
Or maybe our mother was just too tired to be completely
loving. Thus, we develop a little way of thinking that says,
"I'm not worthy of love." This becomes a habitual thought
and continues to operate inside of us on a very deep, quiet
level.
Even when we're no longer children, this thought pattern
still affects us. We may have a tough time with
relationships because there's this little part of us (that
we may be completely unaware of) that's saying, "Hey, you
don't deserve this loving relationship."
We can pick up these habitual thoughts (which we'll call
"grooves" like the grooves in a record) from many different
sources, not just our parents. I had a lot of brothers and
sisters; naturally, there was competition and I always
seemed to come out on the short end of the stick, feeling
criticized and unappreciated. Thus, I picked up a groove
that operated in me for many years. I took everything very
personally -- like the whole world was out to criticize me.
Fortunately, we do not have to live with these grooves
forever. There IS a way to erase the grooves. We'll get to
that in a little while. But first let's consider what
happens when we go to school. We learn to compete, not to
create. We learn that we don't do math as well as Billy, so
we stop doing math. We put every bit of our creative energy
into a drawing and we're told, "Ewww, how ugly!"
Part of us totally believes everything we're told; most of
us stop drawing by the age of six. What if Monet or Picasso
had been told, "That's a crummy picture!" and what if they
believed it? The point is that these stresses picked up so
innocently through our experiences freeze our lives into a
strict form. We make a definition (or identity) of our life,
based on things that happen to us, things that seem beyond
our control.
And many of our grooves (or internal programming) come from
the society we live in. We all have cultural conditioning;
we're all part of the collective consciousness of our
society. Now, some of these beliefs are useful; and some are
not. Most of us don't need to know how to climb a coconut
tree for food. Instead, we're taught how to shop at the
supermarket. But if we were born in the tropics, our
society's knowledge would be very different. A jungle
dweller would not survive very well on the Interstate. We
probably wouldn't survive very long in the jungle.
continued...