by sublimity-001-main | Apr 8, 2024 | 2024, Healing, Purpose, Spiritual Growth
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There’s so many angles that I can come at this from, but really meditation carries a lot of baggage for a lot of people, and it’s also something that more and more is becoming as normal as going to the gym. It used to be a time when you had to talk about meditation in hushed tones. What are you doing this weekend? I’m going to a meditation retreat. It’s like, what? You’re going to be silent? You’re going to go crazy. It used to be very unusual to know meditators, and especially in business and academia, but now everybody from rock stars to celebrities to hedge fund guys running big multibillion dollar hedge funds are all meditators. They’re doing it for a variety of different reasons: health, mental clarity, focus, spirituality. Ultimately, the meditation is the most powerful, one of the most powerful technologies for connecting with what is true, what is real, and the basic reason is because your mind is a set of programs and a swirl of thoughts and filters and concepts and perceptions, and all of it is the content of your consciousness. It’s content.
Listen in now for the full explanation and support your personal development and spiritual growth and start participating in your future good NOW.
And remember, self-help is shelf help – you have everything you need already!
Stay inspired!
Transcription
Welcome to another episode of Ask Derek, where we do a deep but quick dive into some of your most common asked questions and issues. This is Derek Rydall, founder of the Law of Emergence process and author of the bestselling book Emergence. It’s just great to be with you again, as we dive into this question what if I can’t meditate?
There’s so many angles that I can come at this from, but really meditation carries a lot of baggage for a lot of people, and it’s also something that more and more is becoming as normal as going to the gym. It used to be a time when you had to talk about meditation in hushed tones. What are you doing this weekend? I’m going to a meditation retreat. It’s like, what? You’re going to be silent? You’re going to go crazy. It used to be very unusual to know meditators, and especially in business and academia, but now everybody from rock stars to celebrities to hedge fund guys running big multibillion dollar hedge funds are all meditators. They’re doing it for a variety of different reasons: health, mental clarity, focus, spirituality. Ultimately, the meditation is the most powerful, one of the most powerful technologies for connecting with what is true, what is real, and the basic reason is because your mind is a set of programs and a swirl of thoughts and filters and concepts and perceptions, and all of it is the content of your consciousness. It’s content.
Most of what we identify with, most of who we think we are, and what we think is real and true, is content. It’s like the clouds passing through the sky, the birds, the planes, the storms, the elements, but none of that is the sky. It’s like all the stuff that flows through the ocean, the fish, the bushes, and the garbage, but none of that is the ocean. There is an essential nature to ocean, essential nature to sky, and then there is the content in it. There is an essential you, and then there is all of the content. As the essential you emerges as experience and phenomena, it creates content. It creates perceptions, concepts, experiences, mental, emotional, physical patterns. None of that is you. That is the story and the character and the part in the play, but you are the Divine author and actor that is never submerged by the character, the part, the story, the play, that is never limited by it. It arises out of you, and then passes away again, but you are something that is behind and beyond all of that.
As the great metaphysical or mystical statement, supposedly attributed to Jesus, “Before Abraham was, I am.” That’s a profound statement of the I am nature which preexists and preexisting is not quite the right way. It’s not a linear thing. It’s not so much before time, as it is behind time. Time and space is a canvas upon which we paint with the concepts of our soul, but right behind that stands the real you. So meditation is that technology that allows you to move through the content, to see through and beyond the mental, emotional, physical, biological, sensational, sensual content, and have a direct encounter with reality, with the real you that was never born, that never ages, never diminishes, and never dies, the real you and the real nature of life itself, which is whole and complete and perfect and infinite and eternal.
Another thing to understand is that meditation isn’t the thing you do. Meditation isn’t sitting in lotus position or walking like Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s not the different techniques that you do. Meditation really is the moment when you have that undistractible, as Michael Beckwith would say, paying undistractible attention. Meditation is that moment when you shoot the gap, and you touch reality with singleness of focus. If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. Meditation is that moment when you are focused without distraction on reality. So all the techniques, of which there are many, ultimately are to get you to that moment, and then the practice of meditation is to allow you to strengthen dominion over your attention so that you can hold your place in that expanded space, so that you can hold that moment for longer and longer periods, that moment of silence, that moment of stillness, that moment of undistractible attention to ultimate reality.
That’s what we’re doing when we meditate. We’re building that muscle, that dominion, that ability. Now again, there are many kinds of meditation. There’s contemplative meditation where you contemplate a passage, a piece of scripture, or a quote, or just some quality in you. Roll it around, and you let it unfold and reveal its deeper truths, and eventually that leads you to a moment of silence. In that moment of silence you have a moment, hopefully, of meditation, of an undistractible connection with reality, with God, with the presence which is within you.
There’s other forms of meditation where you use a mantra. It could be a mantra, or it could just be a quality, love, peace, joy, God, Christ, Buddha, and/or just a sound. Again, that is to focus the mind, to still the mind, and allow you to drop down beneath the tension of the surface tension of the mind and touch some dimension of ultimate reality, or at the very least, have a sense of respite from the storms of the mind and a sense of peace that bubbles up from within you.
Ultimately all of them, in the truest sense, are to get you to this moment of making connection with reality, and then getting strong enough so you can make it long enough until reality takes over your being, and dissolves all that isn’t reality. So that the light so breaks through that it shines away all the darkness, and we call that Enlightenment, to be awake. Being awake merely means you’re no longer identified with any of the content. You’re identified with that which is unchanging, that which is true, that which is real or spiritual. Spiritual really just means that which is real or unchanging. So meditation is for that.
When people say, I can’t meditate, what they’re really talking about is my mind is going crazy. It’s too busy. I sit, and I’m fidgety. My body is anxious and irritable and itchy, or my mind is just going to this project and that project and this argument and that shopping list. What’s important to understand is the practice of meditation is not about not having all that stuff going on. It’s not about stopping your mind from thinking. It’s not about stopping your body from feeling itchy and painful and agitated. All of that is content, and the reason why it’s hard is because, at least for now, if you’re struggling with this, or whenever you are, you are so closely identified with that part of you there’s not really a spaciousness in that area, and so you are the itchiness. You are the agitation. You are the clouds and the storms and the birds and the things moving through your sky of mind.
The practice of meditation, at least let’s just pick one, a mindfulness approach where you are mindful, insight meditation and mindfulness meditation. You are observing what’s going on. So you start with the breath perhaps, and you could start with a mantra or a quality. Then your mind gets pulled off into a fantasy, and you don’t even realize it until several minutes later you’ve been making shopping lists or trying to win that last argument or win the argument you’re about to get into, or you’ve fallen asleep, whatever the case might be. The minute you become aware of that the practice is to bring your attention back to the breath or the mantra, and then in some cases when the thing is pulling you really strong, like an itch or an ache or a particular emotional energy, as you strengthen your dominion you can place your attention on that itch, on that pain, on that ache, and you don’t try to get rid of it. What you resist persists. What you fight you fuel.
As Buddha taught, we are learning to release craving and aversion, which means when there’s a good feeling we don’t try to attach to it. When there’s a bad feeling we don’t try to get rid of it. We’re learning to find equanimity, which is that where we have no attachment. We’re not detached. We’re non-attached, unattached. Nonattachment, not detachment. So we’re present. We’re absolutely feeling and seeing what’s there, but we’re not reacting. We’re observing, and we begin to form a gap between the stimulus and our response, or the content and our pure consciousness, our pure awareness, the I am, and we are able to observe there’s an itch. It’s not my itch. It’s the itch.
As we observe it for a while, we notice it’s just energy moving, and as we continue to shine the light of our awareness on it it starts to swirl and eventually spirals and disintegrates. It might spiral out of our body. The energy’s always trying to move somewhere and ultimately move out of the body and disintegrate into higher and higher levels and speed up. As you observe it mindfully without reaction, it is transmuted. It’s redeemed. The karmic patterns and the emotional patterns and the mental patterns and the physical patterns, they are redeemed. That energy gets released and then another layer emerges. It might be a moment of freedom, release, bliss, and then another layer will come up.
The good news is that you don’t have to get rid of all of that stuff going on. You just have to observe it. Now, the bad news is that it’s hard. It is difficult, and that’s okay, because the good news is you don’t have to be good at it. You don’t have to observe it for a long time. You observe it until you get distracted again, until it gets too hard, and then you can observe the part of you that feels like it’s too hard, or you bring your attention back to the breath or the mantra if it gets really hot in the kitchen. You just keep beginning again. It’s like how do you train a puppy? You sit the puppy down and say, “Sit,” and it runs off. You sit it down, and you say, “Sit,” and it runs off. You sit it down, you say, “Sit,” and it rolls over and then runs off. You keep giving little treats, and eventually it sits for longer and longer and longer, and eventually you say, “Sit,” and it sits, and it stays.
So you’re training. You’re in training. You might have to go back to the breath or the mantra a thousand times, or at least dozens of times, in a sitting, and in the beginning you also don’t have to sit for a long time. When people say, “Why can’t I meditate, or I can’t meditate, or I just can’t do this. I’m not wired for this,” the first reason is because all this stuff is coming up, and they think it shouldn’t be, or it’s painful and uncomfortable, and they think it shouldn’t be, because they hear about all these people that just go off on these lala land trips of meditation, or they’re able to just relax, and they just disappear. That’s not meditation. If you don’t remember what happened, that’s not meditation. That’s you just going off. For all you know you went into dream state, or some other dimension, but you weren’t necessarily meditating.
Meditation is about increasing conscious awareness, not decreasing it, not going unconscious. A lot of times what you would call a bad meditation, for the ego is a really good meditation for the soul. You might have spent that 10 minutes 100 times, like every second you had to bring your attention back to the breath, and then you got distracted, and you had to bring it back to the breath. Then you had an itch, and then you had to bring it back to the mantra. Then you were doing a shopping list, and you’re like, oh my God, am I ever going to get this? Then you notice that part of you saying, oh my God, am I ever going to get this? You observe it. Then there’s a moment where there’s the thought or the feeling, and there’s you observing it, and you suddenly realize, I’m not that thought or feeling. I’m not that sensation. I’m the one watching it. In that moment a gap begins. You are now a little more awake. You have now disintegrated a little bit of karma. You are now a little bit more enlightened. You now have a little bit more free will, because free will is a function of expanded awareness. Until you have space and can look at the patterns that are driving you, the compulsive patterns, you don’t actually have choice. You have the illusion of choice, but you’re not really choosing. The patterns are just acting out. You can observe the busy mind, the nervous body. You can observe it and then come back to the breath or the mantra.
Another thing is you don’t have to sit for an hour or a half an hour, or even necessarily for the 20 minutes or the 22 minutes or whatever the TM length is. You can start off by doing what I call the One Minute Mystic, which is where you stop for one minute. Instead of sitting for 20 minutes, stop one minute 20 times. So every hour, every half hour, just stop for one minute and watch your breath, and notice what’s going on in your body, in your mind. Notice the feelings. Notice the thoughts. Don’t react to them. If a part of you rises up to react, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m thinking that, or oh my God, as soon as you become aware that you’re reacting, take a breath. Observe the reaction, and then as soon as you can, bring your attention back to the breath or the mantra for a minute. Then go back to work or play or whatever.
Set a timer to stop once an hour to start with, and eventually maybe it’s twice an hour. Maybe in the morning then you notice you start with your one minute and maybe it becomes two or three or five, and that’s fine. Maybe eventually you stretch to have two or three periods of five minutes a day, one in the morning, the afternoon, one at night. You still have these little moments throughout the day where you’re stopping and reconnecting, where you’re suddenly bringing yourself back to conscious awareness.
This is really important. Some would even say it’s more valuable than sitting for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 minutes, because you’re training yourself, cutting a subjective groove to wake up. It’s like if you’ve ever practiced lucid dreaming. One of the strategies is throughout the day, on a regular basis, you have to question reality. You have to go, am I dreaming? You have to look around you and look at the people, and look at a book and try to read it. You know how it’s hard to read in a dream? Ask, am I dreaming? Am I dreaming? It creates a subjective groove for you to be absolutely not taking anything for granted, and then what happens is when you’re dreaming something happens. It triggers that, and you suddenly ask, am I dreaming? You realize, oh my God, I am. You become lucid in your dream.
That’s lucid dreaming practice. This is lucid living practice. Stopping multiple times throughout the day and saying, where’s your attention? Where is my attention? What am I thinking about? What am I feeling? Let me notice it. Let me watch the breath. You’re just driving, and you come to a stoplight. You watch your breath. You’re waiting in line at the bank. You watch your breath. As you’re watching your breath you’re not trying to control your breathing. You’re just noticing it. The air coming into your nose kind of cooler, coming out of your nose slightly warmer. A little bit more into the right nostril, a little bit out of the left nostril. Noticing the abdomen rising or the chest rising and falling. Then maybe you notice an itch on your right arm. You’re just observing. That’s practice. You’re a meditator.
The key is to do what works for you and build from there. Don’t do what is going to make you stop doing it. Seems common sense enough, right? But you know the old saying, common sense is uncommon. Something like that. You want to do what works that you will build on, but I really do want to suggest that if you’re finding yourself saying I can’t meditate, it’s too hard, and giving up on it, that you do not, because it really is one of the most powerful technologies for waking up, for increasing focus, for purifying your consciousness, for healing, for expanding and accelerating your creative capacity. It’s truly the greatest technology to humankind. So you want to make it part of your practice.
Again, start off small, but consistent, and build from there. If it’s hard, that’s okay. Do it anyway. Observer the hardness. If your mind’s going, feeling victimized by it, observe the part of you that’s sad and mad and upset that you have to do this. In that way what you’re actually going to begin to notice what’s really driving you, because that part of you that feels angry, agitated, impatient, frustrated, sad, depressed, alone, all of those things that come up when you meditate, that isn’t being caused by your meditation. The meditation, you becoming mindful for a moment, is allowing that to come up to conscious awareness, but all of those patterns are running roughshod in your unconscious or nonconscious awareness and sapping your energy and creativity and power and creating all manner, wreaking all manner of havoc in your life.
It’s okay if it’s hard. In fact, it means you’re in for some really awesome and powerful growth if you stay with it. I promise you. You’ll go through periods of what’s called chemicalization where those patterns will start to break up. You’ll have spaces of what Michael Beckwith calls afterglow, where you feel a sense of openness, spaciousness, lightness, and then you’ll also have after grow, which is spaces where it feels like all the junk’s coming up, and you feel worse. All that’s normal. It’s like a washing machine. The first part it’s creating all the friction and getting all the dirt and debris out of the clothes, and they’re rubbing and beating up against each other, and it’s gnarly. All that dirt gets released, and then it washes all that dirt away, and then it goes through a spin cycle. Eventually it comes out all nice and clean and fluffy.
There’s a process, and when you first start meditating it’s often going to be crazy. You’re going to be like, oh my God, my mind is a dangerous place. I would never let anybody I care about go there. Then as you begin to witness that circus and observe it, those patterns begin to break down. The noise gets a little quieter, and you have moments of peace and awareness and expansiveness, and you feel like, oh my God, I’ve reached it. I’ve reached the Promised Land. I’ve arrived, and then all of a sudden you sit down one day, and it’s gnarly and terrifying and terrible and noisy, and you’re like, what happened? It’s all gone backwards. No. It’s a whole other wash cycle coming up. So it goes.
The difference is that over time you just understand the patterns. You are able to observe them. You’re not identified with the content as much, and you just know, just another rinse cycle. Just going through it. You observe it, and you move through it quicker often as that happens, except for those rare periods where you’re really doing deep transformative work. It’s a very powerful, very vital, and I would go so far as to say really irreplaceable part of your practice. Begin it today. Do it consistently, and when you stumble, and when you don’t do it, and when you forget, as soon as you remember, stop. Take a minute, and begin again. Just like in meditation. When you get pulled off track, you don’t go, this is terrible; I suck at meditation, and give up. You notice you’ve gone off. You bring your attention back to the breath. Whoops. I’ve gone off again. Bring your attention back to the breath. Like the airplane that’s heading from one place to the next, it’s off track 90, 95, 99% of the time, buffeted about by all the elements, inertial forces, weather, pilot error, but it keeps getting brought back to the flight plan, brought back to the flight plan, and it makes it to its destination relatively on time.
The same is true with meditation, and the same is true with meditation as a way of life. You wake up one day, you don’t do it, or you forget. You’re too busy. Then as soon as you have time, as soon as you remember, just like in the meditation, you notice you’ve forgotten. You notice you didn’t meditate. You bring your attention back. You sit. You stop for a minute, or maybe you just do it at the stop light. Now you’re back on practice. You see what I mean? You can get back on track at any time during the day. The minute you remember, you come back. As you do that now you cut a subjective groove. You create a subjective habit. You transform your character, and you absolutely activate a destiny of greatness in you.
I hope this has been helpful. It was longer than I anticipated, but I guess I had a lot more to say about it. This has been an episode of Ask Derek. Please post your questions in the Facebook groups, on the Facebook pages, and you’ll keep listening for the answer to your question. Until next time, remember to live authentically, love unconditionally, and follow your destiny, and meditate.
by sublimity-001-main | Apr 5, 2024 | 2024, Emergence, Healing, Podcast, Purpose, Relationships, Spiritual Growth, Wealth and Abundance
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Today’s episode is about what it really takes to create the best year of your life. First of all, what it really takes? Not what you think it takes, not what they tell you it takes, but what it really takes.
The best year of your life is a completely subjective thing. What is best? What is best? Now, from your ego standpoint, it has one idea. From your soul standpoint, it has a very different idea. As the old saying goes, “A bad day for the ego is a good day for the soul”. It’s really important we acknowledge this because we’ve been conditioned to what is success, what is best, what is good, what is right, what should be, and what shouldn’t be; but most of that that we’ve been conditioned into from the world, the truth is often opposite.
[bctt tweet=”A bad day for the ego is a good day for the soul”]
From the world standard, the best year would be a year free of pain, free of most challenges, free of lack and limitation and struggle. For most human consciousness, the best year would be greater wealth, greater success, greater health, greater relationships, improvement of our human experience. That’s what most people—and then again, it’s relative if you’re living in Syria and trying to get out the best year of your life would be to find a country that would be willing to take you in, so finding a safe place to live. If you’re on the street, it’ll be finding shelter.
So it’s always relative to where we are.
Listen in now for the full explanation and support your personal development and spiritual growth and start participating in your future good NOW.
And remember, self-help is shelf help – you have everything you need already!
Stay inspired!
Transcript
Greetings my fellow Emergineers, Derek Rydall here, and it’s great to be with you in this eternal moment, whatever it is that you are hanging out in the time zone. What we’re talking about today is what it really takes to create the best year of your life. What it really takes? What it really takes to create the best year of your life? There’s so much coming through right now. I got to pick a lane because I got to feel this slot opening up so much because there’s so much just in that title. First of all, what it really takes? Not what you think it takes, not what they tell you it takes, but what it really takes.
The best year of your life is a completely subjective thing. What is best? What is best? Now, from your ego standpoint, it has one idea. From your soul standpoint, it has a very different idea. As the old saying goes, “A bad day for the ego is a good day for the soul”. I was not going to talk about this but it’s just coming through really strong. It’s really important because we’ve been conditioned to what is success, what is best, what is good, what is right, what should be, and what shouldn’t be; but most of that that we’ve been conditioned into from the world, the truth is often opposite. From the world standard, the best year would be a year free of pain, free of most challenges, free of lack and limitation and struggle. For most human consciousness, the best year would be greater wealth, greater success, greater health, greater relationships, improvement of our human experience. That’s what most people—and then again, it’s relative if you’re living in Syria and trying to get out the best year of your life would be to find a country that would be willing to take you in, so finding a safe place to live. If you’re on the street, it’ll be finding shelter.
So it’s always relative to where we are. But it’s also, we have to really begin, if we’re really going to be individuals on a path of really waking up to our true potential, our true purpose, our true self, true spiritual liberation, not merely using God to get more stuff in the world, but using everything in our world to get closer to God. Whatever that means to you, closer to love, closer to truth, closer to beauty, closer to real freedom, real peace, remember, when we talk about God, we’re not talking about it anthropomorphic, white-bearded man in the sky, in the cloud with the scepter in one hand and sitting in a golden throne, and Jesus at his other hand. That’s not the God that we’re talking about. There is no such God. We’re talking about this principle, this presence, this divine something, that is our true nature and being and the ground of all being.
So there comes the point where we make the flip. We try to use all these things to improve our human experience, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong with that but what our soul is aching for, and if you’re in this community, and if you stay to hang around for any amount of time, is because your soul is aching for this other piece. And that is to awaken, to really become free because as long as you think the world has something for you, as long as you’re merely trying to improve your body or bank account or business, you are still trapped in a human dream. Again, there’s nothing wrong with having all the good things of life experience, but as long as that’s your main, prime motive, you are stuck on the wheel of human life and will suffer. If you sowed the flesh of the flesh, you will rip corruption. If you sowed the spirit, you will rip everlasting life, eternal life.
All that I was really saying is if you are anchoring yourself and planting yourself in that which is unchanging and real and to true about you, a.k.a. the spirit, love, peace, joy, beauty, abundance, that has nothing to do with conditions, then you will rip a harvest that is eternal, that doesn’t change with the economy. You will live in a state of joy and peace and greater fulfillment regardless of condition. That’s real freedom. That is what everybody really wants if you can get them to think about it long enough. They think that it’s one of better paycheck or a better body, but then they know that that paycheck could go away and that body could break down the next day; so, what they really want is a state of peace and well-being, and abundance that the world cannot take away from them, that even if their body goes sideways and the bank account goes the other away, and their relationships go another way, they’re okay, and they know it because they’re anchored in the real, the real love, the real companionship, the real health, the real wealth, the real life that the world didn’t give to you and so the world can never take away.
So there comes a point where we have to choose what are we really going to primarily be about. I say primarily because the statement to be in the world but not of it. So we’re not just becoming ascended masters and floating off the planet, we are absolutely here to be in the world and to play full out, all systems go, out on the field, creating and building and projecting our concept and consciousness of good into the world. But, it’s the context that we live in that matters most, more than the content. So we’re definitely here to create some content, to write that book, launch that program, build the business, build the family, and then just paint a masterpiece on the canvas of time and space. But are we going to do it and forget that it’s our canvas and that we’re the artist and get lost in the picture, or are we going to do it from the context of I’m whole, I’m complete, I’m already free, I already have everything I could ever need and from that place, now I’m going to paint.
So there comes a point incrementally, sometimes dramatically, where we make that shift and for a lot of you, you’re making that shift, and for some of you, you’re making it but you don’t know it yet because the longer you hang out in this community, the more it’s going to get a hold of you and you’re not going to be able to help it because that’s the vibration of frequency and underlying intention of all this work, is to set you free, truly free. I’m saying all these to say that as we begin to think about what is it really takes to create the best year of life, we have to look at what is the best year really look at. Again, we have to decide how we are going to determine that. What is the criteria by which we determine that we’re having our best year or not?
If we’re going to use the world’s criteria of more money, improved health, relationships, whatever, that’s one metric and we will then be tying ourselves back into sowing to the flesh, tying ourselves back into all the ups and downs, in the rollercoaster ride of human consciousness, the laws of duality, up and down, good and bad, and we will to some greater or lesser extent, be fold along by the tides of the human trend. Will we decide that the best year has something to do with a deeper realization and demonstration of who and what we really are and why we are alive. In other words, at the end of the year, let alone the end of our life, it’s not so much what we have but what or who we become that determines our success.
It’s not so much how many possessions we’ve attained, but how much we are in possession of our true self and of the truth that makes us free. Have we gained some outer treasure or have we gained that pearl of great price? Have we laid up our treasures on earth where moth and rust will corrupt and thieves can break in and steal or have we laid up more treasure in heaven in consciousness, in the development of our conscious realization of these inner treasures where moth and rust can never corrupt, where thieves can never break in and steal, where the world can never take it away? That’s the treasure we take with us. So, that first inquiry and the first sort of challenge I put to you, my question is what’s going to be your definition of best year?
Again, I really want you to hear this, there’s no judgment which one you choose, and I want you to understand that when you choose the ladder which is it’s going to be about me having great possession of myself, greater possession of the truth, about who I become, it does not preclude you from also having and going for your outer success goals. We’ll talk about that. It’s not an either or. It’s just what is your priority and by priority, I mean at the end of the day or the end of any moment, or in the midst of any moment, when you must make a choice, choose this day who you will serve, God or mammon, truth or appearance, cost or effect, love or fear, the material acquisition or the spiritual realization. Which one are you going to choose? And that is determined by what is your priority and where is your commitment.
In other words, if you got a moment where there’s really a choice where you could go out and you could do something, say something, make a call, send an email, it’s really coming from a place of fear because you’re afraid if you don’t, you’ll lose something or you’ll be taken advantage of some kind of humanly driven acquisitive, some action based on your ego, based on the appearances, etc. Or are you going to choose to become still and to reclaim the truth about you and to re-anchor yourself on who and what you really are, and remember my best year is more peace, more joy, more love, more compassion, more of my real self; so, now in this moment, because that’s my priority, I’m going to choose that. So that’s what I mean to choose this day who you will serve, and it’s multiple moments throughout the day, but that’s determined by where have you made the commitment, where have you made the priority, what have you decided really is most important to you.
At the end of the year, do you want to have more possessions or more possession of yourself? And then based on that, because that’s your definition of best year, now on a daily, weekly, monthly moment-by-moment basis, when the choice arises, you get to know what you’re choosing, and that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. In fact, in many cases, it’s going to be really, really difficult. That’s why the way is straight and narrow and few there’d be that walk in, but if you decided that’s what best year looks like, you have to do the hard thing. If you don’t make a choice, if you try to kind of play both sides of the fence and never really get clear on what best year is for you and make that priority and commitment, then you are serving two masters; and if you try to serve two masters, that’s like trying to ride two horses at the same time going in opposite directions, not a pretty picture.
As the Bible says, it’s like you have a house divided and a house that’s divided cannot stand. So you have no structural integrity, and you’ll be not only torn internally, but you won’t be able to galvanize the energy to actually be truly successful in any direction. So you do have to choose which is going to be your primary context. Again, I want to say this also – it’s not like you make the choice now and you’re done. You have to keep re-choosing. You’re building a muscle. It’s in your heart of hearts, you really want to be anchored in the truth of your being, you want to become truly free, truly empowered, and the only way you can ever be empowered is that you choose the conscious spiritual path, you choose the path of having more possession of yourself. You will never ever be empowered truly if you’re choosing the former or the latter, whichever the order is.
The best year is defined by outer success because you’ll be always be at the whim of some external appearance and so you’ll always be having to give away your power to it. Whenever you make something external to you, your source of support, supply, security or safety, you have to start giving it your power and eventually you’ll become its servant. When the locus of power and control is within you, within your consciousness, that’s where you begin to have true power, true mastery, and ultimately true freedom. There is no other way to get that. I believe all of you want that. So I invite you all to make that choice but then again, it’s going to require on a moment by moment, sometimes, daily, weekly, monthly basis to re-choose and re-choose and re-choose, to get stronger and stronger in your ability to hold your place in that expanded space.
As we looked at this, if we decide that the best year looks like me having greater possession of my true self, looks like me becoming more of who I really am and letting more of that out, then we have to ask—and I also want to say that it changes the nature of how we judge what’s working, what’s not; what’s good, what’s not. When you go to the gym, and you work out really hard, it doesn’t always feel good and especially if you haven’t done it for a while or you’re taking it to a new level, the next day or two or there, it doesn’t always feel so good. If you remember the analogy of when you go to the gym, and let’s say you’re max weight, you can do 10 reps. What’s the easiest rep? The first rep. I joked. That’s actually the hardest because you got to go to the gym first, but let’s just sit and take that for granted. The easiest rep is the first one or second one once you get warmed up.
Then I ask what’s the hardest one and people will say the tenth rep. Now you all heard me tell this, so you know what the answer is here, and I would say no, it’s the eleventh rep. It’s the one you can’t do yet, because you can do the 10 reps. It’s hard, I mean it still requires effort but you already know you could do 10 but you can’t do more. That’s why they call it your max. It’s on the eleventh rep where all the growth happens. One through ten is just maintenance. So you have to get to the eleventh rep, maybe not every day, maybe not even every week, but frequently and regularly you have to push into the eleventh rep because that’s where all the growth happens.
So living your best life from that metaphor and your best year could mean real challenge. It could mean real challenge. It could mean a year full of challenge, struggle. Yes, pain even, doesn’t mean to be suffering because pain is inevitable suffering as a choice because we resist what’s happening. But it might be suffering. Edi Rama said years ago when they asked what did he think about America and how America is doing and he said, “I wish for the Americans more suffering,” and he meant it with absolute, loving compassion because he understood that America was a very young nation, very young and somewhat immature because they’re barring the revolutionary war and then the civil war. America has had a long, long time of just pretty much prosperity and power, not a lot of real growth, and interestingly, this was before 9/11, not that long before either.
So sometimes, again, a bad day for the ego is a good day for the soul. Sometimes the bad year for the ego is a good year for the soul. I’ve had what on some level, some people would consider a bad year in the sense of a really, really difficult challenging year where a lot of my structures were disabled, disintegrated, disassembled, let’s say, a lot of my identities and concepts around relationships, family, and all kinds of things, many is not most of my major life structures where had to be disassembled. I was at that point in the Rubix cube where I got in the bunch of sides looking really, really good and, remember the Rubix cube, what’s working that’s in your way and you get it all looking really good, but in order to get the next side of the next side, you got to keep messing it up. I got a bunch of sides looking really good, and I was like, “Oh, I’m really something. I got it going on.”
Then life was like you’ve been praying some pretty big prayers of transformation. To get to that next side, you got to let some things fall apart, some structures that can’t hold the next level. From an ego standpoint, it’s been a very, very difficult year. Now, there had been a lot of successes, too. I released a book, had it best seller, launched and had an amazing life event, have an amazing program happening, there’s lots and lots of good. But emotionally and spiritually, and again in all these areas, physically, financially, relationally, all those structures have been just torn down and disassembled. It’s like when you go to Ikea and you buy a whole bunch of new furniture. In the first few days or weeks, you just got rooms fall apart and pieces all over the place, and you’re like, “Oh, my God.” At the end of it, you’ve built everything and you’ve got all these extra pieces, then you’re really not in trouble. I know from a soul level, it’s one of the most productive years of my life.
Now, I’m not going to lie to you. From an ego level, from a human level, it’s really hard and I’ve wished, and still have a part of me that wishes, I didn’t have to go through it. And that’s why it’s so important that I have a practice and that I have support, my coaches, my spiritual practitioners, my friends, and that I have a practice that I go back to daily, hourly, moment by moment sometimes. Because my prayer for the best year of my life and the best life is to fully awaken, is to become truly free, is to become completely anchored in that that is real, so that I can stand in the face of any appearance and be the truth and know the truth and be the light and shine the light unconditionally and all conditionally, that I can pour the love and the joy and the peace, the gratitude and celebration and the power onto everyone and everything, everywhere at all times regardless of condition.
So that’s a big prayer. It’s a big intention. A lot of structures don’t support that internally and externally. So I’m saying all that to say that it’s really important as we set our sides for the best year, that we understand these elements to it. What does that really look like?? What does that really mean? Now again, we’re not setting the intention in going on there, I am really going out there and have a really great year in pain and suffering so I can grow. We’re not saying that. You don’t go to the gym with the vision and intention of lots of pain and suffering, I hope not. You have a vision for sure of a beautiful, healthy, vibrant, vital, athletic, maybe sculpted, strong, flexible, agile body. That’s the vision. The vision isn’t pain and suffering and breaking down and tearing muscles and all that. You understand that along the way, that’s going to happen. If you didn’t understand the process of growing from the work-out standpoint and you experience the pain and all that, you might misdiagnose that and stop.
So the same thing is true with your life. That the challenges you’re going through particularly as you’re going to conscious path are some of the most valuable and important and potent aspects of really creating a best year. So you’ll look at the best year and you say, “Okay, it’s going to look like me having more possession of myself, more possession of truth. It’s going to look like becoming more of my real self and letting more of real self out.” So we have to look at. So what is that real self? And that real self is the divine and it’s made up of, at least we’ve broken it down this way, into qualities: love, peace, joy, beauty, abundance, creativity, gratitude, authenticity, truth, right? So the criteria for the best year is—am I more of these qualities? Are these more active in me? Am I more anchored in them? Are they become more important to me? Am I expressing more of them? I tell you that even though there’s all this challenge I’ve gone through, my internal generosity has magnified.
I’m getting chills here right now, so I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting it from me or from someone else. I’m getting a lot of tears and chills coming through me right now. So there’s a download happening. Like the level of love in my heart for humanity, for those around me, especially those that I’ve experienced challenge with, the level of generosity, the inner desire to love and to serve and to be an instrument of service, it’s profoundly magnified to some moments where, I think I’ve shared it with you guys, where I literally wanted to give away everything. There was so much love and so much desire for people to have everything and that is real progress, spiritually speaking. That’s the sign of what I’ve been talking about and there are many more of those kinds of signs. Those are the real fruits of the spirit and just a greater and greater realization and dedication to my path.
So you have to look at yourself and go at the end of the year, am I more loving, more giving, more forgiving, more peaceful, more joyful, more grateful, creative, authentic. That’s one level of criteria. That’s the new bottom line versus do I have more money, do I have more health, do I have more relationships, do I have better relationships. You might not have better relationships. In some ways, a lot of you know that me and my wife separated, some of you maybe not if it’s new. That happened the end of last year. That was one of the big catalysts to my growth, something that is really been in the works for a while in terms of internally what was emerging, but in some respect, our current relationship is not better than it was then in the outer appearance of things. Internally, my level of love for her is magnified, and internally, my level of humility and just to my level of so many things. So we’re looking at a new bottom line.
In a very real way, I’m having this conversation with somebody last night. This is really a new emerging paradigm on the planet and that is that we have a bottom line on the planet right now that’s about living in an economy that’s non-renewable. It’s a non-renewable economy based on non-renewable resources based on raping and plundering the planet and war and killing and very masculine energy, run amok without the balance of the feminine. We keep trying to fix it but we’re still coming from the old paradigm, it’s because our bottom line is still is what are those quarterly numbers look like. Is there more money, more profit, profit at all cost, profit above people, profit above planet? That is the materialistic, human motive run amok that is non-sustainable and that it will destroy us.
In my micro concept, this is what we’re being called for as ourselves. We have to have a new bottom line. We have to have a new bottom line that looks at the end of the corner and goes not just do I have more money and more profit and more of what the world calls success? But do I have more of the biggest success? Am I more loving? Am I more forgiving? Am I more giving? Am I more generous in my heart? Am I more peaceful? Am I more joyful? Am I more grateful? It doesn’t mean we have all of these, but are you seeing some of the real fruits of the real new bottom line of this emerging paradigm on the planet. If your life is not aligned with that, you’re not in integrity with what we’re trying to emerge on the planet because what we’re trying to emerge is this new model that is sustainable, renewable, holistic, and when the bottom line is more love, more peace, more joy, more beauty, more real harmonizing prosperity and abundance, more gratitude, more creativity, that is renewable, that is inexhaustible and the fruits of that are greater and greater structures and institutions and organizations and environments that support to sustain everyone. Right?
So that is what you’re looking at. You might be saying, “This is all really nice, Derek. And you’re talking a lot today, Derek, and it’s very poetic, and it’s very sweet.” Yeah, I want that but you don’t understand. What I really just want to do is pay my bills and finish my book, and launch my business. I would say, “Cool.” I would ask if you would achieve those things, what will you be then? Why do you want those? And if you’re honest with yourself and you answer, keep asking, why do I want that? Well, I want to finish my book so I can’t sell it. Okay, why do you want to sell it? Because if I can sell it, I can grow my business. Why do you want to grow your business? If I grow my business, then I can have more money. Why do you want more money? Because if I have more money, I can pay my bills. Why do you want to pay your bills? Because I don’t want to be out on the street and be without power. So if you did have the power and you weren’t out on the street, why would you want that? So I can relax and enjoy my life. Okay, and if you’re relaxing and enjoying your life, why would you want that? What would that bring you? You find you take a deep breath and go, “I finally have peace.”
There you are. That’s what you really want. It’s not those other 50 things. It’s like, “Yeah, I finally be in joy. I finally feel secure. I finally had peace. I’d finally be happy. I finally feel good about myself.” Yeah, that’s what you’re actually going for, is that state of feeling good about yourself, of peace, of joy, of happiness, a sense of generosity if you had more abundance, whatever. So it’s those state of being that you’re really after. Always, since the beginning of time and forever, that’s all that every being will ever be really going for. It’s just they move to all the filters of separation. We don’t know that. The reason why that’s all that you’re going for—I really want you to hear this—is because that’s what you’re made of and the only impulse of life is to express more of itself and life is made of love and peace and joy, and beauty. You’re very nature in being with those qualities so the only way you’ll ever truly be free is in the expression of the more of you which is those qualities.
So everything is conspiring for you to reveal and express more of those qualities. That’s all that your heart and soul really longs for even though we’ve been tricked because we projected those qualities onto people, places, and conditions and believe therefore that the peace and the love and the joy was based on a certain amount of dollars and the bank or health and our body or relationships in our life, and we projected onto that for so long that now we’ve got this belief that say my love, peace and joy is in that condition. And that’s a lie. It has nothing to do with condition. Nothing. We can prove it because you could go within right now and activate those qualities even though the conditions have changed. So the real thing is you are always only really going after the state of consciousness, state of being.
So all I’m really suggesting is let’s cut out the middleman. Let’s go straight for what we really want. Let’s create a bottom line in our life that actually reflects what we really want, which is the truth for the world, the human, the companies that whatever that are just only profit motive. It’s because they believe if they have enough money, they’ll finally be safe, be powerful, be free. They want the same thing. They just don’t know it. It’s our job to know it and to live it. So let’s cut out the middleman and go straight for these. This is what it really means to seek first the kingdom of heaven when to take no anxious thought for your life, how you will be clothe, what you’ll be fed, etc., etc. but instead seek first the kingdom of heaven which Jesus said was within you which is another name for this state of connection, for this realm of the real, these qualities. Buddha called it Nirvana. Lao Tsu called it the Tao. They also all taught how to let go of that incessant mechanism of trying to control your conditions. Buddha called it craving and aversion.
In other word, you must let go of all craving and aversion, trying to get or get rid of in order to be free, and instead seek first Nirvana. Seek first the Tao. Seek first heaven which all of them taught was within you. Now in quantum physics, they’d say in your consciousness. So that’s really what we’re going after. The best year of our life is about a greater and greater connection to these qualities of our being, to our true nature and a greater realization of them and a greater expression of them. That’s what our soul is after. That’s what our true self is after. That’s all it really cares about—the emergence of more of these qualities and then we get to paint with the colors of our soul which are these qualities. We get to paint with those qualities of love and gratitude and joy and peace and abundance, and create this beautiful works of art called our relationships and our businesses, wonderful, but we know what we’re really doing now. We’re artist of the heart and the soul painting with the colors of our spirit onto the canvas of time and space.
So our focus is on developing our palette, developing and activating these colors, these qualities because we got a very rich, rich palette full of great wonderful abundant qualities to paint with. We can paint with these qualities no matter what the conditions are. They are unconditional and all conditional. They have nothing to do with conditions. And then the more we see this and acts from this, the freer we become from all conditions which is what we really, really want and then bonus, our conditions begin to match what we are being in expressing and painting. That’s what Jesus meant when he said seek first the kingdom, don’t worry about your life, don’t take thought about all those other things, seek first the kingdom, this connection and then those other things will be added onto you.
So the way to create your best year is to begin with the end in mind and then design a plan that puts you into a practice to activate and express more and more of these qualities, more and more of the colors of your soul. And as I said that also does include the outer success goals, the outer paintings that you want to paint. If you’re a great artist, you have a vision for the year like I want a… my wife is a nurse and she’s like I want to paint this kind of painting and this kind of painting, this kind of painting, that’s great. But she didn’t think the canvas was the source of the painting. She knew that her palette and her colors and her paints in her was the source of it and then she’d go about over time painting these paintings.
So you definitely still have your outer vision of what will your life look like when you painted this magnificent masterpiece on to the canvas of time and space with the colors of your soul. You definitely want to include that. But remember it’s secondary to your real soul goal which is in any given moment, week, month, if you find that you’re starting to make the achievement of some outer goal, to the detriment of these qualities of your soul, that’s when you have to stop and get back to your practice. So if you find the chasing after more dollars is actually cutting you off from the development and expression of more of a consciousness of abundance, you have to stop chasing the dollars at least for the moment and get connected again to abundance.
If you find that the chasing after a relationship or the chasing after your partner or spouse to get them to change that you don’t feel so uncomfortable is taking precedent over and actually cutting you off from a sense of feeling whole and complete, and loving and kind, you need to stop chasing relationship or stop chasing your spouse around the house and stop and get reconnected again to your real goal which is to feel whole, to feel loved, to feel loving, to activate the qualities of peace. So instead of convincing your partner that you’re a good person, which is actually making you feel it’s retarding your development of the qualities that would make you a good person, the joy, the peace, the love, etc., you have to stop and go back to that. When it comes to relationship, two HALVES do not make a whole. Two HAVES is the only thing that will make wholeness in relationship.
So if you’re seeking a relationship, or trying to control or manipulate a partner to get yourself to feel better, you have gone off the beam of your real goal, of what will really make the best year of your life and you need to stop and come back to activating, cultivating the qualities of your own soul, and then go back into that relationship and then go back to that client, to that business project. Now, not trying to get anything from it, as if you’re an artist going to a blank canvas and shaking the canvas and saying, “Why won’t you create some colors for me?” You’d look kind of crazy. You stop and you go back to your palette. You mix some more paint and you activate those qualities then you go back to the canvas and paint on it.
So now, you’re entering into that relationship for what you can give. You’re entering into that project for what you have to give – more joy, more abundance, more power. It’s why Jesus said when you pray; pray believing that you already have it that you may receive it. You’re not praying for your praying from. It’s not an out for nation; it’s an out from nation. You’re going out into the world not to get anything but to let more of your real self out. Yes? So that’s how you begin to think about your best year and then begin to design it, reverse engineer it. So one of the things I would invite to just to think about right now and do as homework is—so I want to open this up to some questions—is if you had overcome all your challenges this year and over the next year, we’re really preparing you for next year, and if you had achieved what you most deeply wanted in terms of the outer success goals, who would you be, how would you feel, how would you act or show up in the world?
What I would invite you to do is to break that down for each major life structure: health, wealth, work, relationship, spirituality, personal development, and service. Personal development is things like if you’re wanting to develop your ability to be a speaker or writer or a chess player, whatever, that’s personal development. You’re developing talents and capacities. Spirituality is obviously your spiritual practice and a deeper connection to the divine and all that. So looking at those areas, if you were to make the progress you most want in those areas, how would you feel, who would you be, so it’s qualities of feeling and qualities of being. A quality of feeling looks like peace, love, joy and quality of being is more active like loving, playful, spontaneous, outgoing, generous, it’s more active quality, and begin to articulate for those core, big goals that you would want to either overcome or achieve. What would those qualities be? And then that is what your real goal now becomes.
At the end of the year, my real goal isn’t just do I have more money. It’s do I have a greater sense of safety, security, power, confidence, whatever that means to you, whatever the qualities are, and then in terms of the way to determine, to create a metric around this, you can ask yourself very honestly on a scale from 0 to 100, where am I right now with this quality. Then at the end of each week or month or quarter, you can reassess the bottom line. So we can still use math here. We could still use metrics, and I think it’s very important that we do. Otherwise, we can fool ourselves, and go, “Okay, I started off as a 25%.” Zero to a hundred, 25. Of a greater sense, where I want to be at the year? I want to have a sense of at least be 100% more peaceful than I am now. So let’s say, I started off right now. I’m at 20. I want to be at least at 40 by the end of the year, as an example when choosing the scale of 0 to 100.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be at 100. If 100 means complete and total, perfect peace, you want to look at where are you really and what would be the kind of growth you want to see. I want to see a 50% improvement. That’s a really good improvement. Just think about it. If you could be 50% more loving, more peaceful, more compassionate, more of a feeling of abundance, of all needs met. 50% more by the end of the year, would that be a pretty good year? So you decide. But the answer is probably yes. So you could look at where you are, create a metric and then that’s the bottom line you judge by, and you could even create a metrics for each day, and go at the beginning of a day, “Where am I with my peace?”
Like if you’re a salesperson and you know that at the end of the year, you want to achieve $100,000 and to do that, you have to sell a thousand of these programs, products or whatever, and for that means, every quarter, you have to sell 250 of them. That means every month, you have to sell 80 of them. Then that means every day, you have to sell whatever two and a half of them, whatever, it’d be 3 if it means business days. So then at the beginning of the day, you would have a metric. You started off at zero. By the end of the day, you’d see that I sell three. So you could begin to break this metrics down and look at, “Okay, today, I now know that in order to be I’m on track for my growth of 100% improvement of my peace, I realized that I need to see a 5% improvement, or 1% improvement, whatever that would be.”
Then you get really honest with where is your peace that morning on the scale from 0 to 100. If zero is baseline, it’s where you are. It’s where you were the day before or whatever; and 100 is achieving that 1% increase, whatever you decided. At the end of the day, look and see where am I on that scale, and you might go, “Yeah, I’m 100%. I did it. I’ve increased my peace by such and such.” Some of you are starting to glaze over whenever I talk numbers. We all have different intelligences, but it’s important because it’s hard to really manage what you don’t measure. A dream without a real plan is just a fantasy or a vision without a plan is a fantasy. A plan without a vision is chaos or mediocrity. But it’s important to break it down, so this is real, right? Like you’re really looking at your day or your week and going—am I making progress? Am I feeling a little bit more connected to this quality, a little bit more expressive of it? How many times today did I consciously express?
That could be one of the other ways. Like with sales conversion, they’ll have not just the number of sales they want to make per week but that will determine what is the number of conversations they need to have about the product to make that many sales. Let’s say 10 sales a week is 100 conversations. Then the metric is am I having those 20 conversations today. So you could look out a quality of joy, let’s say, and break it down and play with it and come up with the metric that say 10 acts of joy each week. And you can use the lift practice where you’re taking these qualities and breaking them down into the people, places, objects and activities that activate that quality and that becomes your metric. Let’s just say you realize joy is a quality and you discover that one of the activities that creates joy for you is dancing—music and dancing. And so you decide, “Okay, I’m going to dance to music for five minutes every day to get my joy fixed, to activate my joy.” That’s the metric I’ve got. And then if at the end of the day, you haven’t got that in yet, you might turn on some music and dance.
So you can start to play with this and break it down ultimately to create this best year of your life. It’s not just about, again, the outer success goal and the plans to achieve that, all which is great. It’s about creating a way of life that is actively activating these qualities of your being. And so you can reverse engineer it. Once you come up with your big vision which is the other success goal, then you reverse engineer it into the qualities and then you break it down into where would you want to be with those qualities, where are you from the scale of 0 to 100, and where would you want to be at the end of the year, and where would that be at the end of each quarter and then ultimately what kind of activities and people and situations would help you to activate those.
Now, you can start to put together a real life plan that is integrating those elements that you now know will lead you towards activating and expressing and bringing forth more and more of who and what you really are, more and more of the colors of your soul, the qualities of your heart, and you know that you’re now on track to what a best year really looks like and feels like. So I know that this is a lot and I didn’t realize how much I wanted to come through. I know this is a long talk and a lot of content. Hopefully you found it very helpful, and I really encourage you don’t just listen to it, get inspired and move on. Listen to the replay. Sit down with this, work on this. Work on this. People often would say in giving all these different ideas, “Okay, when do we get to the advanced stuff.” This is the advanced stuff.
The beginner’s work is all of the theories, the concepts, the principles, the ideas. The advanced class is practice. It’s all practice. So take something from this call today and put it in to practice and really do the work to play. You can think about it, dream about it, plan about going to the gym and being in great shape all your life and you will never grow a single muscle. You have to go to the gym and lift the weights. You can theorize and philosophize and write books on the power and the magnificence of broccoli but the only way you’re ever going to get the value of it and really grow is if you eat it. So, you got to do the real work. That’s the real path of mastery.
All right, my dear ones, let’s take a deep breath and allow this all to just soak in. As I just say a very brief prayer and knowing that the prayer has been ongoing, that we’re dropping down into this field of grace, where life is so very, very good all the time, where these qualities of love, joy, peace, beauty, abundance, wholeness, harmony, order are always expressing, are always emanating, always radiating, always fully and completely being themselves everywhere present. This is the presence that is never an absence. This infinite all loving, all giving, all knowing, all powerful presence, that is infinite so there’s nothing outside of it. It’s omnipresent so there’s no other present. Omnipotent, there’s no other power. Omniscience, omniscient, all true knowledge, there’s no other knowledge. There’s no other mind, no other intelligence. It’s all in all as all, it’s all there is, and that nature is love, is life, is goodness, there has no opposite. It is all there is, and therefore it’s all that we are.
All that there is to me is thee. All that there is to each and every one of us is unique, infinite, individualized expressions of the one life, the one love, the one power, the one presence, and nothing else. All the appearances of luck, limitation, world without fear, diminishment, disease, dysfunction, karma, astrology and every other ology, the whole human scene and experience from time and memorial, all of that is rolled up into this one ball called content, concept, belief, projection, perception. None of that is I. All of that is just a projection, a relative perception and projection of the infinite perfection and I am the infinite perfection, before Abraham, was I am. Meaning before all of human experience behind the whole human picture, I stand infinite, immortal, eternal, whole, complete, perfect, all loving, all giving, all knowing, all powerful, all containing, all possessing, nothing can be added to me, nothing can be taken away, no person, place or condition has ever diminish when I ought to, nor ever can who by taking thought can add one cubit to their stature.
What God has put no man can put asunder. All that there is is the power and the presence and the love of God infinitely expressing as the divine self that I am and nothing has ever touched that. Nothing has ever diminished that. Nothing ever can and in this holy instant, all the years of diminishment are now restored. Everything is made new. In this instant, all of the finished kingdom of infinite good, infinite riches and treasures of life that we could ever imagine in the so called future are right here, right now shining expressing circulating broadcasting right where each and every individual is because each and every individual on this call and in this community is a unique center in divine mind through which all of life shines in every shine. Yes, that’s it. So everything is conspiring to bring forth more life, more love, more truth, more beauty, more abundance, more of the divine, infinite pattern of perfection as each and every individual here. It’s dissolving, disintegrating, disassembling all the belief, concepts and structures that no longer serve the fulfillment of their destiny, of greatness which is happening now.
Oh, healings are breaking out. Miracles are breaking out, mentally, emotionally, physically, astrally and theoretically. Great transformation is the order of the day. Whatever needs to be seen, spoken, heard, thought, released, embraced, to support the full on emergence of genius and greatness and fulfillment and real power, real joy, real peace, the full manifestation of heaven on earth in every dimension of living is happening now. It’s happening right where each individual is. It’s the only thing happening. It’s the only power. It’s the only cost. So it’s a law of fulfillment on to where it is set. It needs no resistance, no obstruction. It is fulfilled, pressed down, shaken over. It is done, and so it is. Amen.
by sublimity-001-main | Apr 3, 2024 | 2024, Emergence, Podcast, Purpose, Spiritual Growth
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Life is friendly and all of life is conspiring for your highest good, and here this title says Life doesn’t care what you want or don’t want and then it says, it cares about this . . .
So it’s true. Life doesn’t care what you want or don’t want. Life doesn’t actually know that you want or don’t want. Life is not binary. Life experience is filled with duality – want, don’t want, craving and aversion as Buddha taught.
In fact the whole cornerstone of Buddhist teaching was the dissolving of that pattern of craving and aversion, which is the wanting and the not wanting, the incessant drive to get or get rid of in order to be free, with the understanding that the desire to want or not want actually is, the core source of the false self and all of the resistance and all of the suffering.
And when that mechanism dissolves, when you no longer want or don’t want, what is underneath it is the great ‘isness,’ is life itself, is wholeness itself, harmony itself, freedom itself, fulfillment itself, naturally expressing and naturally occurring.
Listen in now for the full explanation and support your personal development and spiritual growth and start participating in your future good NOW.
And remember, self-help is shelf help – you have everything you need already!
Stay inspired!
Transcript
Derek Rydall here, founder of the Law of Emergence and author of the bestselling book Emergence. And it’s just such an honor and a pleasure to be with you again. As we take a deep dive on this path of Emergence, this never ending, ever expanding unfoldment of your infinite potential, and hopefully this title of today’s talk piqued your interest. And that’s why you’re listening because of course I’m always talking about how life is for you, and life is friendly and all of life is conspiring for your highest good, and here this title says Life doesn’t care what you want or don’t want and then it says, it cares about this . . .
So it’s true life doesn’t care what you want or don’t want. Life doesn’t actually know that you want or don’t want. Life is not binary. Life experience is filled with duality, want, don’t want, craving and aversion as Buddha taught. In fact the whole cornerstone of Buddhist teaching was the dissolving of that pattern of craving and aversion, which is the wanting and the not wanting, the incessant drive to get or get rid of in order to be free, with the understanding that the desire to want or not want actually is, the core source of the false self and all of the resistance and all of the suffering. And when that mechanism dissolves, when you no longer want or don’t want ,what is underneath it is the great isness is life itself, is wholeness itself, harmony itself, freedom itself, fulfillment itself, naturally expressing and naturally occurring.
Jesus taught the same thing just use different languages when he said if you try to save your life you’ll lose it but if you lose your life for my sake you’ll have life eternal. Same basic teaching or when he talked about loving your enemy and forgiving them and that the enemy was in your own household. He was also seeking to teach how to dissolve this incessant drive of wanting and not wanting, of trying to get or get rid of. Indeed all the great master teachers were fundamentally teaching that, because the very core of the false self is this pain pleasure mechanism. Are we seeking pleasure and seeking to avoid pain? And so the average human life is a constant circle and cycle of seeking pleasure, avoiding pain, but really getting nowhere in terms of our true awakening and our true evolution. So when you understand this and you understand the real nature of life itself, that it is non-dual, that life is an isness, that love has no opposite.
Fear is not the opposite of love except in the world of duality, there’s love and fear but in Reality, with a capital R, love has no opposite. Chaos is not the opposite of peace or peace is not the opposite of chaos. Peace in reality is non-dual, it has no opposite. All qualities of truth are infinite and omnipotent and omnipresent meaning there’s nothing opposite or other than them. Because all qualities of truth are ultimately synonymous with God or infinite intelligence or life itself whatever concept you want to use. That love, peace, joy, beauty, abundance or supply, freedom, fulfillment all of these are just other ways and names of describing the aspects or describing a facet of this one great jewel of divine reality.
They’re not separate, they’re not opposite, they have no opposite. And so the divine intelligence, the divine impulse of life it doesn’t know anything other than its own wholeness, harmony and perfection. As the bible says God’s eyes are too pure to behold iniquity, or as it says, I believe it’s in the Bhagavad Gita. I might be misquoting the right place, but the basic teaching is that there are seven veils between us and God but no veils between God and us. In other words, we have all these filters and perceptions and sense of duality and separation but from the perspective of divine intelligence it only knows us as its own, as itself, as an emanation of its light.
So this divine life, this divine intelligence which in ultimate truth is the only thing there really is, has no opposite, has no otherness. There’s nothing other than it so when you are wanting or not wanting it doesn’t know that language. It doesn’t hear you. I know that’s hard to understand especially it seem like a contradiction in terms. If God is all there is and God is everywhere how can God not be aware of that. And it’s just that you’re having a perception of the sense of separation. You’re perceiving a sense of a self apart from life, a part from fulfillment and in that dream or really nightmare, you perceive yourself separate from the things you want or you perceive yourself as being or having a condition that you don’t want. And then you go about wanting to get more of something you don’t think you have or get rid of the thing you do have that you don’t want.
All of that is happening within the realm of the dream, within the realm of the hypnotic spell of separation. But only you are experiencing the hypnotic spell not the divine intelligence within you. It only knows you as itself, perfect, whole, complete. So when you are wanting and not wanting it’s not a signal that reaches this divine law within you, this divine life within you. It’s not acting upon the want or the not want. But here is what it does care about; here is what it is acting upon the law itself, the law of mind. It’s acting upon what you’re interested in; it’s acting upon what you are focused on. So this was a long way to get to the point that it doesn’t know or care what you want or don’t want. It cares about what you’re interested in. So if you say I want more abundance or I don’t want death, and if you’re saying that simultaneously you’re actually giving two messages because again all it hears is, it hears first the focus of abundance and then it hears the focus of death. It doesn’t hear that you don’t want death because there’s no duality in it, it is only aware that you’re focused on something.
There’s only a yes in the universe ultimately speaking or in this divine law. So if you’re focusing on I don’t want, I don’t want, I don’t want ,all that it hears is whatever the focus is I don’t want to be sick , I don’t want to be sick, I don’t want to be unhealthy. I don’t want to be fat; I don’t want to be -all that its hearing is sick, unhealthy, fat, sick, unhealthy fat. Okay I guess they want to experience sick unhealthy and fat. And I know it sounds so odd because you’re clearly saying I don’t want that. But the focus of your attention is where the energy goes, the energy flows where your attention goes.
You know just like you’ve heard, you may be use the analogy of the race car driver. They’re learning how to drive and how to pull out of the spins and when the car starts spinning towards the wall, everything in the body does not want to hit the wall, everything in the instincts doesn’t want to hit the wall. And so the tendency is to look at the wall. I don’t want to hit that wall; I don’t want to hit that wall. So I better look at the wall and then what you do you hit the wall. And so even though you don’t want to hit the wall, the only way to pull out of the spin and give you the fighting chance of not hitting the wall, is to actually look away from the thing you don’t want, and look towards the thing you do even while you’re spinning towards the thing you don’t want – the wall. You got to look towards the finish line or towards the next bend or whatever. You got to look back on to the track to where you want to go and then the hands follow the eyes and you course correct. So of course you are not guaranteed in that example to always pull out of spin but you are guaranteed to hit the wall if you focus on the wall. If you focus on what you don’t want you are guaranteed to hit it.
So likewise, in life if your focus is on what you don’t want, if you are going into prayers and affirmations and praying and affirming about what you don’t want, what you’re actually programming into the law of mind and action is the very thing you don’t want. It’s like the story of the guy that was going on a family trip and he spent the first hour of the morning praying and affirming you know, that his family wasn’t in any danger, that they would be safe and that nothing bad would happen and you know he prayed and affirm this for an hour and got on a highway and got into a terrible accident, where they almost all died, they ended up all in the hospital. And afterwards as he reflected on this and got some counsel, he just could not understand it, and when the counselor, the practitioner was listening to them they finally said, well you spent an hour focused on not getting in an accident even though you were saying I want to be safe , we don’t want to be hurt , we want to make sure we’re safe we’re surrounded by the car and the white light, the focus really was I don’t want us to be hurt or get in an accident. So you spent an hour creating a powerful energetic focus on accident.
So we want to be very mindful that in all of our prayer work and our affirmation work, just our thinking and our talking that whatever our dialogue is inside and out, that the focus is on what we do want. This is also why as I talked about in other trainings the questions you ask must contain the actual result you want. If you’re asking why is this happening to me? Why aren’t things working out for me? The focus is on the thing you don’t want and so the answers you’re going to get will only bring you more of what you don’t want. You’ll get a bunch of reasons why it’s not working for you. But that’s not going to necessarily get you any closer to working. Is it going to make you feel bad and worse and worse about yourself and just keep you plugged into the database of human consciousness of lack and limitation? But if you ask how can I become free or what is the divine lesson and opportunity for growth here or what is the larger version and vision of my life trying to emerge by means of this?
Now the focus even if you don’t have the answer, the focus is still basically saying I know there’s an answer here, I know there’s a solution. I know there’s something good here that’s trying to emerge, a lesson, a blessing, an expanded vision and that’s the focus. And so the answer to that question will bring you closer if not right to the doorstep of the thing you want. And so we have to be very mindful that when we frame and fashion our conversation inside and out that we focus on what we want.
Now of course the caveat to all of this is that if you’re focused on wanting just in general, the very concept of wanting connotes that you don’t have. So you want to be aware that whatever you’re wanting is actually an indication of what is trying to emerge. As I teach that desire is not a sign of something out side of you that you need to go get, but a sign of something inside of you trying to get out. So that deep desire, aka wanting is a signal of something, a seed that is hatching within you. You are pregnant and the baby is kicking and so you can still be aware of the want and the desire. You can absolutely make it a conscious awareness, yes I really do want to have more wealth or health or happiness or love. But then from the emergence model you have to begin to reorganize the way you deal with that want, the old model is I want this now let me go make it happen. The new model is I want this which means it’s already in me now let me make it welcome.
So we are no longer focusing on what we don’t want or if we are focusing on what we don’t want we only use it as a very brief moment of guidance because sometimes if you’re not sure what you do want focusing on what you don’t want as a contemplated exercise where you’re not necessarily giving a lot of energy in trying to like fix it you’re using it as a way to go, well I really really don’t want this kind of relationship or this kind of body. So then that gives you an idea then, a direction of what you do want which is some degree of the opposite of that.
I really, really don’t want to have to be in traffic all the time. Okay so well what would be the opposite to that? not being in traffic or maybe you look a little deeper why don’t you want to be in traffic? Because it makes me so angry and frustrated I really, really don’t want to be angry and frustrated for an hour or two or three every day. Okay so what do you want? What is the opposite of that? Being at peace, being happy. So what you want is either not being in traffic which could mean you get up earlier or leave work later, or if you can’t do that because you’ve gone a layer deeper, what you want is to be in a state of peace and joy.
So now you can ask good question how can I be in a state of peace and joy even while I’m in traffic? So you can still get what you really want, which really wasn’t about the traffic but was about the state of being. And you could go a little deeper and go well it’s a waste of time. But what would you rather be doing then? What would be the opposite of wasting the time? What would you do with that time? I would be creating something or learning about something, growing in some way. Great! So now you can fashion your want as I want to use my time in traffic to deepen my sense of peace and joy and to learn and to grow and to create in some way.
Now you’ve got a very real vision and you can actually go about creating that. Make you’re drive a mobile university, have your tape recorder, you know iPhone whatever the recording, dragon dictation or some recording device and you could be creating things while you’re driving. You could be praying and affirming, you could be listening to audios. I’ve gotten easily more than a degree or two worth of knowledge in education by driving in traffic. But notice so that I use the not wanting traffic scratch the surface a little deeper to see what I really do want and then was able to flip that into a vision that could turn my driving into something that was truly nourishing, nurturing, inspiring and expanding. And maybe even if I really am honest it might allow me to grow in ways that I would have done otherwise, if I did not have that situation if I wasn’t a captured audience you know, a captive audience for that hour or two every day.
So focusing on what you don’t want for a moment as an exercise, to see what the opposite of it is, so that you could begin to unpack what you really do want, create a vision out of it and began to move towards that is a valuable exercise. But you don’t want to just unconsciously be a complainer and focus on what you don’t want and then try to change your life from a standpoint of what you don’t want. And then again once you’ve done discern what you do want ,you want to reframe that and in the emergence model which is the understanding that that signal of something that you already have, a seed of potential planted in the soil of your soul that is now budding. And as it cracks open and buds it feels like a wanting or a desire but it’s really an emerging potential.
So you can still go for it but you begin to nurture it and feed it. And like you would a baby, when you’re pregnant with a baby you don’t feel the kick and go, Oh my God I have to get a baby and start to go out and try to find the baby or even try to get pregnant again that would be called crazy. And a lot of people we’ve basically gone insane because we’ve got this desire which is a sign that we’re pregnant with something and then we go out and try to get it. And so you still can do a lot of things to nurture it you know the different lift, practice, work of living in the feel and telling the vibration of it already being done, praying, affirming, visualizing , radiating, taking wonderful appropriate actions steps.
It’s all coming from the standpoint of I’m giving birth to something, and now I’m going to be and to do and to feel and show up as if this thing is emerging in my life, very different energy and much more congruent, much less resistance and ultimately a much greater chance that you’ll actually give birth to that next stage of your unfoldment. So don’t focus on what you don’t want, but you can use it to determine what you really do want and then reframe what you do want from the understanding that it means you’ve already got it, and now you just need to bring your inner and outer life into harmony with it, into integrity with it, so that you don’t make it happen but you make it welcome.
You midwife the birth of the next stage of your own growth and unfoldment. This is what life really cares about. It doesn’t care about what you want and don’t want. It just cares about what you’re focused on. So make sure you’re focused on what’s truly trying to emerge. I hope this has served you for a deeper dive. Make sure you go to derekrydall.com; make sure you sign up for the podcast so that you can continue to get more and more of these emerging training and activations all that good stuff. If you go to derekrydall.com you can get other free downloadable content trainings etc., to really support you on this journey of emergence. If you like this please leave a review and five stars, go to my Facebook page post a review or insights and get engaged, get involved and stay inspired. Until next time remember to live authentically, love unconditionally and follow your destiny.
