To live, to honestly live, you have to shed the idea that there are rules.

Trust is the ultimate antidote to fear. But trust is not an event … it’s a feeling.

If you think like the world, you will wind up like the world.

Everything is a thought. Realize this inescapable fact — that even the thought that everything isn’t a thought is a thought too — and you grasp the entirety of your power.

To be spiritual or to become enlightened is not about being anything other than what you are.

The idea that you have to change to do either – that you have to not love what you love, to edit how you truly feel, to believe that what you are right now is somehow not right – stems from the notion that only certain things are “spiritual”, while others are not. With this premise, in order to become “spiritual” you must reject in yourself what does not measure up.

The result of this approach to “spirituality” does not however make you more spiritual. Rather, it produces conflict between what how you actually feel and how you allow yourself to feel. And the result of this conflict is shame.

Though it is rarely recognized, this sense of shame over who you are creates a natural fear of and resistance to enlightenment because it conflicts with the human spirit’s great passion not to be “spiritual”, for it already is spiritual, but rather to be real.

What is real? Being real is accepting what any part of you actually feels right now. It is simply recovering your innate acceptance of yourself you had at birth, but which you lost as you began to learn what was wrong with you.

Being real isn’t the same as being nice, or moral, or unselfish, or “spiritual”, or even safe. In fact, being real can be disruptive only because we have constructed lives based mostly on how we are supposed to feel, rather than how we actually feel. After all if you are a “spiritual” person and you find that you are angry or that you love something you’re not supposed to, expressing it can be very problematic because you will be in conflict between having that emotion and the idea that it is not spiritual to do so.

If you don’t know what real is anymore, then imagine what you would do if there were no consequences of any kind and you’ll find it there. You can also find your realness by recognizing the conflict that arises when you attempt to repress who you are. Behind this conflict you will find the hidden shame. Bring love and acceptance there and you will bring your real self out into the light where it belongs, and you will discover what real enlightenment is all about.

While being real is often not very “spiritual”, it is profoundly healing. For if you simply allow yourself to be angry, you will no longer be resisting how you truly feel. This puts an end to the conflict within you. And when you are no longer in conflict with yourself, you will no longer be angry. So just by allowing yourself to be angry you stop being angry and thus realize the enlightened state of being you aspired to in the first place. So being real is enlightened because in accepting how you feel you replace shame with love.

And the value of being real applies to everything.

For your longings that you have never allowed yourself to express it means your soul finally gets what it was longing to know and to feel, and the enormous joy and fulfillment that brings. For the aspects of you that are violent, angry or destructive being real means you bring love to those aspects through sheer acceptance, which will heal the shame that is creating those feelings in the first place. You will realize then that shame is not the result, it’s the cause.

This newfound freedom from shame will liberate you into the heaven on Earth that comes from the simple act of allowing yourself to love what you love. In freeing yourself to finally just be who you love to be and pursue everything that you love to do, you will discover that heaven is not “out there”, it’s here. The mystery as to whether heaven exists and if it does, how to you get there, is solved when you realize that you are already there. You will then see that the key to the entrance to heaven wasn’t in changing, but in being.

And heaven is an entirely internal, individual experience – it’s never someone else’s heaven you know, it’s yours. So whatever is heaven for you, do it, have it, be it, love it.

Though keeping from yourself from loving what you love and thus getting what you long to have can give you a reason to stay alive, ultimately all you do is keep what your soul is longing for permanently out of reach. In that state you are indeed alive, but afraid, and unfulfilled. Letting yourself love whatever it is you love and get whatever it is you are longing for let’s you live for that. Living for what you love may spell the end of the future, but it is also the beginning of eternity. And eternity is where heaven takes place.

And trust that doing, getting and being what you love is your contribution to an enlightened world, for rejecting what is here and what we really love has done nothing for humanity but bring suffering beyond measure.

Follow the path of realness and you will realize that you are not here on Earth just to learn or to heal so you can get back to the spiritual realm. In other words, you didn’t come “here” just to get back “there”. However, through the very act of allowing yourself to love what you love you will finally begin to do what you are really here to do, which is to live.

And when you go down the path of being real rather than “spiritual” – to get out of your own way and just let yourself be – you will begin to see the truth, which is that you are already spiritual. You can’t help but be. After all, if your spirit’s defining characteristic is its intangibility – its lack of physicality – then you can observe that everything that is truly, definitively you is already non-physical. Your emotions, your thoughts, your dreams, your imagination, your creativity, your ideas, the movie screen of your mind upon which you witness any reality you can possibly conceive, are all non-physical in nature. And yet they define your experience. They are here, and yet not here, which means this is the case for you too.

So you couldn’t be more spiritual if you tried.

Accidental Openness

Reality seems very firm, but it isn’t.

Whatever you experience as reality is only as firm as you make it. The power in this is to realize that you can unmake “the world” and your world in a flash and remake it according to whatever it is you like. This idea has become yet another “spiritual” belief held by many, but I don’t suggest believing it. Rather I suggest discovering for yourself if it is true.

And I think a good way to do so is by accident.

Like most people you probably spend your days concentrating on recreating things as they already are: recreating how you usually feel, how you usually react, what you usually expect. And the result is like spending a lot of your life walking around the same block over and over and over, and getting more bored with every turn. This insistence on reptition is, by the way, what creates what is thought of as “age”.

It’s very hard when you’re in that place to imagine anything else without feeling that it is crazy to do so. If you have a hundred dollars in the bank and no check on the way for two more weeks, and you live in a perpetual cycle of close proximity to poverty, it is going to seem very insane to try to imagine that you have a million dollars in the bank at the moment. So I actually don’t suggest going about making a radical change in your reality that way, regardless of what particular reality it is that you are contemplating a change.

Rather I suggest allowing it to happen by accident. Here’s what I mean:

If you are, for instance, like a lot of people and normally very frightened everyday about getting everything done, then you probably usually wake up every day scared. And in that state you go through the list of what has to be done in your mind and it is indeed overwhelming, and you are indeed scared you won’t get to it all.

But from time to time, say on a Sunday morning, or Christmas morning, or a morning on a vacation, where you wake up and you don’t feel scared and overwhelmed because you know it’s time to rest and it’s okay to completely relax, you no doubt don’t wake up scared and fixated on what you have to accomplish that day. Or maybe you wake up one morning with the fire alarm going off and you spend the first half hour dealing with that and you don’t have time to be scared about what is going to happen at noon, or 2, or 5 because you’re too busy dealing with now.

In any of these situations the openness and fearlessness you experience is conditional to the moment you’re in, but it is openness and fearlessness nonetheless during a moment in which you are normally afraid. And the openness was not something you intended to accomplish. It was an accident. And this makes perfect sense. After all, trying to be open is like trying to relax. It’s a contradiction in terms.

The point is that without trying you accidentally find yourself in a reality where you aren’t scared, where you aren’t overwhelmed, where there aren’t thousands of things to do. There is just what to do now. And whether it’s during a vacation or during a crisis, there is a richness to the experience because life is suddenly unexpected, unusual, exciting, new, and it produced a brief period in which you feel particularly alive. In other words, it is the opposite of boredom. And you are completely in the present. These types of moments are classic examples of accidental openness.

Another common experience of accidental openness occurs when you have been worrying deeply about something, then you got distracted and forgot what you were worrying about. You only notice that you stopped worrying because you suddenly felt much better than you just did and you don’t know why. Then you realize that you forgot what you were worrying about. If you’re anything like me, you then set out to recall what you were worried about at all costs, only to discover when you finally remember what you were worried about that you sacrificed the light, wonderful and energetic feelings you had in the interim just to have your worry back. So you traveled from a dismal reality to a wonderful reality back to a dismal one within moments without being consciously aware of it.

There are countless other ways accidental openness is experienced. You may have had it in a dream that you were profoundly happy; in a moment that you were stunned by something shockingly beautiful like an unobstructed starry night; or in sex when someone accidentally touched something intangible inside of you that released a waterfall of wonderful feelings all over your body and being. You may even have been walking down the street one day on the way to the grocery store and suddenly felt overwhelmed with bliss. But it doesn’t matter how the openness got triggered – it only matters what you felt when it did.

A lot of “spiritual” people try very hard to find this openness, and the more they try, the more elusive it gets. Worse, a lot of seekers of enlightenment force themselves to act like they are open. This very inauthentic “openness” simply disguises anger, frustration, fear and boredom in the same way enforced religious morality does. This is an unfortunate side effect of the way we have all been trained by religion to believe that we must believe in something to know it, when in fact it is the belief itself that is the obstruction. After all, if you know your best friend you don’t have to believe in her. So why do you think you’d have to believe in anything to know it? If you know it you don’t have to believe in it. Let me tell you something: transcending belief is a revelation. And I highly recommend it.

The great thing about accidental openness is that it takes the pressure off of becoming enlightened or learning how to “create your reality”.

This is because for everyone who has become a believer through modern mediums like What the Bleep Do We Know?, The Secret, The Law of Attraction, etc etc. “creating your reality” has become just another stress point. I mean, here you are again in the same fight with your boyfriend; here you are again not getting your raise; here you are again at the sex club even though you don’t want to be; here you are again waking up unhappy, and the problem is that you simply aren’t believing hard enough. Or you must not be trying hard enough. Or you must just be bad at The Secret.

But to see things from this perspective is to completely misunderstand something critical: that you can’t help but create your reality, and that it is in trying too hard that you recreate the same stuff over and over. Reality creation has nothing to do with force, but everything to do with openness. Just think about it: you can’t force yourself to be open, just like you can’t force yourself to love someone, force yourself to be sexually attracted to someone, or force yourself to go to sleep. That’s because you can’t force what is involuntary. And openness is involuntary. So you can’t force yourself to create your reality because you are already doing it whether you want to or not.

Rather, openness come from lack of force. It comes when you let go. Like sleep, it comes when you get out of its way. When you let go and you experience openness you find yourself elevated from your normal day to day reality. You find yourself floating somewhere above it where you can see many, many more options, and can feel and experience them instantaneously. Greater openness means you go from having only two directions to choose from to twenty; five curtains to open up to five hundred; ten treasures in your life to ten thousand…instantaneously.

Whether you remember or not you are much more open when you’re dreaming which is why anything can happen there. Disaster can often spur you to great openness that results in you seeing enormous opportunities you never did before, and thereby the ability to accomplish the impossible only because you never contemplated its possibility. The moment that you inexplicably listened to a silent voice which told you to walk one way instead of the other right into the very thing you were seeking is the moment that openness availed possibilities to you without you having to try. It is the moment that you accidentally stop worrying and feel fantastic. It is the moment something accidentally makes you laugh and you go from grief to delight in an instant. That instantaneous ability to switch from one reality to another is the power of accidental openness. It happens all the time, we just haven’t been trained to spot it. Now you know.

While you can’t force or make openness, you can encourage it by getting out of its way when it makes an appearance.

One way to do this is to recognize when you’ve had a moment of accidental openness. If you’re in the middle of trying to accomplish your day and taking no joy out of it, and an old friend calls unexpectedly and in five minutes you’re laughing you’re head off, then you catch yourself thinking you need to stop laughing and go back to work, reconsider. If something has occurred by accident that is making you feel wonderful, you can choose to stop what you were doing and stay there in that place. And even when it’s over, you can choose to remain in that state by simply not going back to working, to trying, to worrying, to agonizing, to fighting. Anytime you accidentally walk into bliss, you can simply choose to remain.

By embracing the openness while you’re in it, you can stay there quite easily. So say, like in the example up top, if you usually walk around feeling a lot of financial burden and you get a check in the mail and feel financially secure for a day or two, you can choose to stay in that feeling. When you do you not only find that you simply feel much better, you will find that financial security finds you. You didn’t even have to work for it. All you had to do was feel it. And I would say this to skeptics: if feeling poor has never helped you get rich, it might be time to give feeling rich a try.

When you allow yourself to stay in openness and the goodness you feel while in it and then find that the physical world has changed as a result – your boss suddenly started being nice to you, money suddenly came in, the guy you were interested in suddenly gives you a huge smile – you’ll realize for yourself that you create your reality because you saw it change as a result of your own change of thought and feeling. Going about it this way means you don’t have to read The Law of Attraction and thereby believe that every thought draws in a physical expression of itself, you know it from experience. And you don’t have to know why whatever it is you are feeling and thinking eventually comes to you in a physical form, you just know from direct experience that it does, and that therefore you only have to feel wonderful for the world to bring wonder to you.

So next time you wake up from a beautiful dream, or someone makes you feel wonderful or you find yourself soaring emotionally because of beautiful music you heard by accident, try this: hold on to the feeling. Concentrate on remembering what was beautiful. Talk to yourself as you would a child and let yourself know that it is okay to feel that way. Then see what happens. Try it out as an experiment. You may find that that beautiful feeling alone changes everything around you, and that life seems beautiful because you feel beautiful. You find that beautiful feelings and opportunities go hand in hand with openness, and you don’t have to work for it. It’s already yours.

The fact is that we choose to be closed and unhappy not because it is right or real or virtuous or noble or moral, but because it is familiar. So get familiar with openness and let it be your new normal. And this is your single, but unbelievably important, contribution to a beautiful world.

There is nothing outside of the realm of what is virtuous, beautiful and right for you. We are here now. We are a part of this world. So there is no good reason to dismiss what is in this world that will make you happy. And infinite possibilities abound. So trust that there is no one judging what you want and what will make you happy as wrong. You only need to be open to what will make you happy for it to find you.

And it’s no accident.

I am a gay man, and I am powerful.

I know this because I was born into a world that did not love me for who I am. And so I had to learn to love myself. Though this was a difficult path, it showed me how powerful I am. From tapping into this strength, I have thrived. And I know myself much better for having gone through it.

Because I have come such a long way, it can be easy to forget that there is even more to me and my power yet to be discovered. So when life is tough for me…when I am down, when I am out of control, when I do not feel healthy or fulfilled…it can be easy to think that my life can’t be better. That this is all there is.

But I can remind myself that I have changed my life for the better before. And all it takes to change is imagination.

If I can imagine being happy, I will be. If I can imagine having choices, I will have them. If I can imagine getting what I want, it will come to pass. If I can imagine feeling wonderful, so be it.

For it is my own will that determines the kind of life I live. As a gay man, I know this better than anyone.

But just as I did not have to change in order to love myself before, I do not have to change to love myself now. It was learning how to love myself exactly as I am that changed me. And it is what will do it again.

And I know all of this because I know myself.

For I am a gay man, and I am powerful.

The idea of experiencing heaven here and how is a challenging concept because, let’s face it, we have all been raised to believe that heaven on Earth is impossible.

To begin with, the religious messages we get very early on in life is that Heaven is for after life…that is, if you qualify.

Then there is the added problem of all your problems and the world’s problems: everything that is wrong right now, everything that is wrong with you, everything horrible that might happen, and everything horrible happening in the world.

Supporting the upkeep of these viewpoints is a belief that there is nothing that we can do about it: that God and Heaven are somewhere else, and that problems are “out there” and very difficult if not impossible to solve…not to mention constantly coming at us.

The end result of this programming is feeling anything like you’re in heaven. The very idea that heaven, here, now is impossible is what creates anxiety, fear, depression, anger, frustration, and everything else that we can generally define as “pain” that basically makes it suck, to one degree or another, to be alive at any given time. This is what produces hell here on Earth. When you add to this experience the unquestioned belief that there is nothing you can do about it, well, you’re pretty much screwed.

But are you? There is a way to penetrate the barrier that stands between you and heaven. And it requires a lot of questioning.

HOW TO MAKE HEAVEN POSSIBLE

You have to begin by questioning the notion that you personally and we communally as the human race can’t have heaven here on Earth, and that heavenly feelings are only for later when we die if we earn it. Just question this belief, and open yourself up to find out on your own if it’s possible to have heaven here and now.

Look at this idea not as another belief, but as a premise, and then set out to find out if it’s true. After all, you aren’t dead, and you are here on Earth now. So why wait? And who can say what happens after you die anyway? And have you ever been anywhere but here and now? Could that possibly change? If that can’t change, and you’re always here and it’s always now, then how could heaven be somewhere else and later when somewhere else and later don’t exist. When you look at it that way, the very idea that heaven is somewhere else in the future couldn’t possibly be true. But here and now is true, and you will always be in the here and now, which means that if heaven exists, it only exists here and now.

To sum it up, heaven there and later makes heaven impossible. Heaven, here, now makes heaven possible.

Next, you have to do some tinkering on the way you see your particular here and how.

One of the main things you have to look at anew is the idea that something terrible is going to happen. That belief itself is what creates that perception, and it’s what makes it terrorizing to be alive, which then goes on to invite and create terrorizing experiences. So what I highly recommend is to question the belief that something terrible is going to happen, and replace it with a new premise to explore: maybe nothing terrible is going to happen. Consider that that may be the case, and set out to find out if it’s true. If you begin to let go of the idea that something terrible is going to happen and you feel much, much better, and you then find that something terrible doesn’t have to happen, then you’re on the right track to being in a heavenly state here and now. …And again, nothing happens in the future. It all happens now. So terrible things simply can’t happen later because there is no later.

You also have to stop believing in punishment. This is a tough-y because we have been raised on punishment from “God”, and punishment from others because we deserve it. We have been raised to believe that not only have we done wrong, but that we are wrong.

But let’s think about this. First of all, everything is wrong from a religious and secular standpoint: being happy is wrong, having sex is wrong, being beautiful is wrong, being ugly is wrong, being successful is wrong, being a woman is wrong, being gay is wrong, being black is wrong…it’s all a sin in somebody’s book, and we all deserve to be punished.

If you want to change this you have to stop believing in punishment. Then you will stop experiencing it. But you have to be willing to let go of the idea that you have done anything wrong. You have done nothing wrong. You have to let go of the idea that there is something wrong with you. There is nothing wrong with you. If you let go of those ideas you find that you no longer deserve punishment, and you will therefore slowly discover that you are no longer waiting around for it. …and you do wait around for the punishment. You absolutely do because we all do. Imagine a life without punishment, and that’s what you’ll experience. Think of it this way: it’s either all a sin, or none of it. Liberating your mind of the entire concept of punishment altogether is what makes “hell” – both now and the possibility of it – go away forever.

HOW TO TAKE DOWN THE WALLS OF HEAVEN

Once you’ve moved through that obstacle course, you’ll find yourself at the next gate standing in the way of you and heaven, and it is the thought that it is selfish to be happy, to be wonderful, to be in heaven. On that note, I would tell you this:

Your heaven is the only heaven you can make. If you have ever tried to “save” someone else, you’ve discovered this to be true. You can’t save anyone else. You can be of help to them if they ask for it, but you are only their servant. If you look out onto the world you see every nation and every culture and every religion trying to change everyone else, and you see the result, which is endless war between us all. Trying to fix someone else creates hell. Allowing yourself to be in heaven creates the one piece of heaven that you can make.

Imagine that every person on the planet is on the same factory floor working on the same factory line, and everyone has one piece of it to make. Each person can make a heavenly piece, or a hellish piece. The only way to contribute to heaven on earth – to getting the ball rolling communally in that direction – is to make your one piece heavenly. People in heaven don’t wage war. They don’t hate. They don’t horde. They are benign, loving, and giving.

So it is not “selfish” to be in heaven in the sense that being in heaven hurts or takes away from others. It is selfish in the sense that your self is the only self you can send to heaven, and by doing so you help others learn that they can do the same. After all, you inspire others with your actions, and if you act in a heavenly way in your own reality, you will uplift the communal perception of us all into a higher order of understanding of our personal power to make of our lives and our planet what we like. Be your own messiah, and you will teach others that they can do the same.

WHAT “GOD” HAS TO DO WITH IT

Lastly, to do all of this, you have to let go of “God”. What do I mean by “God”?

“God” is a concept, and you can make “God” into anything you want. You can make it a Him, or a Her; you can make it angry or loving; you can make it approve or disapprove of anything you want; you can even make it exist or not exist because “God” is just an idea, nothing more.

God on the other hand is your very being. It can not be conceptualized because It is simply is. And It doesn’t have to be conceptualized because It can be known through direct experience of your self – your thoughts, your emotions, your mind, your body, your life. There is no “God” required for you to be. That you exist is the miracle, and therefore You are the miracle. You’re it. You’re in charge. It’s all you. Notice that you are the creator by changing what you create and living in a whole different world, and this fact becomes indisputable.

Now, when you begin to consider this you will most likely find yourself under attack by two mechanisms of your programming that are very successful at keeping you a prisoner of yourself.

The first one is that you have offended “God” and that He will punish you when you stop believing in Him.

To begin with, as Ramtha says, God can not be offended, and it is a joke that whatever it is that you are thinking could “offend” All of time and All of creation. The idea that anything you do could offend God is truly narcissistic. But if you go back to the idea that there is no punishment, and therefore you stop punishing yourself, this fear will dissipate. As the fear dissipates you find that you were indeed in charge all along, and that YOU made “God”, which means there is no “God”. Everything you experience is you, including “God” and God. That is the ultimate answer to the ultimate mysteries of life, and the knowledge is sitting in your waiting to be discovered right now.

The other guard that will attempt to keep you in a prison of fear will be the idea that it is narcissistic and egoistical to realize that you are God. This programming tells you that you are full of yourself to believe that…that you are not humble, or properly respectful. But that’s a lie. Hunkering down and pretending to not be the amazing totally powerful artistic creator that you are is not noble or humble…pretending you are less than what you are comes out of fear that you are the creator, and that you are amazing. This is not about humility, this is about humiliation, which goes back to punishment. You see, it’s all connected.

YOU CAN DO IT

You have to be very brave, a real hero, to walk through the barrier of illusion and fear and into this unknown. But I would suggest to you that that is what it means to be truly alive. Being brave can be tough, but it’s also wonderful because the braver you are, the more unknowns you walk through, the deeper you dig down into yourself, the more you discover, the more you’ll realize who you really are: that you don’t have be scared of anything because you are strong, you are brave, you are powerful. The realization of these things is what makes a hero. The adventure itself is how you discover it.

Wake up every day not trying to avoid your fears, but rather facing them. See every day as an adventure. No, you don’t know what’s going to happen. And yes, scary things can happen. But as you discover your strength, and that every day is an adventure, then you learn to love it, and not judge it because it’s just another adventure that is leading you to the promised land of yourself. You learn to love to be alive. You learn to love surprises. Love sex, love your body, love things, love people, love your job, and accept and embrace it all and you will discover heaven, here, now. You learn that things and people can go, but what makes you you – what makes you powerful – doesn’t leave you.

And that feeling is the very beginning of heaven. I’d never be writing this if I hadn’t begun to discover it myself. I ask myself, why not now? Why not here? Slowly, day by day, I am answering in a new way: why not.

Most of us walk around ignoring or dismissing how we feel. And yet we are driven by our emotions. So just as becoming aware of what you think is incredibly powerful, so is becoming aware of how you feel. And there are many important reasons to be acutely aware of how you are feeling at any moment.

To begin with, your emotions are the sole determiner of whether you feel good or feel bad. And that’s basically the whole show when it comes to the value of and reason for living, so that’s reason enough to pay attention to what you are feeling. After all, when you are feeling good, the question of whether being alive is worth it or not disappears altogether. Happiness is its own answer when you’re in it. However when you have forgotten what it is like to feel good, you wonder why you are living in the first place.

As well, unlike your thoughts which can lie just as well as speak the truth, your emotions are 100% faithful to the truth – they are the ultimate detector of what is truly going on with you, regardless of what you might be saying to yourself. Any gay person who has ever said to themselves and others, “I’m straight,” but felt totally aroused by the same sex nonetheless, knows this truth very well.

What this tells us is that we are in the closet about much more than just our sexuality. We are in the closet about what we believe, how we truly feel, and what is going on with us. This means that straight people are in the closet too. Though this is a revolutionary and mostly unconsidered concept at the moment, as the human consciousness evolves in the next few decades, it will be become commonly accepted. And the idea that it is just gay people who go into the closet will be as antiquated a notion as racially segregated water fountains.

This conflict between what we tell ourselves and how we really feel manifests in innumerable facets to our personality because we are all inundated with programming about who we should be, rather than encouragement to know and be who we truly are. So not only are emotions that feel good the very goal we truly seek in life, they are also the gateway to the truth within us.

But there is another reason to be aware of how you are feeling, and that is the unique and over all effect of emotions on your life.

There are two primary results of emotions: they either heal, nourish and energize you, or poison, wound and diminish you.

“Good” emotions, which is to say emotions that feel good because they are derived from the love within you, such as joy, happiness, fulfillment, optimism, and humor (which is in its own way a distinct emotion) are uplifting to your entire system. They heal your mind, your psyche, and your body, and then extend out to heal your relationships, your career, your finances, and every other element to your life. “Good” emotions are quite literally the ultimate alchemy – they transmute what is sick, tired and dark into what is healthy, energized and bright. Just one drop of an emotion that is agreeable to you can dramatically heal what ails you in an instant. If you’ve ever been distraught in one moment, and made to laugh in another, or felt incredibly sick in one moment and then jumped out of your bed driven by a burst of happiness, you know what I’m talking about.

“Bad” emotions, which are emotions that feel bad because they are derived from fear, such as anger, anxiety, frustration, depression, and judgment bring down every element of your experience. This includes the intangible such as your sense of energy, enthusiasm and passion for what you are doing at any moment, and the tangible such as the health of your body, your finances, and how well you relate to the people in your life. What “bad” emotions do, in a nutshell, is create illness in every facet of your life, and just one drop can poison your system instantaneously. If you’ve ever been having a wonderful time with someone close and then suddenly felt like you hated them because of something they said, or been totally enjoying yourself on vacation until the thought of a problem came to mind and completely stressed you out, then you know from which I speak.

Emotions are the ultimate force which reach out from your inner being and create your experience in the physical and non physical realm. Though we have been raised to believe, for instance, that your body acts on its own and either is sick or healthy depending on circumstances outside of your control, in fact it is the opposite. Your emotions create what your body experiences – the second you feel depressed emotionally, your body responds with a total lack of energy. The more you stay in that state, the more likely you are to invite viruses, disabilities, diseases, and injury because your system has been weakened by depression. And this isn’t an abstract concept that requires that you believe it – simply measure your physical energy level when you are laughing very hard or totally moved by beautiful music to when you are totally afraid and in a state of great anxiety. The result of emotions on the body is immediate, and cumulative.

Similarly, the result of emotions on what seems to be “out there” in your life can just as easily be observed. When you are in a state of love with yourself, you are very much in love with those around you, and your relationships are healthy as a result. When you are in a state of judgment against yourself and fear that you aren’t good enough, your relationships become toxic because you will naturally blame others for how you feel, or worship or resent them for being so much better than you. Either way, it will hurt to be around them, and your relationship will turn into one of pain. If you feel poor, you will be. If you feel ugly, you are. If you feel like a failure, so be it.

Emotions are all powerful in the determination of what kind of life you are living – one that is healthy and getting healthier, one that is sick and getting sicker, or one that is in conflict between the two. Emotions either make you well, or they poison you. Everything that happens in your physical self, your psyche, and in the tangible world around you are simply tools to reflect and magnify the emotions you feel. In other words, if you feel terrible, this emotion will call on every element of your life to express it. If you feel wonderful, this emotion will also call on the entire radius of what you call you – from what you see in your mind and what the world looks like to you to the general well being of your body and your overall life situation – to bring it to life. In a nutshell, the entire Cosmos is simply a tool of your own personal emotions.

The ultimate lesson is that you have the power to elevate or destroy yourself with how you feel, because how you feel stems from one place, and one place only: your thoughts. No other entity or force in all of existence can interfere with the power of your thought to create your emotions, or with the innate power of your emotions to create heaven in and all around you, or to create hell.

If you, like everyone, have been trained to think that you have no control over your emotions, and to dismiss your thoughts because they do not matter (or worse because you don’t acknowledge they exist) and you still whole heartedly believe this, then the idea that it behooves you to pay close attention to how you are feeling is not something you will be able to consider at this time. And in that condition you will truly live passively as you are tossed about by the wild beast your mind and emotions will become, and your only coping mechanisms will be the high of addictions — to sex, money, status, whatever — the numbing effect of anti depressants, drugs and alcohol, the perverse satisfaction from conflict, the deluded treasure of greed, and the ultimate goal of suicide. In short, you will live as an individual in the same general state of unconscious misery and frustration the world as a whole primarily resides in today.

So remember this: pay attention to your emotions because your emotions are the complete and total trustworthy barometer of what thoughts you are thinking, which means that you can become aware of your thoughts by paying attention to your emotions, and if you don’t like them, change them. With a simple change of thought, you will change your emotions, and thus your entire Cosmos. And nothing will ever be able to interfere with or diminish that power.

In the process you will discover your ultimate power as the only Creator there is. You.

There is no power in your life greater than your own. We fear this possibility because we think that if we embrace it, then we are to blame for what has gone wrong in our lives. But if you let go of blame altogether, the premise turns into one of unlimited power – that you have the potential to make every good thing you’ve ever wanted for yourself come true. Because, in fact, it isn’t just that there is no power in your life greater than your own – there is no power in your life other than your own.

This is the central message of The Way Out, and the central message I am here to pass on.

And it is a powerful message. Embedded in this statement is permission to free yourself of punishment, blame, guilt, and judgment, and allow yourself right now to be liberated into the very emotional state, physical condition and general state of being that you long for most.

If you don’t know what you long for, or if you have forgotten what freedom feels like, you can go about reconnecting to it by recognizing a good and beautiful feeling when you feel it, regardless of when or why you are feeling it. Once you do that, you’re on to the very emotion this statement is giving you permission to feel, and the very state of being it is permitting you to be.

I’m not saying that giving yourself permission to feel wonderful is the easiest thing to do, especially at first. To begin with we’ve all been shamed into thinking that being happy is somehow wrong – that you’re harming others, that it’s selfish, that it is irresponsible, that being happy is being in denial of everything horrible that is going on, that it is a sin. And so feeling wonderful, being happy, and getting what you want has indeed become a sin – but only because we made it one.

You can’t change the world’s opinion on this – you can only change your own. Decide that it is not a sin to wake up everyday thrilled to be alive, and to be enjoying everything that you do, and to be receiving everything that your heart, soul, mind and body long for, and it will no longer be a sin to you.

As you go about this process of changing your mind day by day, minute by minute, about the rightness of your personal happiness, you’ll get better at it. As you do, all the reasons to be unhappy will dissolve and be replaced with reasons to be happy. You will not have changed “the world”, but you will have changed your world, which is the only world you will ever live in, and the only one you can ever change. If you want to save the world, save yourself. That’s all you have to do, that’s all you can do.

You have my permission, but that means nothing. You must give yourself permission to be happy, for that is the only permission, and the only power, you’ll ever know.