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you are constantly in the act of creating yourself. You are in every moment deciding who and what you are. You decide this largely through the choices you make regarding who and what you feel passionate about.
Passion is the love of turning being into action. It fuels the engine of creation. It changes concepts to experience.
To live your life without expectation—without the need for specific results—that is freedom.
The renunciate therefore renounces results—but never, ever renounces passion.
“what you resist persists, and what you look at disappears.”
Yet never resist anything. If you think that by your resistance you will eliminate it, think again.
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Chapter 64 in Audible
This is not what my life is about, but it sure would be nice if this could be a by-product, at least.
A true leader is not the one with the most followers, but one who creates the most leaders.
Let your love propel your beloveds into the world—and into the full experience of who they are. In this will you have truly loved.
You always get what you create, and you are always creating. I do not make a judgment about the creations that you conjure, I simply empower you to conjure more—and more and more and more. If you don’t like what you’ve just created, choose again.
You can undo the teaching by reading and re-reading this book. Over and over again, read it. Until you understand every passage. Until you’re familiar with every word. When you can quote its passages to others, when you can bring its phrases to mind in the midst of the darkest hour, then you will have “undone the teaching.”
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Chapter 69
Relationships are constantly challenging; constantly calling you to create, express, and experience higher and higher aspects of yourself, grander and grander visions of yourself,
You can choose to be a person who has resulted simply from what has happened, or from what you’ve chosen to be and do about what has happened.
Not wanting to “let you down,” they try very hard to be and do these things until they cannot anymore. They can no longer complete your picture of them. They can no longer fill the roles to which they have been assigned. Resentment builds. Anger follows.
the purpose of relationship is not to have another who might complete you; but to have another with whom you might share your completeness.
Let each person in relationship worry about Self—what Self is being, doing, and having; what Self is wanting, asking, giving; what Self is seeking, creating, experiencing,
The most loving person is the person who is Self-centered.
Many people make the mistake of seeking love of Self through love for another.
They think: “If I can just love others, they will love me. Then I will be lovable, and I can love me.”
First, they don’t believe you. They think you are trying to manipulate them—trying
evolution. You are evolving, you are becoming. And you are using your relationship with everything to decide what you are becoming.
You have brought your Self to the relative world so that you might have the tools with which to know and experience Who You Really Are.
If there is one thing none of you can tolerate, it is someone being holier than thou. Yet your religions force you to call others holier than thou. And so you do it—for a while. Then you crucify them.
My teachers have all come with the same message. Not “I am holier than thou,” but “You are as holy as am I.”
The first is to admit honestly to yourself and to another exactly how you are feeling.
You must honor your feeling. For honoring your feelings means honoring your Self.
The first question in any interactive process with another is: now Who Am I, and Who Do I Want to Be, in relationship to that?
you can disown these first feelings as “not Who You Want to Be.” The Master is one who has lived through enough such experiences to know in advance what her final choices are. She does not need to “try out” anything.
since a Master’s life is devoted to the constant realization of Self as one knows oneself to be, such ill-fitting feelings would never be entertained.
Given an identical outer experience, on day one you may choose to be patient, loving, and kind in relationship to it. On day two you may choose to be angry, ugly, and sad. The Master is one who always comes up with the same answer—and that answer is always the highest choice.
this throws open the question, what choice is highest?
but, what is the most profitable?
He who asks the second question says, “I am my body.” She who asks the first says, “I am my soul.”
at the critical juncture in all human relationships, there is only one question: What would love do now?
What you do for your Self, you do for another. What you do for another, you do for the Self.
“Well,” chirped the little girl, “if you’ll just let me finish.…”
There’s a difference between being and doing, and most people have placed their emphasis on the latter.
Doing is a function of the body. Being is a function of the soul.
Your soul cares only about what you’re being while you’re doing whatever you’re doing.
Your soul is Me, and it knows it. What it is doing, is trying to experience that. And what it is remembering is that the best way to have this experience is by not doing anything. There is nothing to do but to be.
One person is being open, friendly, caring, helpful, considerate, cheerful, confident, even joyful in her work, while the other is being closed, distant, uncaring, inconsiderate, grumpy, even resentful of what she is doing.
Suppose you were to select goodness, mercy, compassion, understanding, forgiveness, love? What if you were to select Godliness? What then would be your experience?
You are not on this planet to produce anything with your body. You are on this planet to produce something with your soul. Your body is simply and merely the tool of your soul.
in seeking to be Me, the soul has a grand job ahead of it; an enormous menu of beingness from which to choose.
and then producing the right and perfect conditions within which to create the experience of that. It is therefore true that nothing happens to you or through you that is not for your own highest good.
the soul leads you to the right and perfect opportunities for you to experience exactly what you had planned to experience.
The spirit of you seeks, in the largest sense, that grand moment when you have conscious awareness of its wishes, and join in joyful oneness with them. But the spirit will never, ever, force its desire on the present, conscious, physical part of you.
The mind very often does seek to exert its will on the body—and does so. Similarly, the body seeks often to control the mind—and frequently succeeds.
