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So the most important thing to realize is this: Your life has an inner purpose and an outer purpose. Inner purpose concerns Being and is primary. Outer purpose concerns doing and is secondary.
Your inner purpose is to awaken. It is as simple as that. You share that purpose with every other person on the planet—because it is the purpose of humanity.
Finding and living in alignment with the inner purpose is the foundation for fulfilling your outer purpose.
Awakening is a shift in consciousness in which thinking and awareness separate.
Instead of being lost in your thinking, when you are awake you recognize yourself as the awareness behind it. Thinking then ceases to be a self-serving autonomous activity that takes possession of you and runs your life.
Awareness is conscious connection with universal intelligence. Another word for it is Presence: consciousness without thought.
Whatever you do will be the ego trying to add awakening or enlightenment to itself as its most prized possession and thereby making itself more important and bigger.
as they suddenly become aware of the kinds of thoughts they habitually think, especially persistent negative thoughts that they may have been identified with all of their lives. Suddenly there is an awareness that is aware of thought but is not part of it.
Awareness is the space in which thoughts exist when that space has become conscious of itself.
What is the mind of God? Consciousness. What does it mean to know the mind of God? To be aware.
As long as you are unaware of Being, you will seek meaning only within the dimension of doing and of future, that is to say, the dimension of time.
And whatever meaning or fulfillment you find will dissolve or turn out to have been a deception.
“Making it” in whatever field is only meaningful as long as there are thousands or millions of others who don’t make it, so you need other human beings to “fail” so that your life can have meaning.
It means you should connect them to your inner, primary purpose, so that a deeper meaning flows into what you do.
not your aims or your actions are primary, but the state of consciousness out of which they come.
psychological time, which is the mind’s deep-seated habit of seeking the fullness of life in the future where it cannot be found and ignoring the only point of access to it: the present moment.
When you look upon what you do or where you are as the main purpose of your life, you negate time. This is enormously empowering.
When you negate time, you negate the ego. Whatever you do, you will be doing extraordinarily well, because the doing itself becomes the focal point of your attention.
So while your inner purpose is to negate time, your outer purpose necessarily involves future and so could not exist without time. But it is always secondary.
Whenever you become anxious or stressed, outer purpose has taken over, and you lost sight of your inner purpose. You have forgotten that your state of consciousness is primary, all else secondary.
The great arises out of small things that are honored and cared for.
The paradox is that the foundation for greatness is honoring the small things of the present moment instead of pursuing the idea of greatness.
Only when you align yourself with the present moment do you have access to that power.
Anxiety, stress, and negativity cut you off from that power.
why did anxiety, stress, or negativity arise? Because you turned away from the present moment. And why did you do that? You thought something else was more important. You forgot your main purpose. One small error, one misperception, creates a world of suffering.
So be true to life by being true to your inner purpose.
As you become present and thereby total in what you do, your actions become charged with spiritual power.
The human Being becomes more important than the things of this world.
In fact, the doing unfolds not only more easily, but more powerfully when the dimension of Being is acknowledged and so becomes primary.
success is anything other than a successful present moment.
And what is that? There is a sense of quality in what you do, even the most simple action. Quality implies care and attention, which come with awareness. Quality requires your Presence.
The unconscious assumption behind all such action is that success is a future event, and that the end justifies the means. But the end and the means are one. And if the means did not contribute to human happiness, neither will the end. The outcome, which is inseparable from the actions that led to it, is already contaminated by those actions and so will create further unhappiness. This is karmic action, which is the unconscious perpetuation of unhappiness.
This doesn’t mean you don’t know where you are going; it just means this step is primary, the destination secondary.
And what you encounter at your destination once you get there depends on the quality of this one step. Another way of putting it: What the future holds for you depends on your state of consciousness now.
When doing becomes infused with the timeless quality of Bein...
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The essence of who you are is consciousness. When consciousness (you) becomes completely identified with thinking and thus forgets its essential nature, it loses itself in thought.
such as wanting and fearing—the primary motivating forces of the ego—it loses itself in those formations.
Consciousness also loses itself when it identifies with acting and rea...
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It comes through awareness, not through thinking.
you may have to find out what is not right, what no longer works, what is incompatible with your inner purpose.
Some changes may look negative on the surface but you will soon realize that space is being created in your life for something new to emerge.
There may be a period of insecurity and uncertainty. What should I do? As the ego is no longer running your life, the psychological need for external security, which is illusory anyway, lessens.
You are able to live with uncertainty, ...
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When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities ...
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It means fear is no longer a dominant factor in what you do and no longer prevents you from takin...
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Not everybody, however, will have to go through drastic change in their external circumstances. At the other end of the spectrum you have people who stay exactly where they are and keep doing whatever they are doing. For them, only the how changes, not the what. This is not due to fear or inertia. What they are doing already is a perfect vehicle for consciousness to come into this world, and it needs no other. They too bring into manifestation the new earth.
The other more serious reason for the illusion of separateness is compulsive thinking.
It is when we are trapped in incessant streams of compulsive thinking that the universe really disintegrates for us, and we lose
Extremely unintelligent and destructive action arises out of such a fragmented view of reality.
The whole is made up of existence and Being, the manifested and the unmanifested, the world and God.
