I would invite you to understand that you are the world, so, if you don’t like what’s going on in the world, then, at least, you know where to start.

I have shared my experience in a previous message of confronting the petty tyrants in my life in which I knew that if I followed through with my plan there would without question be a death involved. I would not be able to go to battle without experiencing loss.

On the other hand, if I chose not to confront, I would not be able to live with myself, for I knew that my fear and cowardice would have been the forces to which I had succumbed. It was an easy choice to make, but a nightmare to live through.

In spite of all of the limitations and barriers that you face in your physical, horizontal world, you will achieve mastery by no longer dividing and separating the events of your life as good or bad but by unifying every event in your life as part of truth-consciousness, part of the Divine, part of God. For everything here is a tool of truth-consciousness, including you.

At heart, there are very few beings who are not enamored of struggle. There are very few who would consent to having no darkness or who can conceive of light as anything other than the opposite of obscurity.

Only a change in consciousness is going to save us from ourselves and we take the position that that will happen through the individual.

You can’t solve the problem because you don’t know what the problem is. Make as many positive changes as you can. But truth is going to come from somewhere else.

Aspiration is the ladder as you seek the mastery of your life, the perfection of your beautiful self, increasing your knowledge of how your beautiful self works from the inside out. The ascending effort of aspiration is met, has to be met, with the descending power of God, of Truth, of reality, of consciousness, whatever you want to call it as the old you is not reconciled but canceled out.

Developing and training your mind to transcend this divide can require a lot of patience and strength; it requires a lot of humility to see and admit your own stupidity and mental limitations.

The object of your life in the tossing and turning of the daily grind IS reaching the realization that you ARE the joy, not that you just have joy but that you ARE the joy. You ARE the thing from which you have come…and always will be, no matter how you destroy yourself, no matter how you cloak your mind with ignorance and judgment and belief. So, try it on for size, right now, whether you’re driving your car, flying to another city, cleaning the house, exercising.

You’re not working on the world, you’re working on you. You start with you and you’re going to end with you because that’s where the work is until you can get to a point to be able to say with great satisfaction, “This is who I am.” Many of the great ones have gone to their deaths proclaiming, “This is who I am.”

Maybe you’re like me. Sometimes when I look back, I don’t even recognize that person, myself, so it’s easy for me to look back and shake my head. I don’t know who he was but he apparently didn’t know what he was doing.

But the secret of reality is always the same: the joy of existence, the bliss of being alive, of being in the human body, of realizing you are a spiritual being having a physical experience. In that evolutionary process, you must learn to face and embrace, to take responsibility for the issues affecting your life because you are the one who created them.