The Bridge

What is the bridge between Story and Truth? My thesis here is that anxiety is this bridge. You either struggle to get rid of anxiety or you use anxiety as the bridge from story to truth. Usually our story entirely consumes our attention, perception, time, and energy. But we are unaware that we are living in a self-written story. We think we are living in reality, not in some flawed story about reality. Yet we are flabbergasted when we become aware that life isn’t working. In order to handle that fact, we pretend that life is working. Let’s face the facts. Life isn’t working except in a very limited way in a few selected areas. Anxiety calls this to our attention and that is why we resist the awareness of anxiety. That is why we can’t be still and quiet. Meditation means allowing anxiety to emerge. Courage means observing anxiety without judgment.

Observe your anxiety. Observe your pain. Observe your frustrations. Observe your problems. Observe your illness. Observe your relationship dramas. Observe your financial worries. Observe your opinions. Observe your judgments. Observe your avoidances. Observe your story about your anxiety, pain, frustrations, problems, illness, opinions, judgments, relationships, financial worries, and avoidances.

What is the difference between your illness and your story about your illness? What is the difference between your debts and your story about your debts? That difference is your bridge, your healing journey, your life of inquiry. We don’t know the difference in reality and our story about it. We don’t know the difference in our identity and our story about our identity. We don’t know what this mystery involves. But realizing we don’t know, we can begin to question and inquire about the truth of our story.

Are you curious about the unknown? 95% of you is unknown. The other 5% is the story. Do you want to know your forgotten 95% or will you cling to the known 5%? As we expand more into the 95%, our anxiety reduces proportionately. As the unknown becomes more known, anxiety decreases. God is the unknown of you. The infinite is the unknown of you. The 5% is the finite story you and I cling so tightly to. “Give me liberty or give me death” can be taken on two levels. On the outer level, it means that we want to be free of external control. On the inner level, it means that we want to be free of our self-limiting 5% story.

As we make our journey across the bridge, we think it is just a finite external trip, but all the while, it is really a journey from the story of good-versus-evil to the Reality of the Infinite Good. Each lifetime is offering us the opportunity to transcend our known story and choose the unknown Infinite Good. The reason our life is not working is that we are clinging so tightly to our story and don’t even realize it.

Waking up means stepping out of our well rehearsed story or drama and observing it. You can transcend your story right now, even though it might be only a brief encounter of the third kind, an encounter beyond the known opposites, beyond the personna and the shadow. If you truly step outside of your drama into the Observer Posture, you are at then in Eternity, in Unconditionality, in Infinity. You are no longer time-bound, space-bound, thought-bound, or fear-bound. You have become one with omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience. It may only be a flash, an instant, but it is a taste, a beginning. This conscious choice breaks the hypnotic spell of the story that you are a limited personality or ego in a time-space-material world. Suddenly you are the Observor of that ego and its mirror, the created world. In that instant you are no longer a victim of your story.

You begin to realize that you are writing this story, creating this experience, and always have been, albeit unknowingly. And what is amazing and miraculous is that you can choose again and again to be there now, to be aware. Even though you go back into the drama, it is no longer your prison, and with each such experience, the story changes. Eventually, like Jesus, you will live only in the Kingdom of God as the Son of God, while still in your body and in the world. Your story of the ego and its world will no longer hold the same attraction and anxiety-ridden suffering for you. Christ is born anew through the process of awareness. Our journey is from sleep to awakening, from brain-washed to aware. Anxiety is what disturbs our sleep, our matrix thinking, our story, our daily dramas. Anxiety and suffering are wake-up calls.

Life’s Burning Existential Question

“I’m a whore to the man,” said my client, Jack. “I give up what I want for others. I shovel their s***. I do what I am supposed to do, and I don’t like it.”

The other half of the time, Jack rebels against this idea. He resists such a degrading story. He goofs off. He seeks escapes of various sorts. He is trying to live an impossible story. It can’t be done. We may tell ourselves that we sacrifice for others, or that we are people-pleasers, or conformists, or doormats, or victims, but it is impossible. It only seems that way. It’s just a story we tell ourselves. Such giving in is only a pretense. There is some kind of massive payoff, as well as massive regret and resentment.

Jack pursues meaning in brief little projects and hobbies, but he soon runs out of steam. He tries something new and it soon gets boring. He desires a change and when the change is made, he is soon disappointed. He tries to hide his disappointment because he sees others doing the same thing and they seem satisfied. He tries to copy them and to become satisfied. It doesn’t work. Disillusionment sets in.

Little does Jack realize that disillusionment is the last step before a breakthrough. We can never settle for disillusionment, nor can we avoid it. Disillusionment is preparation for level change. To find what we are seeking and desiring, we have to change levels. We can’t find ultimate meaning or satisfaction on this horizontal level. Neither can anyone else. Even if you become the best in your field, and even if you get rich, and even if your marriage lasts forever, and even if your kids succeed, it won’t satisfy. Finite food won’t satisfy an infinite appetite.

Jack has to try to identify what his lifelong burning question is. Everyone has such a question, although it may be buried underneath the fear of not finding an answer. It may be buried by disillusionment. “Why is this happening to me?” is one common form of a life question. “How can I find meaningful work?” “What is my life’s purpose?” “Do I have a mission?” “Why am I so miserable?” “What’s the use?” “Why should I care?”

I was asking Jack what his life’s question is. He misunderstood me and said “Are you asking me what is my life’s quest?” He was right! Our life’s question has to do with our life’s quest.

He recalls that he read a lot at one point in his life. He read all of the classics in which famous writers were expressing their disillusionment and the meaninglessness of life. He identified with their stories and found some temporary comfort there, but eventually he could not accept their conclusions. His relentless anxiety keeps pushing him to find and answer his fundamental life question.
What is your fundamental existential question about your self? Find that question and you will know the source of your angst.

The ego cannot be satisfied because it is a story of separation, lack, and entrapment. This story makes the ego into a control freak, with inevitable anxiety. If you perceive that there is lack, you will seek to control the world to remedy that lack. And you will fail because at the level of the ego story, there is no remedy for lack.

At the level of reality there is no lack, and so you are wasting your effort, and your control strategies will come to naught. You will only add more stress and anxiety to your experience. And so, our most fundamental question is “How do you get to Level Two where there is no lack, no need for control strategies, and no anxiety?” Living on Level One is an inevitable anxiety experience. Living on Level One involves unbearable stress, which results in disappointment, conflict, aging, disease and death.

And so, what we call reality is fantasy (Level One), and what we call fantasy is reality (Level Two). Level One is the level of fantasy or illusionment, Level Two is reality. and the journey of life is a disillusionment process from Level One to Level Two. What an upside- down world we have created! No wonder enlightenment has to be our number one priority each moment!
Once I said to this client that there is a formula about anxiety which can be helpful. That formula is “Anxiety is unawareness” He asked “Unawareness of what?” Perhaps that question is Jack’s existential life question. It certainly is mine.

An Inquiry Map I Developed

An Energy Map of Awareness and Happiness through Dilemma Inquiry

This map estimates the vibratory energy levels of various states of consciousness in terms of questions related to those states:

The Infinite Good: A continuing state of inquiry, choice and unlimited possibilities
↑
+100,000 to Infinity: Is it possible to be fully alive, fully free, fully awake?
↑
+90,000 Can I be aware of the Infinite Treasure of happiness within and without?
↑
+80,000 What is my natural state of peace, when I am free of brainwashing and programming?
↑
+50,000 Can I reach my unconditional, unlimited world of love and joy through belief investigation of anxiety?
↑
+47,000 How can I discover incredible beauty by questioning ugliness and banality?
↑
+45,000 How do I reach the awareness that I am spirit?
↑
+20,000 Truth-discovery: a painful wake-up call to inquire about the meaning of your crisis
↑
-19,500 Is it true that confusion is a bad thing?
↑
-19,500 Is it true that you shouldn’t love reality 100% as it is right now?
↑
-19,750 Is it true that you have to prove something to someone?
↑
-19,000 Are you sure that you know what is right for others?
↑
-18,500 Is it true that life shouldn’t be as it is (e.g. boring or catastrophic) right now?
↑
-17,000 Is it true that you need approval, acceptance and appreciation?
↑
-15,000 Are you sure that someone has hurt or deprived you in the past?

-14,500 Is it true that anger and force can get you what you want?
↑
-14,000 Is it true that you can hurt others?
↑
-13,700 Is it true that marriage can make someone happy or unhappy?
↑
-13,500 Is it true that your partner should change?
↑
-13,000 Is it true that you can’t be happy without more sex, money or stash?
↑
-12,500 Is it true that you don’t have what you want or need?
↑
-11,000 Is it true that you are not searching externally for your desired good?
↑
-10,500 Is it true that anxiety is a problem?
↑
-10,250 Is it true that fear is informative?
↑
-10,000 Is it true that someone can deprive you?
↑
-8,500 Is it true that you are a body?
↑
-9,000 Is it true that you know why your body seems sick?
↑
-8,500 Are you certain that you are a victim?
↑
-8,000 Is it true that you have to compensate for some past mistake?
↑
-7,500 Is it true that you lost something irreplaceable?
↑
-5,000 Is it true that you are powerless?
↑
-3,000 Is it true that you did something you shouldn’t have?
↑
-2,000 Is it true that you should not be experiencing shame?
↑
-1,000 Is it true that deadness and sleep exist?

Up to -19,500 we have the symptomatic level of functioning
At +20,000 the level of symbolic functioning begins
Above +45,000 we have the reality level of functioning

We are inquiring here about the difference in self-esteem building and Self-knowledge. Perhaps self-esteem is ego-building and Self-knowledge is Self-discovery.

Ask yourself and see if self-esteem (ego-building) depends upon:

Circumstances being just right
Other people doing as we expect
Accomplishing goals
Anxiety-suppression
Manipulation and avoidance schemes
Substance abuse
Obsessions and addictions to prop you up in case the above don’t
Continuous self-and-other rescue strategies
Fault-finding and sympathy-seeking
False religious, moralistic and philosophical notions and pet peeves
Clever self-deception
Not asking questions about any of the above

Is it true that anyone has ever won the self-esteem building game?
Check it our and see if self-esteem building is the first birth, and Self-discovery is the second.

Carroll J. Wright, Ph.D.

The Key Question

The key question for humanity is whether imagination creates experience. When you are having unwanted experiences, then, you would need to ask yourself how you are mis-using imagination, and how you can choose again to use your all-powerful imagination and creativity anew. In our current mindset we tend to use imagination and creativity in habitual unconscious ways according to our ego agenda and story. In other words, our story is fear-driven, unconscious, and out of control. Can you consciously and consistently choose your goals, attitudes, and happiness? If not, why not? Are you choosing moment by moment to be aware of your Infinite Good, or are you drifting into hodgepodge, ambivalence, and conflicted thinking? Are you still thinking in terms of winners and losers? Are you still entertaining feelings of victimization? Are your old limiting assumptions still controlling your current perceptions and assumptions? “Old” means yesterday. “New” means right now. Can you honestly say that you have the choice of unlimited new possibilities right now?

Just Imagine!

Imagine for a moment that your currrent dilemma is presenting you with an unnoticed opportunity which far exceeds the pain and impasse with which you are preoccupied. Just imagine that everything happens for a reason. Just realize that you could already be imagining what you don’t want. What would happen if you began to imagine what you do want? Imagine that this current dilemma really represents the next big step in your evolution. You have been here many times before in one form or another. You have made the same conditioned, reactive, self-defensive response many times before. Perhaps this is your opportunity to find out what your real dilemma is and to make a creative choice. Perhaps this is the time to get to know yourself at a much deeper level. Perhaps this is the time to transform your repetitious life pattern, your old story about yourself.

Today we have many tools and technologies for self-transformation available. We do not have to continue to use stone-age thinking and crude fight-or-flight responses. Usually people only advance about 5% in a whole lifetime. Probably 80% of the world never even heard of enlightenment, much less realizing this is the purpose of life. Mid-life crises present this choice in the guise of anxiety. Find out how you experience anxiety and what its life-saving meaning really is. For a beginning, the next time you get upset, use this formula: “Anxiety is unawareness.” Unawareness of what? (1) Of the fact that your story is creating your anxiety. (2) Unawareness of the big picture, of your Infinite Good.

Gospel Of Thomas Quotes

Jesus said, "If those who lead you say to you, 'See, the kingdom is in heaven,' then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. But the kingdom is inside of you and it is outside of you. "When you become acquainted with yourselves, then you will be recognized. And you will understand that it is you who are children of the living father. But if you do not become acquainted with yourselves, then you are in poverty, and it is you who are the poverty."

His disciples said to him, “When will the kingdom come?”
“It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, ‘Look, here!’ or ‘Look, there!’ Rather, the Father’s kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and people don’t see it.”

Oh, All Powerful Words! William Blake

What we complain about is what we reproduce
What we criticize is what we attract
What we blame is what we get blamed by
What we threaten about is what we are threatened by
What we nag about nags us
What we imagine is what we experience.

“If you say you can or if you say you can’t…you are right.”
Henry Ford

The Old and the New

Anxiety arises when we are no longer satisfied with the old, the known, the mediocre, the taken for granted, the stable, the conforming, the typical, the normal. The old is our self-concept, our stereotypes, our belief system, our prejudices, our habits, our ho hum. The old wants to change and yet it resists change.

Anxiety is a sign of eminent change. There is a third factor between the old and the new which we call anxiety, or the potential for change. Can you allow this anxiety, this call for change, without sabotaging yourself? Can you “wait upon the Lord?” Can you be patient and allow the Creative to occur? Anxiety is the preparation for change, for creativity, to emerge and bring about the new. The old must die for the new to be born. “Behold, I am making all things new” can be your watchword for today. If you can befriend anxiety today, you can enter into co-creativity with the Infinite Good.

The created must give way to the creative, the old to the new, the ego to the Self, Adam to Christ, the known to the unknown. T.S. Elliot said “In order to arrive at what you do not know, you must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.” Do you have an open mind? The ego rarely does. The ego clings to the old for its identity and security, and then complains.

If you are going to be happy and successful, you must be ready for change, open to the meaning of your anxiety, open for the creative. God is creative imagination and so are you. You imagined the old as a creative act at some point in time. Even if you duplicated something you saw others do. Being a copy-cat is duplicative creativity. Doing the opposite of others is also a creative act. But now it is old. You want change, but you do not want to be a copycat or a rebel in your own eyes. So you settle for what seems safe. You are stuck. You have just mummified your creativity. Life is change and you have just deadened yourself.

You created non-creativity. You created a closed mind. You created false safety; The only safety is creative change. Static or old creativity is not safe. Death of the old is the path to the life of the new. Anxiety is the door to that path. Can you tolerate and befriend anxiety? No? Then you will not encounter God, you will not face the Mystery. You have settled. We all do it. But in the next moment of Now, you will have that choice again. Maybe this time you will wake up to Reality, the reality of the yet unknown. Maybe next time you will not settle for the devil you know in preference to the god you do not know. Maybe next time you will not be so angry and sad and bored. Maybe next time you will come alive and take the path less traveled.

Goswami argues in Quantum Creativity that the old must de-structure in order for the new to manifest. During this de-structuring experience, we enter the “cloud of unknowing” to quote a 12th century Christian mystic. Have you ever been stalked by a question, asks Goswami? If you are going to move out of “stuck:” into “flow” you will have to be willing to listen to and be stalked by your questions. Everything you have learned must be questioned if you would enter into the New. Now you know why Neitzsche said God is dead. The old god must die for the new God to be born. All old gods become idols. The new is alive. Anxiety marks the passageway between the old known ego and the new quantum self. For Christ to be born, Adam must die. If you want to experience the joy of creativity, you must risk.

The Power to Bless

The news of the world, with all its dissension and strife, causes many of us to feel helpless. We turn away from what’s happening both down the block and around the globe. In so doing we deny our role in world events and limit our capacity to serve as a healing force. The Tibetan practice of Tonglen is a simple, lovely way to prevent this process.

The Practice: Whenever you see someone suffering, notice whether it causes you to flinch, go numb, or shut down in any way. If so, this is a perfect opportunity for Tonglen. Here’s how it works. With the power of your imagination, take all the pain that you’ve witnessed directly into your heart. Behold that pain with compassion and empathy, transmuting it into love. Once this is complete, send all that love back to the original sufferer.

Raphael Cushnir

Isn't this Tibetan practice a lot like the unconditional love we hear about? Isn't it the practice of alchemy? Isn't it about changing the energy from negative to positive? Isn't it about forgiveness? You can do it today. That is the silent work we are here to do. Try it today. Take any stress and change it to what you want it to be. Change stress to blessing. Even if it was yesterday, you can re-visit the scene and do your wonderful work of alchemy. Your blessings are your choice, not someone else's.

God Does Not Say No--You Do!

There are a couple of things you've probably heard said over and over. The first is, "Why doesn't God answer my prayers?". What you'll generally hear next is the response which goes something like, "God DOES answer your prayers. Sometimes he just says 'No'".

The fact is, it's not God who says "No". In fact, God - the infinite source of "All that Is", ONLY says "Yes"! God is the ultimate "creation" mechanism. God responds PRECISELY to YOUR creative catalyst.

So you say, "Well, I've been asking God for money, but he hasn't given it to me.". The answer lies in HOW you are asking! Remember that God - the Universe - responds in a very precise way!

It's a matter of Quantum Physics! If your prayer goes something like, "Dear God. I'm in trouble. I have no money. I can't pay any of the bills. I need money!", then THAT is what will be real for you. You WILL be in trouble. You WILL have no money! You WON'T be able to pay the bills, and you WILL NEED MONEY.

The Universe feeds back to you what you give it - and in fact, amplifies it!
If who you are "being" is a person with what we'll call "lack consciousness", then LACK will be your reality! Every thought you have about "not having" will be mirrored in your experience of reality.

Do you desire wealth? Then BE wealthy first, and the Universe will respond.
The fact is, we are here for the express purpose of creating our realities and living incredible lives. We are the manifestation of God's experience in the physical. God does not desire for us to live in lack, and in fact strongly desires that we have everything we desire. It is WHY we have desires in the first place! We are not only meant to have our desires realized, but we have the ability to have them manifest in our lives WHENEVER we want!

However, our egos and limiting belief systems have distorted our power. We have made ourselves "small". We have created thoughts about wealth and prosperity that make them inaccessible to us. Yet they are RIGHT THERE...waiting for us to experience them.

God does not say, "No, you may not experience wealth." God says, "YES! EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING!". However the "mechanics" of reality creation require you to BELIEVE that you already have the things you desire. That's why it's so easy for so many people to experience "lack". It's easier for them to believe that they "can't have something" than it is for them to have everything they want because they have all this external "evidence". The fact is, however, that it is just as "easy" to have either one. It is simply a matter of your belief.

Your current experience is the PERFECT manifestation of your current belief system. It is the EFFECT, not the cause. YOU are the cause of your experience. When you can integrate that, you can begin to create consciously from the inside out (which is the only way you CAN create). You can break out of the "loop" which has you believing that your external circumstances are causing your experience.
You must understand that whatever your experience is right now, it is God (the Universe, All that Is) saying "YES" to whoever it is you are being, thinking, speaking, and acting.

To create consciously you MUST "be", "think", "speak", and "act" that your desires are already fulfilled - and they shall be. To the extent that you do these things, you will experience the "yes" that you REALLY desire from God much more quickly.

By Bob Doyle