Could it be "The End of the World" as We Know It?...Yes!

 "The Promised Land has nothing to do with real estate."  

Joseph Campbell

Remember all those poor old evangelists who promised the end of the world? They all had a lot riding on that prediction, so you can't help but feel a little sorry for them when it didn't happen when and how they said it was going to. But then perhaps it did happen – it is happening, just not the way they thought it would.

May I be the first to bring you the real good news right here and right now? Despite whatever evidence to the contrary, The World – as we have known it – has ended.

It's been the "end of time," and "the end of the world" so many times now, it seems like it never will really end, and it won't. Of course, it's never actually the end of the world we're talking about. As George Carlin (the patron saint of cynical enlightenment) said: "It's not the end of the world, it's the end of people, man. The world is still gonna be here – we aren't." 

The end of the world hasn't come the way we usually think of it, because the classical "End of the World" doesn't describe a literal ending; like all scriptural spiritual scenarios it's really a metaphor. "The End of the World" is really a spiritual and psychological end – the reframing of a new reality brought about by a big change: a transformational coalescence of consciousness, a "singularity" after which old ways of thinking and doing are in an instant rendered obsolete. Sound familiar? It is a lot like what's been happening around here lately. 

It even fits quite nicely into that Mayan theory that around 2012 the Earth began to resonate with a level of consciousness that simultaneously threw things into a kind of chaos, and seriously began to inform it's occupants that a major change was taking place. The "occupiers" showed up in town squares, the "Arab Spring" took place. Hong Kong began to percolate. Fraudulent elections became unacceptably obvious, and their results provoked the most massive global protests ever known. War became obsolete (but it's chief proponents will never admit it). Now pandemic is defining the falsehoods of financial structures, the equivalent needs of all people – and the grotesque inequalities forced onto humanity by unconscious folly, greed, and self-worship. A revolution has erupted against the "Era of Power" that supports itself on lies and hatred. Climate change attests to the truth that what we do has consequences – that we can cause irreversible destruction to this beautiful world.

And all the while, arising awareness and Love demonstrates the solutions presented to us by spiritual sanity. We are all one.

Wherever you're at home now, everyone is learning that the Earth's endless potential is being mismanaged by a criminally unconscious minority (God bless 'em). It's global knowledge that misguided, destructive segments of humanity are intensely wasteful, while the majority of our brother and sister humans are subject to unnecessary want and deprivation. It's clear that our extreme economic disparities are selfishly foolish and completely unsustainable. The occupants in every small town know about the elite class of super-wealthy, extraordinarily fearful (suffering) people, who feel they need to control the world's resources and media (the true "Fake Media"); corporate agents who are happy to kill off every Mom & Pop business in the world, and control all consumption from soulless global distribution centers. We can see their duplicity and their political mess on TV everyday, and increasingly we are living in it, too.

Yet the true, vast majority of real earthly occupants are aware of what the miraculous potential of the Earth actually is.

Naturally it's all happened before, when these literally medieval disparities bring us to a spiritual renaissance. We suddenly realize that being programmed to identify ourselves with the insane demands of corporate materialism, like "trickle-down," "know your class," "what you deserve and must have," and "how our way is right," is a form of destructive insanity that's forcing us to live totally inauthentic lives. The death of that inauthentic self becomes inevitable, and that's the shift – "The End of the World." Nothing can ever be the same after that.

Here's what it means: Everyone deserves to be who they are. Everyone deserves to be reborn into a fulfilling, authentic life. Everyone deserves life, health, and sufficient wealth – the shared resources of this incredibly abundant planet. We will have that, but there almost always seems to be a kind of "Dark Age" first, where faith is not always a well-lit place. It's like that period inside the caterpillar's chrysalis that is pure chaos, before the formation and flight of a new Era of Ethics.

I can't say exactly where we are in the process – at the start of that dark age, in the middle, or towards the end of it – whether we've stopped crawling and are growing our wings...but I do know one thing for certain regarding "The End of the World:"

Humanity is currently experiencing a mass metaphysical impulse to transcend the delusion of separateness. It's the collective death of an illusion, and it's spreading faster and more completely than any virus ever could. The resurrection is arising; the "Ethical Era" is settling upon the followers of the one true prophecy: That all Life on Earth is beginning to realize that it is one in the same thing. The Earth already knows, the animals do too – it's just people that are a little late to the real party.

As that global entity, we can all recognize the unfathomable mystery that everything comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, to a kind of ultimate ground of being that we're becoming aware of through quantum physics, cyber-consciousness, and verifiable sixth-sensory perception. We know that a mysterious ground of being – a 'matrix' of loving intelligence – transcends this form we're in; that this "radiance of the eternal" penetrates everything and everybody, and is intuitively informing a graceful and responsible way to live that's possible for everyone, and that everyone in this world deserves as their birthright. The darkness just requires deconstructing first.

Then the "radiance" (that understanding we all share) can illuminate the dark place where we'll find trust in ourselves and each other – call it Faith. That is the light we can shine now to penetrate our media, our destructive mass-ego, our "One Percent," and expose it – penetrate through it back to the fundamental mystery where we all live free and equal lives. 

Now we can stand our ethical ground with an unassailable authority; the boundaries protecting humanity simply can no longer be contested; and if you stop for a moment, and just listen and feel, it is yours to occupy.

The best and easiest way to make all this happen is to simply show up for life with this knowledge in our hearts, and try our best to live our authentic lives – where the inspiration for our actions comes from the inside, not the outside. We're being taught the difference between what is really important, and what is completely unnecessary and destructive – just pay attention and follow that direction! 

And here is the good news, here is the real gospel – the world has ended. Welcome to the new world.

"It will not come by watching for it. No one will be saying, Look, here it is!

Or, Look, there it is! The Kingdom [of the Father] is spread out over the whole earth, and people do not see it."

Logion 113, The Gospel of Thomas

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

Why Meditate? Because "Meditation Works When Your Mind Doesn't."

Sitting quietly clears our mind to reflect Consciousness better, and grounds and binds our mind to our heart...

      As a three-time near-death survivor, I can tell you that Heaven is not any place in particular—in fact, it is different things for different people; but all heavens have some very powerful attributes in common that demonstrate it to be an attainable state-of-being, available to everyone...possibly in the next life, and very possibly in this one.

      This little excerpt from the chapter Meditation Works When Your Mind Doesn't, in the Part III: Purpose section of How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), is a taste of the relief, clarity, and serenity that meditation can provide anyone (even the most unlikely meditators) in a successful search to find a little piece of Heaven.

      "When we start being able to sit longer in meditation, we can consciously engage that holistic experience and hold ourselves in a balanced state where we discover that most demanding thoughts aren't really so important. Life can be experienced in a more "realistic" way when we are in this way "less realistic," because we recognize that the actual moment we're living in is fine, as it is. Life isn't really full of sequential demands or threatening "realities" at all—those are mostly imaginary delusions thrown up by our prehistoric ego. Equipped with the conscious awareness that a meditation practice gives us, we can start freeing ourselves from unnecessarily demanding thoughts. Nothing really needs to happen right at this moment—unless a bear is heading your way or you're sitting on something wet.

      The escape from serial thinking delivers us into presence, and the power and comfort alive in the eternal moment. It's a presence for Life that only becomes possible when we can gain some control on the courses we run through our heads, and meditation allows us an easy awareness of those different parts of of inner life—the duality of material ego versus our extra-dimensional spirit. When we can identify ourselves with our loving, spiritual nature, we become more effective in our demanding daily lives, because the ease  in our thinking makes it easier to get things done.

      As we sit making space in our thoughts, we experience a sense of joyful transcendence, and a sense of unity that's impossible to experience when we're pent-up and weighed-down by material demands. There's the presence of that graceful intuitive intelligence, rising up through our more spacious thinking, informing our decision-making and problem-solving with fresh clarity and confidence." 

      I almost always end my encouragements to meditate with this wonderful quote from the Buddha, when he was asked: 

"What have you gained from all your meditation?"

"Nothing at all," he replied.

"Then what good is it?"

"Let me tell you what I lost through meditation: sickness, anger, depression, insecurity, the burden of old age, the fear of death. That is the good of meditation, which leads to nirvana."

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it? And BTW, in Buddha-talk, nirvana is Heaven.

(quote; Easwaran, The Dhammapada, p.58)

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn available direct on this page or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!

"Trying Out Your Angel Eyes" at The Mindful Word

Image by Alice Popkorn 

"When I imagine inhabiting Heaven, I sometimes consider what it would feel like to be an angel, and how it would be to return to this world to take up the effort to help earthly human beings get to Heaven, too."

This very generous excerpt from 

How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near Death Survivor

is gratefully featured at The Mindful Word.

Taking it Easy in the Isn't-Matter-World

The ocean pours through a jar, and you might say

It swims inside the fish!

This mystery gives peace to your longing,

and makes the road home

become home.

                                                   Rumi

Yep, sometimes it’s a challenge just to take it easy.  This world does assault us. This world makes a lot of demands on us. But then, which world is it that asks so much and gives so little, and which world is it that really gives us everything (and maybe even more, if we let it)?

Any major Buddhist will tell you that the world of material attachments is an illusion, composed of a constantly changing—constantly coming and going—surface “reality.” What we think we need often turns out to be not what we thought we needed at all, and it’s all because of what we’re thinking. It’s because we’re usually making things up.

So, okay, it’s not really real…but then it is real, isn’t it? It just isn’t always too reliable, and a lot of it doesn’t come when we want it, or stay as long as we’d like.

This world is a made-up world. It’s made up of outside appearances, of important occasions, of accelerating schedules, of stuff you have to have and stuff you have to do. But all of that stuff comes and goes, and often it’s just fine when you realize that you forgot all about it, until it was too late. Oops! I missed it!...and it doesn’t even matter that I did.

That’s the world we usually think really matters—the world of matter. That’s the world that’s so alluring, so demanding, so unforgiving. The “matter-world.” The world that you usually forget about (the one you take for granted) is the one that’s always there, but always sort of underneath everything. That’s the world where everything of real importance actually comes from. It’s the (often invisible) world that doesn’t change. 

It’s the Isn’t-Matter-World.

The Isn’t-Matter-World is the world of beautiful ideas that never go away, that stick with you until maybe you bring them into the material world, if you really want them there. It’s the world of Love, which is the deepest fundamental connection and motivation we have for everything of real value that arises in this life. It’s the world of miracles (like this miracle we’re all participating in, in every single instant).

The deep river water under the ice is the real, unchanging world of Love, of Art, of wonderful ideas and miraculous synchronicities—like meeting each other, or doing something really nice for someone else. It’s a world of elemental innocence, of compassionate connectedness, and of the awesome power of true humility that flows through everything of real value and beauty.

Skate lightly on the material surface, and know the deep river water-world is running through you. Live in that world, showing up (with an open heart) for the easy-does-it demands of the ever-changing surfaces. Then, the Isn’t-Matter-World will carry you in it’s flow.

Rumi by way of Coleman Barks

Read about concepts like these and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct on this page, or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it at your local bookstore!

The Spiritual Lives of Beavers and the Purpose of Life

   
     We walk around in a bit of a stupor at certain times in our lives, with a head full of crazy questions, like: who am I, really? And what am I doing with my life? We should know those answers naturally, shouldn't we? But things are always changing (including us), and life can be very demanding, and it might all become a little confusing now and then. At those times it's good to recognize that the answers we should know naturally may actually be living in plain sight, in our very nature, in our very form. Perhaps we should look to natural forms to get a handle on our elusive sense of the purpose of Life.

     As I see it, Life is three things: a matter of expression – expressing your true self, that is; an evolution – that is, growing toward some kind of connected self-realization; and naturally (and most importantly) finding, feeling, and living in Love. So let's take a look at a very natural example of all those things; let's look at beavers.

     But why, you may ask, would we seek such advice from a beaver? I mean we all know that they’re fuzzy, have paddle-tails and build dams and all, but what does that have to do with expression, evolution, and Love? Let’s look at the natural forms of beavers and how as simple, purposeful expressions of what I like to call Divine Consciousness, they present living evidence of the Love in everything, and a lovely lesson we can learn for ourselves.

     Beavers have dense oily fur that keeps them warm on the inside no matter what. They have flaps in their ears and noses that block out water when they submerge, clear inner eyelids that serve as goggles, and even a set of inner lips that seal their mouths off when they carry cut greenery in their teeth underwater. Their teeth are self-sharpening, so they never, ever get dull their entire lives. They can chew through practically anything from the coarsest bramble to large tree trunks, and cut and arrange wood with precise dexterity and intelligence in such a way as to build dams and lodges of unequaled design efficiency for their uses. 
     Their homes are multi-roomed, vented at the ceiling, and have multiple entries – one conveniently leading directly to their storehouse of cut greenery, naturally refrigerated underwater to retain freshness. Their tails not only propel them above or beneath the water with great speed and grace, but also serve to pack mud as a building material, or to slap the water loudly as a warning to their loved ones.

     In terms of their impact on the environment and the creation of their habitats, the beaver's expression of intuitive engineering skills is second only to humans – except that beavers don’t harm the natural world in realizing them. 

     So who is smarter than who? Who has real direction and purpose? Whose form provides an unencumbered connection to the Divine, and brings balanced and beneficial contributions to our shared planet? And what might all of this have to do with Love, as opposed to being a simple accounting of natural selection? How, exactly does Love come into play for our beavers?

     It’s because Love – as survival of the most cooperatively adaptable – actually is natural selection. That’s true authentic purpose, “survival of the fittest,” in its most loving, heavenly sense. The beavers form facilitates expression, evolution, and, yes, Love – like our form does as well (or almost as well).

     Did you know that beavers mate for life (something a few of us have trouble with)? They give birth to numerous young, spread out over time, and they all live together sharing their food and warmth and companionship – at least until the kids can make it on their own (no surprise, it can be difficult to get young beavers to finally leave home too).

     Their homes not only serve to shelter and protect their families, but create ecosystems that dozens of other species thrive in, and contribute to the health of the greater, holistic environment. It’s a kind of natural stewardship of the Earth that demonstrates a purer purpose, and the metaphor of “The Garden” – where plants and animals contribute to the planet just by being, not by being able to think about it too much. Beavers don’t cut down trees to spite anybody, only people living in ignorance of their natural Divine Unity do that.

     The First Nation Americans recognized the merging of these purposeful forms of nature and Love. They called beavers the “little people.” They saw Love in the building of their homes and their families. They witnessed, with wonder and res-pect, how Love created their perfect purpose, which was simply, perfectly, to be beavers.

     The indigenous peoples of all countries around the world have never had any problem with the presence of Love in all of their surroundings – as the body of Mother Earth, as the land they love (which no one ‘owns,’ and which bears the bones of their ancestors); the air they breathe (the same air as their forefathers breathed); the water which cycles through themselves and this layer of Life on Mother Earth; and as the Sun which brings energy to the cycles of Life. They saw their purpose clearly was to be natural human beings – part of something infinitely larger than the rigid concepts of what our material lives “are supposed to be,” and more as a channelers of greater energies – more what we are meant to be.

        “The heart is a sanctuary at the center of which there is a little space, wherein the Great Spirit dwells, and this is the eye…by which He sees all things, and through which we see Him.”

                                     Black Elk

     It’s with this perspective of shared Divine Consciousness and the presence that allows us to find Love in every eternal moment, that we can receive the gift of our purpose – the expression of our innate intelligence, our potential for rea-soned and responsible stewardship of the world – and its other, very important occupants. Getting there does require effort, even if it’s just by living by those principles that we know will liberate our spirits and contribute to the welfare of all Life.

     It’s not supposed to be easy being a human being. This is where we learn some of our very hardest lessons, but the beavers show us there are easier ways to cut through the obstructions created in our inner lives – the destructive beliefs that tie us to the illusion of separateness and struggle, and remove us from the direction and purpose of our natural forms. They direct us toward an unimaginably rich and magical world where our purpose is to protect the forms of life who aren't subject to the ravages of self-centered thought. A world of expression, evolution, and Love.

     Beavers show us how to live in a world we might call Heaven. 

The latest book: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor from Llewellyn Worldwide can be ordered direct on this page or online; and the first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for them it at your local bookstore!

Coping With Lunatic Leaders—This World's Like a Spiritual Elementary School

Our world seems like a pretty crazy place these days, with everything changing so fast—and particularly with all the lunatic leaders grabbing headlines. As population grows, it's inevitable that life is changing a little everyday, but when it comes to the sanity of many of the world's leaders (or often the apparent lack of it), some things may never change. If you think our global leaders are crazy now, imagine witnessing the fall of the Roman Empire and the antics of very disturbed people like Caligula or Nero (God bless 'em), the scourge of Ivan the Terrible, or the atrocities of Hitler's Holocaust.

There's one simple cause for this phenomenon that applies to all of human experience: that human expression originates from a wide spectrum of awareness—its beauties are enhanced by the degree of spirituality with which life is lived, its sufferings are exacerbated by the lack of that spiritual connection by some humans to what we might call Divine Consciousness.

Our most pressing difficulties arise from the fact that as more people appear on the planet, there are more people who delusionally associate themselves strictly with material aspects of living, and feel that they live separate lives—independent of all other life, and our shared Consciousness. They're trapped in the delusional primacy of our limited human intellects, and fall prey to the constraints of their egos and their unconscious desires for gratification and "control."

The result is that the spiritually sickest individuals are more driven (than spiritually-balanced folks) to act out their delusions of control and selfish gratification in order to ameliorate the personal sufferings of their karma—the cause and effect of their past and present life-actions. So we find it's often profoundly dis-eased people that are pathologically driven to gain positions of political power, because it's so much more important for them to try to control Life—to gratify the dictates of their self-centered delusions. The tragic lack of Consciousness in a minority of humans is what exacerbates all suffering in the world, and prevents the spontaneous realization of the kind of Paradise the Earth started out as—and is meant to be.

This relatively small minority is the cause of the self-destruction that has always plagued humanity, and is likely to continue to do so. I won't detail all their excesses (you probably know already), let's just say it has to do with hoarding resources, starting wars, exploiting Nature (and people), rigging elections, etc., etc. The world is often "led" by terminally self-centered sociopaths, and unfortunately, we have always been brought along on their lunatic ride.

The good news is that the ever-overwhelming majority of human beings never experience these lunatic impulses; so there are two very promising realities being created by the rising, shared Consciousness spreading into the world. The first lay in the forms of natural spiritual evolution evident in the level of environmental awareness—the growth of compassionate self-realization practices, such as yoga and meditation; the expanded understanding of the sentience of all the Earth's life and inherent magic of its quantum physical nature; the intuitive movement toward clean energy; and the instantaneous connections of technology.

The second reality is also a result of growing population—there are simply more highly spiritually-evolved souls present in this world everyday. These unstoppable evolutionary changes bode very well for the future of humanity on Earth, it's just that we must also suffer the destructive growing pains of the spiritually disconnected.

The bad news is that these people will never go away. This unconscious minority has always been amongst us, and always will be—that's the nature of human life, cycling through existence on Earth. Their persistence comes from the penetrating sense of fear they trade in, and in the seductive promise that there is a material solution to suffering, when real solutions are actually found in our spiritual nature.

The good news is that they aren't really the world's leaders—they're material impostors. The true leaders quietly, intuitively embody spiritual solutions. In terms of the profound evolution of all living things, every community's inevitable growing alignment with Divine Consciousness comes about not as a result of the fearful manipulations of misdirected charismatic demagogues, but as an energetic shift in the direction of a simple majority of the species—towards survival and spiritual evolution. The school, the flock, the majority of people, simply heads toward the light.

It wouldn't be wrong to imagine this world as a metaphoric elementary school, with grades one through six attending simultaneously, except in humanity's expression, everyone are "adults." The truth is (as always), a minority of particularly power-hungry, unconscious students aren't adults at all, they're spiritual children, acting out their unformed nature, responding to baseless fears and provocations. They answer a reactive urge to control things, and become destructive when they are forced to confront the fact: You can't control the Universe. That's not what's really going on here.

The sixth grade and the second grade are all here together, but no sixth-grader can change the karmic trajectory of any other student, they can only point them toward the light, by demonstrating the spiritually-liberating, growth-inducing principles of kindness, honesty, humility, compassion, forgiveness, and selfless service.

They can only—we can only (as we always have and always will)—try our very best to hold this persistently nasty mess together with Love, until the great flood of Divine Consciousness changes the world. 

That is why we're here—to realize the transformative power of Love.

The book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is now available everywhere, but ask for it it at your local bookstore! How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying) is due out early 2018, from Llewellyn Worldwide.

Creating Your Landscape with Karma, Intention, and Ego

...let's dance

"Everything...is made by mind. If one speaks or acts with with a pure mind, happiness will follow..." 

 Buddha, The Dhammapada

In the course of our time here as our path takes us towards what some call self-realization, there is a kind of leveling of the landscape of our life, so to speak, as we get more and more accustomed to simply being alive and getting along. That which didn't kill us has not killed us – yet. When we look back at the past, the rough features of that daily existence, which at the time seemed so difficult to maneuver, the power of all those dramas we took part in unconsciously diminish and the landscape our road has taken us over seems to smooth out into a calm, even plain of being. Of what once was, back then. Just as the future arises unpredictably out of nothingness, the past simply returns to the uncreated, only popping up occasionally like a whack-a-mole when we need to re-learn the same lessons we've forgotten. 

 The landmarks left standing behind us are just the ruins of those "great dramas" that shaped us, that changed us. Their matter and mass blow away like sand castles in time-lapse photography. We intuitively understand our quantum reality, the way it builds and deconstructs – packets of energy and information that become real when they react with our consciousness, and one another. Nothing is actually solid. 

 Ahead, the landscape likewise appears even and smooth – except for potential obstacles arising that will only show up as difficult life-events if we invest them with too much of the wrong kind of energy, and turn them into monuments of future drama, future suffering. There are those inevitable sorrows and losses of life – the death of a pet; the loss of a romance; a career disappointment; the passing of a parent. But as we go on, we learn that we can avoid a lot of the difficulty in those obstacles by approaching them a different way, maybe with love this time. We can climb to the top of those monuments to past or potential dramas and put them into perspective. We can energize their becoming real with positivity.

Look out over the views behind and ahead of you, and notice that the landmarks on the geography of your past are the same shape and made of the same stuff as the potential obstacles that lay ahead. Become a geographical detective. What do those patterns mean, and where do they come from? Why are they always so familiar? You know you have built those forms out of potential energies, and going forward you know that you can strongly influence the way something comes about by focusing your energies on it. That's "The Secret."

Once you determine your patterns, you can build your life landscape based on the three great life factors: Karma, Intention, and Ego:

Karma is practically self-explanatory at this point, the average person's consciousness now being evolved enough to almost automatically understand that each soul labors towards it's inherent completion, and the cause and effect generated by one's life or lives determines what's needed to complete the lessons. There are things you need to fix, and things you need to build. Life is the result of cause and effect. You have to do something because you have to learn that. Your life sets itself up with certain conditions, the luck of the draw and the seeds that you plant, so to speak. Life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you. It's evidence of the spiritual evolution of our species that this formerly esoteric Eastern concept is now pretty well part of the global mainstream of thought. What goes around gets around.

Intention refers to the fact that we live in that thoroughly plastic, quantum world, where whatever you set the focus of your intention on, and follow the event stream of your life diligently and with passion, you can manifest out of the potentially limitless material field of being. The trick is that you have to show up, keep trying, and believe. There are greater powers at work than meet the eye, and they are quite capable of producing your wildest dream, just as you are quite capable of preventing it by your own resistance and negativity. Which leads to the last of the three, Ego.

Ego is simply the mechanism by which one remains fictitiously attached to the visible, superficial, material aspects of the world. It fears the underlying change, which is life. It's the false self that keeps you out of alignment with The Divine by convincing you that you're separate from it, often because you "don't deserve it," when you naturally deserve to manifest your dreams as much as anyone. If you can put this Ego (judgment and comparison) aside, you'll immediately develop insight to being. Using this insight, life will show you your karma; and then when you focus your intention on following your life, you can take short-cuts along your karma path simply because your soul is learning the lessons it requires for completion. Jung called it Individuation. Some of us tree-huggers call it finding yourself.

"Samsara, the transmigration of life, takes place in one's mind. Let one therefore keep the mind pure, for what a man thinks that he becomes."

 Maitri Upanishad 6. 24

Read about this and much more in: How to Get to Heaven (Without Really Dying), Wisdom From a Near-Death Survivor  from Llewellyn Worldwide available direct or online. The first book: How to Survive Life (and Death), A Guide To Happiness In This World and Beyond is available the same ways – but ask for it it at your local bookstore!