Many people think that guilt is a natural experience. It is a familiar experience, but it is not healthy or productive. It serves no constructive purpose. How can that be? Here are six things to think about the next time you are feeling guilty:

• Guilt comes from fear. Your spiritual growth requires challenging fear and cultivating love. Holding onto your thoughts and feeling of guilt will not support you or anyone else. They prevent you from living in love, creating in love, and enjoying yourself in love.
• Guilt impairs your ability to learn from your experiences. When you see something that you could have done differently, or wish you had done differently, remember how you could have spoken or acted in love instead of fear so that you can apply what you have learned next time (not to make yourself feel more guilty). Your experiences are designed to inform, support, and benefit you, not cause you to contract into fear and remorse.
• Guilt is an experience of a frightened part of your personality, just as the actions that you regret came from a frightened part of your personality. Following fear with fear moves you in the opposite direction that your spiritual development requires, which is toward love.

What you share is not as important as why you share it. For example, sharing with the intention to impress people with your generosity, intelligence, or good nature is not the same as sharing with the intention to support another with no strings attached, or sharing because sharing with love is healing and natural to us, or consciously sharing with love your presence with others. Your intention for sharing determines the consequences of your sharing and your experiences of sharing.

Clarity allows you to identify your intentions, distinguish among them, and to understand their effects. When you share to change someone so that you will feel better about yourself or safe, you strive to manipulate and control. You pursue external power. This creates painful and destructive consequences. When you share to contribute to Life without thought of self-benefit, or share from your heart without second agendas that benefit you first and others second, or share the compassion, wisdom, and love that you were born to share, your frequency increases, you shine brighter, and your choices contribute constructively to the collective consciousness.

What is unworthiness? Of course, it is the awareness of a part of your personality that says to itself, “I am unworthy,” for example, I am unworthy of the love that I have in my life, or the wealth that I have, and more commonly, I am unworthy of the happiness that I feel. Thoughts such as “It’s too good to be true, and “This can’t last forever because it is too good” are experiences of unworthiness. You feel unworthy of what the Universe has given you, that you do not deserve it, that the other shoe will fall, and it is only a matter of time before you will get what you really deserve, which will be painful.

Unworthiness is all these things and more. It is the inmost frightening thought that you do not belong, no matter how much you want to belong. That you are an outsider and will always be an outsider. It is the idea that you are flawed and cannot be fixed. It is wanting to be loved and feeling unlovable, or wanting to love and feeling that you are not capable of loving. It is the feeling that no matter what you do, it is not enough, that you are incurably inadequate, intrinsically and permanently flawed. It is the fear of people seeing you as you really are, the belief that if they did, they would not want anything to do with you. All this is the experience of unworthiness, and beneath all of this is the experience of powerlessness – of feeling powerless to be a real part of Life, to love, to be loved, to affect the world, to be heard, to be worth hearing or to have something worthy saying. It is self-loathing, self-hatred, and no matter how difficult this idea is to even consider, it will not leave you somewhere deep inside, and it is excruciating. It is the most painful experience in the Earth school, and everyone shares it. This is the pain of powerlessness.

An alcoholic demanded to return home from a treatment center. His wife felt that being home where she could take care of him was a good thing even though the staff at the center strongly advised otherwise. Once she had assisted with his return, she did her best, as she had over their years together, to love him with tenderness, encourage him to stop drinking, create distractions, and generally try to make him feel good about himself, or at least better. She appealed to his reason (this didn’t work when he was drunk), and addressed the needs of the most frightened parts of his personality when they were active. For example, he would say, “No one cares for me,” and she would say, “Of course people love you.” He would say “I am washed up,” and she would say, “You have so much to give.” He would say, “I can’t start again,” and she would say, “When the going gets tough the tough get going.”

He feared experiencing the emotional pain that years of drinking no longer masked (which is what the center would have required him to do). His wife feared his rage, mood swings, irrationality, and drinking. Three months after his return home, he drowned in his vomit in bed, too incoherent or weak to prevent his death. There was no compassion in this picture. Neighbors may have thought the wife was compassionate, but what would they think if they realized that her choices assisted his death? Her fears and his fears prevented them from listening to professionals who know about alcoholism.

Integrity, love, and authentic power are inseparable. Integrity is much more than doing the right thing. From the perspective of your soul, there is no “right” and “wrong” thing. There are causes and there are effects of causes. When the cause is love, the effect is love. When the cause is fear, the effect is fear. When you are torn between love and fear, or between fear and love, your personality is splintered. It is not whole, not integral. You are out of integrity. Your wholeness is not present.

Contributing to the new humanity gives me meaning beyond anything I could have possibly imagined. I write books, give events, and create programs to teach about creating authentic power—aligning the personality with the soul so that we can transform ourselves with our own wills instead of trying to change others.

I am filled with meaning when I am giving a gift to Life. Sometimes when a chapter that I am writing comes to an end, or I reread a chapter that I have written, I cry without being able to stop because I am so grateful to be allowed to write these words and share these thoughts.

Have you ever wondered why things happen the way they do in your life? Have you ever considered that the creation of your experiences, like the creation of everything else, is governed by the law of cause and effect? In this case, the nonphysical law of cause and effect. The physical law of cause and effect governs physical causes and physical effects, such as launching a rocket and landing it on the moon. The physical law of cause and effect is a limited version of the nonphysical law of cause and effect. The nonphysical law allows you to use nonphysical causes to create nonphysical effects and also physical effects. This does not mean that you are not in control of what you create. On the contrary! It means that you are entirely free to create what you want, provided you are aware of how the nonphysical law of cause and effect works. If you are not aware of this law and how it works, you will create, as you continually do, but you will not want what you create.

Commitment is a stretch when you commit to something new, something constructive and healthy, and stick to it, such as commitment to your integrity. How do you stay in integrity without being insensitive? How can you be sensitive to others and stay in it?

There are degrees of commitment, and each new degree is a stretch. It is as though we are individuals who are practicing yoga. As we stretch we become more limber, but we are always at the edge of what we can do. Individuals who come into the Authentic Power Learning Community may think that they are committed to creating authentic power and feel that they are committed, and yet as they begin to experience the depth of the transformation that occurs within themselves as they develop emotional awareness and apply responsible choice, they discover that they are indeed required to commit yet again.