Long before it’s possible for us to be spiritually reborn, we must first awaken to ourselves.

Awakening is the sudden realization that somehow or other what I took to be the only world isn’t the only world..

But in a true awakening, I recognize that there’s a world beneath me. And the way I know there’s a world beneath me is that I can feel something pulling on me. Something wants to drag me down into depression. Something wants to pull me into anger. Something wants to move me into a state of myself where I can justify my agitation. Then, as I start to get irritated, angry, impatient, something else says, “Uh-uh. And it isn’t some moral platitude that’s been pressed into my brain. It’s an actual understanding that, “This hurts and I don’t want to act from it!”

All the methods to prevent or reverse aging begin with the same assumption: aging is universal. It happens to everyone. But that isn’t strictly true. The only processes that age are rooted in time. Your mind has thoughts, your cells in your body undergo thousands of changes per second, and even your genes, which are permanent, trigger all kinds of activities that are temporary. This whole structure rooted in time will age.

What happens when your righteousness and mind trips disappear?

The predicament is that as you awaken you realize you have been the perpetrator of the conspiracy you’re caught in.

It’s not real paranoia, it’s not like, “They did it to me. They’ve got this terrible conspiracy.” You’re it. You are it. We are it. We are the conspiracy, and the interesting question is, when you extricate your awareness from being part of the conspiracy, what happens? A mature person isn’t in the conspiracy, and is not in the conspiracy even to the point of putting down the conspiracy. They’re just not in it, and then them not being in it, buying it, becomes freedom they are able to offer others, for them to also not get caught in it all.

It’s as if we meet through our prison cells.

To see the maturity of being able to extricate your awareness from entrapment in a role, and then, without violence, still fulfill the role, it requires coming from a different place.