The allure of living in the present moment is popular but also endangered. The pandemic lockdown has forced millions of people into cramped living conditions that disrupts normal life, puts strain on relationships, adds stress to families, and introduces depression and anxiety. Escaping the present moment is likely to be everyone’s dream.

But the situation will eventually change, and phrases like “the power of now” are embedded in people’s aspirations. The present moment has wound up being a problem and a solution at a same time. The most basic question needs answering, then. Why live in the present moment and how is it achieved?

Sometimes the present moment brings experiences of love, kindness, creativity, beauty, and insight. In those moments no one needs to ask why it’s good to live in the now. (The body’s trillions of cells, including brain cells, don’t ask the question, because they are designed to only live in the present, occupied with thousands of chemical reactions and electrical signaling every second. Even when you recall a past event, your brain is strictly confined to the now in order to retrieve the memory.)

The first thing to notice when you are overtaken by the now is that you didn’t have to work for it. The present moment is always present. The real question is why we aren’t in the present moment. Countless people ae working hard on themselves to stay in the now. But if it takes no work to get a glimpse of the beauty, love, and fulfillment that dawns in the present moment, can we expect that working to get back there is really necessary, or even effective?

An essential spiritual force is missing from our lives. We are about to gather ample evidence of this fact, and learn ways to recover this crucial force that we unknowingly give away. 

The power we're missing is patience. Real patience is not about waiting for one's expectations to be fulfilled. This is the kind of patience that we have now, and as we will see, it is necessarily filled with impatience; so, it isn't so much that we are actually patient, as it is that we are hanging around, impatiently, waiting for that moment to get what we have hoped for.

This kind of patience is a contrivance. We pretend to have patience while inwardly our own unappeased thoughts and feelings pound on us. What we are about to study are some facts about the true nature of patience, and what it is that we have to acquire ­– meaning what we have to understand – if there is any chance for any of us to become a different order of human being. 

The way our present mind meets life is much like a machine. Most of our lives are spent in automatic reactions to moments where an expectation of ours meets either the fulfillment or the denial of our dreams. We have yet to see that our own conditioned expectations always set us up for a sorrow of some kind or another.

We’re alive during an unprecedented time that is calling us to have a radical revolution and redefinition within ourselves. I want you to know that you are God. You are that which you have been looking for outside of yourself. The infinite ocean has been expressing itself as the drop, but the drop is the ocean itself. 

It’s time to go beyond any and all forms of separation, any and all forms of duality. It’s time to take our power back from everywhere we have given it away thinking in some way shape or form, that there’s somebody who’s further along, somebody that’s better, somebody that is more evolved or somebody that has a gift that we don’t have. 

By virtue of the fact that you are a divine being, you are the source of every single thing.  Everything that you are seeing outside of you is the light not that you are. Everything you are experiencing outside of you is the manifestation of your own state of consciousness. 

Sometimes the twists and turns of life on Earth can feel like loss or emptiness, especially now. Yet the greater significance of our experiences may not be completely understood when they occur. Time brings perspective. There are no mistakes, and we are never really lost. Everything we experience provides an opening into greater awareness and an opportunity to grow and trust in the trajectory of our own lives.

At any moment, you are consciousness involved in a nature package.

The nature package includes your heredity, your environment, all of your personality characteristics, all of the opportunities that exist at this moment, all of your attitudes, all of your predispositions, it’s the whole package. That package is functioning under the laws of karma or the laws of the universe. That package is unfolding; it’s just lawfully working itself out.

As you get more conscious, every act you perform increases the amount of the consciousness in the universe, because the act itself conveys the consciousness.

It’s quite apparent that as you work on yourself, on your consciousness, you continue to do whatever dance you’re doing, the dance evolves. You begin to see how the acts you perform can become more and more optimum to the conditions. For instance, when you’re about to change a law in a country you stand back, and you begin to understand the way the whole system works, and you see what the optimum act you can do is, and you perform it totally, without emotional attachment to that act, and instead an awareness of how that act works in the whole system.

There is something really important that is not getting much attention in the media or on social networks, so I’m going to share my thoughts about it with you today..  

It is the pivot that is necessary as we come out of COVID-19, the death of George Floyd, and other injustice occurring in today’s world. 

We must shift from an unconscious pattern of living on the Earth to a conscious design and an elevated humanity supporting the well-being and balance for all living species. 

Our way of living on the Earth is not sustainable. We’ve lost our sense of cohesion with nature, the Divine, and life. Collectively, we’ve been barreling down a dangerous path toward a future that leaves our children and future generations very exposed. 

And we can all feel the effects of this now.

“Who wants to live forever?
Who dares to love forever?”
—Brian May

In the Western world, time tells us when we are born and when we die. Based on calculated averages, we know approximately how long we’ll live. We go through our lives with a clock ticking away in the background, measuring out the years we have lived and those we have left. This “knowledge” influences everything we say or do, every decision we make. In fact, it permeates our entire culture: education, employment, medicine, insurance, religion, marriage, law, property. Our lives are shaped by time’s constraints. Yet physicists tell us that time and space are human inventions, a way to quantify something that is unquantifiable.

When you are in a state of trust and surrender, you are acknowledging that there is an organizing principle taking care of you. You are accepting the truth that reality is on your side. You are defining your human experience as one in which all that you need will come to you. The more you relax into that receiving, the faster it shows up as a physical manifestation in reality.

Surrender allows you to relinquish your personal will and align with Divine will. Trust naturally arises from within through the gradual surrendering of your individual wants.

Conscious awareness, expanded mindfulness, acceptance, alignment, and harmony are all part of the greater awakening that tells you it’s okay to release your grip. Trust and surrender are whispering to you that you can end your suffering and find peace.

During a recent Facebook Live session, I mentioned a chapter in my book Psychic Navigator that I thought would be helpful as we continue to face these difficult times of people-distancing and remaining vigilant to keep up the good practice, even though it's easy to let things slip.

The more we stay connected to our Higher Mind—which we also call the Universe, the Source, or Spirit—the more we strengthen and build that crucial bridge between ourselves and our higher consciousness.

While we’re all born connected to this Divine awareness, we tend to pull away from what was once natural. It’s reasonable to assume that when we become disconnected from our Higher Mind, the Source that once nourished us will be replaced with something else. In other words, the connection could be with food, alcohol, nicotine, co-dependency to someone or something, or even work.

I thought after death had its way with us, you would have stopped trying to get somewhere. You would have stopped making up conclusions. But you still take what you go through and force it on others, making the world into a silhouette of your pain. Yet this never frees us. We just keep praying to what is missing. I know. For I painted the strangers I met while lost with the colors of my sadness, wondering if anything mattered. Then, just as I was about to give up, something gave way, including my want to make everything like me. Sure, it was frightening. But when the Mystery of Oneness washed over me, experience dropped me into the common well below our names, where what happens to one of us happens to all of us. And then, the way a boulder tired of holding on slips into the sea scattering the fish into a glimmering pool of light, I began to cascade anonymously. Now, I can only say that though what pains us may be different, where it hurts is always the same.

This is how we find each other.

Our soul journeys—how we find our way to recognizing the enlightenment or God that lives within us—are completely unique to each of us. I mean completely. Even your closest friend or wisest spiritual teacher is not on exactly the same path as you. We need to remember and honor the wisdom within us that is our guide in this, especially now at this time of such tumultuous change in the external world. The old religious structures that prescribed certain behaviors and beliefs, monitored by an external authority figure, are not the wave of the future. Neither are current spiritual programs that revolve around the popularity of one teacher or speaker. Previous paradigms of all kinds are falling away. We may eventually live in a “flexi-paradigm,” part of an ever-evolving and expansive collective consciousness. Within that, each one of us is singular, unrepeatable.

Spiritual hope opens us to possibility and energizes us to manifest our potential for love and wisdom. In contrast to attachment or egoic hope, which is the grasping for what will benefit a separate self, spiritual hope arises from trust in the openhearted awareness (bodhichitta) that is always and already within us. This talk explores how, as individuals and as a society, we can nourish spiritual hope, and create the grounds for healing and radical transformation.

“The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness.”  

These times of chaos, turmoil, and massive uncertainty require faith and a deepening with our relationship with the Divine. Spending time in prayer, meditation, poetry, being in nature, having gratitude for all that is, cuddling with loved ones and pets…all will infuse the field with love and healing.

My beautiful late sister, Debbie Ford, wrote a prayer book, Your Holiness, and below is one of my favorites.

Acceptance allows energy to flow and supports the natural unfolding of life at a higher vibration, to a more evolved state and an expanded understanding.

To some of you, this kind of total acceptance sounds preposterous. Perhaps you are suffering in a loveless marriage, battling a chronic illness, enduring the daily torture of a soulless job, or drowning in debt with no viable opportunities for escape. Finding harmony within the limitations (internal or external) of your current frame-work can sound far-­fetched. But from the standpoint of vibrational transformation, the reason you remain where you are is that you are in resistance to your reality.

Generally, I’ve found that resistance manifests itself in people in two ways: attachment and aversion. Attachment is grasping at things and circumstances you believe will make you happy and end your suffering. Aversion is pushing away everything and everyone you believe is creating your unhappiness and suffering.

How do you escape from this utterly exhausting see-saw of physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual ups and downs? Through the restoration of your connection to your Essential Self.

In the course of our lives, human beings form attachments to events, people, memories, feelings, beliefs, experiences, physical objects, and much more. If we choose at some point to follow a spiritual path, we learn, sometimes quite painfully, to see the impermanence of everything and to let go of many of those attachments. One of our strongest attachments is to the personality we have constructed over the years and the stories we tell ourselves about our lives. Lives that are in reality ephemeral and transitory—a truth never more poignantly visible than in the past few months as humanity confronts death on a daily basis because of the coronavirus. We are taking a collective crash course in letting go—of everything.

When I read the morning news, most of what I see are stories about people wanting to move past the pandemic. They’d like things to return to normal; they’d like things to be the way they were before. 

This is true even for people who were terribly unhappy with their lives, because for them the comfort of the known far outweighs the fear of the unknown.

But there are others who see a gift resting quietly in the misfortune and sadness that enfolds the Earth. 

Certainly, those who feel there’s a gift within this crisis also hold great compassion for those in pain, and they lovingly appreciate the souls who, on some level mysteriously unknown to us, have agreed to leave the planet during this pandemic.

But there is more going on than the universal opening of hearts to others. Much more.  

There is one way, and one way only, that any of us will ever know the real meaning behind the life of Christ, and that is... to share in his death. And by this, I do not mean symbolically, or by any other allegory. If our wish is to know the truth behind his seemingly incomprehensible, incomparable act of self-sacrifice -- and the rebirth that crowns this surrender -- there's but one thing to do: we must stop thinking about it... and get down to the business of actually dying to our own lower nature.

Spending one's time wondering why this god-man agreed to lay down his life for the sake of the immortal Self that he embodied... is like hoping to be healed by a medicine that you give someone else to take for you.
 

Let me be clear: it doesn't matter what we say we believe in, or otherwise profess to be true. Belief alone amounts to nothing. To paraphrase and enhance a timeless idea: faith without acts is not only fruitless, but along with being the dangerous root of fanaticism, it is one of the dark seeds from out of which grows the evil of religious intolerance. Comparing the value of our ideals to those of others is not what it means to act truly, anymore than the act of judging someone proves the worthiness of the judge.

It’s a wonderful thing to know that what we see outside us, is not the only reality, that there is more than one perspective to take when viewing both external and internal conditions! In fact, it’s a wonderful thing to know, that God and the Universe, HAVE YOUR BACK!

Can’t wrap your head around that? That’s just it, one can’t! But we can open our hearts and merge with what is currently shaking humanity to its core! And what is shaking humanity to its core is LOVE!

I sense we each have been presented with an extraordinary chance to cut our cord with separation!  Floating weightless in zero-gravity consciousness, we have a chance to make the jump to hyper-space, the quantum-leap from duality to Oneness, from the lie into the Light, from asleep to awake, from broken to whole.

With Spring’s natural turn just under our belts, we have nature on our side REGARDLESS OF CIRCUMSTANCES! As the sun grows brighter and the days longer, we begin the mythical journey of recreating life over again either in fear and reaction to external conditions or with a new, natural courageousness, confidence and intuitive creativity perhaps unknown to us before as it rises from a deep, inner knowing we have carried with us for our whole lives. This is but one opportunity these Viral Times are gifting us!

“Intuition is a sacred gift, the rational mind its faithful servant. Sadly we have thrown away the gift and have become enslaved to the servant.”  ~Albert Einstein

In Inner Bonding, we often talk about who is in charge—your wounded self or your guidance? Most people are enslaved by the thoughts and beliefs of their wounded self—their programmed mind. But the mind is meant to be the servant of our inner and higher guidance, not the master. Why do we too often throw away the gift of intuition – of our inner knowing?

Imagine living in a society where people trusted their intuition—trusted their feelings and their higher guidance. Could people in this society be easily controlled by government, religions, or the media? Obviously not, because when you trust your own inner knowing, you are not vulnerable to others’ manipulations and lies.

After being born physically, we unfold within a second womb, meant to incubate our better angel. The second womb is an experiential one that, through the labor of a lifetime, births the soul on Earth. This journey opens us to a process of transformation that is mysterious, difficult, and inevitable. This dynamic transformation is how we are revealed and shaped by experience. By living the one life we are given, we release the wisdom that waits in our heart, and that tender, human process leads us to the way under the way, the place of true meeting. When we commit to these holy engagements that join who we are with the world, we discover that the temple is the world.

Eventually, all the love, suffering, and humility we go through wear away our walls of resistance until Spirit shines from within us like an inner sun. This is how Spirit is revealed on Earth—as the coverings we carry are worn away by life, the light we carry can pour into the world.