(This is the channeled second chapter of a book manuscript.)
When we find our way back home, we can see that we’ve been lost for a very long time. We’re learning to open to our spirit, to the Love within. Whenever we turn within, we’re returning home. It’s when we’re lost in our minds that we forget who we are. We can’t continue like this. We have to learn how to come back to ourselves, come back to our spirit, come back to Love.
Sometimes it feels like returning to our spirit will require that we escape from a prison. We have indeed been in a prison in our own minds for a very long time. It’s a prison of our beliefs. Even so-called “good” beliefs can imprison us. When we believe that we should be a certain way or act a certain way, we don’t allow for the Truth to come in. Sometimes our ideas are very narrow and limiting. Once we gain an inner perspective, we’ll be able to see this very clearly. We’ll be able to see clearly how limited we have been. And the limiting has been self created. It’s a prison of our own making.
The hardest thing to do is to look inside and be honest with what we find there. Nobody wants to admit that they have ugliness inside or that they have beliefs that have been imprisoning them their whole lives. It takes a lot of courage to escape from these patterns. This is what we’re learning to do now. We’re looking for the key to let ourselves out of our own prison. When we understand how lost we’ve been, we’ll feel the need to find the way out, to find the way home. But this isn’t always easy because we don’t have a map. Our minds threw away the map long ago.
The irony is that it’s very simple to find our way home. It’s just a matter of undoing some things and then finding the doorway to peace. If you look for the doorway without undoing some mind patterns first, you’ll get sucked right back into your mind patterns, back into your prison. The mind has a very strong energy field, and, like a tornado, it will suck you in.
When you go around in circles in your mind, you think that this is normal and acceptable. The problem is that this has become normalized, but going in circles in your mind is insanity. And that’s how most people live. The same thought patterns keep us spinning around and around so fast that we can’t gain our bearing. We first must gain our bearing in order to get out of the whirlpool or vortex of our mind. It’s this very powerful energy field that has been keeping us trapped, but the energy of spirit/God/source/Love/peace is even more powerful. It’s all powerful. It’s just a matter of finding our way back to it, finding the doorway. And in order to do this, we have to be willing to let go. We have to be willing to let go of the way we’ve been and the way we’ve been living.
Many people say that they want to be free but then when they’re confronted with the reality of leaving their surface selves behind, they become very fearful. We want to emphasize that there is nothing to fear here. We’re returning to Love. there may be some ugliness that you have to cross through in order to get there, however, that’s just a temporary phase.
We’re not going to be able to help anyone who doesn’t truly want to be free. This is an important point to remember. We can’t help you get out of your prison if you don’t want to escape. If you’re comfortable in your prison with your negative mind patterns and all of your long-standing emotions and attachments to the outer world, then we won’t be able to help you. You have to be very clear about your intention to make the shift.
Again, the shift is not something to be afraid of, it’s a return to Love. It’s a return to oneness. That doesn’t mean that your body is going to dissolve, it just means that certain structures in your mind will dissolve—certain structures that you don’t need and that are keeping you trapped.
The other thing we want to mention is that you can’t trick the mind. You can’t escape your mind prison through trickery or deception. This will only get you further trapped in your mind. The only way to truly escape from the mind prison is to consciously welcome the shift. And we are going to explain how to do this now.
The place to start is to become very still inside as in our meditation from chapter 1. Becoming as peaceful as possible is always the place to start. But of course, there will be the mind patterns that are hiding and waiting to trip you up. Some of them may appear in your meditation to distract you. We recommend that you let go of your struggle with your thoughts. When you struggle with the thoughts that are floating around in your head, you will continue to stay trapped in the mind.
The struggle itself is another trick of the mind. It has convinced you that in order to be free you have to struggle, but the struggle actually takes you deeper into your mind prison. The mind prison, as we’ve said is like a tornado. The walls of the prison are actually not solid. They just appear to be solid. They have an energy to them that feels solid. But like everything else, when you go inside and look at them, you can see that they aren’t solid. None of the walls in your mind are solid. You can move through them with your intention. This is not an intention to struggle or fight with them. It’s just an intention to find the Truth. So when you sit with the intention to find the Truth in your meditation practice without struggle or resistance, you can move to a very deep place. This is the place of freedom.
As we go along, we will give you some phrases or mantras that are pointers for inner freedom. The first one is:
Freedom is my natural state.
This you can repeat at the beginning of your meditation practice and also during your practice if and when the mind patterns and sneaky thoughts try to distract you or pull you back in.
Now we’re going to talk about how to give up the things that we hold dear. This sounds very scary and you may not want to do this, but we are only giving up our mind’s attachment to them. We can’t control who and what comes into our lives and stays in our lives. Everything on this plane, in this world, is temporary. And when we emotionally attach to things, this inevitably causes suffering when the things or people leave us, or when we have to let go of them. This is one of the main causes of human suffering—losing things that we hold dear.
Once we understand that everything comes from the same source—every person and every thing in our life comes from the same source, then we understand that nothing can be lost. We come from the same source and we return to the same source. Even if somebody willingly leaves you, like through a break up or a falling out with somebody, they are still connected to you on a deep level.
This is where we get confused and suffer. We don’t understand that on a deep level we’re all connected and nobody can ever leave anybody. The only person that can ever leave you is their image. It’s very painful for the mind to lose an image that it has created. It believes that this image represents love or whatever type of relationship you have with that person.
Let’s use the example of a love relationship. When you have an image of love for another person and they leave you, the image collapses and then you’re left with pain. This is something that all humans suffer from. When we learn that the image was not the person, then we can get out of the pain and connect to them on the deeper level. When we find the light within that person and connect to that, then they can never leave us. The light can never leave us.
The light is who we all are and that is the one thing that does not change. So the practice here is to give your image of the person or whatever you’ve lost back to the light. You connect deep within, go deep inside into the peace below your thoughts and emotions, through the portal of your life force, and you picture that person or thing in your mind. When you do this, you have to be in a very clear place without other thoughts and emotions disturbing you. You hold the image of the person or thing that you’ve lost and see it going into the light. Then you see yourself going into the light. You’re both merged together in the light. We will have a guided meditation video for this as well.
When we merge back into the light, it doesn’t mean that we lose ourselves. It means that we gain our Truth. We gain our true Self back. Nothing will be lost. Thoughts and emotions aren’t real, so they can’t be lost. Images aren’t real, so they can’t be lost. When you look at yourself from the inside, you realize that the self that you call “me” is actually just an image. It’s an image made up of a lot of thoughts and beliefs and emotions, mostly negative emotions.
There are no real emotions. There is only one Truth and that is Love. And the only true thoughts are the thoughts that bring you back to Love. Thoughts that create division are not real. They are tools of the mind to keep you in prison.
We aren’t using the term ego here because that term is very divisive and it has many different meanings. So we will simply use the term mind. The mind by itself is not an issue. It’s when the mind decides to run your life and run the world that it’s an issue.
The mind is not our guide. The mind is a tool. But that tool should only be used for spreading Love and helping one another. When the mind has a mind of its own and creates its own will, that’s problematic. And that’s where we are now. We have a mind with its own will that is running our world.
What should be running our world is Truth and Love. These two terms mean the same thing—Truth and Love, which are also the same as the light, the source, consciousness, God, true peace. There are many terms we could use for the Truth within, but no one word really encapsulates the experience. Because that’s what it is, it’s an alive experience. It’s not something static or needy or fearful or insecure or helpless. All of these terms describe the willful mind, the separate mind. That’s what we’re escaping from now. We’re escaping from the willful mind and returning to spirit/source/God/Love.
